CHAPTER XXIV.

LAWRENCE SLEEPS ON IT.

"Now, Friend What-d'ye-call-'em, are you going to accept his majesty's polite invitation? or d'ye mean to stand staring all day like a stuck pig, at your brother-porker's pate here?"

The dig in the ribs accompanying these words, which were rendered bewilderingly indistinct by reason of the quantity of the toothsome edibles he referred to, filling the speaker's mouth, materially assisted Lee to catch something of their signification; and he started from the reverie into which he had fallen. "Your majesty--" he began, looking round with dazed, uneasy eyes, and staggering forward a pace or two.

"Ha! ha! ha! That's excellent!" broke out a laughing chorus. "Your majesty! Hear the fellow! Are his wits clean gone? I' faith, he looks something like it! Majesty forsooth! There's none of it here, friend; unless we're to be having you for a change. Come, Master Up-in-the-clouds, out with you! Was ever such insolence! Out with you! D'ye hear?"

It was the most doubtful question in the world whether he did. If so, it was, at all events, without a spark of comprehending; and Lawrence Lee continued to lie back, pale and more than half senseless, in the king's chair, whither he had staggered forward as he had uttered those last words, and with a twist and a reel, sunk among its crimson cushions.

"Nay," said another of the crowd of lackeys; "leave him alone. Let him bide a minute. I saw 'twas a comin' over him before the king had done speakin' to him. He went on gettin' whiter and whiter. Come, man, drink a drop o' this;" and he took a tall ruby-red Venice goblet of wine from the table and placed it to the young man's lips. "So; that's brave!" he went on in kindly tones, as Lawrence drank a little of the wine and roused up. "Finish it, man, and have another atop o't. One leg o' mutton drives down another. Oh! eh! but we don't take noes here. Drink, I tell 'ee;" and refilling the goblet, the well-meaning fellow forced Lawrence to drain it again, in spite of his efforts at resistance.

[Sidenote: Where is the King?]

"Where's the king?--the king?" said Lawrence as consciousness all broke in upon him, and he sat up. "I must speak to him. I haven't told him half--"

"Then t'must wait!" cried another lackey, "for the king's gone."

"Gone!"

"Ay; ever so far by now. He wasn't going to stop here all day listening to your wild-goose tales, I doubt. He's half-way across the heath by now, and all the lot after him."

"But the queen!"

"Ay; her too. Didn't you see them all go? Where had your eyes got to?"

"Gone a wool-gathering along of his wits!" laughed another.

And while their shouts of boisterous laughter made the old walls echo again, Lawrence pressed the palms of his hands on the top of his aching head and made an effort to recall all that had passed, and to solve the puzzle of the strange condition in which he found himself. Possibly the fact of neither food nor drink having passed his lips since a hasty meal snatched at the Nether Hall early dinner of the previous day, was accountable for much of it. Neither can long-fasting men ride a score and a half of miles and retain their wits in good working order; and strong wine, if it be a temporary remedy, is scarcely one to be recommended, as these noisy court lackeys seemed bent on doing. And when he refused the dainty food they hospitably pressed upon him with the savageness only those who have lost all desire for eating, from too long going without it, can ever be guilty of, they forced more wine upon him, challenging him with a toast he neither dared nor willed to refuse.

[Sidenote: A loyal toast.]

"The king! the king!" they cried, filling all round for themselves, and brimming the goblet in his hand. "Come, Master Stranger, we must see what metal you're made of. Drink a bumper to the king's majesty, and no heeltaps. Here's confusion to all crop-eared knaves."

"Ay, ay!" shouted Lee, starting to his feet, and waving the goblet high over his head. "Confusion to all crop-eared knaves. And now a toast. A toast!"

"Silence! Oh, yes; oh, yes! Listen!" shrieked the noisy crew. "Fill high. His majesty the chairman proposes a toast."

"The queen. God bless her!" cried Lee, putting the glass to his lips and draining it to the last drop.

"Ho! ho! Ha! ha! Queen? Which queen?" cried the roysterers. "Which queen?--"

"Queen Ruth, to be sure!" shouted one, hooking his arm into Lawrence's as Lee rose from the chair. "She of the Rye House, you blockheads. Queen Ruth!"

[Sidenote: Lawrence escapes.]

