When Knighthood Was in Flower Part 21

Poor fellow, his suffering was so acute during this period that it affected me like a contagion.

It did not make a mope of him, but came in spasms that almost drove him wild. He would at times pace the room and cry out: "Jesu!

Caskoden, what shall I do? She will be the wife of the French king, and I shall sit in the wilderness and try every moment to imagine what she is doing and thinking. I shall find the bearing of Paris, and look in her direction until my brain melts in my effort to see her, and then I shall wander in the woods, a suffering imbecile, feeding on roots and nuts. Would to G.o.d one of us might die. If it were not selfish, I should wish I might be the one."

I said nothing in answer to these outbursts, as I had no consolation to offer.

We had two or three of our little meetings of four, dangerous as they were, at which Mary, feeling that each time she saw Brandon might be the last, would sit and look at him with glowing eyes that in turn softened and burned as he spoke. She did not talk much, but devoted all her time and energies to looking with her whole soul. Never before or since was there a girl so much in love. A young girl thoroughly in love is the most beautiful object on earth--beautiful even in ugliness. Imagine, then, what it made of Mary!

Growing partly, perhaps, out of his unattainability--for he was as far out of her reach as she out of his--she had long since begun to wors.h.i.+p him. She had learned to know him so well, and his valiant defense of her in Billingsgate, together with his n.o.ble self-sacrifice in refusing to compromise her in order to save himself, had presented him to her in so n.o.ble a light that she had come to look up to him as her superior. Her surrender had been complete, and she found in it a joy far exceeding that of any victory or triumph she could imagine.

I could not for the life of me tell what would be the outcome of it all. Mary was one woman in ten thousand, so full was she of feminine force and will--a force which we men pretend to despise, but to which in the end we always succ.u.mb.

Like most women, the princess was not much given to a.n.a.lysis; and, I think, secretly felt that this matter of so great moment to her would, as everything else always had, eventually turn itself to her desire.

She could not see the way, but, to her mind, there could be no doubt about it; fate was her friend; always had been, and surely always would be.

With Brandon it was different; experience as to how the ardently hoped for usually turns out to be the sadly regretted, together with a thorough face-to-face a.n.a.lysis of the situation, showed him the truth, all too clearly, and he longed for the day when he should go, as a sufferer longs for the surgeon's knife that is to relieve him of an aching limb. The hopelessness of the outlook had for the time destroyed nearly all of his combativeness, and had softened his nature almost to apathetic weakness. It would do no good to struggle in a boundless, fathomless sea; so he was ready to sink and was going to New Spain to hope no more.

Mary did not see what was to prevent the separation, but this did not trouble her as much as one would suppose, and she was content to let events take their own way, hoping and believing that in the end it would be hers. Events, however, continued in this wrong course so long and persistently that at last the truth dawned upon her and she began to doubt; and as time flew on and matters evinced a disposition to grow worse instead of better, she gradually, like the sundial in the moonlight, awakened to the fact that there was something wrong; a cog loose somewhere in the complicated machinery of fate--the fate which had always been her tried, trusted and obedient servant.

The trouble began in earnest with the discovery of our meetings in Lady Mary's parlor. There was nothing at all unusual in the fact that small companies of young folk frequently spent their evenings with her, but we knew well enough that the unusual element in our parties was their exceeding smallness. A company of eight or ten young persons was well enough, although it, of course, created jealousy on the part of those who were left out; but four--two of each s.e.x--made a difference in kind, however much we might insist it was only in degree; and this we soon learned was the king's opinion.

You may be sure there was many a jealous person about the court ready to carry tales, and that it was impossible long to keep our meetings secret among such a host as then lived in Greenwich palace.

One day the queen summoned Jane and put her to the question. Now, Jane thought the truth was made only to be told, a fallacy into which many good people have fallen, to their utter destruction; since the truth, like every other good thing, may be abused.

Well! Jane told it all in a moment, and Catherine was so horrified that she was like to faint. She went with her hair-lifting horror to the king, and poured into his ears a tale of imprudence and debauchery well calculated to start his righteous, virtue-prompted indignation into a threatening flame.

