And the prospect cheered me wonderfully. It gave me something to do, and opened my eyes to the great change of which Penruddocke had been the herald, a change which was even then beginning. As we rode down Highgate Hill that day, messengers were speeding north and south and east and west, to Norwich and Bristol and Canterbury and Coventry and York, with the tidings that the somber rule under which England had groaned for five years and more was coming to an end. If in a dozen towns of England they roped their bells afresh; if in every county, as Penruddocke had prophesied, they got their tar-barrels ready; if all, save a few old-fashioned folk and a few gloomy bigots and hysterical women, awoke as from an evil dream; if even sensible men saw in the coming of the young queen a panacea for all their ills--a quenching of Smithfield fires, a Calais recovered, a cure for the worthless coinage which hampered trade, and a riddance of worthless foreigners who plundered it--with better roads, purer justice, a fuller Exchequer, more favorable seasons--if England read all this in that news of Penruddocke's, was it not something to us also?
It was indeed. We were saved at the last moment from the dangerous enterprise on which we had rashly embarked. We had now such prospects before us as only the success of that scheme could have ordinarily opened. Ease and honor instead of the gallows, and to lie warm instead of creaking in the wind! Thinking of this, I fell into a better frame of mind as I jogged along toward London. For what, after all, was my father to me, that his existence should make me unhappy, or rob mine of all pleasure? I had made a place for myself in the world. I had earned friends for myself. He might take away my pride in the one, but he could never rob me of the love of the others--of those who had eaten and drunk and fought and suffered beside me, and for whom I too had fought and suffered!
* * * * *
"A strange time for the swallows to come back," said my lady, turning to smile at me, as I rode on her off-side.
It would have been strange, indeed, if there had been swallows in the air. For it was the end of December. The roads were frost-bound and the trees leafless. The east wind, gathering force in its rush across the Essex marshes, whirled before it the last trophies of Hainault Forest, and seemed, as it whistled by our ears and shaved our faces, to grudge us the shelter to which we were hastening. The long train behind us--for the good times of which we had talked so often had come--were full of the huge fire we expected to find at the inn at Barking--our last stage on the road to London. And if the Duchess and I bore the cold more patiently, it was probably because we had more food for thought--and perhaps thicker raiment.
"Do not shake your head," she continued, glancing at me with mischief in her eyes, "and flatter yourself you will not go back, but will go on making yourself and some one else unhappy. You will do nothing of the kind, Francis. Before the spring comes you and I will ride over the drawbridge at Coton End, or I am a Dutchwoman!"
"I cannot see that things are changed," I said.
"Not changed?" she replied. "When you left, you were nobody. Now you are somebody, if it be only in having a sister with a dozen serving-men in her train. Leave it to me. And now, thank Heaven, we are here! I am so stiff and cold, you must lift me down. We have not to ride far after dinner, I hope."
"Only seven miles," I answered, as the host, who had been warned by an outrider to expect us, came running out with a tail at his heels.
"What news from London, Master Landlord?" I said to him as he led us through the kitchen, where there was indeed a great fire, but no chimney, and so to a smaller room possessing both these luxuries. "Is all quiet?"