“You have seen the king?”
His face lengthened a little. “Not seen him. But I found one of the duke’s secretaries, a pleasant young fellow... not such as we used to be. But the duke was kind enough to interest himself. Perhaps my name has lived in the land. I was called Curricle Kemp, as I may have told you, because I drove a vermilion one with green and gilt wheels....”
His face, peering at me through the bars, had, for a moment, a flush of pride. Then he suddenly remembered, and, as if to propitiate his own reproof, he went on:
“I saw the Secretary of State, and he assured me, very civilly, that not even the highest personage in the land....” He dropped his voice, “Jackie, boy,” he said, his narrow-lidded eyes peering miserably across at me, “there’s not even hope of a reprieve afterwards.”
I leaned my face wearily against the iron bars. What, after all, was the use of fighting if the Lion were not back?
Then, suddenly, as the sound of his words echoed down the bare, black corridors, he seemed to realize the horror of it. His face grew absolutely white, he held his head erect, as if listening to a distant sound. And then he began to cry—horribly, and for a long time.
It was I that had to comfort him. His head had bowed at the conviction of his hopeless uselessness; all through his own life he had been made ineffectual by his indulgence in perfectly innocent, perfectly trivial enjoyments, and now, in this extremity of his only son, he was rendered almost fantastically of no avail.
“No, no, sir! You have done all that any one could; you couldn’t break these walls down. Nothing else would help.”
Small, hopeless sobs shook him continually. His thin, delicate white fingers gripped the black grille, with the convulsive grasp of a very weak man. It was more distressing to me than anything I had ever seen or felt. The mere desire, the intense desire to comfort him, made me get a grip upon myself again. And I remembered that, now that I could communicate with the outer air, it was absolutely easy; he would save my life. I said:
“You have only to go to Clapham, sir.”