"My Merry Rockhurst" Being Some Episodes in the Life of Viscount Rockhurst, a Friend of King Charles the Second, and at One Time Constable of His Majesty's Tower of London

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“My Merry Rockhurst”

* * * * * *

By Agnes & Egerton Castle

THE PRIDE OF JENNICO “IF YOUTH BUT KNEW!” THE SECRET ORCHARD ROSE OF THE WORLD THE STAR-DREAMER THE HOUSE OF ROMANCE THE BATH COMEDY INCOMPARABLE BELLAIRS THE HEART OF LADY ANNE

[Illustration]

By Egerton Castle

YOUNG APRIL THE LIGHT OF SCARTHEY CONSEQUENCES MARSHFIELD THE OBSERVER LE ROMAN DU PRINCE OTHON THE JERNINGHAM LETTERS ENGLISH BOOK-PLATES SCHOOLS AND MASTERS OF FENCE ETC.

* * * * * *

[Illustration: Through the open window, out of the darkness, gathered a heavy rumble of wheels; then again uprose the call of the bell, the cry of the hoarse voice: “Bring out your dead!”

(_See p. 293._)]

“My Merry Rockhurst”

Being Some Episodes in the Life of Viscount Rockhurst, a Friend of King Charles the Second, and at One Time Constable of His Majesty’S Tower of London

Recounted by

Agnes & Egerton Castle

Authors of “The Pride of Jennico,” “‘If Youth But Knew!’” “Rose of the World,” etc.

New York The Macmillan Company 1907

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1907, by the Macmillan Company.

Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1907.

Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

To

Randolph Henry Stewart

ELEVENTH EARL OF GALLOWAY HEAD OF THE ANCIENT HOUSE OF STEWART THIS STORY IS DEDICATED WITH THE AUTHORS’ AFFECTIONATE REGARD

Sept. 1, 1907.

Contents

Page

The King’S Comrade 1

I. The State Crust 3

II. Cavalier and Capitan 21

Farrant Chace 43

I. Farrant Chace 45

II. The Lady in the Snow 58

III. The Ransom 64

IV. Under the Stars 78

The Enigma Of The Locket 87

I. Little Satan 89

II. Whitehall Stairs 106

III. The Linnet’s Song 124

The Peacock Walk 145

I. June Roses 147

II. Fatherly Wisdom 168

III. The New French Pass 186

The King’S Cup 197

I. Little Satan 199

II. The Venetian Glass 225

III. The Phial of Acquetta 236

Lady Chillingburgh’S Last Card-Party 251

I. Lincoln’s Inn Fields 253

II. Love’s Reproach 267

III. The Plague-Cart 281

Broken Sanctuary 297

I. The Haven of Refuge 299

II. The Gold Whistle 308

III. Nemesis 323

The Red Desolation 339

I. The Watchers 341

II. The Testament 351

III. The Last Command 368

Illustrations

“Through the open window, out of the darkness, gathered a heavy rumble of wheels; then again uprose the call of the bell, the cry of the hoarse voice: ‘Bring out your dead!’” (See page 293) FRONTISPIECE

Opp. Page

“The single contemptuous exclamation fell like the cut of a whip” 68

“She felt at last that she had power” 132

“Lionel took place beside him and from narrowed lids looked smilingly at the young man’s happy countenance” 184

“The huddled figure in the great chair. The face of her that had so stout a heart, conquered in death—but less piteous, less awful sight than the living face of the French madam” 314

“Harry gave a deep groan, covered his face with his hands, and fell upon the bench” 364

The King’S Comrade

The King’S Comrade

I

The State Crust

The early September night had descended upon Bruges,—“City of Bridges,”—once the seat of the most luxurious court in Europe, now so far away, fallen from its high if not from its wealthy estate. The life of the little town, never very active or varied under the Spaniard’s rule, seemed this evening to have been swept into a stillness emphasised only by an occasional footfall upon the cobbles of its winding streets, some husky cry from a barge gliding ghost-like down a canal, or the far-away barking of dogs on the farm lands beyond the walls. A sea mist had crept from the north, muffling even these sounds of silence, rolling in thicker volumes along the many sluggard waters that intersect the old Flemish Mart and bring prosperity to her comfortable merchants, as it were in their sleep. It hung itself in loose wisps around the carven towers of the Cathedral, the giddy heights of the belfry—whence, as the hours slipped on, deep bell voices answered clear bell voices, like spirits communing from their heights across the petty lives below.

* * * * *

The corner house of a row of solid burgher mansions, flanking the canal on the Quai Vert, stood slightly apart with an air of greater importance than the rest, giving to the street on the one side through courtyard and wrought-iron gate, and on the other sheer over the water that lazily lipped the green, slimy foot of its walls.

The second floor of this house had been the dwelling of my lord Viscount Rockhurst ever since—that is, some two years before—Charles had transferred to Bruges his penurious little court of English Cavaliers, exiles like himself since the fateful days of Worcester, of Boscobel, and Whiteladies.

In a long, low room overlooking the canal, two men sat together, one on each side of an open hearth, lost in deep musings. The curtains were undrawn; one window stood open, and ever and anon admitted a wreath of the sea-fog that swirled a moment and swiftly fainted away. The only light in the apartment was the ruddy glow of a driftwood fire, now cheerfully burning, although the acrid savour that still hung in the air betrayed its recent stubbornness and explained the gaping casement. It seemed as if the two lacked the energy either to shut out the gloom of night or call for the enlivening of candle or lamp; as if the paralysing, sodden weight lying upon the world without had laid hold of their souls.

The blue-tipped flames that leaped round the logs flung now one brooding countenance in relief, now the other. Upon the right, the dark head of the exiled King of England, still in the very ripeness of young manhood, would be sketched against the leather-backed chair upon which it wearily rested. But not all the geniality of the blaze could give sanguine hue or gleam of cheerfulness to the sallow, harsh visage. In utter dejection, the long figure—“a tall man, above two yards high,” so had run the description on the Council of State’s Warrant for the apprehension of Charles Stuart—extended itself as if unconsciously to the warmth, chin sunk upon breast, eyes fixed and moody under drooping lids and singularly bushy eyebrows.

Upon the left, the fitful tongues of flame revealed a face of equal melancholy if of greater energy and comeliness. My lord Rockhurst sat forward, supporting his cheek upon his hand. His was a type such as Sir Anthony Van Dyck, some few years before, had loved to fix in his incomparable line and colour. Like his King he was dark, but with chestnut lights and a crispness in the waves of hair falling upon his shoulders absent from the heavy locks of Charles. Against the glow his profile stood out, fine-cut and pale-hued as a carving in ivory. Older by some years, there yet was a youthful air of alertness about his whole personality, even as he sat motionless, that was conspicuously lacking in the apathetic figure facing him.

Ever and anon his eyes, hawk-like in their keenness and the quick dilation of their pupils, would shift from the wistful contemplation of fire-pictures to the royal countenance, where they would rest in scrutiny, and, it seemed, in deepening concern. Ever and anon, upon the withdrawal of this gaze, a slight sigh escaped him.

Suddenly Charles gathered his long limbs into a more erect posture, and jerking his head toward his companion:—

“And there you go again, Harry, with your heigh-ho’s. I fled but an hour ago from the long faces of my lord Gerard, of Erskine, and Armorer—”

“My lord Gerard, gentleman of the Bedchamber, Messieurs Erskine and Armorer, Cupbearer and Comptroller of the Household—” murmured Rockhurst, with a humorous twist of bitterness.

“Gentleman of the Straw Pallet and Wooden Stool … Comptroller of the State Crusts! As for Mr. Cupbearer Erskine, he had to-day to pledge in pawn the last silver pot for fear of arrest.… Marry! I took refuge with you, who at least, God be praised, never weary me with talk of debts. Yet even you must need treat me to sighs! Upon my soul, a man would no more cheerful company than that of this Court of mine to put him in fit frame for the monastery—How say you, Harry? Is’t perchance the one issue left us? There is Royal, aye, Imperial example for it. Do you see in me proper material for a Trappist? ‘_Brother, we must die_’—Nay, ‘_Brother, we are dead_’ would better suit our case! No Cistercian wall could hold a drearier prospect than this dismal town of Bruges.”

He rose as he spoke, and dragged himself with slouching steps to the window:—

“Faugh! the smell of those dead waters—the stillness of them!… I vow I can hear the drip from yonder leafless poplars on the bank! Aye, Charles is dead, and Bruges is his tomb! ’Tis no lofty withdrawal from life, like his great namesake’s, but a very sordid end, my good Harry. Death of credit, death of hopes.… Here we are, in a town of merchants, a community of buyers and sellers, and we have not wherewithal to pay for a supper, nay, not even for a bottle to help us forget that we have not supped.”

The other man had risen in his turn and approached the window.

“Why, now!” he cried, and his voice in its brisk, manly tone formed a strong contrast to the other’s melancholy drawl, “’tis surely but this pestilent fog keeps Mr. Secretary Hyde and my lord of Bristol from rejoining us with the promised supplies; faith, and who knows? with news that may cheer our hearts, my liege.”

“Harry,” said the other, wheeling round and facing him with something of humour in his rueful visage, “this _my liege_ of yours to my empty stomach savours most damnably of mockery. For love of Heaven, if thou wouldst help me to bear it, remember we are but comrades in bad straits together. Here is poor Charles, and there stands poor Harry. Liege? Majesty? Psho! Our own country will have none of us; our friends abroad have failed us; the wise burghers of this town will no longer recognise the value of a signature of mine—and as for thee.…”

“My last remittance, overdue this month; intercepted, I make no doubt, by Old Noll’s—” Rockhurst made a gesture toward the casement: yonder to the north, but a score of miles, perhaps, Cromwell’s well-found ships were cruising, as he knew, close in shore. “Well, better luck next venture!” he went on. “Our friends at home—the one certainty in these uncertain times—do not forget us. Sighs! Did I sigh? ’Twas at the thought that, though there is still firewood in the house you deigned to honour to-night, there is ne’er a bottle left for your Majesty’s entertainment—and.…”

In eloquent conclusion, the Cavalier pulled out a silk purse and crushed its emptiness between his palms with a smile, which the anxious gaze he fixed upon his visitor markedly belied.

“My last angel gone to the surly porter of Mynheer Tratsaert’s house of business this afternoon. I had better have kept it for our supper. But who would have thought that Mr. Secretary Hyde, Councillor, Chancellor of the Exchequer, would allow such lack.…”

“And who would have thought who knew the fortunes of Charles that he was ever destined to do aught but lack? The fox hath his hole and the birds of the air have nests … but Charles shall not even have a stone whereon to lay his head. Aye—you may well stare, Harry, to hear me quote Scripture. The waters are at lowest ebb with us, good friend; and like the rest of the world, in our extremity, we turn to the texts.”

A moment the elder man stood gazing through the gloom which in the falling firelight was gathering ever more closely about them, at the face of his royal master. Then he said in a low voice which more concealed than betrayed emotion:—

“When the tide is at lowest, ’tis but nearest to the turn.”

