Sir Mortimer Part 12

The room in which she found herself was ruddy with firelight, the flames coloring the marble chimney-piece and causing faint shadows to chase one another across an arras embroidered with a hunting scene. Upon a heavy table were thrown a cloak and mask.

The man who had worn them turned from the window, came forward a few paces, and stood still. Damans put forth her hand, and leaned for strength against the chimney-piece--a beautiful woman in the heart of the glow from the fire. At first she said no word, for she was thinking dully. "If he comes no nearer, it must be true. If he crosses not the shadow on the floor between us, it must be true." At last she asked, in a low voice,

"Is it true?"

In the profound silence that followed she made a step forward out of the red glow towards the bar of shadow. Ferne stayed her with a gesture of his hand.

"Yes, it is true," he said. "It is true, unless, indeed, there be no answer to Pilate's 'What is truth?' For myself, I walk in a whirling world and a darkness shot with fire. Did I do this thing? Yea, verily, I did! Then, seeing that I dwell not in Edmund Spenser's faerie-land nor believe that an enchanter's wand may make white seem black and black seem white, I now see myself nakedly as I am,--a man who knew not himself; a sword, jewel--hilted, with a blade of lath; a gay masker whom, his vizard torn away, the servants thrust forth into the cold! I am my own a.s.sa.s.sin, forger, abhorred fool!"

He paused, and the embers fell, growing gray in the silence. At last he spoke again, in a changed voice. "Thy brother, lady.... There will not lack those to tell thee that I tripped him with my foot, that I slew him with my dagger. It is not true, and yet I count myself his murderer....

See the shadow at thy feet, the heavy shadow that lies between you and me!... How may I say that I would have given my life for him who was thy brother and my charge, whom for his own sake I loved, when I gave not my life, when I bought my life with his and many another's?... Thou dost well to say no word, but I would that thou didst not press thy hands against thy heart, nor look at me with those eyes. A little longer and I will let thee go, and Sidney's sister will comfort thee and be kind to thee."

"What else?" said Damaris, beneath her breath. "What else? O G.o.d! no more!"

Ferne drew from his doublet a knot of soiled ribbon. Again he was speaking, but not with the voice he had used before. "Thy favor.... I have brought it back to thee--but not stainless, not worn in triumph....

There is a fortress and a town that I see sometimes in a dream, and the governor of them both is a n.o.bleman of Spain--Don Luiz de Guardiola, Governor of Nueva Cordoba. He filched from me my honor, but left me life that I might taste death in life. He set me on the river sands that I might call to the s.h.i.+ps I had not sunken and to the comrades I had not slain. He gave me back my sword that in the cabin of the _Mere Honour_, in my leader's presence, I might break the blade in twain. He restored me _this_ when he had ground it beneath his heel!--No, no, I will not have you speak! But was he not a subtle gentleman?... Now, by your leave, I shall burn the ribbon."

He crossed to the great fireplace and threw the length of velvet ribbon into a glowing hollow. It caught and blazed and illuminated his face.

Damaris moved also, groping with her hands for the chair beside the table. Finding it, she sank down, outstretched her arms upon the board, and bowed her head upon them. Through the faintness and the leaden horror that weighed her down she heard Ferne's voice, at first yet monotonous and low, at the last an irrepressible cry of pa.s.sion:

"Now there is no longer troth between us, and all thy days, by summer and by winter, thou mayst listen unabashed to tales of such as I. If I am named to thee, thou needst not blush, for now I have seared away that eve above the river, that morn at Penshurst. And there will be no more singing, and men will soon forget, as thou too--as thou too must forget!

I loved; I love; but to thy lips and thy dark, dark eyes, and thy whole sweet self I say farewell.... Farewell!"