The sound of her name steadied Lee's senses like the working of a charm. He straightened himself to his full height, and striking out right and left, sent the troublesome fellows stumbling and tripping pell-mell among the chairs and tables. Then with a parting fling of his empty glass at the one who had dared to make a jest of the dear name, he rushed from the room--on, on--by the now entirely deserted ante-chambers, headlong down the grand staircase, through pitch dark interminable passages, until he found himself standing spent and breathless in the open air, the cloudless blue sky above him, and his feet ankle-deep in a miry lane.

[Sidenote: The King's garden.]

The place seemed to form a sort of thoroughfare to the back premises of the palace, whose walls skirted its length on one side, while the other was bounded by a tall privet-hedge. Between the ragged twigs he could discern the broad flat stretch of country beyond. On the left, some fifty yards off, stood the timbered plaster fronts of a row of street cottages, and a few paces to his right a high narrow iron gateway, flanked by a couple of moss-grown stone pillars surmounted respectively by the royal lion and unicorn. Through this gate's filigreed iron-work, at the end of a somewhat broad, gravel, yew-bordered path, Lee could see a podgy marble Cupid spouting water through a hunting-horn into a basin. Lured by the gentle plash of the water, he approached the gate and attempted to push it open. With a faint screech, as if of surprise at being disturbed, it yielded, and undeterred by its stone guardians, whose jaws seemed indeed to grin less in defiance of his intrusion, than in wonder and derision at his fancy for exploring the deserted place, Lee entered, and strolled towards the fountain. On its broad edge he seated himself, to the great confusion of the gold and silver fish moving about its weedy depths, and found that it formed the centre of a fair-sized garden, the path by which he had come being one of four, radiating off at equal distances between grass-plots, towards the lofty red brick boundary walls, gay now with the snowy blossom of espaliered fruit-trees.

Here and there white stone gods and goddesses gleamed amidst the dark yew paths, and would have seemed to render the silence of the place still more intense, had it not been broken by the voices of the myriad insect creatures footing it merrily among the parterres, and the darting butterflies, while stout old bumble-bees hummed cogitatively as they gathered in their wealth, as if they were mentally reckoning the probable sum total of its returns; and all to the music of Sir Cuckoo, who had a vast deal to promise of the good time coming.

[Sidenote: A reverie.]

Well, well; and Lawrence Lee, rising from his seat on the fountain's brink, and strolling listlessly onward by the nearest path, heaved a prolonged and heart-vexed sigh, making all the while not too flattering comparisons between these careless denizens of the king's pleasaunce--the bees, of course, simply proving his case by their exceptional prudence--who troubled their feather-brains not one doit about to-morrow's storms, which were as likely as not--more likely than not, indeed, to fall; as you might see if you would but spare half an eye towards the south-eastward horizon--and the king himself. As to the idiotic, selfish, frivolous lot about him, they were beneath contempt, Lawrence considered. To compare them with the butterflies and gnats would be an insult--to the insects.

This stage of his meditations brought him so near to the foot of a flight of rustic wooden steps that he tripped upon the lowermost one; and looking upward, as he recovered his balance, he saw that they wound up to some height, terminating at the entrance of a pavilion of octagon shape, built into the angle of the wall, and partly overhanging the road running beneath. For sheer lack of something better to wile away his enforced leisure--for to see the king again, by hook or by crook, Lawrence was determined--he ascended the steps, and found himself in a small eight-sided chamber. Its walls were studded with morsels of spar, bright-coloured shells, and bits of looking-glass disposed in various and eye-fatiguing geometrical devices, sparkling like Hassan's cave in the rays of sun, now beating fiercely through the two windows. One of these looked upon the road, the other, commanding a view of the rear of the palace, admitted light into the place; but in accordance with the rule of such pleasure-houses, no air, since they were "not made to open."

[Sidenote: The summer house.]

Nevertheless, a cool breeze rustled in through the doorless entrance; and Lawrence, wearied out, and still dizzy with the fumes of the wine which had been forced upon him, sank upon the part of the bench running round the wall which was nearest the inner window, and fell to a listless contemplation of the scene before him.

Ugly, or altogether unpicturesque it assuredly could not be called; but incongruous and disorderly it was, with its queer irregular mass of wall and roof, new and old, time stained and brand new, all flung together without apparent rhyme or reason, as if they might settle down as they could.