“Nay,” broke from the other with ever-increasing bitterness, “if that is where thy hopes lie, I am sorry for thee. There is no turn in such fortunes as mine, but an ever-sapping drain. Why, there is not a kinsman can afford to show countenance to such a falling house, not a lady in Europe who has heart enough to risk her fate with my hopes. Nay, there’s not even a fat tallow merchant of Flanders who thinks it worth his while to risk a present guilder for future favour. You would do better, my lord, to go seek your peace with the powers that be—and for this you have recent high precedent—rather than remain to share the last ruin of our line.”

“Sire,” exclaimed Rockhurst then, “how shall my house stand if yours fall? How shall my body keep health if yours ail? Where is my country but with you, or my hopes but with yours?”

Charles answered the steady tones with an attempt at lightness which failed to cover completely a certain tender break in his own voice.

“The more fool you, then, Harry! Easy terms would be made to the Viscount Rockhurst. He could dwell on his fat lands once more in power and opulence instead of wasting them in fines—he could bring up his heir in leisure; nay, he could wed him a new wife and beget him a fresh family, all in merry England.”

“My son,” answered the other, “is in good hands—and my sister in the farm-house where she hath refuge brings him up even in such wise as I should myself. As for a new wife, poor Charles,”—his lips broke into a smile as they spoke the words,—“believe your poor Harry, he is as little likely to seek one as he is to seek a new master—But, Heaven forgive me!” he went on with brisk change of tone, “this outer fog seems to have befogged my inner wits. The house can at least afford us lights. Nay, I will close the casement upon the dull, wet world. Another log or two on the hearth!” He added action to speech, and a cheerful roar and blaze answered the ministration. “The curtain across the casement—so! Now we were in worse straits after Worcester. Have you forgotten how we stole a sheep and killed it and brought you the reeking leg, and you yourself cut it into collops and set them in the pan? Good lack—how tough they were! Yet ’twas a merry supper. Back to your chair by the warmth, my dearest Sire. An hour’s patience, and it will go ill with me if I serve you not a meal—and wine to it—fit wine for the pledge it shall wash.”

“Aye, and how will you manage that, my merry Rockhurst?” asked Charles Stuart listlessly, as he suffered himself to be led back to his chair.

“Why, by a fight or a kiss, a laugh or a lie!” cried his companion gaily. “Since the French king has thrust us out to please England’s Protector; since the Don neglects to maintain us in proper state, why then, the Don’s land must be made to provide!” He took up his sword which lay on the table to his hand and buckled it round his lean figure as he spoke. “A joke will bring a man far along sometimes; or, if not, then a prodigious bit of deceit. I am ready, too, to kiss, my good liege, or kill. Is not all fair in love and war? And are we not at war still, aye, and with the whole world too,—and as much in love as out of it? There are women in this Flemish town, and they have hearts for a man, or how could even this Bruges subsist?”

He stood in the full light of the racing hearth-flame, the points of the thin mustache quivering with his smile. So handsome, although worn with anxiety and privation; so tall and proper a man, so dashing a presence in such tattered and faded garb.

Charles turned his dark eyes slowly on his friend.

“Art a likely figure, in verity, to go courting the prude burgher’s daughter!” he drawled upon a yawn. “Aye, well—off with thee, then, and I’ll have a nap to pass the weary time. _Qui dort dine_, as the French say—though my sleek cousin of France would scarce put up with the alternative!—But mind how you play, my lord, with your kisses and your blade—I can ill afford to lose my last friend!”

Rockhurst answered but by a look of affectionate devotion. Then, after a little pause:—

“I will send Chitterley with candles,” said he, “and bid him lay the table against my return.”

Upon which, he made as low a bow toward the languid figure as if the exile sat in state upon his throne, and withdrew from the room.

In the entrance-hall, dimly lit by a tallow candle thrust in an iron sconce, he paused, and an air of concentration succeeded the spurt of enforced gaiety.

Charles had indeed summed up the situation. The English Royalists, bankrupt of credit, bankrupt at last of hope, the King himself reduced to pledge his orders, even his favourite silver-hilt sword, the royal dinner “dwindled to one dish”; withal the taste of wine like to some receding memory! It would require an inspiration of audacity this evening to provide the rashly promised guerdon. But Rockhurst had a soul to which emergency was a sure spur. He wasted no further time upon reflection, since reflection served but to show ever more sternly that in this night’s foray he must suffer chance and his own boldness to guide him. Going to the door of the servants’ quarters, he called for the French factotum—a clever rascal, cook, valet, groom,—who, with his faithful English attendant, represented the household of the whilom sumptuous Lord Viscount.

“Marcelin!”

“Monseigneur?” The word rang back in brisk interrogation from the underground kitchen.

“Get thee a lantern and attend me. We go foraging, you understand?”

“Oh, yes, monseigneur!” There was something of a joyous ring in the prompt answer.

“Chitterley!”

“Yes, my lord!”

“His Majesty himself is with us to-night! Take up candles and lay the supper table—”

“Yes—my lord.” The quavering response was given in tones of doubt and wonder.

Rockhurst adjusted his cloak,—a garment more weather-stained and damaged even than the suit it covered,—flung upon his head the battered beaver with its derision of a Cavalier plume, and was unlocking the door when Marcelin emerged.

“I have taken the liberty to bring a basket, monseigneur,” said the man, casting the object (which was of bloated dimensions) on the floor whilst he settled his lantern to better trim. “Foraging?—Good news, my faith, for it’s a weary time since we have had but Poor-John or a sandhill rabbit to our stringy cabbage! Monseigneur has his plan, no doubt?”

“None as yet,” said Rockhurst. “But, at whatever cost, Marcelin, we return not here empty-handed.”

“As soon die of a knock on the head as of famine,” said the Frenchman lightly. “Milord hardly conceives with what joy I am of his enterprise. I would follow milord at all times, but to-night there is hardly a crime I do not feel capable of after these days of stock-fish and clear water.”

The strokes of nine were falling slow and grave from the Cathedral tower, somewhere high above the fog, as they turned into the street. All Bruges, wrapped in her blanket of mist, lay to their will: a town asleep, or soon to be, for your Fleming is a creature of early hours.

The hungry Cavalier had instinctively shaped his course through the High Street toward the Grande Place, in or about which purlieus lay the few taverns that remained open during night hours—dismal holes enough, which brought sighing remembrance of jovial London meetings. But no hostelry good or vile is a place of promise to him who, in the local parlance, “lodge but the Devil in his purse.” And much to Marcelin’s disappointment his lordship passed pensively on to outlying districts. There was, as he had admitted, as yet no definite plan in his mind; but he sought those quarters of the town where the evening fare was likely to be most succulent. Was he not to cater for a king?

With one or two of the great houses which rose on the quay of the Augustines, isolated from each other by the length of high-walled gardens, he had had in earlier and slightly more prosperous days of exile a passing acquaintance. Had a forgotten shutter, an undrawn curtain, but given him a glimpse of some pleasantly lighted family repast, he would have made bold to ply knocker and bell and demand a loan, trusting to the hour of mellow conviviality and his own winning address. But not even a ray was suffered this night to send its cheerful message into the street from those carefully barred balconies and windows. The burgher filled himself from his good fleshpots—the English exile or Spanish soldier might roam, ragged and empty, in the cold.

“Has monseigneur any definite purpose in making his promenade through the fog, which—saving monseigneur’s respect—is as searching as the devil? If I might venture to suggest,” murmured Marcelin at last, in tones of apologetic weariness, drawing close to Rockhurst’s elbow, “if monseigneur would visit the Three Flags tavern, or the Cellar at the Sluys Gate, he might perhaps deign to win a few pistoles from some Spanish coronel or some French gentleman prisoner on parole. Then—”

“Marcelin,” interrupted Rockhurst, “the lining of our purse admits of no such suggestion, however otherwise sagacious. Do not attempt to interfere with the guidance of fate. The night is foggy, ’tis true; natheless is fog more substantial to take into your empty carcass than mere airs. These houses do not present a hospitable front, yet each one holds gold both in purse and in flagon. The question is how to get it. That question is fate’s business to solve for us. March.”

He swung into as quick a pace as the uncertain gloom and the rough pavement permitted; and, as if his servant’s words had started it in his memory, began to sing, not loudly, but in a voice of some sweetness, the air of a swaggering popular Spanish song that was much on the lips, this autumn, of Don John’s soldiery.

Hardly had he reached the second stave when, overhead, a window guarded with ornamental bowed iron grille-work was cautiously opened, and a woman’s voice took up the refrain as gently as a swallow twitters.

Rockhurst instantly halted, and doffing his hat with gallant alertness, glanced up at the square of faint light, against which a woman’s head, leaning forward behind the curving bars, was just visible.

“Hist—” The warning sound dropped sibilantly.

“Hist!” promptly responded Rockhurst, ready for all emergency.

Then through the bars a hand fluttered a second.

“_La llave del jardin_,” breathed the timid tones, in a Spanish which even his own foreign ear recognised as more Flemish than Castilian. Upon which something fell with a muffled clang at his feet: the key of the garden door.

“My soul…!” responded Rockhurst in his most ardent whisper.

His Spanish did not go very far; but he had at least that nodding acquaintance with it which residence in Flanders rendered necessary to a Cavalier. Fortunately, more was not required of him; for the house wall grew blank again with the closing window.

But fate had pointed her finger.

Stooping, he groped for the key. It was wrapped in a fine kerchief which had a fragrance of angelic water, and he sniffed with amused anticipation ere he thrust it in his breast. He was weighing the heavy key in his hand as Marcelin crept up to him again.

“If monseigneur had only deigned to inform me that it was a rendezvous…!” he thought plaintively. “Here am I very foolish, with my basket instead of good cutlass to keep watch over his _bonne fortune_!”

The honest fellow’s head was in a complete whirl. That milord should abandon the King for the sake of a lady was milord all over, it was true; nevertheless an astounding proceeding, and milord’s manner of conducting the affair confusing in the extreme. But his master’s next words brought illumination:—

“Look you now, Marcelin, did I not tell you Fortune would solve the riddle? Has she not brought us to the most opulent house of the whole row? And if it were not for the fog, her servant, would that sweet lady have mistaken me for her Spanish lover? Come, now, the garden door must lurk in this wall to the right.”

He moved on a few steps, running his hand along the brick. Marcelin followed, lost in admiration.

“Eh, by the little dog of St. Roch!” he cried, “does monseigneur intend—?”

“Certes, my friend, and to make the lady glad of the exchange,” answered the Cavalier in his quiet voice. “Ha, here is the nail-studded wood: here with your lantern.”

II

Cavalier And Capitan

Even as he spoke, bending to look for the lock, there came along the cobbles of the lane a clink of spurs that rang to the rhythm of a martial tread. And presently a rather husky voice was uplifted into that same conquering lilt—the tune of the marching Spaniards—that had come to Rockhurst’s mind a few moments before.

