The King's Men Part 12

"As we regarded his, no doubt--as a crime."

"G.o.d!" thought Geoffrey, pacing the floor, "how strange that two men so n.o.ble as these should look upon each other as traitors and enemies!"

"Were it not for Richard Lincoln the Monarchy would have been restored ten years ago. He is a powerful supporter of his cla.s.s," said Dacre, slowly.

"Dacre!" said Geoffrey, stopping in front of him, "it is we who are cla.s.s men. Richard Lincoln is a patriot!"

Dacre leaned his chin on the old sword, and looked silently into the fire.

"What will you do with such men as he, should this revolution succeed?"

continued Geoffrey. "They will never submit."

"They must," said Dacre, with compressed lips, "or--" The sentence was left unspoken.

Geoffrey saw it was no use to argue. He had cast in his lot with Dacre, and there could be no drawing back.

"Stay with me to-night," said Geoffrey, as his friend was b.u.t.toning his coat. "Reynolds has prepared a room for you."

"No; I must see Featherstone, who returns to London early to-morrow. I should like to see you later in the day. I shall come here, I think."

"Yes; it is quiet here. Well, let me walk with you as far as the end of the cliff."

And lighting their cigars the two men struck across the field, Geoffrey having ordered old Reynolds to go to bed.

Mrs. Oswald Carey waited till the old man had left the kitchen and retired. Then she came from her hiding-place and at one glance saw what she wanted--the list of conspirators, which Geoffrey had laid open on the table. Her keen sense of hearing had followed this paper as if it were visible to her eyes, and she knew that it had not been returned to Dacre. With a firm hand she seized the doc.u.ment, and the next moment she had left the room, closing the two doors behind her. She kept close to the wall as she circled the lodge to the lower path, and then she started on a rapid walk for Ripon House.

As Geoffrey returned he was thinking of the list, and he looked for it, with something of alarm at its absence. When he realized that it was gone he walked through the kitchen and called up Reynolds.

"Were you in the room since I went out?" he asked.

"No, my lord."

"Is there any one else in the house?"

"No, my lord."

"Has there been any one else here to-night?"

The old man hesitated before he answered this time.

"No, my lord; no one has been here."

Geoffrey had not the slightest reason to doubt the faithful old man, but had asked the questions for rea.s.surance. As he retired for the night, or rather morning, he said to himself that Dacre had no doubt taken the doc.u.ment, which was too precious and too dangerous to be left in any other hands.

CHAPTER VII.

A FOUR-IN-HAND AND ONE IN THE BUSH.

The four-in-hand which was drawn up in front of the great terrace of Ripon House the next morning reflected much credit upon Mr. Jawkins's _savoir faire_. The new harness glistened in the sunlight of the bright November morning; the grooms, in the nattiest of coats and the whitest and tightest of breeches, were standing at the horses' heads; and the horses themselves, beautifully matched, clean-limbed and glossy, were fresh from a toilet as carefully made as that of a professional beauty, or even Mrs. Oswald Carey's own. And that lady stood on the threshold of the Doric portal, her clinging driving-dress seeming loath to hide the grand curves of her figure, and her violet eyes drinking in the day. As she stood there, she seemed anything but the flower of a moribund civilization, the last blossom of an ancient _regime_; but there is a certain force which flourishes in anarchy, a life which feeds upon the decay of other lives, and grows but the more beautiful for it. Geoffrey looked upon her with a half-repelled, unwilling admiration, little knowing how near he had been to her the night before. Then Maggie Windsor came out, and he tried to look at her instead.

"Remarkably fine horses, those, Mr. Windsor," remarked the Duke, with a gravely approving nod of his polished head. "Remarkably fine horses," he repeated, as if one could not have too much of a good thing from a duke; and this time he threw in a wave of his patrician hand, gratis. Jawkins looked at him with admiration, and again felt that he was a prime investment. The strawberry-colored dome of his bald head was alone worth the money, not to mention the strawberry leaves.

"And does not your Grace admire the break?" asked Mr. Jawkins, with a preliminary bow and smirk. "It is a new pattern; and the panels picked out in cream color are thought to give a monstrous fine tone to the body. And as for the horses--they're from ex-President Rourke's state stables."

The Duke looked as if he deprecated the introduction of any such recent personage into the company, even by the mention of his name; and at that moment the d.u.c.h.ess arrived with Sir John Dacre. Sir John did not look much like the member of a coaching party; a close observer might have noted a slight mutual glance of intelligence pa.s.sing between his eyes and Geoffrey's. Mrs. Oswald Carey was that close observer.

"A four-in-hand is all very well for those that like it," observed Mr.

Windsor to the Duke, "but give me a box buggy and a span of long-tailed horses. Are you off to-day, Jawkins?"

"Yes; the Prince has sent telegrams at twenty-minute intervals all through the morning, and in the latest one he began to swear. The Prince is a natural linguist and can swear in fifteen different languages. I must be off to Brighton at once. I will return late at night. I have left one of my young men, who will take good care of you, you know.

Good-by, Mr. Windsor--your Grace, I am your most obedient--" Jawkins bowed low and jumped into his little dog-cart. By this time the break had got fairly loaded; the horses were given their heads; the horn sounded; and in the wake of the great equipment provided for Mr.

Jawkins's clients, Jawkins himself rattled contentedly along to the station.

