"That man," added Charles, in a tone of great agitation, "will make terms. He came abruptly and left abruptly, he spoke obscurely—but his meaning was to offer himself for my service."

"It is no wonder," replied Lord Digby, "there is a great and widening rift between the army and the Parliament, and Cromwell hath been heard to very plainly urge on the Presbyterians the advisability of submitting to Your Majesty."

"What," muttered the King, walking about the room, "does he want?"

"Did he not tell Your Majesty? Methought that had been the object of his visit."

"He told me," replied Charles, "the usual demands—what the army would have, what it would not have. I take no notice of that. What doth he want for himself?"

"His price would be a high one," returned Lord Digby thoughtfully. "He is much esteemed by his party; he hath good hopes of rising."

"Faugh!" cried the King angrily. "He hath risen—what more can he hope? He comes to me because he finds his usurped honours perilous, because he can hardly hold his own. There is no loyalty in the fellow. I take him to be a very artful, false rebel."

"Yet," said my lord earnestly, "he is worth gaining. I know of none whom the rebels think so highly of, and his interest in the army is supreme."

"I also have some interest in the army," said Charles haughtily. "Dost not thou know it? Even as this Cromwell knoweth it—else why doth he come to me? Nay, he is well aware that I still count for something in this my kingdom."

"Still, I would say that it were well to gain Oliver Cromwell—if he be willing to bring the army over to Your Majesty. I say, he is greater in the public eye than we can think. His party taketh him for a man."

"And so he is, and therefore can be gained," replied Charles, with a bitter smile. "I tell thee it goes to my heart to deal with this fellow, whom I would very willingly see hanged; indeed, it does. But as I do believe he hath influence, I will do it. What would he have—some patent of nobility? It were fitting to offer him the rebel Essex's title. Hath he not some distant relation to that Thomas Cromwell who was the Earl of Essex?"

"I have heard it," assented Lord Digby, "and I believe that Your Majesty hath hit on a good bait. Cromwell hath much railed against the nobility, which is a good sign in a man that he would have a title himself."

"And Fairfax—I must throw a sop to Fairfax," continued Charles. "There is more loyalty and more manners in him than in his Lieutenant."

"He is not," added Lord Digby, "so useful."

Charles paused before the window.

"You know," he said, "that my best hopes are still in Scotland, and not with these rebels. If I can make a secret treaty with the Scots, I am independent of army and Parliament both."

Lord Digby was not practical nor level-headed. His loyalty was too sincere to allow him broad-mindedness in his view of the struggle now taking place in England, and his ideas were rather fantastical and partook of that lightness and even frivolity which characterized so many of the King's followers; but even he could not help seeing that Charles was playing a game which every day became more dangerous, and that this complicated and subtle intrigue was not suited to present circumstances. A straight dealing with the army leaders, the Cavalier thought, would have been better than these underhand negotiations with the Scots, who had already proved themselves so unreliable, especially as Charles never would, under any pressure, take the Covenant, and therefore his alliance with Scotland could only be based on delusion and fraud; while, at the same time, if these negotiations were revealed, the English Parliament and the English army would be further set against the King, and with England and the divisions in England lay Charles' best chance—not in his northern kingdom.

It was these constant intrigues and subterfuges on the part of the King, his blindness to his real interests, his unconquerable disdain of his enemies, his firm refusal to believe that any pact or agreement was possible between him, the King, and them, his subjects, his proud resignation, which would take any ill, but would never give way on any detail, however small, that had driven those fierce and downright Princes, Rupert and Maurice, out of England. Rupert had thought the Royal cause lost before he delivered Bristol, yet the King had had many chances since then, all lost, or missed, or flung away.

He was too extraordinarily incredulous of his enemies' successes; it seemed as if he could not believe nor remember that he was no longer what he had been, one of the foremost kings in Europe, but a monarch without an army, without a town, without revenues or allies, separated from his family, surrounded by adversaries, practically a prisoner, and dependent on the dole of the Parliament for the very bread he ate. Charles could not realize these things—his birth, his instincts, his character were too strong for his intelligence, though that was not mean—and he still blinded himself with the idea that he was the King, and that he needed no other claim and no other force than what lay in those words to eventually triumph over, and be signally revenged on, his rebellious subjects.

Not that Charles had shown this temper too openly or exhibited any outward folly in his long dealings with Scots and Parliament. These complicated negotiations had shown him at his best; he had been clever, learned, courteous, full of resource and firmness. The principle of his unalterable divine authority (the rock on which all the various hopes of a compromise were eventually shattered) he kept securely out of sight, being too proud to vaunt or rave. None the less it was there, and he was disdainfully storing up future vengeance for all of them—Scots, Presbyterians, Parliament men, army men, and Puritans—when the time should come for him to have done playing with them.

Such advisers as he had (the Queen was still the foremost) supported him in his views and in the means he took to advance his aims; but now affairs were become so desperate that he held the bare semblance of kingship only by the consent and tolerance of the Parliament and the army. And it occurred to many, as it occurred now to Lord Digby, that an open peace with the rebels on the best terms to be got was the safest, indeed the only, policy to be pursued.

Lord Digby ventured now to say as much, in guarded and respectful terms, but with as much weight as his own volatile nature (only too much like Charles' own) would allow.

The King, resting one elbow on the window-sill, his chin in his hand and his eyes fixed on the passing glitter of the river, listened with impatience hardly disguised.