Lilt and step fell into sudden silence at the corner of the house. The newcomer had halted, apparently struck by the sight of the two figures, shadowed as they were through the vapours at the garden gate by the lantern light. Rockhurst’s head as he bent over the lock was lit up fantastically. The bold features, the thin, upturned mustache, quivering now with a mischievous smile, the peaked beard, black as raven’s wing, and the hat with its challenging tilt and its incredible plume, all seemed to proclaim in him one of Don John’s own rakish soldiers of fortune.

The key turned in the lock. The next instant the Capitan (the red plume sweeping over the hat-brim proclaimed his rank) sprang forward with a growl like an angry dog’s and plucked at Rockhurst’s cloak, even as the latter was pushing the door open.

“Hey, there, comrade!” he whispered, “you are caught at it—breaking into an honest burgher’s house! Out of this, sharp!”

“Breaking in, camarado? Why, not at all,” responded Rockhurst, in his own Franco-Spanish. “Merely entering where I am expected, and my servant there holds the light.—Come in, Marcelin.”

He stepped lightly through the doorway, leaving his cloak in the other’s grasp. His voice, in the undertone they both deemed prudent to adopt, yet conveyed the perfection of mockery.

“Expected? _Cuerpo de Dios!_” said the gallant, and fell back a step, blank surprise robbing him, it seemed, of all other emotion for the present.

“Even so, Señor Caballero, witness this key. (Up with the light, Marcelin, that the señor may see for himself.) Witness the token.” He brandished first the key, then the scented handkerchief, with gay gesture. “May I trouble you for my cloak? Then I shall wish you good night.”

Marcelin, grinning, stood between the two, his back against the door-post, the basket on his arm, holding up the lantern. The light fell full on the Spaniard’s visage: young and handsome enough it was, though now livid with fury. Still speechless, he seemed rooted to the spot, his black eyes starting, the wings of his nostrils distended upon his angry breath.

Rockhurst waited a second or two, then with a laugh:—

“Marcelin,” he ordered, “relieve the noble Capitan of my cloak: he will understand my impatience.”

The little valet, shifting the lantern into the basket, put out his hand obediently for the ragged garment in question. But here the newcomer, suddenly leaping into active ferocity, made a headlong rush into the garden, and had not Rockhurst by a dexterous step aside avoided the onslaught, would have seized his rival by the throat.

“Come in, Marcelin, and shut the door,” came the mocking voice from the darkness. “Let us unravel this little question of precedence in snug privacy. We shall want your lantern, my friend.”

The garden, tree-shaded and high-walled on all sides, seemed to shut in and concentrate the night’s gloom. The sound of two swords, hissing out of the scabbards even as the words were spoken, was sinister in the darkness.

Rockhurst quickly drew once more within the faint circle of light. The lantern held aloft (now in a somewhat nervous clutch, it must be said) revealed the silent laughter that rippled over his features like wild-fire, as he flung himself into an extravagantly truculent fencing attitude. The Spaniard, stamping on the sod like a bull enraged, filled the air with guttural execrations, while he swung Rockhurst’s cloak in frantic circles over his left arm. His rapier gleamed one moment aloft, then, low-aimed, shot forward like a flash.

Marcelin involuntarily shouted warning; but Rockhurst, with the coolness of the experienced fighting man, had already slipped from the stroke of death as airily as the practised dancer to the turn of the tune. On the instant he had plucked his dilapidated beaver from his head, and beating with it the menacing blade widely aside, brought down his own steel whistling upon the wrist that palely showed behind the gilt Toledo hilt.

With a muffled scream of rage and pain the Spaniard dropped his weapon, fell on one knee, feverishly shaking the cloak off his arm to nurse his helpless, bleeding hand.

Rockhurst’s skill, guided by luck, had inflicted, at the first pass, one of those disabling wounds that cause pangs singularly disproportionate to their seriousness. He sheathed his rapier with much deliberation, picked up his cloak and flung it around him as it were a royal mantle, smoothed out the feather in his hat,—not improved in any way by its buckler service,—and set it back on his head at the right jaunty cock. He was about to pass the Capitan with a taunting _buenas noches_, when some impulse of careless good nature bade him change his mind.

“Nay, I am sure,” he said, “that our fair one within will support my invitation when I bid you to sup and converse. In your own Castilian phrase: Will you not enter into this your house?—Marcelin, support the Señor Capitan; he waxes, methinks, somewhat weakly.”

And, upon a further spur of magnanimity, he himself returned the fallen sword to the defeated man’s side.

Faint chinks of light cut upon the darkness showed them where the house door stood, slightly ajar, upon the garden. And as the trio approached, the feet of the wounded man shuffling along the tiled path, the soft voice called out, in its broken Spanish:—

“Señor Ramon, is that you?—For the love of God, what has happened?”

He who was just adjured answered only by a groan; whereupon Rockhurst, stepping up to the chink and speaking in low but cheerful tones, addressed the invisible lady in French this time:—

“Dear madam, if you will but admit us, you shall have explanation. The Capitan Ramon has met with a slight misadventure, and needs but your smile, a bandage, and a tass of brandwein to restore him.”

“Ah, heavens!” answered she, and the door was flung wide open. A woman, evidently of the rich burgher class, young, and very fair of colouring, stood in the passage, a small lamp in her hand. Her face blanched as the half-fainting man was assisted across the threshold, and she caught her free hand to her lips as if to stifle a rising scream. It was evident, thought Rockhurst, that there were those in the house whom she feared to disturb.

The danger of her own situation weighing apparently upon her even more than the condition of her lover, she gathered herself quickly together; and, imploring caution by gesture, ran light-footed up the passage, beckoning as she went. She thus inducted the whole party into a panelled room, which seemed built at the most distant end from the front. It was gaily lighted by a hanging crown of candles, warmed by a stove, furnished in brown oak, with dressers and shelves upon which gleamed much pewter and brass of high polish. Upon a table covered with fair red and white napery stood revealed an unmistakable supper for two, with abundance of good things, at sight of which Rockhurst and Marcelin exchanged a deep glance of meaning.

As she closed the door upon their entrance, the young woman drew a deep breath of relief, exclaiming in her Flemish French:—

“Here we are safe!—In the passage,” she added, turning to Rockhurst, “the servants, sir, might have heard us from their quarters.”

The simple air with which she spoke, the round blue eyes she fixed upon them, the practical candour with which she excused herself for a seeming want of hospitality before attending to her groaning lover, gave Rockhurst swift insight into the nature they had to deal with. Here was a matter-of-fact young vrow, not even pretty,—at least to a fastidious English eye—for, with her little moon face and her hemp-coloured hair, she might have emerged from a canvas by Master Gerard Dow, yet with much that was agreeable about her manner, about the gentle irregularity of her features, but above all about her engaging youthfulness. Here certainly was none of your vaporous dames. She showed no undue emotion at sight of the Spaniard’s blood-dyed hands; but, as she turned to help him, was neatly careful to twitch her dress from too close proximity and to push her lace cuffs higher up her plump arms.

After examining the gash with crooning sympathy, she poured water into one of the bright pewter dishes that stood on the sideboard; then, cutting a napkin into strips with the carving-knife, addressed the Cavalier:—

“If you will kindly give him the brandwein—it is in the square glass bottle beside the pasty.”

Rockhurst started from his amused contemplation and turned to the damaged gallant. This latter, installed by Marcelin with mock solicitude in a chair near the table, sat collapsed, with his head on his breast. Rockhurst conceived a shrewd suspicion that the Capitan’s prolonged weakness was more feint than reality, an opinion apparently shared by the servant, whose face was wreathed in satiric smiles. And when the wounded man pettishly pushed aside the brandy and demanded _del vino_, the doubt became certainty.

“Wine, Marcelin,” ordered the Cavalier briefly, as one in his own house.

After having drained a rummer of Rhenish, the Capitan recovered sufficiently to roll his head toward his lady as she knelt on his right, laving the languid, bleeding hand.

“Ah, traitress!” he observed scathingly.

“Madam,” interjected Rockhurst, as the pale blue eyes were raised in wonder from their task, “your valiant friend refers, I imagine, to your having honoured me with a song, an invitation, a token, and a key. It is because of his failure to understand the right of a lady to dispose of all favours at her will that he met with the little accident to which he now owes the honour and the joy of your sweet ministration.”

“Sir…!” cried Ramon the Capitan, lifting his olive-hued countenance to fling an uncertain glare across the table. Then, no fresh argument apparently occurring to him, he repeated resentfully, “Traitress—traitress!”

“In heaven’s name,” she cried, pausing in her task, “was it not you?—How, sir, was it you?”

She turned her childish gaze from one to the other, her blond head, as she knelt, just emerging above the table. For all answer, Rockhurst drew key and kerchief from his breast and pushed them toward her.

The Spaniard drew breath for a fresh compliment. But, Marcelin putting a second glass opportunely to his hand, he plunged his mustache again into the wine.

“Ah, what a mistake!” murmured the vrow, returning placidly to her ministrations. “Alas, what a cut!—it must be tended by the surgeon, but I will draw the lips together and bandage. You can give yourself time for supper first.”

She wound the strips firmly as she spoke, though the patient spluttered in his cup, winced, and whistled. To complete the artistic effect she took the handkerchief that lay on the table and tied it neatly over all. Rockhurst was shaken with his silent laughter over the singular pair of lovers.

“Sir,” said the little hostess, rising to her feet and addressing him, then, not without dignity: “I know not whom you may be, but your presence here is the result of a misunderstanding. That you may not misunderstand further, let me inform you that I receive the Capitan Ramon at this hour only because my husband, who went off to-day to Antwerp, has forbidden him to enter his house.”

“Madam,” said Rockhurst, as he rose in his turn and bowed, concealing under an air of preternatural gravity his delight at the simple statement, “had I the honour of standing in your husband’s shoes, I should be jealous of every dog that looked at you.”

“But, sir,” she exclaimed, her gaze widening upon him, “but my husband is old and fat.”

The hard brilliancy of the Cavalier’s eye softened: here was a remark which betrayed the logic of a perfectly childish mind.

“The poor Capitan Ramon,” she went on, “has so little money and gets such poor fare. I think it but right to help him.”

“Madam,” said Rockhurst, “you have described my own case. I bless the hour when I was inspired to pass beneath the window of so tender-hearted a lady!”

“Indeed,” she said, and her creamy skin flushed to the roots of her hair, “if you will share the supper, too, I shall be glad of it.”

Again the Spaniard rolled his glare of sullen doubt. Rockhurst had not lived the life of camps for so many years without becoming familiar with every variety of your _soldado_. He was able, by this time, to read very clearly that here was but one of those ubiquitous “officers of fortune” who, behind a punctilious manner and a conquering exterior, screen anything but a chivalric soul—mercenaries who, no doubt, will fight when occasion is imperative, but who reckon upon looks as much as upon “derring-do” for the securing of this world’s comforts. The attack in the garden, under the spur of sudden fury, upon the invader of his own conquered province, had exhausted the Capitan’s pugnacity: Rockhurst saw that, in the further progress of the night’s adventure, this Ramon need no longer be taken into account.

