y vanished. King-maker and king were
alone! At the first sight of Warwick, Henry had turned pale, and receded
a few paces, with one hand uplifted in adjuration or command, while with
the other he veiled his eyes,--whether that this startled movement
came from the weakness of bodily nerves, much shattered by sickness and
confinement, or from the sudden emotions called forth by the aspect of
one who had wrought him calamities so dire. But the craven's terror in
the presence of a living foe was, with all his meekness, all his holy
abhorrence of wrath and warfare, as unknown to that royal heart as to
the high blood of his hero-sire. And so, after a brief pause, and a
thought that took the shape of prayer, not for safety from peril, but
for grace to forgive the past, Henry VI. advanced to Warwick, who
still stood dumb by the threshold, combating with his own mingled and
turbulent emotions of pride and shame, and said, in a voice majestic
even from its very mildness,--

"What tale of new woe and evil hath the Earl of Salisbury and Warwick
come to announce to the poor captive who was once a king?"

"Forgive me! Forgiveness, Henry, my lord,--forgiveness!" exclaimed
Warwick, falling on his knee. The meek reproach; the touching words; the
mien and visage altered, since last beheld, from manhood into age;
the gray hairs and bended form of the king, went at once to that proud
heart; and as the earl bent over the wan, thin hand resigned to his
lips, a tear upon its surface out-sparkled all the jewels that it wore.

"Yet no," continued the earl (impatient, as proud men are, to hurry from
repentance to atonement, for the one is of humiliation and the other of
pride),--"yet no, my liege, not now do I crave thy pardon. No; but when
begirt, in the halls of thine ancestors, with the peers of England,
the victorious banner of Saint George waving above the throne which thy
servant hath rebuilt,--then, when the trumpets are sounding thy rights
without the answer of a foe; then, when from shore to shore of fair
England the shout of thy people echoes to the vault of heaven,--then
will Warwick kneel again to King Henry, and sue for the pardon he hath
not ignobly won!

"Alack, sir," said the king, with accents of mournful yet half-reproving
kindness, "it was not amidst trump and banners that the Son of God
set mankind the exemplar and pattern of charity to foes. When thy hand
struck the spurs from my heel, when thou didst parade me through th