The Line of Love Part 22

I said: "Madonna, earlier in this crowded night, you told me of love's nature: must my halting commentary prove the glose upon your text? Look, then, to be edified while the fool is delivered of his folly. For upon the maternal side, love was born of the ocean, madonna, and the ocean is but salt water, and salt water is but tears; and thus may love claim love's authentic kin with sorrow. Ay, certainly, madonna, Fate hath ordained for her diversion that through sorrow alone we lovers may attain to the true Castle of Content."

There was a long silence, and the wind wailed among the falling, tattered leaves. "Had I but known--" said Adeliza, very sadly.

I said: "Madonna, go forward and G.o.d speed you! Yonder your lover waits for you, and the world is exceedingly fair; here is only a fool. As for this new Marquis of Falmouth, let him trouble you no longer. 'Tis an Eastern superst.i.tion that we lackbrains are endowed with peculiar gifts of prophecy: and as such, I predict, very confidently, madonna, that you will see and hear no more of him in this life."

I caught my breath. In the moonlight she seemed G.o.d's master-work. Her eyes were big with half-comprehended sorrow, and a slender hand stole timorously toward me. I laughed, seeing how she strove to pity my great sorrow and could not, by reason of her great happiness. I laughed and was content. "As surely as G.o.d reigns in Heaven," I cried aloud, "I am content, and this moment is well purchased with a marquisate!"

Indeed, I was vastly uplift and vastly pleased with my own n.o.bleness, just then, and that condition is always a comfort.

More alertly she regarded me; and in her eyes I saw the anxiety and the wonder merge now into illimitable pity. "That, too!" she said, smiling sadly. "That, too, O son of Thomas Allonby!" And her mothering arms were clasped about me, and her lips clung and were one with my lips for a moment, and her tears were wet upon my cheek. She seemed to shield me, making of her breast my sanctuary.

"My dear, my dear, I am not worthy!" said Adeliza, with a tenderness I cannot tell you of; and presently she, too, was gone.

I mounted the lamed horse, who limped slowly up the river bank; very slowly we came out from the glare of the crackling fire into the cool darkness of the autumn woods; very slowly, for the horse was lamed and wearied, and patience is a discreet virtue when one journeys toward curses and the lash of a dog-whip: and I thought of many quips and jests whereby to soothe the anger of Monsieur de Puysange, and I sang to myself as I rode through the woods, a n.o.bleman no longer, a tired Jack-pudding whose tongue must save his hide.

Sang I:

_"The towers are fallen; no laughter rings Through the rafters, charred and rent; The ruin is wrought of all goodly things In the Castle of Content.

"Ei ho! Ei ho! the Castle of Content, Rased in the Land of Youth, where mirth was meant!

Nay, all is ashes 'there; and all in vain Hand-shadowed eyes turn backward, to regain Disastrous memories of that dear domain,-- Ei ho! the vanished Castle of Content!"_

MAY 27, 1559

_"'O welladay!' said Beichan then, 'That I so soon have married thee!

For it can be none but Susie Pie, That sailed the sea for love of me.'"_

_How Will Sommers encountered the Marchioness of Falmouth in the Cardinal's house at Whitehall, and how in Windsor Forest that n.o.ble lady died with the fool's arms about her, does not concern us here. That is matter for another tale.

You are not, though, to imagine any scandal. Barring an affair with Sir Henry Rochford, and another with Lord Norreys, and the brief interval in 1525 when the King was enamored of her, there is no record that the marchioness ever wavered from the choice her heart had made, or had any especial reason to regret it.

So she lived and died, more virtuously and happily than most, and found the marquis a fair husband, as husbands go; and bore him three sons and a daughter.

But when the ninth Marquis of Falmouth died long after his wife, in the November of 1557, he was survived by only one of these sons, a junior Stephen, born in 1530, who at his father's demise succeeded to the t.i.tle.

The oldest son, Thomas, born 1531, had been killed in Wyatt's Rebellion in 1554; the second, George, born 1526, with a marked look of the King, was, in February, 1556, stabbed in a disreputable tavern brawl.