“I should be churl, indeed,” said he to the lady, as he sat down at the table, “to decline your gracious courtesy. Nay, madam, pray take your seat; my servant will even pass the dishes. Natheless, if you will so honour me, a glass of wine from your fair hand?… I give you thanks.—Marcelin, you can feed the Señor Capitan.”

* * * * *

So the odd supper party began; the hostess unconsciously admiring; the Spaniard all a-frown; Rockhurst rattling his compliments with fascinating courtliness—his heart the while in the bare lodgings of the Quai Vert with his unprovided King; his brain intent upon turning the tide of events to the channels of his own purpose. He could see nothing thus far, but to await the moment when the Spaniard, sufficiently fuddled with wine after his blood-letting, might be conveyed back to the street by Marcelin and handed over to the next patrol. Then, thought Rockhurst, the gentle vrow would be left to the unhampered diplomacy of her uninvited guest (who felt prepared to wield it as profitably, and justify it as gallantly, as any Castilian in Bruges), and all would be plain sailing.

The astute valet seemed to have divined the scheme, and was plying the bottle sedulously upon his charge. Fate, however, upon which the wanderers had hitherto so blindly reckoned, again wielded the key.

Marcelin had hardly drawn the first sweep of the knife upon the goose’s breast when the house reverberated to the sound of distant knocking. The little dame went as white as the kerchief at her bosom; a far greater discomfiture fell upon her than she had manifested at sight of her gallant’s wound.

“Heaven’s mercy!” she gasped; “it is from the street!”

She ran to the inner door and listened in the passage; the knocking was resumed, from no patient or weakling hand, in peculiar cadence.

“It is my husband,” she said then, coming back into the room, with the calmness of despair. “It is my husband, and I am lost.”

The Spaniard rose to his feet and stood swaying, a look of dismay and helplessness upon his countenance. Instinctively she turned to Rockhurst, and pointing to the sorry figure, she cried:—

“My husband will never forgive me … no, Josse will never forgive me! He bought Ramon out when they had billeted him on us, last month. He bought him out and I was forbidden ever to speak to him again. I thought I was safe to-night … I am lost!”

The thunder of the husband’s rapping accompanied her lament with swelling rhythm.

“Oh!” she went on, “Josse told me this morning he was going to Antwerp. It was a trap!”

“A trap!” exclaimed the Cavalier gaily. “But there is a way out, madam, a way out, since there was a way in!”

“To the devil with this night’s work!” suddenly gurgled the Capitan. “To the devil, say I, with women and fools!”

His lady’s wine had not been without effect upon his wits; but he was sober enough to seize the situation and act on his rival’s hint. In three staggering steps he was at the door, and they could hear him break into a kind of groping run down the passage.

In the midst of her terror the Dutchwoman’s eye flashed with sudden scorn.

“Truly,” said Rockhurst, as if in answer, “’tis a valiant heart! Yet, madam, with him is your chief anxiety removed. Whilst you play with bolts and delay your lord with fond embrace, we, on our side, vanish by the garden whence we came. Aye, and let out the señor, for ’tis still I who have the key.—Go, dear madam; leave the rest to us.”

“Alack, alack!” she moaned, “this supper table, laid for two, will yet betray me!”

“Say you so!” exclaimed Rockhurst, his wits leaping to the humorous opportunity. “Nay, then shall the supper vanish, too! Your Flemish household still sleeps heavily; our chances are good. Madam, before you hurry to the door, you had better put some dishevelment in your attire to show you had but just descended from your bedchamber, where you were doubtless already disrobing.—Marcelin, you rogue, you have a reputation for a smart table servant; deserve it!”

Even as he spoke the hurried words, he had begun himself to toss goose and pasty into the basket and to stuff a brace of the long flagons securely in the interstices.

There was a stir overhead; the household was awaking.

“Monseigneur,” cried Marcelin, on an inspiration, “no time for niceties! If monseigneur will take one end of the cloth, I will take the other. We can carry the victualling wholesale into the garden and there advise about packing—Madam will see to the bloody basin, no doubt?”

Upon these words, with all presence of mind, the valet ransacked the dresser of everything it bore in the shape of good cheer, cakes and ham, brawn and an eel pie, and many flagons (not forgetting the square-faced bottle), and made a pile of the booty upon the table.

Obedient to his suggestion, the hostess had tripped out to fling the contents of the basin upon a flower bed. She came back in a trice, found Marcelin already loaded with the weighty, strangely bulging bag, and with fervent words of thanks held the door open for him. Rockhurst meanwhile was gaily blowing out candle after candle of the hanging crown. Ponderous footsteps descending the stairs proclaimed that the porter was at length aroused.

“One light for you, madam,” said Rockhurst; “you are just in time!” He thrust the last unextinguished taper into her hand; then, his arm round her waist, bending his height to her small stature, drew her toward the door: “Good-by,” he said, “sweet hostess. Another time choose more wisely both your hour and your cavalier.”

She turned her soft, childish face with a little sob up toward him. And with a sudden stirring of the heart, as toward a winsome child, he bent and kissed her.

“I shall never forget how you have saved me, this night!” she said, her lips upon his. At which Rockhurst kissed her again to conceal his amusement.

The sound of a bar grating reluctantly in its socket rang the urgency of parting. Yet, she clutched him.

“You said you were poor and hungry, like him … like him who fled,” she panted. “I had saved this for him: I had rather you had it.”

She thrust a small velvet bag into his hand, one second more pressed clingingly against him, and the next instant was flying light-footed away. There came a sound of a growling voice; at which Rockhurst in all celerity flung his cloak over his shoulders and withdrew, closing the outer door noiselessly behind him. Marcelin’s lantern flashed one ray of guidance: yonder the gate and the end of the adventure.

The three emerged into the street. Rockhurst paused, his silent laughter stimulated afresh at sight of Marcelin, who stood doubled in two under the burden of the great white bag, his basket with the two bottle necks protruding, horn-like, on his arm, and his lantern illumining a grin of supreme satisfaction. Then he glanced down at the purse in his hand—it lay in the hollow with a highly comforting weight—and from thence to the Spaniard, who had begun to crawl away, supporting himself against the wall.

“Señor Capitan,” he cried ironically after him, “I wish you once more, and I trust finally, a very good night!—Marcelin, I’ll take that basket: we must make good speed.”

He halted, however, yet a breathing space to gaze at the great front of the house where, from window to window, gleamed a light on its upward way, suggestive of a bed-going procession.

“This is how we live at Bruges!” he murmured to himself, dropped the purse philosophically into his pocket, thrust his right arm through the basket and, his hand pressing on his rapier hilt, the tip of the scabbard jauntily raising the cloak behind him, started off at a swing.

Marcelin followed at a gay if uneven hobble, occasionally staggering under his succulent burden.

Old Chitterley opened the door to his master.

“His Majesty sleeps,” said he, finger on lips; “I looked in but just now, to place a log on the fire: his Majesty slumbered very sound, as I heard and saw.”

Then the speaker’s eye wandered to the basket on his lordship’s arm, the contents of which were agreeably discernible, and to the improvised sack on Marcelin’s back, for which the latter’s jubilant face was warrant.

“Heaven be praised, my lord!” he exclaimed fervently, as he extended his hand to relieve his master. The tragedy of events had robbed the old servant of all sense of humour. “His Majesty shall have supper to-night; our house is not disgraced.”

“Aye,” said the Cavalier cheerfully, tapping his breast; “and I have here the wherewithal for many more, an I am not mistaken. See, Chitterley, since his Majesty sleepeth so fast, an you can spread the fare without awakening him, so that he may open his eyes upon a pleasant sight. There has been but little pleasantness for the royal glance of late.”

“I will step like a cat, monseigneur,” said Marcelin, quicker to seize the idea than his English comrade.

* * * * *

Whether Charles found it not worth while to rouse himself from the only condition in which he could forget his dismal state, or whether indeed the servants had carried out their task with true noiselessness, he stirred not in his great chair by the fire until Rockhurst, stepping up to him gently, laid on his lap the velvet bag with its snug weight of coin. Then he opened a lazy eye while, instinctively, his long hand closed upon the purse.

The King stared a moment vacantly at his devoted follower, and with a stupendous yawn let his gaze wander round the room.

“Odd’s fish!” he cried, critically weighing the bag; “a purse, my lord, as we live! And a fuller than these fingers have held for many a week!—Am I dreaming, or am I but just awakened from some monstrous nightmare of years? Is this St. Germain once again?—or has fate worked with us benignly while we slept, and is this Whitehall at last?… Why, my merry Rockhurst, this is never a goose I behold, on a Bruges table, flanked by pasty and brawn! Hath our uncle of Spain paid our pension at length—or has our Chancellor of the Exchequer chanced at last upon an Exchequer to draw upon?—Harry, dost thou actually hold in thy hand a brimming goblet? Aye, methinks the fragrance of it already reaches me!”

He broke off his bantering tone to add, as he dropped the purse carelessly into his pocket and extended his hand for the glass:—

“Nay, but, prince of friends, how have such miracles been worked?”

“My liege,” said Rockhurst, with unmoved gravity, “even as I ventured to prophesy: by a laugh, a lie, a fight, a kiss. The fight came first and the kiss came last—and the lie, I’ll warrant, is even now being expounded within the house of a certain mynheer of this town. As for the laugh, your Majesty, nay, the laugh will be between you and me anon when I tell you the tale.… But, Chitterley, bring me a glass of wine.”

Charles, his merriment stayed on his lips by the look of sudden emotion he marked on his host’s face, gazed wonderingly up at him.

Rockhurst took the glass, and dropping on one knee:—

“I pledge the future!” he murmured. “I drink to the hope of England, to your Majesty’s happy restoration, to the triumph of his cause—_Sursum corda!_… my beloved liege!”

Farrant Chace

Farrant Chace

I

Farrant Chace

Storm without; and within, melancholy humours!—Without, fine, blinding, dry snow, driven in eddies against whatever obstacle it met: against the walls of Sir Paul Farrant’s Manor House: against the holly and clipped yews of his garden: against the serried ranks of firs which screened his estate from the wild blasts that ride from the Downs up the great rise of Hindhead. Never more wildly, never more triumphantly, did the winds ride than on this night of the winter solstice, this Christmas Eve, the fifth since the happy date of his Most Gracious Majesty’s Restoration.

Within, a fire of logs glowing under the huge mantelled chimney; rosy flicker on wainscot, glitter of crystal and silver on fair white napery, and a full-paunched bottle or two, dusty and cobwebbed; crocus flames of candles against the rose of the hearth-light and the brown of the oak. Cheerful enough surroundings, one would have deemed—a sort of room where a man might hug comfort with philosophic egotism and have the greater zest in it for the thought of the outside desolation; sip his glass to the tune of the wind; and toast his legs in luxury as he pictured to himself the circumstance of any poor devil who, upon such a night, still chanced to be on the road.

Yet, as it has been said, the temper that reigned within the oak parlour of Farrant Chace was no whit more cheerful than the weather on the moor. Indeed, my lord Viscount Rockhurst—on his way back from France, obliged to halt by stress of weather at the house of a fellow-traveller—looked more particularly disqualified than usual to wear the nickname bestowed upon him by the “merry Monarch” himself in mockery of his wild favourite’s invariable gravity. “Merry Rockhurst”—never less merry of aspect than to-night.

