Mistress Wilding Part 24

"You shall explain your meaning, sir, or we must hold you a traitor," he exclaimed.

"King James does that already," answered Wilding with a quiet smile.

"D'ye mean the Duke of York?" rumbled Ferguson's Scottish accent with startling suddenness, and Monmouth nodded approval of the correction.

"If ye mean that b.l.o.o.d.y papist and fratricide, it were well so to speak of him. Had ye read the Declaration..."

But Fletcher cropped his speech in mid-growth. He was ever a short-tempered man, intolerant of irrelevancies.

"It were well, perhaps," said he, his accent abundantly proclaiming him a fellow countryman of Ferguson's, "to keep to the matter before us. Mr.

Wilding, no doubt, will state the reasons that exist, or that he fancies may exist, for giving advice which is hardly worthy of the cause to which he stands committed."

"Aye, Fletcher," said Monmouth, "there is sense in you. Tell us what is in your mind, Mr. Wilding."

"It is in my mind, Your Grace, that this invasion is rash, premature, and ill-advised."

"Odds life!" cried Grey, and he swung angrily round fully to face the Duke, the nostrils of his heavy nose dilating. "Are we to listen to this milksop prattle?"

Nick Trenchard, who had hitherto been silent, cleared his throat so noisily that he drew all eyes to himself.

"Your Grace," Mr. Wilding pursued, his air calm and dignified, and gathering more dignity from the circ.u.mstance that he proceeded as if there had been no interruption, "when I had the honour of conferring with you at The Hague two months ago, it was agreed that you should spend the summer in Sweden--away from politics and scheming, leaving the work of preparation to your accredited agents here. That work I have been slowly but surely pushing forward. It was not to be hurried; men of position are not to be won over in a day; men with anything to lose need some guarantee that they are not wantonly casting their possessions to the winds. By next spring, as was agreed, all would have been ready.

Delay could not have hurt you. Indeed, with every day by which you delayed your coming you did good service to your cause, you strengthened its prospects of success; for every day the people's burden of oppression and persecution grows more heavy, and the people's temper more short; every day, by the methods that he is pursuing, King James brings himself into deeper hatred. This hatred is spreading. It was the business of myself and those others to help it on, until from the cottage of the ploughman the infection of anger should have spread to the mansion of the squire. Had Your Grace but given me time, as I entreated you, and as you promised me, you might have marched to Whitehall with scarce the shedding of a drop of blood; had Your Grace but waited until we were ready, England would have so trembled at your landing that your uncle's throne would have toppled over 'neath the shock. As it is..." He shrugged his shoulders, sighed and spread his hands, leaving his sentence uncompleted.

Monmouth sat sobered by these sober words; the intoxication that had come to him from the little measure of success that had attended the opening of the listing on Church Cliffs, deserted him now; he saw the thing stark and in its true proportions, and not even the shouting of the folk in the streets below, crying his name and acclaiming him their champion, served to lighten the gloom that Wilding's words cast like a cloud over his volatile heart. Alas, poor Monmouth! He was ever a weatherc.o.c.k, and even as Wilding's words seemed to strike the courage out of him, so did Grey's short contemptuous answer restore it.

"As it is, we'll thrust that throne over with our hands," said he after a moment's pause.

"Aye," cried Monmouth. "We'll do it, G.o.d helping us!"

"Our dependence and trust is in the Lord of Hosts, in Whose Name we go forth," boomed the voice of Ferguson, quoting from his precious Declaration. "The Lord will do that which seemeth good unto Him."

"An unanswerable argument," said Wilding, smiling. "But the Lord, I am told by the gentlemen of your cloth, works in His own good time, and my fears are all lest, finding us unprepared of ourselves, the Lord's good time be not yet."

"Out on ye, sir," cried Ferguson. "Ye want for reverence!"

"Common sense will serve us better at the moment," answered Wilding with a touch of sharpness. He turned to the frowning and perplexed Duke--whose mind was being tossed this way and that, like a shuttlec.o.c.k upon the battledore of these men's words. "Your Grace," he said, "forgive me that I speak it if hear it you will, or forbid me to say it if your resolve is unalterable in this matter."

"It is unalterable," answered Grey for the Duke.

But Monmouth gently overruled him for once.

"Nevertheless, speak by all means, Mr. Wilding. Whatever you may say, you need have no fear that any of us can doubt your good intentions to ourselves."

"I thank Your Grace. What I have to say is but a repet.i.tion of the first words I uttered at this table. I would urge Your Grace even now to retreat."

"What? Are you mad?" It was Lord Grey who asked the impatient question.

"I doubt it's over-late for that," said Fletcher slowly.

