Patricia at the inn

by J. C. Snaith

As a cat notes the movements of a mouse, had the unhappy lady noted those of the King’s enemies. Of so vastly different a nature was she to the helpless landlord downstairs in the kitchen, that in lieu of his paralysis at the approach of the terrible crisis she had a preternatural keenness in all her faculties. Her mind was perfectly clear, whatever the stress under which it was labouring. Her wits were roused to a desperate acuteness. Her whole being was possessed and dominated by one awful thought. The King’s life was at stake; the King’s life must be saved.

The soldiers did not move an inch but what the lady saw them. An instant of indecision and she was prepared to act upon it.

Captain Culpeper looked doubtfully a moment at Lord Farnham lying in the bed. The next, and the woman had flung herself passionately forward and buried her head beside him among his pillows.

“Oh, my King, my King!” she cried, putting her arms about her husband’s neck. “It were better you had died rather than this. It is indeed the end!”

The soldiers stood off respectfully. The grief of the woman was so piteous, that it pierced even their rude souls. Lady Farnham continued to weep convulsively upon her husband’s neck, calling him by the King’s name, and pouring forth the cries of her despair. Captain Culpeper, who had never seen Charles, and had only the vaguest ideas of what he was like, did not suspect that the real King stood, in a servant’s livery, behind him. The woman’s actions in those tragic circumstances were so in keeping with them, and to the unpractised eyes of the soldiers the man in the bed was the only person in the room who could in the least fulfil their ideas of what a monarch was like, that the deception, once it was set up, was not difficult to maintain.

Charles, with an alertness of mind that seldom forsook him, grasped the scheme as soon as the woman’s first words were uttered. He prepared to do his part when the chance arose. If he could only get through the throng of soldiers filling the room, the stairs, the kitchen below, and the inn entrance, without exciting a breath of suspicion, all was not yet lost. As he stood hemmed in at present, the feat appeared impossible. But fortune had already taken a strange turn: he was as yet unrecognised; he must maintain the demeanour of the carefully trained, impassive servitor. Therefore, while the lady bewailed his fate and clasped her husband in her arms, and the abashed soldiers stood off a little to permit her to do so, he neither spoke a word nor moved a limb, but kept well behind the Captain with respectful solicitude of bearing.

Lord Farnham, who was not so nimble of wit as his wife and Charles, was at first quite bewildered by the woman’s behaviour. Then, in a flash it came into his heart that it was to save the King. She was prepared to sacrifice the lives of them both that that of the monarch might be spared. The thought was no sooner in his mind than it changed his blood into fire. As the arms of his wife clung closer about his neck, he grew possessed with only one aspect of what was required of him. She was calling on him to save the life of the King at the cost of his own.

He was called on to give his own life for that of the one man in the world he feared and hated most. In that first brief instant of time, Charles Stuart was not the King to him, but the man who had dared to come so boldly between him and the woman he adored. It was asking too much of flesh and blood.

Lord Farnham’s hatred of the King was so fierce, so active, so intense, that in despite of his wife’s example, he strove to open his lips to denounce him—to denounce him who had set poison into his soul simply to while away an idle moment. But even as he was wrenched in the grip of his desperate jealousy, he saw the King’s face.

It was regarding him with the same stoical calm as when he had raised his pistol an hour or two before to fire upon it. The same look of slightly amused indifference he thought he saw lurking in the eyes, and creeping round the lips. The King had looked into his heart, and, shrugging his shoulders at the drunken demon he encountered there, had bidden him to do his worst.