His long legs extended toward the embers, he lay rather than sat in the straight-backed chair of honour beside the hearth. His head with its chiselled features, worn, keen, witty, was sunken on his breast; his eyes were fixed abstractedly upon the darting flame, his hands inertly folded. For some ten minutes he had not uttered a word or altered his attitude, and the silent immobility of his guest was beginning to tell heavily upon the nerves of Sir Paul Farrant, his young host.

Sir Paul bit his lip, paced the room three or four times; then halted before the card-table, which stood askew against the wall, as if it had been thrust aside by an impatient hand. He took up the dice-box, dangled it, dropped it; flipped a few of the scattered cards, his eyes ever wandering back to his companion; a hesitating phrase, ever checked upon his lips. Now he went to the window, pulled the curtains aside and peered forth.

“More snow—more snow! Ugh, ’tis plaguey cold!” he cried, with exaggerated airiness, returning to the hearth and spreading his hands to the blaze.

“The drifts are rising higher and higher,” he pursued. “No hope for the road, ’tis not fit weather for a dog.”

The figure in the great chair stirred, a lazy voice was raised:—

“Certainly not weather for a gentleman.”

The other leaped to the symptom of restored companionship.

“As you say, my lord, very vile weather indeed. Not fit for us to travel in, for very truth.”

Lord Rockhurst’s long eyelids flickered.

“Sir,” said he, with marked deliberation, his gaze still fixed on the fire, “I spoke in the singular.”

Sir Paul’s hand, still stretched toward the glow, suddenly trembled. He had a young, smooth face, transparent to emotion; it grew scarlet.

“And what might your lordship mean by that?” he asked, breathing quicker.

Lord Rockhurst shifted his person to a more erect attitude, and turned his satiric face toward the speaker. The elder by some fifteen years, he had none of the genial gleam in his eye, none of the something almost fatherly with which the mature man of kindly mettle regards youth.—Lord Rockhurst’s gaze was colder than the wind that whistled in the leaves, bleaker than the moorland waste.

“I do not desire to qualify you,” said he.

From its uneasy flush, the young face went white.

“My lord, my lord!…”

But Rockhurst raised his hand with a commanding gesture.

“When a man enters upon a game of hazard with another, ’tis the very essence of honour that the chances should be equal between them. Now, my most excellent young host, had you played me with loaded dice to-night—”

The other broke out foaming at the mouth, with the acrid rage of the helplessly insulted.

“My lord Rockhurst—! I will suffer no man, nay, not even under my own roof, to dare such an insinuation. The dice, my lord—”

He made a frantic gesture toward the card-table. But, like the play of water upon red iron, Rockhurst’s cool voice fell upon his heat:—

“Nay—the dice are right enough—so are the cards. We were but us two, moreover, so you had no accomplice. These are the elements of honest play, as I was about to expound to you—since, indeed, your father’s only son, and a lad of your experience in court and camp, appears to require such expounding.”

He changed his tone for one more subtly keen, as the surgeon his blade at the delicate moment: “But another element in play, between gentlemen, is that one player should not stake against the other sums he does not possess.”

Farrant, wincing, ran his hands desperately through his fair locks; he fell into an arm-chair and, still clutching his love curls, drew them across his face. From behind this screen, after a long pause, he spoke muffled words:—

“Your lordship seems to forget the circumstances. To help your lordship to pass this time of tedium (since no horses that ever were foaled could take your coach on through these snows); having the responsibility of entertaining your lordship … since you can find little pleasure but in the cards … and having, in these cursed twenty-four hours, lost every stiver of money, every rood of the poor land I possess … zounds! my lord, that I should have risked a few more throws with nought but my ruin to back them … damnation, my lord Rockhurst, since but a turn of the dice might have set us even again!—these are hard words, it seemeth to me! Aye, and hard thoughts.”

Thus set forth, his own case seemed to the youth so strong that he lifted his head again and displayed his countenance as wrathful and full of reproach now as, a minute ago, it had been shamed.

Lord Rockhurst crossed one lean leg over the other, settled his elbows at the most comfortable angle the carven arms of the chair would afford, and let his brilliant hazel eye wander to the red embers and become dreamy once more.

* * * * *

For a long while silence reigned again in the oak parlour of Farrant Chace.

A resinous knot in the pine log exploded with miniature fierceness—a white flame jetted out, hissing, and dropped. The fire settled itself and the ashes slipped away, sighing. In the tense silence these small sounds made emphasis; while without, ever and anon, the blast came rolling up the slope from the far distance, dashed through the frantic swaying firs with screams of triumph, to hurl itself against the sturdy walls, there to break and part on either side and dash onward once more.

… So comes the charge of horse against the solid mass of foot with ever-gathering speed, rider and beast together, in one frenzied impetus, to break themselves against the serried pikes.…

* * * * *

“Your father fell beside me at Naseby,” said Rockhurst presently, as if speaking to himself.

The incisive note had vanished from his voice. Farrant rose from the table and came towards him, with something of the schoolboy’s mien, who half resents his master’s anger and half hopes to see him mollified. Rockhurst went on musingly:—

“He and I were neck and neck through Edgehill, Newbury, Marston Moor.… Until that hour I was young, younger than you are. And in those days I had mighty thoughts. But in my mightiest I never saw myself reaching to his level. If I could but keep my nag’s head close to his, and go where he led, leap where he leaped—’twas enough for me.… When he fell, struck down by Ireton’s pikes, I thought the world grew dark.… Then I was young, Master Paul. And now, sitting in this chair to-night”—Rockhurst slowly straightened himself and turned his head toward Farrant—“I find there is still something left in me of the old self that I had deemed to be dead this many a year. Enough to be glad to-night, sir, that your father is dead.—Paul Farrant,” went on the elder slowly, “speak: had the luck turned as you hoped, upon what foundation would you have built your winnings?”

The other hesitated, stammered, made a fresh abortive effort to brazen it out.

“Nay, my lord, the world hardly knows you so squeamish. If such rigid rules obtained at Whitehall we should be a dull lot, and many a merry hour lost. Did your lordship say you had charged Ireton’s men? By those tenets we might have dreamed that your place had rather been among the precisians.…”

A subtle change swept over Rockhurst’s countenance. The air of grave severity, the shadow of regretful tenderness, passed from him, to be replaced by the mocking glance, the expression at once reckless and cynical which, before the world’s eyes, characterised the man who had won for himself—among a company of reprobates—that second if scarcely more appropriate nickname of his, “Rakehell Rockhurst.”

“Nay, but you’re a promising lad!” said he, gibing. “And you’ll make your way, my son, I doubt me not. Time advances, old types die out, and manners change. The rules of honour which still shackle old fools like myself would chafe your gallant spirits.… Yet, hark ye, without being a precisian, Master Paul, in my day, a man—a gentleman—would no more have staked what he did not possess, would no more have dallied with the thought of selling a friend, than he would have forced a lady. But, sure, what dull fellows are we of the old days by the side of such sparks, such knights as yourself! Meanwhile,” and here a wide and uncontrolled yawn showed teeth as white as a wolf’s, “meanwhile, excellent young man, I have here in my pocket your signature to so much waste paper—I have it as a memento of a series of tedious games, a reminder of the prospect of another evening, with your company, for all delectation.—Gadzooks, sir, a man does not invite another to his house, in a snow-storm, if there is a tolerable inn at hand, when he, being himself green as a March lamb, has only a housekeeper old as sin!… The Gods preserve me from the green man and the withered woman! Add to this a cellar reduced to thin Rhenish and claret—a cellar no sane man could get drunk on, sir, and Christmastide!” Eye and voice became even more insolently provocative. “I have known many a one spitted for less provocation.”

“Would your lordship find some solace in having a try for my vitals?” cried the youthful host eagerly. His lip trembled; tears of mortification were not far from his eyes. The fleer at his dull entertainment cut him more keenly than the rebuke touching the honour of his play. He already saw himself held up to the ridicule of the Court by the Rakehell’s unsparing tongue.—Gad, his old housekeeper! his doubtful cellar! He, who had worked so hard to achieve a position of fashion and gallantry, who had plumed himself upon the distinction of playing the host to so high a courtier as Viscount Rockhurst, Lord Constable of the Tower—the King’s own close friend!… He flung his arm toward the swords that hung fraternally on the wall, side by side, in their royal crimson baldricks.

But Rockhurst’s laugh, low-pitched, arrested all further movement.

“Nay, good Sir Paul, I pray you! However you may relish the idea of spilling the blood of your guest, your guest cannot so far forget the rules of gentle behaviour as to cross swords with his host. Secondly, sir, you appear still to have to learn that a man may not fight with one to whom he owes money. And thirdly, now: when I had slain you, think you that your corpse would be more amusing than your live body?… Though, truth, it could scarce be less so.”

He laughed again, through his teeth, at his own gibe.

The boy, bated to desperation, stood clenching and unclenching his hands, fighting back the furious tears. The other, his back to the flames, stood looking at him some time in silence. Then, into his pitiless hawk’s eye came a gleam of humour—a slight softening of compassion, perhaps. The mind that once yields to humour can rarely continue to entertain the deadly earnestness of anger. Rockhurst yawned again, drew some crumpled sheets from his pocket and flung them on the table.

“Now, look you, Sir Paul,” said he, good-naturedly, “I care not for this mood. Devise me but something of an entertainment for this evening—an entertainment, mind you, that shall honestly entertain me—why then, I’ll stake again; I’ll stake these, which represent your indebtedness to me, against your inventiveness. Shorten but a couple of hours for me, and I’ll shorten my memory of this night’s business. Zounds, never stare so! Do you not understand? ’Tis your wit for your honour—and the chance of a lifetime to prove yourself a man of resource!”

For an instant Paul Farrant’s countenance became illumined; he made a hasty step forward. Then he hesitated, and, in renewed dismay, put his hand to his forehead. In the middle of the snow-drift, with a condemned cellar and an ugly housekeeper, debarred from gambling, debarred from fighting, his brain paralysed by a crushing sense of failure and folly—to devise amusement for this fastidious, caustic nobleman, what a task!

He moved to the window, in reality more to hide his fresh mortification than to examine the prospect of the weather. It was to find that there was a lull in the snowfall, that the wind had rent a gap between the brooding clouds and revealed a patch of starry sky ridden by the sickle of a young moon. Through the swaying trees gleamed fitfully a distant red fire, and beyond it, further down the waste, a steadier yellow light came and went, as the wind bowed and released some plumy fir branch: the iron-smelting forge of the Hammer Pond! The inn at Liphook! Now, he remembered him, the smelter was a man of infinite popularity, the jester of the countryside; one who could sing a rousing stave to the clank of his hammer, and crack you the drollest stories over the home-brewed, were it only strong enough. Failing him, there was the innkeeper of the Anchor, at Liphook. Mine host had the secret of a noted posset that his Majesty himself, halting on the Portsmouth Road, had once generously praised. Nay, at the inn he might possibly pick up some belated traveller, whose conversation—he bitterly thought—would prove more acceptable than his own. At any rate, ’twas all the hope he had to cling to. Rockhurst never spared.

