went to ruin for mine," replied the King.
"He failed," said the Queen, "and he pays. When we fail, we too will pay. But this is not our time. The people demand Strafford, and we will not risk our Crowns and lives by refusing this demand."
"He trusts me," repeated Charles, "and I do love him. He served me well, he was loyal … our God help me! … my friend——"
He turned away to hide the uncontrollable tears, and, opening a drawer in the little Chinese cabinet, fumbled blindly among some papers and pulled out a letter.
"This is what he wrote me," he faltered. "I have never had one like him in my service. … Mary … I cannot let him die."
He sank into a chair and, resting his elbow on the arm of it, dropped his face into his hand; the other held the letter of my lord written from the Tower.
The Queen had read this epistle; at the time it had moved her, but now that sensation of generous pity was dried up in the fierce desire to save her husband and herself from all the ruin a revolution threatened. She went up to the King and took the letter from his inert fingers, and, glancing over it, read aloud a passage—
"'Sir, my consent shall more acquit you herein to God, than all the world can do besides. To a willing man there is no injury done; and as by God's grace I forgive all the world with calmness and meekness of infinite contentment to my dislodging soul, so, sir, to you I can give the life of this world with all the cheerfulness imaginable, in the just acknowledgment of your exceeding favours.'—
"Hear!" added the Queen breathlessly, "the man himself does not ask nor expect this sacrifice of you——"
Charles interrupted.
"Because he is magnanimous, shall I be a slavish coward?"
"He is willing to die," urged the Queen; "he is pleased to give his life for you——"
"Willing to die? Where is there a man willing to die? There is none to be found, however old, wretched, or mean. Deceive not thyself, Strafford is young, strong, full of joy and life—he hath a wife and children and others dear to him—is it like that he is willing to die?"
The Queen's eyes did not sink before the miserable reproach in her husband's gaze.
"Willing or no, he must die," she said firmly. "He must go. Stand not in the way of his fate."
"He shall not die through me," said Charles, with a bitter doggedness. "Am I never to sleep sound again for thinking of how I abandoned this man? He came to London, Mary, on our promise of protection."
"We have done what we could," returned Henriette Marie, unmoved, "and now we can do no more."
"I will not," said the King, as if repeating the words gave him strength. "I will not. Do they want everything I love—first Buckingham—now Strafford——"
"Then me," flashed the Queen. "Think of that, if you think of your wife at all."
This reproach was so undeserved as to be grotesque. In all the King's concerns, from the most important to the most foolish, she had always come foremost, and this was the first occasion on which he had not absolutely thrown himself on her judgment and bowed to her desires.
Some such reflection must have crossed his tortured mind.
"You always disliked Strafford," was all he said.
"No," said the Queen vehemently, as if she disclaimed some shameful thing. "No, never, and I would have saved him. Do not take me to be so mean and creeping a creature as to counsel you pass this Bill because I hate my lord."
She was justified in her defence; she had been jealous of the powerful minister, and she had never personally liked him, but it was not for vengeance or malice that she urged the King to abandon Strafford, but because she was afraid of that power which asked for his death, and because her tyrannical royal pride detested the thought that she and hers should be in an instant's danger for the sake of a subject. And when she saw her husband, for the first time since their marriage, so absorbed in anguished thought as to be scarcely aware of her presence, as to be forgetful of her and her children, she felt jealous of this other influence that seemed to defy hers, and a fierceness that was akin to cruelty touched her desperation.
"Who is this man that I should be endangered for his sake?" she cried, after she had in vain waited for the King to break his dismal silence.
"He is my friend," muttered Charles.
"Save him then, or share his fate," returned his wife bitterly. "As for me, I will go to my own country, and there find the protection that you cannot give me."
Charles sprang up and faced her.
"Mary, what is this? What do you speak of?" he cried in a distracted voice, and holding out to her his irresolute hands.
The Queen took advantage of this sudden weakening of his silent defences; her whole manner changed. She went up to him softly, took his hands in hers, and, raising to him a face pale and pleading, broke out into eager and humble entreaties.
"My Charles, let him go—let us be happy again—do not, for this scruple, risk everything! My dear, give way—it must be—we are in danger—oh, listen to me!"
He stared at her with eyes clouded with suffering.
"Couldst thou but put this eloquence on the other side I might be a happier man," he said. "Strengthen my conscience, do not weaken it."
His tone was as pleading as hers had been, but she perceived that he was still obdurate on the main part of her entreaty, and she slipped from his clasp and knelt at his feet in a genuine passion of tears.
"You have had the last of me!" she sobbed. "I will not stay where neither my dignity nor my life is safe. Keep Strafford and let me go!"
The King turned away with feeble and unsteady steps, and going to the window pulled aside the olive velvet curtains.
The twilight had fallen and the sky was pale to colourlessness; low on the horizon, beyond the river, sombre banks of clouds were rising, and at the edge of them, floating free in the purity of the sky, was the evening star, sparkling with the frosty light of Northern climes.
The King fixed his eyes on this star, but without hope of comfort; cold and disdainful seemed star and heavens, and God pitiless and very far away behind the storm-clouds.
There was no command, no excuse, no reproof for him from on High; in his own heart the decision must be and now—at once—within the next hour. At that moment life seemed unutterably hateful to the King; everything in the world, even the figure of his wife, he viewed with a touch of sick disgust; the taint of what he was about to do was already over him, his life was already stained with baseness, his happiness corrupted.
He knew, as he stared at the icy star that was already being veiled by the on-rushing vapours of the rain-cloud, that he would abandon Strafford.
Though he knew that it would be better to be that man in the Tower, against whose ardent life the decree had gone forth, than himself in his palace, secure by the sacrifice of that faithful servant; though he knew that in the bloody grave of his betrayed friend would be entombed for ever his own tranquillity and peace of mind, yet he also knew that it was not in him to stand firm against those inexorable ones who demanded Strafford, against the tears and reproaches of his wife, against his own inner fears and weaknesses which whispered to him dread and terror of these hateful Parliament men and of this mutinous city of London.
In his heart he had always known that he would fail Strafford if it ever came to a sharp issue, yea, he had known it when he urged his minister to come from York, and that made this moment the more awful, that his secret weakness, which he had never admitted to himself, was forced into life.
He would forsake Strafford to buy the safety of his Crown, his family, his person, and Strafford would forgive him (he could picture the look of incredulous pity on the condemned man's dark face when the sentence