She was aware of his step beside her; knew that he had lifted the cloak and mask from the table; thought that but for this all-enfolding heaviness she would speak.... The door opened, and Sidney's voice reached her in a low, peremptory "At once!" A pause that seemed filled with laboring breath, then footsteps pa.s.sed her; the door closed. Alone, she rose to her feet, stood for a moment with her hands at her temples, then moved with an uncertain step to the fire, where she sank down upon the rushes and tried to warm herself. Something among the ashes drew her attention. In went her hand, and out came a charred end of velvet ribbon.

She sat before the fire for some time, dully conscious of sound and movement in the gallery without, but caring nothing. When at last she arose and left the room all was quiet enough, and she reached her own chamber unmolested. Towards evening Cecily, fluttering in after long hours of attendance, found her in her night-rail, half kneeling beside the bed, half fallen upon the floor.... The Countess of Pembroke was not at court, and there was none besides whom Cecily cared or dared to call; so, terrified, she watched out the night beside a Damaris she had never known.

Philip Sidney's low voice had been urgent, and the man who owed to him a perilous a.s.signation made no tarrying. With his cloak drawn about his face, and his hand busy with the small black mask, he pa.s.sed swiftly along the gallery towards the door through which he had obtained entrance and where Sidney now waited with an anxious brow. It was too late. Suddenly before him, at the head of a short flight of stairs, the ma.s.sive leaves of the great doors swung open and halberdiers appeared--beyond them a confused yet stately approach of sound and color and indistinguishable forms. The halberdiers advanced, a double line forming an aisle for the pa.s.sage of some brilliant throng, and cutting off the door of escape. Ferne looked over his shoulder. From doors now opened at the farther end of the gallery people were entering, were ranging themselves along the walls. There was a glimpse of a crowd without; beyond them, the palace stairs and the silver Thames. A trumpet blew, and the crowd shouted, _G.o.d save the Queen!_

The tide of color rolled through the great inner doors, down to the level of the gallery, and so on towards the river and the waiting barges. It caught upon its crest Philip Sidney, who, striving in vain to make his way back to where Ferne was standing, had received from the latter a most pa.s.sionate and vehement gesture of dissuasion. On came the bright wave, with menace of discomfiture and shame, towards the man who, surrounded though he was by petty courtiers, citizens, and country knights, could hardly fail of recognition. Impossible now was his disguise, where every hat was off, where a velvet cloak swung from a shoulder was one thing, and a mantle of frieze quite another. He dropped the latter at his feet, crushed the light mask in his hand, and waited.

It was not for long. Down upon him swept the cortege--the heart of the court of a virgin Queen. At once keenly and as in a dream he viewed it.

Not less withdrawn was it now than a fairy pageant clear cut against rosy skies and watched by him from the stony bases of inaccessible cliffs--and yet it was familiar, goodly, his old accustomed company.

This face--and that--and that! how he startled from it laughter or indifference or vagrant thought. There were low exclamations, a woman's slight scream, pause, confusion, and from the rear an authoritative voice demanding reason for the delay. Past him, staring and murmuring, swept the peac.o.c.k-tinted vanguard; then, Burleigh on one hand, Leicester on the other, encompa.s.sed and followed by the greatest names and the fairest faces of England, herself erect, ablaze with jewels, conscious of her power and at all times ready to wield it, came the daughter of Henry the Eighth.

A n.o.ble presence moving in the full l.u.s.tre of sovereignty, a princess who, despite all womanish faults, was a wise king unto her people, a maiden ruler to whom in that aftermath of chivalry men gave a personal regard, rose-colored and fanciful; the woman not above coquetry, vanity, and double-dealing, the monarch whose hand was heavy upon the council board, whose will perverted law, whose prime wish was the welfare of her people--she drew near to the man to whom she had shown fair promise of settled favor, but to whose story, told by his Admiral and commented upon by those about her, she had that day listened between bursts of her great oaths and with an ominous flas.h.i.+ng of jewels upon her hands.

Now her quick glance singled him out from the lesser folk with whom he stood. She colored sharply, took two or three impetuous steps, then, indignant, stayed with her lifted hand the progress of her train. Ferne knelt. In the sudden silence Elizabeth's voice, shaken with anger, made itself heard through half the length of the gallery.

