Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/346

338 as well as much good which I have fully believed.”

“You were so occupied with your own opinion of her, that you forgot to be careful of her opinion of you. Was it so?” the Countess inquired, smiling.

“Just so,” Henrietta replied seriously. “How can it matter what might be the passing impression of a Queen about a girl whom she would forget the next day? But to me it matters much to be assured, that there is nothing mistaken in the utmost reverence and love for those whom God has placed over us.”

“You are a strange girl!” said the Countess. “Does it make no difference to you whether Her Majesty speaks of you with disgust or with favour?”

“O yes! It would be painful to have given her pain, and very pleasant to have her favour.”

“You have it, my dear. Did you discover how pleased she was with you?”

Henrietta had not understood the matter precisely so. She had an impression, from certain tones and half smiles, that—Here she hesitated.

“I knew you would find that out, my child; and that was why I pressed you with questions. Her Majesty had supposed that you had been reared in Puritan prejudice, though not actual undutifulness; and this gave that hardness to her voice last night which her enemies are so fond of describing. But she presently learned to know you better; and you will hear those tones no more. How would you like to be in the Queen’s service?” the lady suddenly asked, after a moment’s pause.

“It could not be,” Henrietta declared. “No child of my father’s could live at Court.”

“Did you observe what the Queen said of His Majesty’s wish to have your father in his government?”

“I did; and my father shall hear of it. But if that were possible, it would be for the sake of my father’s reputation in the kingdom, and as representing the people in the government. It would be a different thing for a girl to be in the Queen’s personal service.”

“But if you could render political service together with the personal—”

“I could not do it. If you would know why, it is because my temper is not patient.”

The Countess laughed, and said her dear child was candid. Did she think the Queen’s temper impatient too, so that quarrels would grow up?

Without expressly answering this, Henrietta explained that there were things done by the authority, and it was said by the orders, of the Crown and the Church, which she owned she could not endure to think of. She could live nowhere where she must rejoice, as the courtiers had done openly, at the punishment of Mr. Prynne and Mr. Bastwick, and—

“O! those things are horrid!” Lady Carlisle declared. “They make one’s blood run cold,—those punishments. But nobody asks one whether one approves of such things. I am sure nobody has ever asked me. Yes, your eyes are asking me now. All I have to say is, that the Lord Deputy considers the utmost severity necessary in these times; and he is always right, you know.”

Henrietta was silent. Lady Carlisle then questioned her closely and eagerly about the opinion entertained of the Lord Deputy by her father and his friends; and so great was the eagerness that Henrietta was glad to have heard no word from any one of them about the Lord Deputy, since he went to Ireland.

“I am afraid of Mr. Pym,” Lady Carlisle declared. “I once knew and esteemed Mr. Pym; and I had hoped better things of him than that he would judge so princely a man as his old friend Wentworth so hardly as he does.”

“They parted asunder about the loan, I have heard,” said Henrietta. “When friends do part, do they not become bitter enemies?”

“Ordinary men may; but it should not be so with men like these. If the princely one is strongwilled and stern, as he has a prerogative to be, the popular one is (or I supposed him to be) so genial, and so wise, that I cannot understand why it is that he hunts the Lord Deputy through all his Irish measures, seeking for means to condemn him. The Lord Deputy scorns all enemies, and ridicules me for my alarm as to what they may do. He believes, as so many of the King’s friends do, that Mr. Pym is like a man possessed of a devil,—full of rage and murderous thoughts, and desiring only to outrage the throne and destroy the kingdom. How far is this true? What has the Lord Deputy to fear from Mr. Pym, think you?”

“I can only judge by what I have seen and heard. I do not believe that Mr. Pym bears malice against any person. I believe that he would be as loyal to the King as any man, if certain evils were frankly set right. He is more likely than my father to be in the King’s service, I should judge.”

“And the Lord Deputy?”

“How can he have anything to fear if he rules by the law? No man can touch him while he sides with the law. If he governs in the way which he admits to be illegal and wilful—”

“Say ‘thorough,’—that is his word.”

“In the way which he calls ‘thorough,’ and which other men call illegal, he must surely expect what cannot but follow.”

“And what is that?”

“That, as he promised, his own right arm should keep his own head.”

Lady Carlisle shuddered, and observed what a fearful destiny it was for a man to be superior to his day and generation. And then she was silent for some time.

“Let us walk further,” she said, at length; and she led the way to a seat formed in a bank of primroses and blue hyacinths, where, if anywhere, a young girl’s heart would open on a sunny spring day.

“I am going to be very free with you, my child,” said Lady Carlisle: “and if I go too far you must stop me. I was not in earnest about your living at Court.”

“I thought so; and I am glad of it,” Henrietta replied.

“I mean only that, loyal as you are, you will