CHAPTER XII
The Mariner
JOSEPH once away on his errand, the landlord felt easier. He had no longer to fear his own irresolution. Things must take their course. Therefore, he sat down and waited through the weary hours, with a conviction steadily arising in his mind that after all he was playing a fine, a manly, not to say a noble, part. It calls for no little courage to sell one’s king for a few pieces of money. Gamaliel, now he came to look back upon this transaction, or at least the inception of it, felt something perilously like pleasure glow within him. He did not glory in his deed as yet; but the fact that it had cost him so many pains to achieve, invested himself in his own mind with some attributes of the heroic.
Therefore he sat down to wait through the weary hours, very well content with himself. With other things he was hardly so. He was mortally afraid that the rare prize upstairs might quit his roof ere the soldiers came. Or his friends might intervene; or a thousand and one things, at present unforeseen, might happen. In any case the landlord was wholly a man of peace. Nothing did he desire less than there should be a scene of bloodshed on his kitchen floor. God forbid! The thought turned him cold. He had a constitutional aversion to blood. Not only did it make such a mess, but it also had a habit of lingering in the mind for many days to come. Besides, like many men of brains, endowed with a great activity of imagination and intelligence, he clearly felt himself to be at a disadvantage in the presence of violence. He had no skill in the use of arms; he preferred to work with subtler weapons; and when he saw them flying about, he was apt to anticipate their consequences more keenly than another. He was not a coward; his great action of that evening, which would change the course of history, was a sufficient refutation of any charge of that sort; but in the matter of actual violence, that ignoble argument of inferior wits, he was not seen at his best.
He hoped to God that to-night there would be no blood spilt at his inn. His poor nerves still ticked in his head as loudly as the spider running up the wall. He was, indeed, very overwrought. He felt that it would be more than his body and soul could endure, should there be a scene of violence this evening in his house. He revolted from the thought. He did hope the young King would have the good sense to acquiesce passively in his fate when it confronted him. He knew that there were two cases of pistols upstairs at least, not to speak of daggers. Probably the presence of a lady would restrain him.
Still, after all, kings were not in the habit of fighting, except on the field of battle. They were much too high up in the world for that. If the King’s numerous friends, who certainly were not a farther distance from the royal person than his safety rendered desirable, would only keep off till to-morrow, all would be well. If they turned up when the soldiers came, the distracted landlord was sure he should run out of the house and hide himself, even if he lost the King’s price thereby. To-night he felt very old and weak and overborne.
The time seemed interminable. It was as though the hands of the ruthlessly slow old clock in the corner would never go round. Five struck, and then six, without engendering much excitement in the landlord’s heart. The tardy passing of the minutes between six and seven, however, occasioned the first flutter in his spirit. It was tentative mainly; the time for the furious beatings of his blood and the palsy of his limbs was not yet at hand.
At about twenty minutes to seven the first incident of that strange night occurred. The kitchen door was suddenly flung open, with never a “With your leave” or a “By your leave,” and a tall man entered. He was attired in a great hat, whose wide flapping brims were tied down over his ears and under his chin, doubtless that it might not fall a prey to the rude sea-wind; whilst a heavy cloak of a sanguine colour covered him from his neck to the calves of his legs, and left but a pair of extremely muddy riding-boots to be seen below. His voice was loud and high, and singularly penetrating. He addressed the landlord without the preface of any ceremony.
“Landlord,” he said, “you have lately taken a new servant-man into your service, I believe, who goes by the name of Jackson. I wish to see him.”
The landlord was full of tremors, but rum-and-water made him bold. This was doubtless a friend of the King, come to take his Majesty away into a safer seclusion.