On a soft golden blue day in September 1651, when the trees were still in full leafage in the Park, and the river reflected a sky veiled with delicate white clouds, when the last sheaves of corn were standing in the fields beyond St. James's Palace, and the orchards near glowed all red with fruit, a crowd was gathered in the streets of London—a crowd as vast and as excited as that which had waited to hear the verdict on Lord Strafford, or had thronged to witness the awful scene outside Whitehall when the King knelt before the headsman.

On both these occasions the people, if triumphant, in the first instance, were still awestruck and silenced, in the second, by the portents of great events and by the magnitude of the terrible daring of their leaders. Now they were triumphant openly, rejoicing almost light-heartedly; the King had died a traitor's death and the skies had not fallen; other great men had followed him in his final fate, and none had avenged them. The present Charles Stewart, called the King of Scots since his coronation at Scone, was flying the country, a proscribed fugitive; the Commonwealth, proclaimed after the death of the late King, was a year and a half old and had shown no signs of weakness nor unstability, and to-day the people were got together to welcome home the Lord-General, Oliver Cromwell, who was returning after having subdued Ireland and Scotland as those Islands had never yet been subdued.

Fire and sword had swept Ireland from coast to coast; Cromwell had not spared the enemies of the Lord, as Drogheda could witness, Papist priests had been hanged or knocked on the head, Papist garrisons massacred, Papist peasants transported, Papist gentry forbidden their religion, and driven from their estates into the desolate regions of Connaught.

Without pause or hesitation or check, with fierceness, vigour, and irresistible onslaught, Cromwell had overcome Ireland, and had left the unfortunate country, silenced now with her own blood, to cherish for ever a terrible image of this Englishman, and a terrible hatred.

Next, he turned against Scotland, where the second Charles, having denounced the faith of his father, and the religion of his mother, having taken the Covenant (submitting in a moment to those things which the late King had died rather than yield to), was setting up once more the standard of the Stewarts.

Cromwell (now Lord-General, for Fairfax, too cold and meticulous for these times, had retired) met the Scots at Dunbar and beat Lord Leven and David Leslie as thoroughly as he had beaten Hamilton at Preston, and with troops as tired, hungry, and outnumbered, as they had been hungry and outnumbered then. Dunbar Drove they called this, as they had called the other Preston Rout.

Both were mighty victories.

Then, a year later, on the 3rd of September, the anniversary of Dunbar, Cromwell, supported by Lambert and Harrison, marched to meet another invading army of Scots headed by the young Charles, and on the banks and bridges of the Severn and in the streets of Worcester city, beat them again, ruining completely the cause of the young Stewart, who watched the day from the cathedral tower, then fled, hopeless, not to Scotland, but beyond seas, this time to seek an asylum at his sister's court.

That was the end of it. Cromwell had subdued kings and kingdoms; there was no one left to lead any army across the Border or ships across St. George's Channel, and neither of the sister islands would be likely to attempt to measure swords with England again. There were no more gallant Cavaliers to rise up for a lost cause. Montrose had been hanged in Edinburgh, and the young King for whom he died had repudiated him almost before the heroic soul had left the gallant body. Hamilton, Capel, Holland, Derby, had suffered on the block, kissing the axe that had slain their master; the rest were beyond seas, in exile and poverty, or in their own country outnumbered, forlorn, impoverished, and silenced.

And the man who had thus achieved the triumphs of his cause and his beliefs, the soldier who had been victorious in every engagement he had undertaken, whose enthusiasm, fire, and faith had heartened his party when even the bravest had been daunted, was the man who was riding into London to-day, welcomed by salvos of artillery and pealing of bells.

Five of the foremost Members of Parliament had ridden out to meet him on his march. One of the royal palaces, that of Hampton, had been given him as a residence; he enjoyed now a grant of nearly six thousand a year, and in his train, as he entered London, were many of the noblest in the country, and with him rode the Lord Mayor, the Speaker, the Council of State, the Aldermen, and Sheriffs.

It was noticed that his carriage was simple and modest; the triumphant conclusion of the nine years' struggle had no more power to shake him from the calm inspired by his sombre creed and intense beliefs than the rebuffs, confusions and temptations of the struggle itself. He was still, in his own eyes, as much God's mere instrument as when he sowed his grain and reaped his harvest in Huntingdon; and the future and his rise or fall were as absolutely preordained by the Lord now as then.

With a modesty that was absolutely unaffected he declined all credit for his overwhelming victories; and with a simplicity some mistook for irony (but irony was not in his nature), he remarked of the huge multitude which had gathered to see him pass: "There would be even more to see me hanged," so exactly did he value the popular favour, and so completely was he aware of the peril of the height on which he stood.

