Master Bertie anticipated the man, and himself opened the door and admitted the knocker. Penruddocke it was; he came in, still drumming on the door with his fist, his eyes sparkling, his ruddy cheeks aglow. He crossed the threshold with a swagger, and looking at us all burst into a strange peal of laughter. "Yoicks! Gone to earth!" he shouted, waving his hand as if he had a whip in it. "Gone to earth--gone forever! Did you think it was the Lords of the Council, my lads?"
He had left the door wide open behind him, and we now saw in the doorway the seafaring man who usually guarded the room above. "What does this mean, Sir Thomas?" Kingston said sternly. He thought, I fancy, as many of us did, that the knight was drunk. "Have you given that man permission to leave his post?"
"Post? There are no more posts," cried Sir Thomas, with a strange jollity. He certainly was drunk, but perhaps not with liquor. "Except good fat posts," he continued, smacking Master Bertie on the shoulder, "for loyal men who have done the state service, and risked their lives in evil times! Posts? I shall get so drunk to-night that the stoutest post on Ludgate will not hold me up!"
"You seem to have gone far that way already," my friend said coldly.
"So will you, when you hear the news!" Penruddocke replied more soberly. "Lads, the Queen is dying!"
In the vaulted room his statement was received in silence; a silence dictated by no feeling for the woman going before her Maker--how should we who were plotting against her feel for her, we who were for the most part homeless and proscribed through her?--but the silence of men in doubt, in doubt whether this might mean all that from Sir Thomas's aspect it seemed to mean.
"She cannot live a week!" Penruddocke continued. "The doctors have given up hope, and at the palace all is in confusion. She has named the Princess Elizabeth her successor, and even now Cecil is drawing up the proclamations. To show that the game is really up, the Count de Feria, the Spanish Ambassador, has gone this very day to Hatfield to pay his respects to the coming queen."
Then indeed the vaulted roof did ring--ring and ring again with shouts of "The Coming Queen!" Men over whom the wings of death had seemed a minute ago to be hovering, darkening all things to them, looked up and saw the sun. "The Coming Queen!" they cried.
"You need fear nothing!" continued Penruddocke wildly. "No one will dare to execute the warrants. The Bishops are shaking in their miters. Pole is said to be dying. Bonner is more likely to hang himself than burn others. Up and out and play the man! Away to your counties and get ready your tar-barrels! Now we will give them a taste of the Cujus Regio! Ho! drawer, there! A cup of ale!"
He turned, and shouting a scrap of a song, swaggered back into the shaft and began to ascend. They all trooped after him, talking and laughing, a reckless, good-natured crew, looking to a man as if they had never known fear or selfishness--as if distrust were a thing impossible to them. Master Kingston alone, whom his losses had soured and who still brooded over his revenge, went off moodily.