CHAPTER V
LIEUT.-GENERAL CROMWELL AND HIS GOD
"Well, well!" stammered Lady Pawlet. "There are some shall answer to God for this. Well, well!"
"Get to thy friends if thou hast any," said the Puritan, "and let them put thee beyond seas. There is an ordinance against Papists."
She stared at him; the body of the dead Cavalier was between them; the red candlelight and the white moonlight mingled grotesquely over the dead and the living.
"Ah yes," she said; her eyes wandered to her husband's face. "The King will be sorry," she added.
"The King," replied Cromwell, "hath troubles of his own to mourn for. Up, mistress, and be going. This is no place for mourner and Papists. Tell me some friend's house and I will have thee conveyed thither."
Lady Pawlet made no reply, and remained kneeling by the couch which held her husband.
Cromwell moved away abruptly; though professional insensibility and his hatred of the Papist checked the pity that was natural to him at any sight of distress, still his mystic, melancholy nature had been moved by the sight of the young man brought in dead. He thought he beheld in him a type of all the fair lives that had been ruined or lost since this war began—wasted men! And how many of them, one, two, or three thousand to-day, now being shovelled into the trenches at Broadmoor ... all English like this one ... all with some woman somewhere to weep for them....
He turned again to the immobile woman.