“If your lordship will give me _congé_ for a short while,” he cried, turning back to the room, “I shall endeavour to meet your wishes.… We may not be so destitute of entertaining company at Farrant Chace as your lordship deems.”

He seized his cloak, flung it angrily about him, goaded by the sound of the faint laugh, and strode out. Rockhurst subsided into the chair, laughed a little yet, then sighed and fell a-brooding again.

II

The Lady In The Snow

The lull after the squall had left a waste world, dim yet white, beneath a cloud-strewn sky. High among the clouds the wind was still racing; and the aspect of the heavens was perpetually changing, as masses of vapour rose and scuttled before the blast like giant herds: rent apart, drawing closer, scattered again. Thus the land was a-flicker with shine and shadows, and yet lay dead under that semblance of life.

Paul Farrant, astride the old farm mare, had no thought to spare for the new appearance of the white wilderness; scarce even a feeling for the biting cold. His brain was all astir with vivid, angry images. His pulses throbbed with the excitement of the gambler playing for the highest stakes a man can win or lose.

“’Tis now your wit against your honour,” had said the Rakehell.

His honour! It had never been to Farrant the thing dearer than his own soul, which to lose, even to his own secret knowledge, were damnation. To know himself dishonoured meant to him merely disgrace if he could not save himself by his wit. Yet disgrace spelt the most unendurable fate that could overtake one in whose nature vanity played the chief part. And if he failed to fulfil the condition so contemptuously placed upon his worldly redemption, he knew his Rockhurst—all was over for Farrant the aspiring; for Farrant, who was already beginning to be envied; for Farrant, who had once sat at the King’s supper-table and had actually been honoured by a quip from his Majesty’s own lips!…

Drooping her great head, drawing her shaggy feet from the snow with dull, sucking sounds, the mare plodded on her way. He did not attempt to guide her, and she took him soberly to the highroad, then turned toward the downward slope leading to the village. On one side a black line of hedge ran in and out like a ribbon; on the other all barrier had disappeared under the drifting snow. Below the turn of the road was the smelter’s forge, redly aglow in the distance; and, something like a mile further, the village where the noted posset might even now be brewing; where comforted travellers, stamping the snow from their boots, might be capping each other’s tales of road hardships and perils. On the sturdy mare, Paul Farrant had no doubt he could reach the further goal; yet he hesitated. The plan which had driven him out into the night suddenly appeared to him ineffable folly. A paralysing vision arose before him: Rockhurst’s countenance at sight of Master Smelter, with the black fists, as the proposed evening comrade!… He could see the dilation of the nostrils, the haughty lips, barely apart upon a smile. What a tale would not Rockhurst’s tongue make of it for royal ears!—As for the inn, were he to find there some chance gentlefolk, how could he hope to induce them to come forth again on such a night, when, in truth, no coach was like to find a passage through the snow?

* * * * *

Through the great silence a distant cry pierced into his consciousness. Heard at first vaguely, it fell in with his thought: the note, it seemed, of his own distress. But in a moment it was repeated, higher, clearer, an unmistakable call for help.

He was in the mood to be swayed by the first impulse, to take the toss of fate. His was not the nature to turn out of its way to assist the afflicted; but now he wheeled the mare round and drove her up the hill, fiercely, as if his own deliverance, not that of some fellow-creature, was at stake. And, in truth, who shall say that it was not?

On the edge of the road, at its abrupt twist down the hill, stood the black bulk of a coach, horseless, crookedly embedded in the snow. It told its own tale. As he drew nearer, a cloaked figure staggered toward him and almost fell against his steed’s shoulder.

“Oh, do not pass; do not go by!” moaned a woman’s voice. “I am dying of the cold!”

She lifted her face. The faint light of the rifted sky, given back intensified by the white world, had a luminosity of its own in which most things were strangely visible. Paul Farrant saw that the woman who clutched at his reins was young and fair-favoured. He stared a moment in mere astonishment. Then a thought, devilish, acute, exultant, leaped into his brain.—There was his ransom!

“Madam,” he said, bending down over his horse’s neck and peering close into her face, “I am fortunate in having heard you. Are you indeed alone?”

“Alone, yes,” she answered through chattering teeth; “the servants rode away for help, God knows how long ago.… Perchance they are lost in the snow, dead, somewhere. Indeed, with this cold, I shall soon be dead, too!”

“Nay, madam, you are saved,” said Farrant, dismounting hastily.

Trembling with excitement, he tore his cloak from his shoulders to cast it about the slender figure that swayed as it stood; then he swung himself into the saddle again, and, stooping, caught her hands in both of his.

“Can you put your foot on my boot?” he asked. “Nay, then, by this mound. So—now in my arms! (On, Bess!) You are not afraid? Courage, madam, ’tis but a few yards to my house, to warmth and shelter!”

His arms still shook with excitement as he grasped the muffled figure and the reins as best he might. And the mare slowly lifted her heavy hoofs stable-ward again.

His frenzy lest his chance should escape, his evil joy over his prize, burned like fire in his veins. And something of his blood heat seemed to pass into the half-frozen woman. She stirred with more vitality in his grasp, settled herself with more definite volition on the mare’s broad shoulder, and heaved a sigh of returning energy. Suddenly she started; and he clutched her, alarmed.

“My servants!” she said, and turned her head so that her breath fanned his cheeks. Her dilated eyes were close to his in the snow-light.

“Madam?” He held her the tighter and urged forward.

“My servants, sir,” she repeated, a thrill of impatience running through her quick utterance. “They will return to find me gone!”

“Why, then,” he made answer, driving his heels into their steed’s bulging sides, “I will even send presently to the coach, and warn them of your safety.… They will be welcome likewise.… But we must go on—yonder is my gate—a very little while and you shall be by the fireside.”

As he turned off the road he cast a look backward down the slope and noticed a brace of yellow lights bobbing through the misty white of the valley: the traveller’s servants were returning with succour. Not a minute too much had fate granted him! But are not the ready ever the successful?

His boyish face was astir with silent laughter as he gathered the lady into his arms upon the threshold of his own door-step.

III

The Ransom

Rockhurst was roused from deep reverie by the opening of the door. His mind had been far indeed from Farrant Chace and his own unprofitable present existence—as far away as the days of youth; days of inspiration and hope; of delicate illusion even in sorrow; days of strife, when loyalty was an exquisite passion, and the blood that ran in his veins sang to shed itself for his King! Days when friendship was near and dear as love, and love itself the golden fruit of an endless mystery. He was of those who grasp at life with both hands. None had brought a younger heart to his youth; no man faced his fulfilled manhood with less illusion. He had wanted much, he had received much, he had taken much—and all had failed him.

He raised his head and stared, almost as if he were dreaming, at the two who entered upon his brooding solitude; two that might have come upon him out of that long-past youth—the lad with the face of the friend he had loved, and this vision of young womanhood, whose beauty shone like a pearl from the dark setting of her hood. But as soon as Paul Farrant spoke the spell was broken.

“A ransom, my lord—a ransom out of the snow!”

The twist of the speaker’s lip, the glint of his eye, gave triumphant meaning to the words.

Rockhurst rose from his chair, the weary look returning to his face. Here, after all, was but the degenerate son of the man whose blood had been his own baptism to noble sorrow. And the sapling slight creature with virginal eyes and soft lips who was leaning upon Paul Farrant’s arm? Why—she was but his ransom!—Nay, these were no longer the days of white-souled Falkland, or generous Hampden, days of chivalrous if hopeless devotion to ideals: these were the days of the merry Monarch, where none could feel a higher sweet than Pleasure, nor feel a deeper pang than Envy.… How far away the days of Youth!

She was but his ransom! And the young man’s words of promise, which had seemed so empty when they were pronounced, “we may not be so destitute of entertaining company at Farrant Chace as your lordship deems,” came back to his mind, and with a new, cynical meaning. Fair company in sooth! But, how, here “out of the snow,” lured by what prospect of light amusement, what offered guerdon, he could only surmise. Possibly some traveller from the inn, ready with all the ease of these times to snatch at pleasure where it offered itself.…

A lady, by every movement of eye and limb. A lady! Bah! was it not the fashion among ladies now to be as eager of base adventure as the gallants themselves?

He stood on one side while, with an exaggerated gallantry, Farrant conducted the stranger to Rockhurst’s just vacated seat, helped her to loosen her cloak, and pressed some wine upon her from the neglected goblets on the table.

When the lady had sipped, and returned the glass into his hand, she spoke at last.

“I thank you,” she said, smiling. “But, my servants…?”

Her voice was a little faint and plaintive yet, from the numbing of the cold, but it had a grave ring in it that fell pleasantly on Rockhurst’s fastidious ear.

“Another taste, madam; we will inquire about your servants anon. The mistress must first be waited upon,” cried young Paul, all agog in ostentatious attendance, and ever flinging a restless glance of inquiry at his Rockhurst. “Fie! Your cloak is heavy with wet. Let me move these dripping folds away from you. And your feet, oh, I protest!” He was down on his knees now, his young head glinting in the glow as he bent assiduously over his new task. “Your feet—ice!”

Even as he spoke, he drew the little doeskin shoe from her foot; and, as she instinctively lifted it toward the blaze, knelt back so that Rockhurst might see the firelight play upon its delicate shape.

The warmth of the wine and of the hearth had stirred her chilled blood. A flush, like the tint of a seashell, crept into her face; into her dazed eyes appeared a light to which the blue shadows of weariness on the lids gave a singular brilliancy; she very simply stretched her other foot for the kindly office.

As Farrant rose at last, with the second shoe dangling in his hand, his exultation broke out. He drew close, and whispered:—

“Say, my lord, shall we not be right well entertained to-night?”

“We?” echoed Rockhurst, aloud.

The single contemptuous exclamation fell like the cut of a whip. He turned, and bowing to the visitor, who had turned startled eyes toward him:—

“Madam,” he said, “I heard you express some anxiety about your attendants. Our young friend is about to fulfil your request … whatever it may be.—Go,” added he, turning upon the disconcerted youth. And as Farrant hesitated he took a swift step nearer to him, and whispered in his turn, “Go—to the devil or where you will, so long as it is out of this!”

His eye commanded more insolently yet than his words. The young man fell back, flung a look of hesitation toward the crumpled notes on the table; another glance at the lady, his fair treasure-trove. Then, with a meaning smile, he bowed profoundly, so that all his shining curls fell over his face, and withdrew.

Rockhurst caught the smile and the look; and the memory of a dead face, that of his old brother in arms, the boy’s father, in its last stern serenity rose up before him. His own eyes were hard as he looked again upon the woman who had been found so promptly willing to come and relieve the tedium of his snow-bound evening.

[Illustration: The single contemptuous exclamation fell like the cut of a whip.]

