“You said just now that house-walls and food and drink were of little consequence—unless you had strong hands about you.”
“But you’re strong of your hands already. And I am weak.”
“Yes,” said Oliphant, “passably strong; but it is each man to his trade, my lady. The hands I need—they greet me on the uplands, when my horse and I are so tired out that it is laughable. We get up into the roomy moors—our business lies in that sort of country—and the curlews go crying, crying, as if their sorrow could not rest since a Stuart once was martyred. And we gather up our courage, my horse and I.”
“You men,” she broke in fretfully—“your thoughts run always up the hills. And you find only the old feuds—a Stuart martyred near a hundred years ago, a king who’s earth and bone-dust by this time, as we shall be one day. It matters so little, Mr. Oliphant, when we come to the end of our lives—to the end of our singing-time.”
Oliphant of Muirhouse had learned the hardest of life’s lessons—a broad and catholic simplicity; and in the learning he had gained an added edge to the temper that now was lithe as steel. “King Charles is neither earth nor bone-dust,” he said pleasantly. “He is—alive, my lady, and he knows that we remember.”
“Remembrance? What of that?” asked the other lazily. “Just last year’s rose-leaves, sir, with the faded scent about them. By your leave, Mr. Oliphant, I thought you more workmanlike and modern.”
It was Rupert who broke in. “Remember?” he said stormily. “My father taught me just that word, when he used to come up into the nursery long ago, and play with us. He did not know then how—how like God’s fool I was to grow up, and he would tell me tales of Charles the First, how likeable and kingly he was always; how he’d have been glad to take his crown off, and live like a country gentleman, following field-sports all the day, and coming back to the wife and bairns he loved, to spend long evenings with them.”
Oliphant of Muirhouse felt pity stir about him. This lad—with the simplicity of one who was seeing far back along the years, scarce knowing that he was speaking his thoughts aloud—was a figure to rouse any thinking man’s attention. He was so good a soldier wasted.
“Then father would tell me,” went on Rupert, the passion deepening in his voice, “how the King was asked to leave it all; how he could have saved his life, if he had given his Faith in exchange, and how he would not yield. And then—father made it all so plain to me—the King went out from Whitehall, one bitter January day, and the scaffold and the streets were thick with snow, and he went with a grave, happy face, as if he had many friends about him. And he knelt awhile at the scaffold in decent prayer; and then he turned to Bishop Juxon, and said, ‘Remember!’ And then—black Cromwell had his way of him, for a little while.”
“My dear, that is past history,” protested Lady Royd, with petulant dislike of sorrow. “Of course he died well, and, to be sure, the snow must have added to his great discomfort; but we live in other times.”