A fine show made the paint and silver and the flowers and the gay cloaks and furs and the beautiful women among them. What is more dashing and brilliant than a coaching-party? What more inspiring to the eye, more light and careless; what fun more fast and furious? And many a man that morning, who felt his hand clothed with all the might of the people, looked curiously at the equipage of the Yankee millionaire and envied these gay people, the haughty beauty of the women, the gentlemen with their calm, unruffled exterior, and the light-heartedness, the carelessness of it all.

Now, upon this coach were six people; and as they bowled along in the crisp November morning they were thinking of many things. Let us fancy, if we can, what some of these gay thoughts were. On the inside seat was Mr. Sydney, the hired wit, the broken-down man-about-town; his health gone, his future gone, with no family, no friends, no faith in a hereafter and no joy in the present; and the day preceding, at dinner, he had eaten a _vol-au-vent_ which had disagreed with him. Next Mr.

Sydney came the d.u.c.h.ess, the gaunt and dignified lady who awed even Jawkins to repose. There was not a night of her life that she did not cry like any schoolgirl whose lover has forgotten her, at the shame of her life, and the bitterness and humiliation of her daily bread. She would rail at the old Duke, who had come to it so easily, and was willing to prost.i.tute the honors of his race for gross creature comforts, his claret, his cigar; and every morning, when her old eyes opened, she hated the daylight that told her she was not yet dead.

Next the d.u.c.h.ess came Maggie Windsor. Come now (you might say), she, at least, is in her place upon a four-in-hand, with her young life, her happy lot, her pretty, pouting lips and laughing eyes? I do not know; I marked the quiver of those pretty lips, and the flush of her fresh face, as her eyes, no longer laughing, looked at Mrs. Carey, just in front.

Beside her sits Sir John Dacre. His lips are closed firmly above the square blue chin, and his eyes, beneath a prematurely wrinkled brow, look straight before him out upon the road. Perhaps you would not call Sir John's face attractive; his expression does not change enough for charm, and there is not light enough in those still gray eyes. As you see it now, so his expression has been these twenty years, from his studious youth at Oxford on. The four horses break into a furious canter down the hill; the coach sways from side to side; and Dacre still looks far ahead and down the road. If there is no light in the eyes, there is no tremor of the lips; just so he looked when at the doorway, all unconscious that Mary Lincoln was looking at his eyes and finding them attractive. Dacre has never thought of women; his life has had but a single thought, a single hope, and that, perhaps, a forlorn one.

In front, on the box-seat, is Geoffrey Ripon, driving, and Ripon is miserable that Maggie Windsor is there, miserable that Eleanor Carey is there, so miserable about either that he half forgets he has promised his life to Dacre, and with him, so close that her full arm touches his, and troubles him as if it had some magnetic influence, sits the beautiful woman whose girlhood he had loved; she, now knowing this, now conscious of the might of love, and of the power that it gave her womanhood upon this man; and in her heart the madness of her misery, the scorning of her world, the courage and the pa.s.sion of despair.

It is a gay coaching party, and many such another rattles through this world with the footmen and the shining trappings and the pomp of paint and varnish. Oddly enough, no one speaks for moments, while they whirl down the avenue beneath the stately trees. "Where shall I drive you to?"

finally says Ripon to the company.

"Where you like," says Miss Windsor, after a pause. "You must know the prettiest place--you have known this country from your childhood."

Ripon drove them up to the highest crest of the down, where the long main wave of the green hills stretches eastward along the coast, and the faint blue sea sleeps glimmering in the south. Still no one spoke; Dacre's eyes were lost over the ocean; even Miss Windsor was grave and silent. Mrs. Carey tried to point out a sail to Geoffrey; he could not see it, and she leaned over close to him that he might follow the direction of her eye. Her breath seemed warm upon his face after the sea breeze.

"Your eyes are not so good as they used to be," said she. Geoffrey looked at her, and thought to himself that hers were deeper. He said so; but she only laughed the more and looked at him again. "Do you remember our rides in the pony-carriage?" she went on. "Poor Neddy!"

He did remember the rides in the pony-carriage only too well; when he sat beside the laughing girl, and she looked up at him as they drove through the leafy lanes when the shadows lengthened till the sunbeams crept under the old trees and touched her hair with gold. It was in one of these drives that he had vowed that he would always love her. He had broken a sixpence with her in earnest of their betrothal contract. But he did not like to have those drives recalled with Maggie Windsor sitting just behind them. The horses were conveniently restive just then, and perhaps Geoffrey did not put on quite so much brake going down the hill as was necessary. The heavy vehicle went down with a rush; Geoffrey and Mrs. Carey were not looking at the horses, the d.u.c.h.ess was indifferent, Sydney looked on dyspeptically, and Dacre was looking far ahead, as was his wont. Only Maggie Windsor gave a little scream and grasped the rail.

"It was not so hard to drive Neddy as that four," Mrs. Carey went on.

"If I remember aright, the reins were often on the dash-board, and we were not always absorbed in the scenery, I fear." Mrs. Carey sighed, and looked away over the green hills and valleys.

"Poor old Neddy!" said Geoffrey, lightly. "I suppose he carries no such happy burdens now."

"Some people are happy yet," the woman answered. "I told you yesterday I had never blamed you for forgetting me after you went to Oxford. It was true. But I missed you very much." There was a little tremor in her voice as she said this. Geoffrey p.r.i.c.ked his horses nervously.

"My heart gave a great leap when you came into the room--it should not leap, being Oswald's," she continued, in a more worldly tone, "but it did all the same. A woman's heart cannot forget its first possessor, you know; even now that you have lost it--with the rest of your estates," she added maliciously.

"With the rest of my estates," Geoffrey repeated, almost unconsciously.