Lady Clancarty did not reply, she could not; she was struggling to conquer her emotions, to prepare herself for the coming interview, and Lady Russell took her hand and held it in silent sympathy.
The agony of that hour of suspense was almost too much to bear; her husband’s life hanging in the balance, at the will of this stern, silent man; this man who seemed to her—as he did to many of the English, an unsympathetic, phlegmatic Dutchman—an alien in the land.
“Yonder is the palace,” remarked Lady Russell, in a strangely quiet voice, though her hand clasped tightly over Betty’s.
They both looked out on the palace and the green before it, the barrack buildings and the gates, at which a dozen or more emblazoned coaches waited, and they could see the sun flash on the arms of the guards within and without the gates.
The girl drew her breath sharply; she shook from head to foot.
“Ah, madam,” she cried wildly, “if he says—‘no’!”
Lady Russell bowed her head, her lips moved; her thoughts went back to the dreadful days of the Rye House Plot; she thought of herself beside her husband at his trial, of his last hours; she seemed to see him in the coach, driven almost past his home on his way to die in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. She shuddered, too, but in a moment her serene sadness returned.
“We must put our trust in the King of kings,” she said gently, clasping her hands and looking upward.
Betty wept silently; at that moment every hope seemed to die in her heart.
Meanwhile, the coach rolled heavily and surely as fate itself along the High Street of Kensington, and at last through the palace gates.