Diana Harcourt, with the return of physical comfort about her, had begun to feel a strange uneasiness gather in her mind. Country-bred, and country-wed to an old man who had little taste for company, she had yet had some opportunities of learning the way of courts; she, for instance, had no doubt that the youth who had saved her from the snow was of gentle birth, and that this grave-looking being, with whom she now found herself alone in the strange, silent house, was a very fine gentleman indeed. Nevertheless, something singular, something not quite open, clandestine almost, in the situation began to force itself upon her. What was the relationship between these two men? The eyes of the elder, who might have been the other’s father, were cold to dislike as he had gazed upon him. And the young man’s febrile excitement came back upon her memory with an impression of distaste amounting to repulsion. What had lurked behind his smile, his furtive, appraising glance? She recalled how innocently she had allowed him to touch her feet, and, flushing hotly, she cast her mantle over them and turned her head with a little movement, at once dignified and shy, to gaze upon Rockhurst. But suspicion fell from her on the instant.—Noble-looking, grave, high-bred, old enough to be her own father, what could she have to fear?

“Sir,” she said boldly, “will you not have the kindness now to tell me where I am, and with whom?”

Rockhurst drew up a chair and sat him down, deliberately facing her. Then he crossed his fine white hands upon his knee, letting his eyes rest upon hers.

“Madam,” he said at last, “do you not hear how the wind begins again to moan outside? I warrant you, behind the thick walls of this old house the snow is whirling in great white drifts. It must be parlous cold without. Here, madam, the firelight is rosy; do you not think we are very well together? ’Tis a quaint hour, stolen from dull old Time’s grudging casket. We do not know each other—why, that has a marvellous charm of its own! Let us not dispel it. We may never meet again; and to-morrow you go back … to the white snow. And I to the fever of the town. And that, perhaps, will be well, too.”

Her eyes dilated as she listened, scarce with fear, but again with the unexplained foreboding.

“Sir,” she said, after a pause, “your words are very strange; I do not understand them.”

“My dear,” said Rockhurst, his languid lids drooping a little now over the first keenness of his gaze, which seemed to narrow his scrutiny to something cruel as a blade, “I have just said it, ’tis a dull world. Will you complain of its strangeness once in a way? Why have you covered up your pretty foot? I vow I thought of Diana in the woodland glades when I saw the arch of its instep.” And, saying this, he opened his brilliant glance once more full upon her. “Diana did I say?” he cried. “Nay, no cold goddess! Far from me the omen!… A nymph. Aurora, with the sun in her hair, and all the roses in her cheeks!”

The blood which had rushed violently to Diana Harcourt’s temples ebbed away as quickly, leaving her white as the drifts without.

These were, no doubt, but idle words of gallantry; and all her woman’s instinctive pride warned her against the shame of seeming to attach any other significance to them. Yet whether glinting between half-closed lids or widely open upon her, the man’s eyes seemed to her to have some terrible, some merciless thought in them—a thought strangely at variance with the dignity of his appearance, the gravity, almost the sadness of his countenance; horribly at variance with the grey which besprinkled the raven of his locks.

“I am not of the town, and not accustomed to fine speeches and compliments.…”

She framed the phrase in pitiful attempt to stem the panic that was gaining upon her. He still sat motionless, his hands crossed, half smiling.

“Sir,” she cried, now angrily, “are there no women in this place? Will you not, in courtesy, allow me the company of one, till my servants arrive?”

“My dear,” he answered her sarcastically, “will my company not really suffice?”

Rockhurst had had Heaven or Hades knew what vast experience of women, of the women of Second Charles’s Court, whether in exile or in Whitehall. Scarce a challenging beauty of the posy that he had not measured swords with; and, as the practised fencer will, he knew every trick of the play, every line of assault and defence, every feint and every parry. And women, being proverbially unfair fighters, pretty dears! he had a smile as well as a wary eye for the tricky pass and the treacherous thrust. Of all the feints, that of innocence in straits, of outraged modesty, was the most elementary. This divine young creature with the copper-glowing hair and the wide-dilating eyes; whose blood ran so richly and so quickly; who had come in leaning familiarly on the arm of that prince of petty rakes, Paul Farrant, come willingly, it seemed, across the snows, to his bidding; who had suffered herself to be unshod with all the unblushing ease of any Whitehall coquette—why, if it now pleased her to play the pretty Puritan, he had no objection, save that, as he knew himself, he was apt to be swiftly wearied. The spark of interest kindled by her unaccustomed kind of beauty, by the something fresh and of the woodland about her, by the utter unexpectedness of her appearance and the mystery it pleased him she should maintain, would so soon flicker out. In love, as in war, he had but one method—straight ahead. In war he had been beaten back sometimes; in love, never.

“Come,” he said, sitting up at last and slowly stretching out one hand. “Come, Diana, since Diana you will be.” (Again she started on hearing herself unwittingly called by her real name.) “Be Diana, if you please, to me. What if I am no Endymion? Bah, my dear goddess,” and he drew his lean frame out of the chair and came over to her with the same deliberate grace, “that was a little mistake of yours to be so ready to stoop to yonder youth! Endymion is but a callow rascal, a greenhorn. When such beings as you descend from your high celestial ways it should be for a man! Come, do you wish me to kneel at your feet, as your shepherd did even now? I will, an’ it please you.”

His arms were almost about her, when, with a fierce movement, she sprang up and thrust him from her.

“In the name of God,” she cried, “into what trap have I fallen?”

“Nay, do not scream,” he said, at one step placing himself between her and the door, and catching her wrist, without roughness, but with that steel-like grasp she had instinctively divined under his gentle movements. “Let us clear this strange matter between us two, madam.—Answer you first: What purpose had you in coming here to-night?”

“I?” she flashed back at him, panting. “Purpose?—Purpose, sir?… That young man found me in the snow, the coach had foundered, my servants ridden away for help, I was perished from cold. Purpose? Let me go, sir. Rather the snow! Oh, let me hence from your horrible house!”

He released her and stood looking at her in silence. Again, even in her turmoil of terror and passion, she was struck by the extraordinary dignity of his air. But to look thus, and to act thus!

“Oh, shame,” she said; “you who might be my father!”

A swift shadow came over his countenance, then passed, leaving it set into marble impassivity. His eyelids drooped. Forgetting her cloak on the chair, forgetting her shoeless feet, she thought she saw her chance, and made a rush for the door; but he arrested her with a gesture.

“No!” he said authoritatively. Then, fixing his eyes upon her with an altered look: “No, child,” he repeated. His voice was as much changed as his gaze. Gone from it the dangerous, even silkiness of his first speeches to her, as well as the quick sternness of the last words. This new voice, something said to her, was the voice of the real self that matched the noble countenance.

He put out his hand. After a pause she put hers on it. Later she wondered at herself that she had done so. But there are moments when some poignant emotion tears away the bodily mask, when souls are suddenly laid bare to each other. For some of us that is the moment when our belief in all that is good and beautiful dies. But Diana, in that flashing look into the soul of this unknown man (who had yet, within so short a measure of time, insulted her) read that to which her own soul leaped. The storm subsided in her heart. She suffered him to conduct her back to the chair by the fire, and watched him—wonderingly, yet no longer with fear—as he straightened himself and, with folded arms, stood yet a little while contemplating her.

In the hawk’s eyes there was a softened shadow. As he gazed the shadow deepened into tenderness.—He was looking at her as the exile might look at the receding shore of the land he will never see again; with a yearning that has passed beyond despair, and so grown serene. At length, sighing, he roused himself, and came forward, pushed the heavy table closer to her, and brought within her reach some of the viands that were spread upon it.

“You must eat,” he said. And, as she lifted her eyes again with her childlike, questioning look, his lips parted in a smile she thought beautiful, upon the gravity of his countenance: “You have not done with journeying yet to-night,” he explained.

He moved to the window as he spoke; and, as he drew the curtains aside, there came into the ruddy brown room a vision of a moonlit fairy world.

“There, too, I was wrong, you see,” he went on, speaking over his shoulder; “the snow-storms are passed, and there is your sister moon to show you the way—Diana.” Then, coming back again to the table, “You asked for a woman’s company. In this house there is no company fit for you.”

Her eyelid flickered over her startled glance. She gave a quick cry.

“Eat, then,” he went on in the same gentle tone, “while I make arrangements for your instant departure.”

The door was shut behind him. Diana involuntarily called after him; but his footsteps died away in the empty passages. The great silence of the house closed about her; and in the solitude her own thoughts seemed to clamour and crowd bodily upon her. She leaned her elbows on the table and buried her bright head in her hands.

Slighted … insulted … then served reverentially like a princess … looked at and spoken to like a beloved child. How was it that all the anger was dead in her heart, and that in its place reigned this feeling of pain and incomprehensible joy commingled? How was it that her fear was banished, that she would have trusted herself with him even in this house which his own lips had named evil?

IV

Under The Stars

Presently she again heard steps without and rapid words; then his voice, uplifted sharp and strong. She smiled, broke a piece of bread and sipped at the wine; she was safe, she knew, where he was. And she would eat, if only because he bade her.

In a few minutes Rockhurst returned. He was now booted to the thigh, and carried a cloak on his arm. Once more he sat down facing her. His eye fell on the discarded shoes; he bent down and felt them.

“They are nearly dry,” he said, and lifted them closer to the flame. “In a little while you must be ready. You will have to ride on the same rustic steed that brought you, but I will see that she carries you to safety.” He paused a second or two, then added: “The inn—a very well-known, reputable place—is not far distant; and you will doubtless hear of your servants there. Our young host,” he hesitated, and his voice seemed to harden, “tells me that, even as he rode with you into the avenue, folk were hastening to your rescue from that direction.”

Diana’s glance still questioned, but she dared not put the question into words. What, then, had the young man with the narrow eyes and the uneasy glance meant by her? And how, if he had had some dark purpose, had she been thrust upon this other and left to his mercy? Ah, and what had this other at first fancied to see in her? The blood surged to her cheeks, her lips trembled. Rockhurst held her under his eye. As if in answer to her thoughts he bent down.

“My dear,” he said, but how differently the words, a while ago insolently familiar, were now spoken; “this is no house for you. It must never be breathed of one such as you that you have been under its roof—with one such as me. You said you did not know the ways of us of the Court—pray God you may never know them!”

Here he was silent again, his eye resting thoughtfully upon her hands, unadorned save for a single posy ring.

“When you marry,” he went on then, as with an effort, “keep in the sweet country, and of a surety,” a sad smile flickered upon his lip, “your lord will gladly keep there, too.”

She lifted her head with a quick impulse; her mouth parted to speak. But an inexplicable, invincible reluctance to tell him she was already wed thrust back the words.

Rockhurst turned, and taking the loose pieces of paper from the table, gazed at them thoughtfully for a moment, and thrust them into his pocket. Then he rose, and almost gaily:—

“Come, madam,” he said, “your palfrey waits in the cold. Put on your shoes.” As he spoke he took down his sword and buckled it on.

She went forth with him, her finger-tips lightly in his hold, without a word, through the passages of the lone house, through the hall. The door, open to the night, cut a square, brilliant silver upon the inner dimness. Cold, pure airs rushed against them.