Soon he interrupted.

"Next thou wilt advise me to take the Covenant," he said, "or to accept the articles offered me at Uxbridge or Norwich!"

"Nay," answered Lord Digby, with a flush on his fair face; "but I do say there is no reliance to be placed on the Scots."

"Wait," returned Charles obstinately. "I am of good hopes I can get an army from them without taking the Covenant, but on the mere promise to do so, and on some suspension of the bishops for three years or so—some compromise, worked secretly."

"Is this plan laid?" asked Digby, who had not before heard of it.

"Yea, with my Lord Hamilton, and then I shall be able to hang up all these knavish rascals who come to me to bargain—to offer terms to me!"

"Meanwhile flatter them," said my lord uneasily.

"I will flatter them," returned Charles, with a flash in his worn eyes. "I will talk of an Earldom to Cromwell—but I hope the Scots will be across the border again before the patent is signed!"

Lord Digby was still not convinced; it seemed to him that this overture from a man of the weight and influence of Oliver Cromwell was not an advance to be lightly treated at this delicate stage of affairs.

"This man is fanatic," he said. "Your Majesty must remember that. I believe he standeth more for principle than party, more for his ideas than for his gain. A title may allure him, but it is a matter where one would need to be careful, sire. The bait must be skilfully played, or this fish will not rise."

But Charles, though supremely constant on some points himself, found it impossible to believe in the constancy of those whose opinions were opposed to him: such as Cromwell were to him 'rebels,' and he gave them no other distinction.

"We shall see as to that," he replied impatiently. "What did this man come here for if not to get his price?"

"Methinks he came on behalf of his policy," said Lord Digby doubtfully. "Maybe he would have the credit of reconciling Your Majesty with the Parliament, and after the peace some great place in the army or at your Council board."

"These high ambitions may be useful to us," replied Charles, with a bitter accent, "and therefore we will encourage them. Meanwhile, our hopes lie across the border or across the sea—not in the rebel camp."

He was then silent a little while and seemed, as had become usual with him, to have suddenly sunk into a meditation or reverie: he would so do now in the midst of a conversation, the midst of a sentence even, as if his mind wandered suddenly from the present to the past, from the objects near to objects far away.

His face looked as if a veil had been dropped over it, so completely absent was his gaze, so utterly did an expression of melancholy hide and disguise all other.

Lord Digby stood watching him with bitter regret, with indignant sorrow, and as he gazed at this face which humiliation and anguish had distorted and altered as a terrible disease will distort and alter, as he noticed the grey locks, the thin, marred profile, the careless dress, a horrible conviction pressed on his heart with the certainty of a revelation: the King was ruined, broken, cast down; never would he be set up again, and these schemes and plots were mere baseless delusions. This conviction was as fleeting as it was strong, yet for one moment the faithful gentleman had seen his master as a thing utterly lost, and he turned his head away swiftly, for he loved the man as well as the King.

Charles turned from the window, his thin fingers still pressed to his face.

"Go and see if any letters have come," he said.

Lord Digby did not say that immediately a courier came he was brought to the King, and therefore there could be no letters without his instant knowledge, but turned sadly to go on his errand; he knew the King was waiting always for letters from Henriette Marie in France—imperious, passionate letters when they came, which he kissed every line of and sprinkled with the scalding tears of pride and love and regret.

As soon as Lord Digby had gone Charles drew from his doublet a gold chain, from which hung two diamond seals and a miniature in a case ornamented with whole pearls.

He touched the spring, the lid flew up, and he gazed at the little enamel which showed him the features of the Queen.

The painting had been done in her bridal days, and the artist's delicate skill had preserved for ever the seductive loveliness of her early youth; she wore white, and her complexion was the tint of blonde pearl, her dark hair hung in fine tendrils on her brow, her large eyes were glancing at the spectator with a laughing look, round her neck was a string of large pearls, and on her bosom a bow of pink ribbon.

So he remembered her as he had first seen her, when, at the first glance, she had subdued him into her willing bondsman: before he met her he had been cold to women, and after meeting her there had been no other in the world for him.

He never reflected if this complete absorption in her, this submission to her will had been for his good; he never recalled the many fatal mistakes she had advised, nor the damage done him by his unpopular Romanist Queen; he never even admitted to himself that the one action of his life for which he felt bitter remorse, the abandonment of Strafford, was mainly committed to please her; nor did it ever occur to him that many women would have stayed with him to the last, at all costs. The brightness of his devotion outshone all these things; he saw her image good and brave and infinitely dear, and of all his losses the loss of her was paramount. As he thought of her, his longing half formed the resolution to quit all these turmoils and escape to France, abandoning for her sake his last chances of keeping his crown.

He might have come to this resolution before and carried it through had he not too well known her pride and her ambition.

"If you make an agreement with Parliament," she had written, "you are no king for me. I will never set foot in England again."

And he had promised her that he would make no pact with the rebels unless she had first approved.

A light cloud passed over the sun, the sparkle died from the river, the glow from the sky, the warm tremble of light from the trees; and as Charles looked other clouds came up, in stately battalions, and darkened the whole west.

Lord Digby returned.

"No messenger, sire," he said, "no letters."

"I did know it," replied Charles, with a smile that cast scorn on himself; "but I am my own fool, and beguile the time with mine own follies."