"What make you here? Who has dared to do this--to place this man here?"

"Myself alone, madam," answered quickly the man at her feet. With a motion of his hand he indicated the long cloak beside him. "I had but made entrance into the gallery--I was taken unawares--"

"Hast a knife beneath your cloak?" burst forth the Queen. "I hear that right royally you gave my subjects' lives to the Spaniard. There's a death that would more greatly please those that mastered you!...

Answer me!"

"I have no words," said Ferne, in a low voice. As he spoke he raised his head and looked Majesty in the face.

Again Elizabeth colored, and her jewels shook and sparkled. "If not that, what then?" she cried. "G.o.d's death! Is't the Spanish fas.h.i.+on to wear disgrace as a favor? Again, sir, what do you here?"

"I came as a ghost might come," answered Ferne. "Thinks not your Grace that the spirits of disgraced and banished men, or men whose fault, mayhap, brought forfeiture of their lives, may strain to make return to that spot where they felt no guilt, where they were greatly happy? As such an one might come and no man see him, hurt or to be hurt of him, so came I, restless, a thing of naught, a shade drawn to look once more upon old ways, old walls, the place where once I freely walked. None brought me; none stayed me, for am I not a ghost? I only grieve that your Grace's clear eyes should have marked this shade of what I was, for most unwittingly I, uncommanded, find myself in your Grace's presence."

He bent lower, touched the hem of her magnificent robe, and his voice, which had been quite even and pa.s.sionless, changed in tone. "For the rest--whether I am yet to hold myself at your Grace's pleasure, or whether you give me sentence now--G.o.d save your Majesty and prevent your enemies at home and abroad--G.o.d bring downfall and confusion upon the Spaniard and all traitors who abet him--G.o.d save Queen Elizabeth!"

There followed a pause, during which could be heard the murmur of the waiting throng and the autumnal rustle of the trees without the gallery. At last:

"Yours was ever an eloquent tongue, Sir Mortimer Ferne," said the Queen, slowly. "Hadst thou known when to hold it, much might have been different.... Thy father served us well, and once we slept at his ancient house of Ferne, rich only in the valor and loyal deeds of its masters, from old times until our own.... What is lost is lost, and other and greater matters clamor for our attention. Go! hold thyself a prisoner, at our pleasure, in thy house of Ferne! If thou art but a shade with other shadows, then seek the company of thy dead father and of other loyal and gallant gentlemen of thy name. Perchance, one and all, they would have blenched had the pinch but been severe enough. I have heard of common men--ay, of thieves and murderers--whose lips the rack could not unlock! It seems that our English knights grow less resolved.... My lords, the sun is declining. If we would take the water to-day, we must make no farther tarrying. Your hand, my Lord of Leicester."

Once more her train put itself into motion. Lords and ladies, lips that smiled and hearts all busy with the next link in Ambition's golden chain, on they swept into the pleasant outer air. The one man of the motley throng of suitors to whom Elizabeth had spoken rose from his knee, picked up his frieze coat, and turned a face that might have gone unrecognized of friend or foe towards the door by which he had entered the gallery.

IX

Giles Arden, having ridden far as required the tale of miles from the tavern of the Triple Tun, came, upon a suns.h.i.+ny afternoon of early spring, to an oak knoll where one might halt to admire a fair picture of an old house set in old gardens. Old were the trees that shadowed it, and ivy darkened all its walls; without sound a listless beauty breathed beneath the pale blue skies; for all the suns.h.i.+ne and the bourgeoning of the spring, the picture seemed but sombrely rich, but sadly sweet. To the lips of a light-of-heart there was that in its quality had brought a sigh: as for Arden, when he had checked his horse he looked upon the scene with a groan, then presently for very mirthlessness, laughed.

"That day," he said to himself with a grimace--"that day when we forsook our hawking, and dismounting on this knoll, planned for him his new house! There should be the front, there the tower, there the great room where the Queen should lie when she made progress through these ways!