"I am not so sure," answered Wilding. "But I am sure that to attempt it were the safer course--the surer in the end. I myself may not linger to push forward the task of stirring up the people, for I am already something more than under suspicion. But there are others who will remain to carry on the work after I have departed with Your Grace, if Your Grace thinks well. From the Continent by correspondence we can mature our plans. In a twelvemonth things will be very different, and we can return with confidence."

Grey shrugged and turned his shoulder upon Wilding, but said no word.

There was silence of some few moments. Andrew Fletcher leaned his elbow on the table and took his brow in his great bony hand. Wilding's words seemed an echo of those he himself had spoken a week or two ago, only to be overruled by Grey, who swayed the Duke more than did any other--and that he did not do so of fell purpose, and seeking deliberately to work Monmouth's ruin, no man will ever be able to say with certainty.

Ferguson rose, a tall, spare, stooping figure, and smote the board with his fist. "It is a good cause," he cried, "and G.o.d will not leave us unless we leave Him."

"Henry the Seventh landed with fewer men than did Your Grace," said Grey, "and he succeeded."

"True," put in Fletcher. "But Henry the Seventh was sure of the support of not a few of the n.o.bility, which does not seem to be our case."

Ferguson and Grey stared at him in horror; Monmouth sat biting his lip, more bewildered than thoughtful.

"O man of little faith!" roared Ferguson in a pa.s.sion. "Are ye to be swayed like a straw in the wind?"

"I am no' swayed. Ye ken this was ever my own view. I feel, in my heart, that what Mr. Wilding says is right. It is but what I said myself, and Captain Matthews with me, before we embarked upon this expedition. We were in danger of ruining all by a needless precipitancy. Nay, man, never stare so," he said to Grey, "I am in it now and I am no' the man to draw back, nor do I go so far as Mr. Wilding in counselling such a course. We've set our hands to the plough; let us go forward in G.o.d's name. Yet I would remind you that what Mr. Wilding says is true. Had we waited until next year, we had found the usurper's throne tottering under him, and, on our landing, it would have toppled o'er of itself."

"I have said already that we'll overset it with our hands," Grey answered.

"How many hands have you?" asked a new voice, a crisp, discordant voice, much steeped in mockery. It was Nick Trenchard's.

"Have we another here of Mr. Wilding's mind?" cried Grey, staring at him.

"I am seldom of any other," answered Trenchard.

"We shall no' want for hands," Ferguson a.s.sured him. "Had ye arrived earlier ye might have seen how readily men enlisted." He had risen and approached the window as he spoke; he pulled it open, to let in the full volume of sound that rose from the street below.

"A Monmouth! A Monmouth!" voices shouted.

Ferguson struck a theatrical posture, one long, lean arm stretched outward from the shoulder.

"Ye hear them, sirs," he cried, and there was a gleam of triumph in his eye. "That is answer enough to those who want for faith, to the f.e.c.kless ones that think the Lord will abandon those that have set out to serve Him," and his glance comprehended Fletcher, Trenchard, and Wilding.

The Duke stirred in his chair, stretched a hand for the bottle and filled a gla.s.s. His mercurial spirits were rising again. He smiled at Wilding.

"I think you are answered, sir," said he; "and I hope that like Fletcher there, who shared your doubts, you will come to agree that since we have set our hands to the plough we must go forward."

"I have said that which I had it on my conscience to say. Your Grace may have found me over-ready with my counsel; at least you shall find me no less ready with my sword."

"Odso! That is better." Grey applauded, and his manner was almost pleasant.

"I never doubted it, Mr. Wilding," His Grace replied; "but I should like to hear you say that you are convinced--at least in part," and he waved his hand towards the window. It was almost as if he pleaded for encouragement. In common with most men who came in contact with Wilding, he had felt the latent force of this man's nature, the strength that was hidden under that calm surface, and the acuteness of the judgment that must be wedded to it. He longed to have the word of such a man that his enterprise was not as desperate as Wilding had seemed at first to paint it. But Wilding made no concession to hopes or desires when he dealt with facts.

"Men will flock to you, no doubt; persecution has wearied many of the country-folk, and they are ready for revolt. But they are all untrained in arms; they are rustics, not soldiers. If any of the men of position were to rally round your standard they would bring the militia, and others in their train; they would bring arms, horses, and money, all of which Your Grace must be sorely needing."

"They will come," answered the Duke.

"Some, no doubt," Wilding agreed; "but had it been next year, I would have answered for it that it would have been no handful had ridden in to welcome you. Scarce a gentleman of Devon or Somerset, of Dorset or Hampshire, of Wiltshire or Cheshire but would have hastened to your side."

"They will come as it is," the Duke repeated with an almost womanish insistence, persisting in believing what he hoped, all evidence apart.