When the triumphal entry was over and evening was closing in, he turned at last to his own home.

One sadness marred the return; Henry Ireton had died in Ireland, worn out by the fatigues of the strenuous campaign which had more than once laid the Lord-General himself on a bed of sickness, and Bridget Ireton was shut into her house, mourning her lord, whose body was being brought home for burial in the Abbey Church at Westminster.

The rest were all there to welcome him; his mother, his wife, his son Richard, now at last wedded to Dorothy Mayor (Henry was still in Ireland, doing good work there), Elisabeth Claypole and her husband, and the two unmarried girls, Mary and Frances.

The women wept, in their enthusiasm and joyful relief. Elisabeth Claypole hung on his breast in a passion of tears, so completely did the sadness of the world overwhelm her sensitive heart in any moment of emotion.

Almost her first words were to ask his kindness towards the poor Irish who were being sent to Jamaica and Barbadoes as slaves. After all Cromwell's victories his favourite daughter's delicate voice had risen with the same appeal: "Be merciful, be pitiful—spare the prisoners!"

"Why do you weep, Betty?" he asked.

"Because she is a foolish wench," said her husband good-humouredly.

"Nay," said Elisabeth Cromwell, "what doth your old poet say—'pity runneth soon in a gentle heart'; and we have had to bear some straining anxieties."

"And we have heard awful reports," murmured Mrs. Claypole, smiling through her tears with that simple archness which her father loved, however he might contemn her carnal mind. "Blood—nothing but blood was spoken of, until my dreams were coloured red."

"Ay," said old Mrs. Cromwell, with the vagueness of her great age. "Hast thou not slain the children of the Scarlet Woman by tens of thousands? I heard that at Drogheda thou didst close the blasphemous idolaters into their own church, and there burn them, as an offering of sweet savour in the nostrils of the Lord."

Cromwell glanced at his daughter Elisabeth, and answered nothing; the cries of the burning Papists echoed sometimes in his own heart for all his stern exaltation in slaying the enemies of God. For a moment his brow clouded, but the subject was swept away and forgotten in the congratulations, questions, and answers of Mr. Claypole and Richard Cromwell. The times were still momentous, even perilous; now there was peace what would they and all the other men of England do?

While the Lord-General talked with these two, the women took the old gentlewoman to her room; she could hardly walk now and her senses were failing, the Bible was constantly in her hands, and she spoke of little else but her son.

When she had reached the chamber set apart for her, she got into her chair by the window and looked at the sunset a little, half-dozing and talking to herself, then she roused suddenly and asked Mrs. Claypole, who tenderly remained with her, to "Fetch your father, child, fetch your father. I have had little of him but the pain of his absences, and I would see him now!"

Elisabeth Claypole, light-footed and delicate in her glimmering white and blue silks, sped on her errand, taking with her some of the last late roses with which she had adorned her grandmother's room.

When she gave her message she slipped the stems of two of them through the button-hole of her father's dusty uniform. Their gay beauty looked incongruous enough on his sober attire, but though his lips chid her, his eyes smiled, and he let the blossoms remain.

Elisabeth Cromwell was wondering, in sentences half-awed, half-vexed, how she should keep house in a great place like Hampton Court?—how many servants must she have, and how could they use such a number of rooms?

"We will come and stay with thee," said Dorothy, Richard's wife, who was not averse to her share of her father-in-law's splendour. Her pretty face was very bright and smiling to-day above the demure fall of her lawn collar, and her gown was new silk, embroidered in a fashion not uncourtly; her husband, too, was habited with a richness beyond his father's. The Lord-General had not failed to mark his son's wide, Spanish boots, fringed breeches, grey cloth passemented with rose-colour, and Malines lace collar and fall. It did not please him, for he took it as another indication of that weakness and levity which he had before suspected, with a terrible pang, in his eldest surviving son.

He made no reply to Dorothy Cromwell, but followed his daughter to her grandmother's room.

That night there was a wonderful sunset, not only the west but the whole horizon was gold, crimson, and scarlet; the earth seemed ringed with fire, and the glow penetrated even into the narrow street, so that there was the sense of a wonderful light and colour abroad—a light brilliant and mystical, shed from heaven upon the earth.

Oliver Cromwell crossed the room, which was dark and plain, but full of the odour of dry rose leaves and lavender and camphire, and stood before his mother who sat by the window, a small shrivelled gentlewoman in a hooded chair. She lifted her blurred eyes and held out her two little hands to him; he kissed them, and then as Elisabeth Claypole left them he broke forth, "Mother, I am tired, tired."

