“Sit down, man. Sit, and listen.”
And now, having first sworn the Colonel to secrecy in the name of their old friendship—to which and to the Colonel’s desperate condition, the other trusted in opening his heart—Tucker delivered himself of what was no less than treason.
He began by inviting the Colonel to consider the state to which misgovernment by a spendthrift, lecherous, vindictive, dishonest king had reduced the country. Beginning with the Bill of Indemnity and its dishonourable evasion, he reviewed act by act the growing tyranny of the last five years since the restoration of King Charles, presenting each in the focus of his own vision, which, if bitterly hostile, was yet accurate enough. He came in the end to deal with the war to which the country was committed; he showed how it had been provoked by recklessness, and how it had been rendered possible by the gross, the criminal neglect of the affairs of that navy which Cromwell had left so formidable. And he dwelt upon the appalling license of the Court with all the fury of the Puritan he was at heart.
“We touch the end at last,” he concluded with fierce conviction. “Whitehall shall be swept clean of this Charles Stuart and his trulls and pimps and minions. They shall be flung on the foul dunghill where they belong, and a commonwealth shall be restored to rule this England in a sane and cleanly fashion, so that honest men may be proud to serve her once again.”
“My God, Ned, you’re surely mad!” Holles was aghast as much at the confidence itself as at the manner of it.
“To risk myself, you mean?” Tucker smiled grimly. “These vampires have torn the bowels out of better men in the same cause, and if we fail, they may have mine and welcome. But we do not fail. Our plans are shrewdly laid and already well advanced. There is one in Holland who directs them—a name I dare not mention to you yet, but a name that is dear to all honest men. Almost it is the hour. Our agents are everywhere abroad, moulding the people’s mind, directing it into a sane channel. Heaven itself has come to our help by sending us this pestilence to strike terror into men’s hearts and make them ask themselves how much the vices by which the rulers defile this land may not have provoked this visitation. That preacher you heard upon the steps of Paul’s is one of our agents, doing the good work, casting the seed in fertile places. And very soon now will come the harvest—such a harvest!”
He paused, and considered his stricken friend with an eye in which glowed something of the light of fanaticism.
“Your sword is idle and you seek employment for it, Randal. Here is a service you may take with honour. It is the service of the old Commonwealth to which in the old days you were stanch, a service aiming at these enemies who would still deny such men as you a place in England. You strike not only for yourself, but for some thousands in like case. And your country will not forget. We need such swords as yours. I offer you at once a cause and a career. Albemarle puts you off with promises of appointments in which the preference over worth is daily granted to the pimpish friends of the loathly creatures about Charles Stuart’s leprous Court. I have opened my heart to you freely and frankly, even at some risk. What have you to say to me?”
Holles rose, his decision taken, his face set. “What I said at first. I am a mercenary. I do not make governments. I serve them. There is no human cause in all the world to-day could move me to enthusiasm.”
“Yet you came home that you might serve England in her need.”