CHAPTER VI.
THE ROYALISTS.
It was a clear, cold night as the two strangely dissimilar friends, Dacre and Geoffrey, emerged from the shadow of Ripon Wood and stood for a moment on the cliff path looking down at the unquiet sea, which was still heaving and breaking from the force of the day's storm. From the horizon before them the full moon had risen about two hand-breadths, and the sky was all barred and broken with torn clouds moving rapidly, behind which the moonlight filled the sky. The white light fell on the black sea like spilled silver, and made a glittering road across the waves.
Dacre advanced to the very edge of the cliff and stood with folded arms, looking into the night as if it were a face or scroll to be read. But the eye, in truth, saw not, though the thoughtless sense perceived the shifting clouds and tossing sea. The vision was introspective wholly. It was turned on a wide inner field, where stood arrayed, like an order of battle, a strange array of Principles and Methods and Men.
Dacre was at work—at the work he loved and lived for. The enthusiast, like a general, was reviewing his spiritual and mental troops—proudly glancing along the lines before he removed the screen and called another eye to behold. He had drawn them up, with their banners, to fill Geoffrey, at once, with his own confidence and knowledge—for it was knowledge and certitude, not opinion or fantasy, that filled him.
John Dacre was a magnificent dreamer, and he saw and lived among magnificent visions. The spirit that had evoked Royalty and Aristocracy and made them a potent reality for twenty centuries burned in him as purely as in the old poet's picture of King Arthur.
No wrong that is all wrong can live for two thousand years and bind the necks of men. Royalty was the first wave of the rising tide of humanity; Aristocracy was the second. Both were necessary—perhaps natural. But the waves fall back and are merged when the risen sea itself laps the feet of the precipice.
It is hard to describe Dacre's face at this supreme moment, except by saying that it was visibly lighted with an inner light. Standing in the moonlight, with his pale features made paler, the shadows of the face darker, and his tall form straight and moveless as a statue, from the intensity of his thought, he almost startled the more prosaic Geoffrey, who had lingered to light a cigar before coming out on the breezy cliff path.
"Hey! old fellow; what do you see?" Geoffrey asked as he came up.