It was some time before Lawrence was able to distinguish, amid such countless odd holes and corners, the door by which he had found his way into the open air; and longer still before, carrying his eye to the upper story, he discovered the row of little bull's-eye casements which lighted the corridor conducting to the king's apartments. That it ran to the rear of the palace he had some hazy sort of notion; since through one of those casements he had caught a glimpse of waving green beechen boughs, and had guessed at the possibility of a garden beyond, while not a single tree shaded the street front of the palace.

[Sidenote: A long nap.]

The last straw, eastern wiseacres say, breaks the camel's back; and it is possible that his toilsome little ascent to the pavilion, and the burning sunbeams pouring in through the glass on Lawrence's head bore their share in producing the drowsy sensations stealing so rapidly upon him, that all the scene before him dissolved as he looked, into one confusing haze. "'Tis like a dream," he murmured to himself, pressing the palms of both his hands on his throbbing temples, in a desperate effort to shake off their oppression. "A murrain on those rascals for drenching me with that stuff till I feel as if I was spinning in an Epping Fair merry-go-round. Like a dream--a bad dream"--and his head drooping lower and lower upon his arms outspread upon the broad window-seat, rested a dead weight there at last, and he fell asleep.

Heavily as one of the Seven Sleepers he slept on. Ten, eleven, mid-day came and went; and still, as afternoon lengthened, and the shadows grew deep upon the grass, he stirred only to sink back again into the unrefreshing sleep of utter fatigue and exhaustion. Sultry as midsummer the sunbeams poured into the airless chamber, till its walls seemed sheeted in parti-coloured flame, which grew but the more dazzling as the time of parting drew on, and the gray evening mists began to spread over the low-lying fields.

[Sidenote: A sudden waking.]

High aloft in the greenish blue sky the young May moon rose and mingled her mild beams with the fiery westward glow, and still he slept on; but restlessly now, and muttering hurried but inarticulate words, as if he was dreaming uneasy dreams. How much longer he would have drowsed the precious hours away, it is hard to guess, had it not been for a sudden and deafening blare of French horns and all kinds of music, mingled with shouts of gay laughter and voices which broke just beneath the window, sending Lee to his feet with a start and a cry of terror. "Fire! Fire!" he shouted, staggering to the middle of the floor and gazing in wild distraction round the pavilion, while he gasped for breath in its stifling atmosphere. Could it be that he was dreaming still? Strange ugly visions of--Nay, now, but see what things are dreams! and what is it after all but the setting-sun blaze? And as Lee stumbled tremblingly back against the trellised doorway, greedily drinking in the cool evening air, his senses dawned upon him.

"Ay, ay," he said to himself, with a faint smile of amusement at his own fancies, as he stretched his neck over the wall, just in time to obtain a glimpse of the brilliant cavalcade turning the street corner in a cloud of white dust, and caught the shouts of the little crowd collected to see the king pass. "Come back, has he? Yes, yes, God save him, with all my heart and soul--God save the king! But the question is, you see, good people. The question is--" and then Lawrence Lee came to a dead pause, and fell into a deep reverie. "How was he to be saved?" pondered on the young man, his brows knitting painfully. This happy-go-lucky Charles, who suspected no foul play, because he would persist in judging others by himself, despite all his harsh experiences, and thought no one capable of taking so much trouble as to contrive it. This good-natured gentleman, whose manner of speaking, far more than the words he spoke, had won Lawrence Lee's heart, as they were apt to win all who approached him. How--so the young man now asked himself, could he ever have been brought to nurse one traitorous thought towards him? Ay, now indeed he understood, as never he had before, his mother's glowing look, when with the proud tears glistening star-bright in her eyes, she would say: "Thy father died for his king, lad."

[Sidenote: What is to be done?]

The last shout sank to silence. The birds' song ceased. The last ray of the sunset glory faded, and only the plash of the fountain broke the silence, and still Lawrence Lee stood leaning against the ivied wall so motionless, and his face showing so white and fixed in the dazzling moonlight, that he might have been taken for one of the garden's statues; but at last, as eight o'clock struck in the town belfries, and far-off village church towers chimed it back, he stirred, and slowly descended the little rustic steps.

[Sidenote: A deep resolve.]

"Rest thee well, father," he murmured, reverently folding his hands as he went. "The world may blame me, and say what it lists. The king shall be saved, though my life should answer for it. Father--only let heaven count me worthy to be called thy son."

And so across the garden, and through the gate, still standing half open as he had left it, he passed on into the street.