His servant met him on the stair.
“He is here,” he said. “I waited for him in the Bell Yard and brought him in secretly.”
Lovel nodded, and stripped off his cloak, giving it to the man. “Watch the door like a dragon, Matthew,” he told him. “For an hour we must be alone. Forbid anyone, though it were Sir Harry himself.”
The little chamber was bright with the glow of a coal fire. The red curtains had been drawn and one lamp lit. The single occupant sprawled in a winged leather chair, his stretched-out legs in the firelight, but his head and shoulders in shadow. A man entering could not see the face, and Lovel, whose eyes had been weakened by study, peered a second before he closed the door behind him.
“I have come to you, Nick, as always when my mind is in tribulation.”
The speaker had a harsh voice, like a bellman's which has been ruined by shouting against crowds. He had got to his feet and seemed an elderly man, heavy in body, with legs too short for the proportions of his trunk. He wore a soldier's coat and belt, but no sword. His age might have been fifty, but his face was so reddened by weather that it was hard to judge. The thick straight black locks had little silver in them, but the hair that sprouted from a mole on the chin was grey. His cheeks were full and the heavy mouth was pursed like that of a man in constant painful meditation. He looked at first sight a grazier from the shires or some new-made squire of a moderate estate. But the eyes forbade that conclusion. There was something that brooded and commanded in those eyes, something that might lock the jaw like iron and make their possessor a hammer to break or bend the world.
Mr. Lovel stirred the fire very deliberately and sat himself in the second of the two winged chairs.
“The King?” he queried. “You were in two minds when we last spoke on the matter. I hoped I had persuaded you. Has some new perplexity arisen?”
The other shook his big head, so that for a moment he had the look of a great bull that paws the ground before charging.
“I have no clearness,” he said, and the words had such passion behind them that they were almost a groan.