Charles was seated at a coral-red lacquer cabinet or desk powdered with gold figures—a princely piece of furniture, rich and costly. Cromwell, seeing him, paused in the doorway and took off his broad-leaved hat.
The two exchanged a quick and steady look. Cromwell had last seen the King at Childerly House, only a few weeks before, when he and General Fairfax had ridden down to Huntingdon to meet His Majesty; but the interview had been brief, by torchlight, and the Lieutenant-General had taken little part in it. The King, too, had been largely obscured by a horseman's hat and cloak, so that the last clear remembrance Cromwell had of the King remained that of the famous day when Charles had come to Westminster to seize the five members.
That scene and the central figure of it remained very vividly in Cromwell's mind, even across all the stormy years which lay between then and now. He recalled the unutterable haughtiness, the poise, the splendour, the rich attire of the King then; he would not have known the man before him for the same.
Charles wore a brown cloth suit passemented with silver, grey hose, and shoes with dark red roses on them; his whole attire was careless, even neglected, and he had no jewellery, order, or any kind of adornment, save a deep falling collar of Flemish thread lace.
But the change in his attire was not so remarkable as the change in his appearance; his hair, which still fell in love-locks on to his shoulders, was utterly grey, and his face had a grey look too, so entirely devoid was it of any brightness of colour, his features were swollen and suffused, and his eyes were heavy-lidded and unutterably weary.
It gave Oliver Cromwell a sudden start to see the King, whose mere name was such a tower of strength, who had vaunted himself so proudly, and been so tenacious of his royal rights, reduced to this semblance of beaten humanity who bore on his face the marks of how he had suffered in body and soul. Cromwell himself had changed too; he was a year older than Charles, but, in his untouched vigour and ardent air of strength and enthusiasm, looked many years younger; his buff and soldierly appointments were richer than formerly, and he carried himself with an air of greater authority and decision.
Charles set down the quill with which he was writing, and pointed to a chair with arms near the window.
"What can Lieutenant-General Cromwell," he said, with a most delicate, most scornful, emphasis on the title, "want with me?"
Cromwell gazed at him with unabashed grey eyes. It might be acutely in the King's mind that it was strange for a country gentleman to be thus facing a King of England, but no such thought disturbed the Puritan.
"Sir," he returned, "the nation is in a crisis that must end soon—the army and the Parliament are in disagreements. We are the victims of unsearchable judgments."