Patricia at the inn

by J. C. Snaith

The King took out his watch and glanced at it.

“It is now ten minutes after eight of the clock,” he said to Lady Farnham. “Your friends are coming for my lord at half-past nine. I think it will be well, dear lady, if we all sup here together in this chamber at nine o’clock. We shall require a good meal, methinks; for many arduous passages may be before us all.”

“At nine o’clock then, Sire,” said the landlord, “it shall be laid in this chamber for three persons.”

The landlord closed the door and got himself below. His first action was to regulate the clock. Ten minutes past eight: the hour was at hand. The landlord stood in the middle of the kitchen listening; there was still only the sound of the sea. Then he heard the cry of a wild bird in the wintry night. But still the noise of horses came not.

Now that the frenzy of his madness was past, the landlord, in the reaction of it, felt that he had better control of himself. It was probably because his senses were numbed a little; the paralysis that had fallen upon them that morning when the King had first revealed his presence was coming upon them again. He was conscious of the same strange stupor creeping through his veins; but this time it was horrible. There was the nausea of the impending to embitter it. The sensation it induced was not unlike that favourite form of nightmare of falling slowly down into space from some dizzy incredible height. He seemed to have been cut adrift from all that bound him to existence; he was being precipitated slowly, feet foremost, into the black gulf of the infinite yawning beneath him.

How slowly! The clock in the corner said twenty minutes past eight. The soldiers were already overdue; the landlord mechanically cursed them for not coming promptly. They could not know what tortures he had passed through during the last two hours, else they would never prolong them and draw them out. If they did not arrive soon to put him out of his misery, he was sure that another frenzy would come upon him. How sick, how weak, how impotent he felt now that he could dimly recall the recent scene before the King! There are times when a thing that has happened many a year ago—some small faux pas or other—will recur to the mind with a dim sense of bashful shame. At first the landlord was afflicted in about the same degree; but as the minutes passed, it grew vastly stronger and more vivid, until in the end it became a whirling vertigo of self-disgust. The landlord loathed himself.

A coward, when he knows he is a coward, and would be otherwise, is not far removed from the most unfortunate man in the world. The landlord had lived sixty years before he had discovered how ignoble were the parts that composed the fabric of his character. For the first time they were confronted by a set of circumstances that would have taxed the resolution of the strongest mind to the utmost. The landlord had awakened—for he was a man cursed with a considerable degree of intelligence—to the fact that the materials out of which his mind was made were miserably inadequate to the present occasion. Something beyond self-love, greed, cunning, and an implacable egotism were demanded of him who aspired to act the leading part in the drama about to be played. He had sold his King, it was true; but his critical spirit told him how terribly he had bungled the tragic business.

Five-and-twenty minutes to nine. No sounds of horses yet. The landlord might listen intensely, but the hope usurped the place of the deed; the soldiers did not come. He had forgotten to tell Cicely to prepare the King’s supper. Bah! he would want no supper. There was only twenty-five minutes, though. If those thrice-cursed soldiers did not come soon, he would be calling for it. Yea, and half an hour afterwards they would be too late. Diggory Fargus and his men were due at half-past nine. And when my Lord Farnham and his lady left his doors, the King would also go.

In the mood of that particular moment these thoughts were bitter. A moment before and a moment afterwards the landlord had half a hope that his message might miscarry, and that the soldiers would not come at all. It would be the loss of a fortune, it was true. But so extreme was the nausea of his weakness, that he felt unable to bear the brunt of all that must ensue.

The cries, the struggles, the prayers, the recriminations, the despair, and possibly the blood, would they not be more than his manhood could endure! But at this instant he was fearful lest the delay should be the means of two prizes of great worth slipping out of his fingers. The King would escape, and the cavalier and his wife would go unchallenged. A fortune would be lost to him, and all because in the first place he had wavered. Had he but been the man that all his life he had thought himself, Joseph would never have been recalled, and the business would have been over an hour ago.