All to be built when, like a tiercel-gentle to his wrist, came more fame, more gold!"

The speaker turned in his saddle and looked about him with a rueful smile.

"I on yonder mossy stone, and Sidney, chin in hand, full length beneath that oak, and he standing there, his arm about the neck of his gray! And what says monsieur the traitor? 'I like it well as it stands, nor will I tear down what my forefathers built. Plain honor and plain truth are the walls thereof, and encompa.s.sed by them, the Queen's Grace may lie down with pride.' Brave words, traitor! Gulls, gulls (saith the world), friend Sidney! For a modic.u.m of thy judgment, Solomon, King of Jewry, I would give (an he would bestow it upon me) my cousin the Earl's great ruby!"

He laughed again, then sighed, and gathering up his reins, left the little eminence and trotted on through sun and shade to a vacant, ruinous lodge and a twilit avenue, silent and sad beneath the heavy interlacing of leafy boughs. Closing the vista rose a squat doorway, ivy-hung; and tumbled upon the gra.s.s beside it, attacking now a great book and now a russet pippin, lay a lad in a blue jerkin.

At the sound of the horse's hoofs the reader marked his page with his apple, and with a single movement of his lithe body was on his feet, a-stare to see a visitor where for many days visitors had been none.

Declining autumn and snowy winter and greening spring, he could count upon the fingers of one hand the number of those who had come that way where once there had been gay travelling beneath the locked elms.

Another moment and he was at Arden's side, clinging to that gentleman's jack-boot, raising to his hard-favored but not unkindly countenance a face aflame with relief and eagerness. Presently came the big tears to his eyes, he swallowed hard, and ended by burying his head in the folds of the visitor's riding-cloak.

"Where is your master, Robin-a-dale?" Arden demanded.

The boy, now red and shamefaced because of his wet lashes, stood up, and squaring himself, looked before him with winking eyes, nor would answer until he could speak without a quaver. Then: "He sits in the north chamber, Master Arden. This side o' the house the sun s.h.i.+nes." Despite his boyish will the tears again filled his eyes. "'Tis May-time now, and there's been none but him above the salt since Lammas-tide. Sir John came and Sir Philip came, but he would not let them stay. 'Tis lonesome now at Ferne House, and old Humphrey and I be all that serve him. Of nights a man is a'most afeard.... I'll fasten your horse, sir, and mayhap you'll have other luck."

Arden dismounted, and presently the two, boy and adventurer, pa.s.sed into a hall where the latter's spur rang upon the stone flooring, and thence into a long room, cold and shadowy, with the light stealing in through deep windows past screens of fir and yew. Touched by this wan effulgence, beside an oaken table on which was not wine nor dice nor books, a man sat and looked with strained eyes at the irrevocable past.

"Master, master!" cried Robin-a-dale. "Here be company at last. Master!"

Sir Mortimer pa.s.sed his hand across brow and eyes as though to brush away thick cobwebs. "Is it you, Giles Arden?" he asked. "It was told me, or I dreamed it, that you were in Ireland."

"I was, may G.o.d and St. George forgive me!" Arden answered, with determined lightness. "Little to be got and hard in the getting! Even the Muses were not bountiful, for my men and I wellnigh ate Edmund Spenser out of Kilcolman. He sends you greeting, Mortimer; swears he is no jealous poet, and begs you to take up that old scheme which he forsook of King Arthur and his Knights--"

"He is kind," said Ferne, slowly. "I am well fitted to write of old, heroic deeds. Nor is there any doubt that the man-at-arms who hath lost his uses in the struggle of this world should take delight in quiet exile, sating his soul with the pomp of dead centuries."

"Nor he nor I meant offence," began Arden, hastily.

"I know you did not," the other answered. "I have grown churlish of late. Robin! a stirrup-cup for Master Arden!"

A silence followed, then said Arden: "And if I want it not, Mortimer?

And if, old memories stirring, I have ridden from London to Ferne House that I might see how thou wert faring?"