The King's Men Part 18

"I think not," answered Mary, her old aversion for Mrs. Carey doubled on the instant.

"Then we shall take him too. Shall we go and find him?"

Dacre was still standing by the window, and Mary Lincoln, thinking to bring him to her, asked him if the meeting had opened.

"Not yet," he said, from his corner; "but they are crowding the platform with speakers."

He would have gone to Miss Lincoln, whose earnest nature, as well as her beautiful face, had impressed the single-minded Royalist perhaps more deeply than anything outside the King's own cause. But he did not move, because of his dislike for Mrs. Oswald Carey, founded somewhat on an instinctive doubt of her honesty.

Mrs. Oswald Carey, glancing from Mary's face to Dacre's, quietly resolved to keep these two from coming together that evening if she could prevent it. She now urged Mary to take her to her father while she "delivered Miss Windsor's message," a word adopted on the moment; and Mary had to go with her.

Meanwhile the meeting in the square had opened, and the voices of the speakers were clearly heard in the drawing-room. It would have been a scene of singularly oppressive character even to a heedless observer; but its unexpressed and perhaps unconscious purport was deeply read by many of those who listened from the balcony and parlors of Mr. Windsor's house.

Now and then came from the vast field of faces in the square a rumbling roar that swelled and died like thunder; and then came the single voice of a speaker, stretched like a thin wire, joining roar to roar. All through the proceedings there was never a laugh from the mult.i.tude.

"Listen!" cried Colonel Featherstone from the balcony, late in the night; "here is a dramatic fellow."

The man then addressing the crowd was one who had from his first sentence moved his audience to an extraordinary degree--one of those magnetic voices of the people which flames the word that is smouldering in every heart. He had used no cloak for his meaning, like the other speakers; but boldly attacked the Legitimists, the Monarchy, the t.i.tles and the privileges of the aristocracy.

"These are things of the past, and not of the future!" sounded from the deep voice. "The England of to-morrow shall have no aristocracy but her wisest and her best, shall have no hereditary rights but the equal right of every Englishman!"

Here followed the thunderous approval of the mult.i.tude.

"Listen!" again cried Featherstone from his advanced place on the balcony. "Listen!"

"Will that crime be attempted?" cried the electric voice of the orator.

"Yes! I believe it will be attempted." Then there was a low murmur among the ma.s.s, and a changing of feet that made an ominous, scuffling sound.

"What then? Then it will be every man's duty to strike down the enemies of the people--to destroy them, so that we and our children shall not be destroyed. We do not appeal to the sword, but the sword is ours, and we can use it terribly. Their blood be upon their own heads who dare to lay their hands on the charter of the people's rights!"

In the wave of tremendous applause that followed these words Mary Lincoln looked at Dacre, who had turned from the window. His face, always severe, was now set in fierce sternness. Again she was on the point of going to him to speak the warning that was burning her heart, but she saw Dacre suddenly draw himself up proudly, as if he had been challenged. She followed his look and saw her father meet Dacre's glance as sword meets sword.

Every line in Richard Lincoln, from bent brow to clenched hand, seemed filled with the meaning of the orator's ominous words.

The two men, standing almost within arm's reach, looked for one earnest moment into each other's eyes and hearts. What might have followed, who can say, had not the engagement been broken from without. Mary Lincoln pa.s.sed between them, and laying her hand on her father's arm spoke to him, asking to be taken home. The father's eyes fell to the troubled face, and without speaking he went with his daughter.

Mary and her father were hardly missed out of the bright party; but one face became smoother when they had departed--the Beauty's. The gloom of the public meeting brought out the brilliant elements of the gathering with rare effect.

From group to group flashed Mrs. Carey, and her lips and eyes were less eloquent than the clinging touch of her arm, which was almost a caress, as she left or tried to leave her impression of sympathy and admiration on one after another of the Royalists.

Two men she avoided, instinctively and deliberately--Geoffrey Ripon and Sir John Dacre. Calculating, cool, unprincipled as she was, she feared to meet the eyes of these two men, whose very lives she had undermined and sold.

It was eleven o'clock and most of the ladies had gone, when the beautiful woman, attended by Featherstone, drew her soft cloak round her in her carriage and gave her hand, without a glove, to be kissed by the big colonel, bending in the doorway.

"Your driver knows where to go?" asked Featherstone, closing the door.

"Oh, yes; straight home," answered Mrs. Carey, smiling; "good-night."

She lived in a quiet street on the south side of Regent's Park, and thither she went. But when she reached Oxford Street she rang the carriage bell and changed her course.

"Drive to Clapham Common," she said, curtly, "and as fast as you can."

It was a dark night, with a drizzling rain, and as the cab rattled along the empty streets she lay back with closed eyes, evidently thinking of no unpleasant things. It was over five miles to her destination, and more than once on her way her thoughts brought a smile to her lips, and once even an exultant laugh.

