“I pray that he may ever be strong enough to receive your Majesty,” said the lady, fervently. “May I conduct you to his chamber, Sire?”
The King and the lady went together up the creaking old stairs. The landlord rubbed his hands across his bewildered eyes. He then sat down suddenly, or rather fell, into his chair at the side of the hearth.
CHAPTER IX
The man in Bed
WHEN the king came softly into the chamber, the stricken man lay pale in his pillows, asleep. The sufferer, now that the grave crisis of his malady was past—it having come to its head on the night the bullet was taken from his body—looked fairer and more youthful than ever. He hardly appeared more than a boy. As he lay in his present unconsciousness, much of the petulance had gone out of his countenance; there was a tender and even sweet expression round his lips; and in many ways his face was far better to look upon than on the sad night of his arrival at the inn.
“Harry,” said his wife, in an eager tone, “open your eyes and look at his Majesty; the King hath come to see you.”
The sufferer, however, was too deeply asleep to be aroused by the soft tones of the woman.
“Do not disturb him, I pray,” said Charles. “I would not do him the least disservice for the world, not even to the robbing him of five minutes of his precious sleep. We Stuarts owe too much to him and his ever to take wantonly from one of his name that which we can never give back again. His grandfather, his father, and himself, have they not given their all—their lands, their blood, nay, their lives—for our poor father’s cause and our own? I know not what fidelity it is in a family that they should from generation to generation, from father to son, lavish their possessions on unfortunate people who can never hope, in any adequate degree, to requite them.”
Charles, as he spoke, seemed to warm slowly into a rhapsody of sentiment. Tears even sprang out of his eyes, his lips quivered, and for the moment he appeared wholly overcome by an emotion of inexpressible regret and tenderness. In the bearer of that name it seemed an exquisitely natural manifestation. The woman, whose life had been passed in the shadow of his ineffably lamentable history, felt herself to be succumbing to this outburst from the lips of the most unfortunate Prince since the world began. The dire circumstances in which this unhappy young King was lying; his voice; his bearing; the mean disguise to which he must have recourse because the hand of every man was against him—all this, in conjunction with the outburst of feeling he now displayed, was too much for the feminine witness of it. Every night she prayed for his safety; in her dreams she saw his face; to her he was the one hero of romance, the most exquisitely noble and tender figure in the whole woman’s world of the ideal. He was the prince out of the fairybook; and when she saw him thus with the tears in his eyes, and a divine tremor in his tones, her heart overflowed.
She looked at the King; she looked at him to bestow upon him the mute consolation of her tender heart. The tears were in her own eyes too; her own lips quivered. The King, half-smiling through the tears that were still coursing down his cheeks, bent towards her as if overcome by such an infinite compassion. The look of sad thanks he gave her seemed to send all the blood wild in her brain; the King’s eyes seemed to set her soul on fire. She was not conscious that he had gathered her in his arms, and that her breast was drawn against his own; indeed, of only one thing had she consciousness, and that with the vague excitement of the senses a dream or a delirium induces. It was, that the King’s lips were pressed in a fierce madness against her own.