Now we have to do with the tenth Marquis of Falmouth's suit for the hand of Lady Ursula Heleigh, the Earl of Brudenel's co-heiress. You are to imagine yourself at Longaville Court, in Suss.e.x, at a time when Anne Bullen's daughter was very recently become Queen of England._

CHAPTER VIII

_The Episode Called In Ursula's Garden_

1. Love, and Love's Mimic

Her three lovers had praised her with many canzonets and sonnets on that May morning as they sat in the rose-garden at Longaville, and the sun-steeped leaves made a tempered aromatic shade about them. Afterward they had drawn gra.s.s-blades to decide who should accompany the Lady Ursula to the summer pavilion, that she might fetch her viol and sing them a song of love, and in the sylvan lottery chance had favored the Earl of Pevensey.

Left to themselves, the Marquis of Falmouth and Master Richard Mervale regarded each the other, irresolutely, like strange curs uncertain whether to fraternize or to fly at one another's throat. Then Master Mervale lay down in the young gra.s.s, stretched himself, twirled his thin black mustachios, and chuckled in luxurious content.

"Decidedly," said he, "your lordship is past master in the art of wooing; no university in the world would refuse you a degree."

The marquis frowned. He was a great bluff man, with wheat-colored hair, and was somewhat slow-witted. After a little he found the quizzical, boyish face that mocked him irresistible, and he laughed, and unbent from the dignified reserve which he had for a while maintained portentously.

"Master Mervale," said the marquis, "I will be frank with you, for you appear a lad of good intelligence, as lads run, and barring a trifle of affectation and a certain squeamishness in speech. When I would go exploring into a woman's heart, I must pay my way in the land's current coinage of compliments and high-pitched protestations. Yes, yes, such sixpenny phrases suffice the seasoned traveler, who does not ostentatiously display his gems while traveling. Now, in courtship, Master Mervale, one traverses ground more dubious than the Indies, and the truth, Master Mervale, is a jewel of great price."

Master Mervale raised his eyebrows. "The truth?" he queried, gently. "Now how, I wonder, did your lordship happen to think of that remote abstraction." For beyond doubt, Lord Falmouth's wooing had been that morning of a rather florid sort.

However, "It would surely be indelicate," the marquis suggested, "to allow even truth to appear quite unclothed in the presence of a lady?" He smiled and took a short turn on the gra.s.s. "Look you, Master Mervale,"

said he, narrowing his pale-blue eyes to slits, "I have, somehow, a disposition to confidence come upon me. Frankly, my pa.s.sion for the Lady Ursula burns more mildly than that which Antony bore the Egyptian; it is less a fire to consume kingdoms than a candle wherewith to light a contented home; and quite frankly, I mean to have her. The estates lie convenient, the families are of equal rank, her father is agreed, and she has a sufficiency of beauty; there are, in short, no obstacles to our union save you and my lord of Pevensey, and these, I confess, I do not fear. I can wait, Master Mervale. Oh, I am patient, Master Mervale, but, I own, I cannot brook denial. It is I, or no one. By Saint Gregory! I wear steel at my side, Master Mervale, that will serve for other purposes save that of opening oysters!" So he bl.u.s.tered in the spring sunlight, and frowned darkly when Master Mervale appeared the more amused than impressed.

"Your patience shames Job the Patriarch," said Master Mervale, "yet, it seems to me, my lord, you do not consider one thing. I grant you that Pevensey and I are your equals neither in estate nor reputation; still, setting modesty aside, is it not possible the Lady Ursula may come, in time, to love one of us?"

"Setting common sense aside," said the marquis, stiffly, "it is possible she may be smitten with the smallpox. Let us hope, however, that she may escape both of these misfortunes."

The younger man refrained from speech for a while. Presently, "You liken love to a plague," he said, "yet I have heard there was once a cousin of the Lady Ursula's--a Mistress Katherine Beaufort--"

"Swounds!" Lord Falmouth had wheeled about, scowled, and then tapped sharply upon the palm of one hand with the nail-bitten fingers of the other. "Ay," said he, more slowly, "there was such a person."

"She loved you?" Master Mervale suggested.

"G.o.d help me!" replied the marquis; "we loved each other! I know not how you came by your information, nor do I ask. Yet, it is ill to open an old wound. I loved her; let that suffice." With a set face, he turned away for a moment and gazed toward the high parapets of Longaville, half-hidden by pale foliage and very white against the rain-washed sky; then groaned, and glared angrily into the lad's upturned countenance.

