CLAY
Never wilfully ungrateful, that I can see. Think of the times, think of the hue and cry after indemnities and offices; think of the million million services, little and great, reported, invented, exaggerated, and real, all being urged together, on the day when fortune first smiled on the King. Could any one man satisfy such greed? Might not any one man get confused in such a muddle of beseeching hungry hands, and despair of ever dealing justly, save with the few he knew and remembered? And those he never forgot: not the least Penderell among them.
WETHERELL
How about the epigram,—Barrow's, wasn't it? A very good hit: let me see. Te magis, that's it:
Te magis optavit rediturum, Carole, nemo:
Et nemo sensit te rediisse minus.
CLAY
That is just the sort of dig Charles enjoyed. It isn't malicious. He was immensely amused by the protestations of the realm which, according to its own tale, had prayed for him, longed for him, and labored to bring him to his own again. He said ironically: "The fault is plainly mine that I came not before." How did he keep his patience through the incessant begging? He must have suffered more than a newly-elected president in America. As it was, he granted innumerable pardons, and restitutions, and awards, "hearing anybody against anybody," and sure to be of propitious bent when petitions forced their way into his own hand. But he kept no memoranda. Or, as his apologist, Roger North, put it in capital plain Saxon, "he never would break his Head with Business." Long before there was much chance of his securing his succession to the crown, the hints of his adherents fell about him as thick as snow-flakes. Hasn't he told us how the country innkeeper, alone with him a moment, during his fugitive days, read him through his disguise? "He kissed my hand that was upon the back of the chair, and said to me: 'God bless you wherever you go, for I do not doubt, before I die, to be a lord, and my wife a lady.' So I laughed and went away.... He proved very honest." That same innkeeper must have turned up, two hundred strong at least, at Whitehall. Again, you know how poor the King was, and how estates and emoluments had been parcelled out, and tied up, during the Protectorate. He had actually nothing, at first, to give.
WETHERELL
Except scandal.