Mary, Jane, Brandon and myself were at once summoned to the presence of both their majesties and soundly reprimanded. Three of us were ordered to leave the court before we could speak a word in self-defense, and Jane had enough of her favorite truth for once.

Mary, however, came to our rescue with her coaxing eloquence and potent, feminine logic, and soon convinced Henry that the queen, who really counted for little with him, had made a mountain out of a very small mole-hill. Thus the royal wrath was appeased to such an extent that the order for expulsion was modified to a command that there be no more quartette gatherings in Princess Mary's parlor. This leniency was more easy for the princess to bring about, by reason of the fact that she had not spoken to her brother since the day she went to see him after Wolsey's visit, and had been so roughly driven off. At first, upon her refusal to speak to him--after the Wolsey visit--Henry was angry on account of what he called her insolence; but as she did not seem to care for that, and as his anger did nothing toward unsealing her lips, he pretended indifference. Still the same stubborn silence was maintained. This soon began to amuse the king, and of late he had been trying to be on friendly terms again with his sister through a series of elephantine antics and bear-like pleasantries, which were the most dismal failures--that is, in the way of bringing about a reconciliation. They were more successful from a comical point of view. So Henry was really glad for something that would loosen the tongue usually so lively, and for an opportunity to gratify his sister from whom he was demanding such a sacrifice, and for whom he expected to receive no less a price than the help of Louis of France, the most powerful king of Europe, to the imperial crown.

Thus our meetings were broken up, and Brandon knew his dream was over, and that any effort to see the princess would probably result in disaster for them both; for him certainly.

The king upon that same day told Mary of the intercepted letter sent by her to Brandon at Newgate, and accused her of what he was pleased to term an improper feeling for a low-born fellow.

Mary at once sent a full account of the communication in a letter to Brandon, who read it with no small degree of ill comfort as the harbinger of trouble.

"I had better leave here soon, or I may go without my head," he remarked. "When that thought gets to working in the king's brain, he will strike, and I--shall fall."

Letters began to come to our rooms from Mary, at first begging Brandon to come to her, and then upbraiding him because of his coldness and cowardice, and telling him that if he cared for her as she did for him, he would see her, though he had to wade through fire and blood.

That was exactly where the trouble lay; it was not fire and blood through which he would have to pa.s.s; they were small matters, mere nothings that would really have added zest and interest to the achievement. But the frowning laugh of the tyrant, who could bind him hand and foot, and a vivid remembrance of the Newgate dungeon, with a dangling noose or a hollowed-out block in the near background, were matters that would have taken the adventurous tendency out of even the cracked brain of chivalry itself. Brandon cared only to fight where there was a possible victory or ransom, or a prospect of some sort, at least, of achieving success. Bayard preferred a stone wall, and thought to show his brains by beating them out against it, and in a sense he could do it. * * * What a pity this senseless, stiff-kneed, light-headed chivalry did not beat its brains out several centuries before Bayard put such an absurd price upon himself.

So every phase of the question which his good sense presented told Brandon, whose pa.s.sion was as ardent though not so impatient as Mary's, that it would be worse than foolhardy to try to see her. He, however, had determined to see her once more before he left, but as it could, in all probability, be only once, he was reserving the meeting until the last, and had written Mary that it was their best and only chance.

This brought to Mary a stinging realization of the fact that Brandon was about to leave her and that she would lose him if something were not done quickly. Now for Mary, after a life of gratified whims, to lose the very thing she wanted most of all--that for which she would willingly have given up every other desire her heart had ever coined--was a thought hardly to be endured. She felt that the world would surely collapse. It could not, would not, should not be.

Her vigorous young nerves were too strong to be benumbed by an overwhelming agony, as is sometimes the case with those who are fortunate enough to be weaker, so she had to suffer and endure. Life itself, yes, life a thousand times, was slipping away from her. She must be doing something or she would perish. Poor Mary! How a grand soul like hers, full of faults and weakness, can suffer! What an infinite disproportion between her susceptibility to pain and her power to combat it! She had the maximum capacity for one and the minimum strength for the other. No wonder it drove her almost mad--that excruciating pang of love.

She could not endure inaction, so she did the worst thing possible.

