Judith said calmly; “Let us walk together somewhere—to St. Enodoc, to my father’s grave, and there, over that sand-heap we will settle what must be settled.”
“I will go with you where you will. You are my Queen, I your subject—it is my place to obey.”
“The subject has sometimes risen and destroyed the Queen; it has been so in France.”
“Yes, when the subject has been too hardly treated, too down-trodden, not allowed to look on and adore the Queen.”
“And,” said Judith further, “let us walk in silence, allow me the little space between here and my father’s grave to collect my thoughts, bear with me for that short distance.”
“As you will. I am your slave, as I have told you, and you my mistress have but to command.”
“Yes, but the slave sometimes becomes the master, and then is all the more tyrannous because of his former servitude.”
So they walked together, yet apart, from Polzeath to St. Enodoc, neither speaking, and it might have been a mourner’s walk at a funeral. She held her head down, and did not raise her eyes from the ground, but he continued to gaze on her with a glow of triumph and exultation in his face.
They reached at length the deserted church, sunken in the sands; it had a hole broken in the wall under the eaves in the south, rudely barricaded, through which the sacred building might be entered for such functions as a marriage, or the first part of the funeral office that must be performed in a church.
The roof was of pale gray slate, much broken, folding over the rafters like the skins on the ribs of an old horse past work. The church-yard was covered with plain sand. Gravestones were in process of being buried like those whom they commemorated. Some peeped above the sand, with a fat cherub’s head peering above the surface. Others stood high on the land side, but were banked up by sand toward the sea. Here the church-yard surface was smooth, there it was tossed with undulations, according as the sand had been swept over portions tenanted by the poor who were uncommemorated with head-stones, or over those where the well-to-do lay with their titles and virtues registered above them.