On the Battersea side of Clapham Common, in one of those immense old brick houses built in the time of Queen Victoria, with trees and lawns and lodges, lived a man whose name was known in every stock exchange and money market in the world--Benjamin Bugbee, the banker.

From his devotion to the House of Hanover, in its glorious and its gloomy fortunes, and from his intimate business relations with the royal family, Bugbee had received the romantic t.i.tle of "The King's Banker," a name by which he was recognized even in other countries.

Bugbee was a small, bald-headed, narrow-chinned old man, with an air of preternatural solemnity. From boyhood up, through all the stages of life, he had been noted for the mysterious sobriety of demeanor which now marked him as an angular, slow-moving, silent and unpleasant old man.

The devotion of Bugbee to the House of Hanover was clear enough; but the springs of it were quite unseen until some years later, when they were laid bare by a rigid Parliamentary inquiry. The astonishing truth was that this silent and insignificant old man, since the year of the King's banishment, had controlled with absolute power one of the greatest, if not the greatest, private fortunes ever acc.u.mulated in any country--that of the royal exile, who was known to his devoted followers as King George the Fifth.

It is true that the poverty of George, in his residence in the United States, was of world-wide notoriety. The shifts of the "Court" in Boston for very existence, and the extraordinary measures adopted from time to time by royalty to make both ends meet were a scandal in the ears of kings and courtiers everywhere.

Nevertheless, George was one of the richest men in the world--or at least he had been while on the throne, and he would be again should he ever become the reigning monarch of England. The enormous wealth which had begun to acc.u.mulate in Victoria's frugal reign had grown like a rolling s...o...b..ll for over a hundred years. For the latter half century the royal investors had, wisely enough, avoided all national bonds except those of the two old republics, France and America; but in the great cities of the earth, and notably in those that stood the least chance of bombardment or earthquake, the heir of the Hanoverian line was one of the largest owners of real property.

George's royal grandfather was a generous and almost extravagant monarch; but his enormous private wealth was sufficient even for so luxurious a prince. The inheritance which had made his reign stable and pleasant he secured for his son, strictly stipulating that it was to be enjoyed by him or his heir while reigning as monarch of England.

Fatal words these of King Edward's will, for they secured the lifelong poverty of the grandson whose welfare he had at heart. During the few years of George's reign the royal coffers overflowed with gold. Bugbee, the King's banker, was exhaustless as an ocean of wealth.

But the revolution that banished the King and his n.o.blemen, among them those who had been executors with Bugbee of King Edward's will, left the solemn little banker absolute master of the royal fortune--until George or his heir came back to reign as King of England.

For twenty years Mr. Bugbee had been in possession, or rather dominion.

The poverty of the royal exile in America was well known to him; but to the demands and pet.i.tions of George and his "Court" he turned a deaf ear. His conscience, he answered, would not allow him to touch one penny of the treasure, which could only be legally drawn by a reigning King of England.

In the early years of the King's exile, Bugbee had sent considerable sums to his royal master, which he alleged were from his own purse; but though he had since continued these, the annual amount had been reduced to a beggarly allowance.

Still the old banker was the most trusted agent of the Royalists; and weak George himself regarded with a vague respect, almost like fear, the inflexible integrity which controlled the conscience of this most devoted subject.

Mrs. Oswald Carey did not hear the city clocks, which "clashed and hammered" the midnight hour, as her cab rolled up the tree-lined avenue of the pretentious house of "The King's Banker."

The driver rang the bell; and as the door almost instantly opened, Mrs.

Carey, from the cab, saw several men in the wide hall, some sitting and others standing, like men in waiting.

A tall flunkey took the card, closed the door, and Mrs. Oswald Carey had to wait in the cab a full minute. Then the door opened, and down the wide steps of the porch hobbled Mr. Bugbee, with gouty, tender feet, the top of his bald head shining under the lamp.

"I had almost given you up," was his greeting; and as he helped the Beauty from the cab there was an unquestionable welcome in his gratified smile. That they had met before, and intimately, was evident in the manner of the reception. The truth was that Mrs. Oswald Carey and her husband were old connections of the banker, the husband through monetary difficulties and the wife through complications of her own, in which old Bugbee had, for some reason or other, a.s.sisted her more than once. She knew that her husband was in the old man's power, but she never pretended to know it. On his side, old Bugbee was a foresighted worker.

For years past he had seen that the day of the King's return would come, and for that day he meant to be prepared in more ways than one. In his cunning old brain he had some plan laid away in which he had provided a part for this beautiful and utterly unprincipled woman.

"Am I too late?" asked Mrs. Oswald Carey.

"Only too late for supper," was the dry answer of the old banker, but the tone was pleasant.

Through the hall, where those in waiting stood respectfully as she pa.s.sed, the banker led her to a small, luxuriously furnished parlor on the ground floor. As she threw aside her wraps and sank into a soft chair, old Bugbee opened the door of an inner room, and turned to her:

"These are your apartments," said he.

The Beauty looked around, but said nothing, only nodding her head.