Cromwell glanced at his daughter Elisabeth, and answered nothing; the cries of the burning Papists echoed sometimes in his own heart for all his stern exaltation in slaying the enemies of God. For a moment his brow clouded, but the subject was swept away and forgotten in the congratulations, questions, and answers of Mr. Claypole and Richard Cromwell. The times were still momentous, even perilous; now there was peace what would they and all the other men of England do?
While the Lord-General talked with these two, the women took the old gentlewoman to her room; she could hardly walk now and her senses were failing, the Bible was constantly in her hands, and she spoke of little else but her son.
When she had reached the chamber set apart for her, she got into her chair by the window and looked at the sunset a little, half-dozing and talking to herself, then she roused suddenly and asked Mrs. Claypole, who tenderly remained with her, to "Fetch your father, child, fetch your father. I have had little of him but the pain of his absences, and I would see him now!"
Elisabeth Claypole, light-footed and delicate in her glimmering white and blue silks, sped on her errand, taking with her some of the last late roses with which she had adorned her grandmother's room.
When she gave her message she slipped the stems of two of them through the button-hole of her father's dusty uniform. Their gay beauty looked incongruous enough on his sober attire, but though his lips chid her, his eyes smiled, and he let the blossoms remain.
Elisabeth Cromwell was wondering, in sentences half-awed, half-vexed, how she should keep house in a great place like Hampton Court?—how many servants must she have, and how could they use such a number of rooms?
"We will come and stay with thee," said Dorothy, Richard's wife, who was not averse to her share of her father-in-law's splendour. Her pretty face was very bright and smiling to-day above the demure fall of her lawn collar, and her gown was new silk, embroidered in a fashion not uncourtly; her husband, too, was habited with a richness beyond his father's. The Lord-General had not failed to mark his son's wide, Spanish boots, fringed breeches, grey cloth passemented with rose-colour, and Malines lace collar and fall. It did not please him, for he took it as another indication of that weakness and levity which he had before suspected, with a terrible pang, in his eldest surviving son.
He made no reply to Dorothy Cromwell, but followed his daughter to her grandmother's room.
That night there was a wonderful sunset, not only the west but the whole horizon was gold, crimson, and scarlet; the earth seemed ringed with fire, and the glow penetrated even into the narrow street, so that there was the sense of a wonderful light and colour abroad—a light brilliant and mystical, shed from heaven upon the earth.