Page:Anthony Hope - Rupert of Hentzau.djvu/404

384 To this day I know not how he chose; no, and I don't know how he should have chosen. Yet he had chosen, for his face was calm and clear.

Come, I have thought so much of him that I will go now and stand before his monument, taking with me my last-born son, a little lad of ten. He is not too young to desire to serve the Queen, and not too young to learn to love and reverence him who sleeps there in the vault and was in his life the noblest gentleman I have known.

I will take the boy with me and tell him what I may of brave King Rudolf, how he fought and how he loved, and how he held the Queen's honour and his own above all things in this world. The boy is not too young to learn such lessons from the life of Mr. Rassendyll. And while we stand there I will turn again into his native tongue—for, alas, the young rogue loves his toy soldiers better than his Latin!—the inscription that the Queen wrote with her own hand, directing that it should be inscribed in that stately tongue over the tomb in which her life lies buried: "To Rudolf, who reigned lately in this city, and reigns for ever in her heart.—."

I told him the meaning, and he spelt the big words over in his childish voice; at first he stumbled, but the second time he