He touched the spring, the lid flew up, and he gazed at the little enamel which showed him the features of the Queen.
The painting had been done in her bridal days, and the artist's delicate skill had preserved for ever the seductive loveliness of her early youth; she wore white, and her complexion was the tint of blonde pearl, her dark hair hung in fine tendrils on her brow, her large eyes were glancing at the spectator with a laughing look, round her neck was a string of large pearls, and on her bosom a bow of pink ribbon.
So he remembered her as he had first seen her, when, at the first glance, she had subdued him into her willing bondsman: before he met her he had been cold to women, and after meeting her there had been no other in the world for him.
He never reflected if this complete absorption in her, this submission to her will had been for his good; he never recalled the many fatal mistakes she had advised, nor the damage done him by his unpopular Romanist Queen; he never even admitted to himself that the one action of his life for which he felt bitter remorse, the abandonment of Strafford, was mainly committed to please her; nor did it ever occur to him that many women would have stayed with him to the last, at all costs. The brightness of his devotion outshone all these things; he saw her image good and brave and infinitely dear, and of all his losses the loss of her was paramount. As he thought of her, his longing half formed the resolution to quit all these turmoils and escape to France, abandoning for her sake his last chances of keeping his crown.
He might have come to this resolution before and carried it through had he not too well known her pride and her ambition.
"If you make an agreement with Parliament," she had written, "you are no king for me. I will never set foot in England again."
And he had promised her that he would make no pact with the rebels unless she had first approved.
A light cloud passed over the sun, the sparkle died from the river, the glow from the sky, the warm tremble of light from the trees; and as Charles looked other clouds came up, in stately battalions, and darkened the whole west.