She went alone, one afternoon, just before dusk, to see Brandon at our rooms. I was not there when she first went in, but, having seen her on the way, suspected something and followed, arriving two or three minutes after her. I knew it was best that I should be present, and was sure Brandon would wish it. When I entered they were holding each other's hands, in silence. They had not yet found their tongues, so full and crowded were their hearts. It was pathetic to see them, especially the girl, who had not Brandon's hopelessness to deaden the pain by partial resignation.

Upon my entrance, she dropped his hands and turned quickly toward me with a frightened look, but was rea.s.sured upon seeing who it was.

Brandon mechanically walked away from her and seated himself on a stool. Mary, as mechanically, moved to his side and placed her hand on his shoulder. Turning her face toward me, she said: "Sir Edwin, I know you will forgive me when I tell you that we have a great deal to say and wish to be alone."

I was about to go when Brandon stopped me.

"No, no; Caskoden, please stay; it would not do. It would be bad enough, G.o.d knows, if the princess should be found here with both of us; but, with me alone, I should be dead before morning. There is danger enough as it is, for they will watch us."

Mary knew he was right, but she could not resist a vicious little glance toward me, who was in no way to blame.

Presently we all moved into the window-way, where Brandon and Mary sat upon the great cloak and I on a camp-stool in front of them, completely filling up the little pa.s.sage.

"I can bear this no longer," exclaimed Mary. "I will go to my brother to-night and tell him all; I will tell him how I suffer, and that I shall die if you are allowed to go away and leave me forever. He loves me, and I can do anything with him when I try. I know I can obtain his consent to our--our--marriage. He cannot know how I suffer, else he would not treat me so. I will let him see--I will convince him. I have in my mind everything I want to say and do. I will sit on his knee and stroke his hair and kiss him." And she laughed softly as her spirit revived in the breath of a growing hope. "Then I will tell him how handsome he is, and how I hear the ladies sighing for him, and he will come around all right by the third visit. Oh, I know how to do it; I have done it so often. Never fear! I wish I had gone at it long ago."

Her enthusiastic fever of hope was really contagious, but Brandon, whose life was at stake, had his wits quickened by the danger.

"Mary, would you like to see me a corpse before to-morrow noon?" he asked.

"Why! of course not; why do you ask such a dreadful question?"

"Because, if you wish to make sure of it, do what you have just said--go to the king and tell him all. I doubt if he could wait till morning. I believe he would awaken me at midnight to put me to sleep forever--at the end of a rope or on a block pillow."

"Oh! no! you are all wrong; I know what I can do with Henry."

"If that is the case, I say good-bye now, for I shall be out of England, if possible, by midnight. You must promise me that you will not only not go to the king at all about this matter, but that you will guard your tongue, jealous of its slightest word, and remember with every breath that on your prudence hangs my life, which, I know, is dear to you. Do you promise? If you do not, I must fly; so you will lose me one way or the other, if you tell the king; either by my flight or by my death."

"I promise," said Mary, with drooping head; the embodiment of despair; all life and hope having left her again.

After a few minutes her face brightened, and she asked Brandon what s.h.i.+p he would sail in for New Spain, and whence.

"We sail in the Royal Hind, from Bristol," he replied.

"How many go out in her; and are there any women?"

"No! no!" he returned; "no woman could make the trip, and, besides, on s.h.i.+ps of that sort, half pirate, half merchant, they do not take women. The sailors are superst.i.tious about it and will not sail with them. They say they bring bad luck--adverse winds, calms, storms, blackness, monsters from the deep and victorious foes."

"The ignorant creatures!" cried Mary.

Brandon continued: "There will be a hundred men, if the captain can induce so many to enlist."

"How does one procure pa.s.sage?" inquired Mary.

"By enlisting with the captain, a man named Bradhurst, at Bristol, where the s.h.i.+p is now lying. There is where I enlisted by letter. But why do you ask?"

"Oh! I only wanted to know."

We talked awhile on various topics, but Mary always brought the conversation back to the same subject, the Royal Hind and New Spain.

After asking many questions, she sat in silence for a time, and then abruptly broke into one of my sentences--she was always interrupting me as if I were a parrot.