"You talk of love," said the marquis; "a love compounded equally of youthful imagination, a liking for fantastic phrases and a disposition for caterwauling i' the moonlight. Ah, lad, lad!--if you but knew! That is not love; to love is to go mad like a star-struck moth, and afterward to strive in vain to forget, and to eat one's heart out in the loneliness, and to hunger--hunger--" The marquis spread his big hands helplessly, and then, with a quick, impatient gesture, swept back the ma.s.s of wheat-colored hair that fell about his face. "Ah, Master Mervale," he sighed, "I was right after all,--it is the cruelest plague in the world, and that same smallpox leaves less troubling scars."

"Yet," Master Mervale said, with courteous interest, "you did not marry?"

"Marry!" His lordship snarled toward the sun and laughed. "Look you, Master Mervale, I know not how far y'are acquainted with the business. It was in Cornwall yonder years since; I was but a lad, and she a wench,--Oh, such a wench, with tender blue eyes, and a faint, sweet voice that could deny me nothing! G.o.d does not fashion her like every day,--_Dieu qui la fist de ses deux mains_, saith the Frenchman." The marquis paced the gra.s.s, gnawing his lip and debating with himself.

"Marry? Her family was good, but their deserts outranked their fortunes; their crest was not the topmost feather in Fortune's cap, you understand; somewhat sunken i' the world, Master Mervale, somewhat sunken. And I? My father--G.o.d rest his bones!--was a cold, hard man, and my two elder brothers--Holy Virgin, pray for them!--loved me none too well. I was the cadet then: Heaven helps them that help themselves, says my father, and I ha'n't a penny for you. My way was yet to make in the world; to saddle myself with a dowerless wench--even a wench whose least 'Good-morning'

set a man's heart hammering at his ribs--would have been folly, Master Mervale. Utter, improvident, shiftless, bedlamite folly, lad!"

"H'm!" Master Mervale cleared his throat, twirled his mustachios, and smiled at some unspoken thought. "We pay for our follies in this world, my lord, but I sometimes think that we pay even more dearly for our wisdom."

"Ah, lad, lad!" the marquis cried, in a gust of anger; "I dare say, as your smirking hints, it was a coward's act not to snap fingers at fate and fathers and dare all! Well! I did not dare. We parted--in what lamentable fashion is now of little import--and I set forth to seek my fortune. Ho, it was a brave world then, Master Mervale, for all the tears that were scarce dried on my cheeks! A world wherein the heavens were as blue as a certain woman's eyes,--a world wherein a likely lad might see far countries, waggle a good sword in Babylon and Tripolis and other ultimate kingdoms, beard the Mussulman in his mosque, and at last fetch home--though he might never love her, you understand--a soldan's daughter for his wife,--

_With more gay gold about her middle Than would buy half Northumberlee."_

His voice died away. He sighed and shrugged. "Eh, well!" said the marquis; "I fought in Flanders somewhat--in Spain--what matter where?

Then, at last, sickened in Amsterdam, three years ago, where a messenger comes to haul me out of bed as future Marquis of Falmouth. One brother slain in a duel, Master Mervale; one killed in Wyatt's Rebellion; my father dying, and--Heaven rest his soul!--not over-eager to meet his Maker. There you have it, Master Mervale,--a right pleasant jest of Fortune's perpetration,--I a marquis, my own master, fit mate for any woman in the kingdom, and Kate--my Kate who was past human praising!--vanished."

"Vanished?" The lad echoed the word, with wide eyes.

"Vanished in the night, and no sign nor rumor of her since! Gone to seek me abroad, no doubt, poor wench! Dead, dead, beyond question, Master Mervale!" The marquis swallowed, and rubbed his lips with the back of his hand. "Ah, well!" said he; "it is an old sorrow!"

The male animal shaken by strong emotion is to his brothers an embarra.s.sing rather than a pathetic sight. Master Mervale, lowering his eyes discreetly, rooted up several tufts of gra.s.s before he spoke. Then, "My lord, you have known of love," said he, very slowly; "does there survive no kindliness for aspiring lovers in you who have been one of us?