He rested his sick head against the mullions and gazed up at the little strip of sky, glorious with floating clouds of light, visible above the houses opposite.

"How is it with thee, my son Oliver?" she asked. "Thou art come in triumph with much acclaim, but hast thou within the peace of God, which passeth all understanding?"

He answered with a fervour and a quickness which was like the passion of self-justification yet ennobled by his usual enthusiasm.

"I have followed the pillar of cloud by day," he answered, "the pillar of fire by night. I have disregarded the wind and the whirlwind, and I have listened for the still small voice. I believe God hath been with me because of the victories I have had."

"Surely," replied Mrs. Cromwell, "He hath witnessed for thee as He witnessed against the King. Is not this fight at Worcester spoken of on all tongues as the crowning mercy?"

The Lord-General continued to look at the sky which was fast paling from flame tints into a burning paleness, like gold in a furnace, thrice refined.

"For nine years I have laboured," he said, "and not once hath the Lord put me down. Yet sometimes the voice will fail, sometimes the Sign will not come—sometimes I even seem to fall from grace—sometimes I wonder why I ever left obscurity. Yet the Lord called me! I will maintain it—He held up my hands and made me His instrument! I have been one with the Spirit; I say it was God's work, for He did not put me down! Now, it were better that I should lay aside my high office and return to what I was."

"It were better," said the old gentlewoman; "but can England spare you yet? For me, I would rather die where I have lived than amid these splendours."

"I will go back to my own place," continued Oliver Cromwell. "I have done what God set me to do—I have swept the enemy from the land, I have seen the tyrant slain, and his children exiled. When shall the young man, Charles Stewart, get another army? Nay, when he fled from Worcester city, he fled from his throne for ever; his forces are scattered and no captain out of Egypt shall ever get them together again. I say the land is purged, and what work is there for me?"

He was silent a moment, then he added, "I am weary and still something sick."

These recent sicknesses of his troubled him; he could not understand the fault for which this weakness had been laid on him. Following out his own thoughts he broke into speech again.

"As for Drogheda, I say it was in the heat of action, and were they not Papists, blasphemous idolaters whose hands were red with the blood of God's poor people? It was in the heat of action! What was that little moment compared to the torments of hell they have earned? When they were shut up in the church and the flames were getting hold on them, I heard one say—'God damn me, God confound me, I burn!' That is God's judgment. God hath damned him—to the flame that is never quenched and the worm that never dieth! Poor clay am I, but a reed He breatheth through—shall I be blamed for His vengeance against Drogheda? Nay, no more than I shall be praised for His victories at Dunbar and Worcester—when He was pleased to make use of a certain poor thing of mine, nay, a little invention, the army."

The ancient gentlewoman leant forward and stroked his sleeve with her pallid hand thickened with heavy veins. She had an instinct that he required comforting in this the highest moment of his glory.

He still wore his buff riding coat, his dusty boots, his plain sword-thread and sword; surely no victorious general had ever returned to take his triumph in such attire. No order, no ornament distinguished him from the meanest of his fellow-citizens; his features, always heavy, were slightly swollen and slightly suffused, his eyes most deeply lined and shadowed; there was as much grey as brown now in the locks that fell to his shoulders, and a general sadness was in his expression, his pose, the tone of his rough voice.

His little mother continued to anxiously stroke his cloth sleeve and to gaze up at him with those failing eyes which saw neither marks of age nor fatigue, saw neither plainness nor ill-health, but only her son in the glory of his matchless achievement.

He looked down at her at last.

"My mother," he said, "how long ago is it since I knelt to say my prayers at your knee? I feel the years grow marvellously heavy and my body full of the evils of old age. So little done, so much to do! For all of us, such a little while."

"Many more years for thee, son Oliver," she replied. "Many more and much to do in them! If there be something to be done in England, wilt thou not do it?"

"Surely," he said, straightening himself, "for I am English—it is the English who now testify most for the Lord, and He out of His mercy hath given us great gifts."

The last sunlight had faded from the narrow street, and the precise chamber was growing dark.

"God keep thee always," said Mrs. Cromwell quietly. "I would not hold thee even from manifest danger if He bade thee go!"

"I believe I never shall go back to Ely," he answered evenly. "My hand is on the plough——"

The door was gently opened and Elisabeth Claypole, holding a candle which illumined her wistful, frail beauty, half entered and told them the supper waited for them below.