The mare, black, steaming, stood patiently, her bridle hitched to a post. There was not a sound of another living thing, it seemed, in all the white-shrouded land. She rested one hand on the saddle-cloth, lifted her foot for his service, and he swung her up with practised ease. She felt the strength of a steel bow in his arm. He folded her in a huge horseman’s cloak; then, without a word, took the bridle to walk by her side.

She looked at him wistfully. Had she dared, she would have invited him to share the saddle. But, dark and grave, he went beside her, and the silence held them.

* * * * *

They moved as in a dream through a dreamland of beauty, a white purity beyond expression. Above, in the pine trees, the wind choired; far out over the waste it sighed. Somewhere very far away, yet strangely distinct, Christmas joy bells were ringing.

The starry sky that domed this wonderful world was still more wonderful. Diana neither felt the cold, nor measured the space she traversed, nor the flight of time. She was another self; she would have asked no greater boon than to journey on through all this splendour, with the vision of his face cut in grave beauty against the white world, to meet the glance of his watchful eye now and again, to have the touch of his hand, kind and steady, upon her knee, when the road was rougher and the mare stumbled. She knew that at that unknown inn door, down in the valley, would come the parting, and her heart contracted.

* * * * *

The little village seemed asleep. The inn itself looked deep in slumber, with barred windows, its every gable huddled under the thick blanket of snow; only a wreathing smoke from the chimney-stack to tell of some watchfulness within.

Rockhurst knocked, masterfully, sonorously. Then turning, the rein slung over his arm, he leaned against a pillar of the porch, removed his hat, and looked up smiling at her. There came sounds, answering sounds, indoor. Then he spoke:—

“Thank you,” he said.

“Do you thank me?” Her voice shook a little.

“Thank you,” he repeated, “for having shown me, once more, a vision of my youth such as I never thought to know again!”

The bars were now heard grating against the closed door. Rockhurst took a step forward. She read farewell in his eyes; and, flinging out both her hands, almost with a sob:—

“Ah, but shall we not meet again?” she said pleadingly. “Your name? Mine—nay, you know it already. It is indeed Diana. Diana—”

But he interrupted her with a quick gesture.

“Hush! My name? No, it is a name of no good report, and I would not have it dwell in your mind. And yours—it were best I should not know it.…” Then, after a slight pause: “You come as a dream to me, you go as a dream, perfect, sweet, beyond words. We shall never meet again, Diana.”

The inn doors were slowly drawing apart. He lifted his arms to help her down, held her a second between them to steady her, then, putting her gently aside, sprang into the saddle and forthwith spurred the mare to her heavy trot.

And Diana, looking after them, saw rider and mount passing from her, black against the snow. He never turned his head. She stood, bewilderment in her mind, pain at her heart.

“God-a-mercy, madam, ’tis you!” cried the familiar voice of her old servant in her ear. “In the Lord’s name, madam, where have you been?” old Geoffrey was tremblingly questioning.

She started, looking round at him as one suddenly awakened. Was it all indeed a dream of the snow? she asked herself, as the sheltering doors of the Anchor, at Liphook, closed upon her.

* * * * *

The sudden spurt of old Bess the mare soon gave place to her usual jog. Through the silent snow she carried her rider back to the door of Farrant Chace. The rhythmic jingle of her bit, the monotonous muffled plunge of her hoofs, the wail of the wind over the down, seemed to point the wide stillness, even as the sparse black firs pointed the immense whiteness of the waste.

Rockhurst stepped in again into the warmth of the parlour, snow sodden on his boots, hoar frost pricking his hair, and found Paul Farrant.

* * * * *

To the young man’s frenzied anxiety it seemed interminable nights that he had been thus waiting, waiting for release or doom; nights that he had paced the brown parlour from end to end; that he had stood shivering in the window recess, gazing out upon the white emptiness, straining his ears for a sound of life in the awful stillness. The uncertainty of Rockhurst’s moods, of his intentions, the mystery that had to-night surrounded his movements, added to the waiting misery. To what end had Rakehell set forth, at midnight through the snow, with the lady whom he had so cynically received? Was it a sudden whim of chivalrous courtesy? His scorching anger upon their last brief meeting might lead him to that preposterous conclusion—Knight Errant Rakehell, out through the snowdrifts on a farm mare for the sake of country virtue! (What tale might he not make of it for supper merriment at Whitehall!) Or Rakehell, jealous of his host’s fair looks and smooth cheek, carrying off elsewhere the prize of grace and beauty.…

At such a point Farrant’s uneasy tread would lead him back to the hearth, to seek vain comfort by the embers, to fling fresh logs on the reddening pile. What was he to do if Rockhurst were to pass away from his road like this? Dare he, so long as those damning notes were in that pitiless hold, ever present himself within earshot of Court?

* * * * *

Then all at once, as he sat staring into his uncertain future, his guest was back upon him—those were his steps without, that was his hand on the latch! Farrant sprang to his feet, and flung a look of piteous inquiry at the great lord’s face.

Rockhurst did not speak. He went to the hearth and stood for an appreciable pause gazing at the lad; in his eyes there was none of the former scorn—nothing but a kind of sad wonder. Then, deliberately, he drew the damning slips of paper from his pocket, turned, and, one by one, with a musing air, threw them into the fire.

Farrant drew a quivering breath of relief. The “debt of honour” was cancelled.

The Enigma Of The Locket

The Enigma Of The Locket

I

Little Satan

Enguerrand de Joncelles—_Monsieur le Vidame de Joncelles_, as he preferred to be called—was new to courts. To the court of Whitehall, _la cour de Witalle_ he had it, he was yet altogether a stranger.

From the noble monotony of Joncelles, the great poverty-stricken chateau which raised its pepper-box turrets above meagre apple orchards, a league south of Caen, to the excitement of the Louvre and Versailles; from the rigidity of the maternal rule at home (in her retirement, Madame de Joncelles, a confidant and friend of the late Queen Mother of France, had never compromised on matters of discipline, and had cherished theories on the education of young men) to complete emancipation—here had been steps high enough to upset the balance of any quick-blooded and good-looking youth of eighteen. But the little Vidame had found his feet, as the saying goes, with astonishing ease, as soon as the austere old lady, departing for a better world, left him to face this one by himself.

The new mourning had scarce had time to be fitted to his comely figure before the whole youth himself had become a different being. There are some whom a single glass of wine intoxicates; Enguerrand de Joncelles was intoxicated at the very first sip of life.… Such a flutter of silk and curls; such constellations of eyes, brilliant or melting or mockingly challenging; such lightning of wit; such whispers, such sighs! In one day he had learned to return, with interest, an _œillade_ that, within the precincts of Caen Cathedral, would have made him drop a modest lid—and set him dreaming for a week. Within a very little while more he had mastered the art of capturing a soft hand and holding it hidden in tender pressure, the while presenting a decorous front to stately company. He had also learned to look down in the right measure of disdain upon the burgher; to bandy, in all delicacy, audacious pleasantry with his equals on the Grand Staircase of the Louvre, or in the _Galérie de l’Œil-de-Bœuf_. He could whip out his new-mode small-sword with as swift a grace as the best noted ruffler. He was able to be more obviously dazzled by the splendour of the _Roy-Soleil_ than many a past-master sycophant—withal cultivating a fine insensibility of outward aspect, keeping the delicate beauty of his features set as in a fine white mask, his voice low-toned—only now and again permitting the wide-pupilled black eyes to betray by a flash the constant alertness of the inner mind.

These demure airs gave a singular piquancy to the boldness of his words and deeds, one which was not without its special effect in that court of solemn sham and wearisome etiquette. Heaven only knows where the precious only son of Madame de Joncelles had found such sudden knowledge of the world, such astuteness and such recklessness combined. It was a merciful Providence that spared his pious mother the sight of the ultimate blossoming of her carefully pruned young tree!

Attached (together with his sister, Madame de Mantes, a noted beauty of Versailles) to the train of Madame Henriette d’Orléans, on the occasion of that princess’s first journey to England since the happy restoration of her royal brother, he now was ushered to the court of Whitehall. What the apt youth here saw and learned filled him deep with surprise—a surprise, however, which he was careful not to betray. Beyond doubt it was a merry place, this court of Charles—if its methods were a trifle astonishing. Enguerrand was not one who would let pass a single opportunity for self-instruction, and now and again, despite his impassive attitude where the natural acuteness of his wits failed him, he condescended to ask for information.

* * * * *

He was in a questioning mood, this night at Whitehall, when, for the first time, he was admitted to the King’s more private circle. By good adventure, he found himself beside a gentleman who seemed to possess an intimate knowledge of the royal ways as well as an amiable readiness to impart it. This was an elderly little man of the name of Petherick, who once, evidently, had been handsome, and was still à la mode. As Enguerrand was to learn later, Mr. Petherick justified his established position at Court by a notable ingenuity in discovering fresh sources of amusement for the easily wearied Charles. Now the acute person’s eye rested critically upon the elegance of the foreign boy; his Majesty liked new faces and new fashions, and his Majesty especially liked the French.

“Aye,” said Petherick, as if pursuing his thought aloud, “the King is vastly fond of your country, Vidame—and of your countrywomen, just now. See—that divine dark creature that came with Madame Henriette; I’ve laid a wager, to wit, that her Royal Highness will have to leave her lady-in-waiting behind, when she returns to France.”

“Sir—you mean, I see, Madame de Mantes,” said Enguerrand, coolly. “My sister.”

“Monsieur de Joncelles…? Ah, of course, Madame de Mantes is married. And M. de Mantes?”

“Say was married—happily widowed within a few months,” said the little Vidame, with elaborate coolness. And from his post slightly in the background he gazed at the brilliant royal circle and singled out the familiar dark curly head, the peach-like cheek, the childlike lustrous eyes with quite a new interest.

Mr. Petherick had too good an experience of the Court not to be more than ever gracious to a newcomer, who proved to be the brother of a beauteous sister.

Following the direction of the Vidame’s eyes, he pointed out the personalities of major importance—handsome Castlemaine, sullen and aggressive to-night; and fair Stewart with her childish face and her studied coldness of demeanour, and put Master Enguerrand _au courant_ of some spicy snippets. Buckingham proclaimed himself by his magnificence, his insolence, and his gaiety.

“But pray,” put in the Vidame, “who may the tall, dark gentleman be, who sits in such silence behind his Majesty, and who, even when the King speaks, seems to have forgot how to smile.… He has a handsome presence—although no longer young, at all.” (Thus, the superb arrogance of his own springtime!) “Do you mark, Monsieur Petherick, how my little sister keeps seeking his notice with languishing eyes—aye, even with his Majesty’s own gaze upon her … the perverse one! Pray, who is the gentleman?”

“How!” cried Mr. Petherick, “a whole week already in Whitehall, and not yet acquainted with the Rakehell? Why, sir, it is our King’s own familiar, an old comrade of the wars and of exile. His Majesty can do nought without my lord Viscount Rockhurst—my merry Rockhurst, he has dubbed his lordship, in a raillery, you will understand, of that countenance which keeps its gravity through the maddest freak. And mad he can be, sir; hence that nickname of Rakehell, which no doubt has astonished your French elegancy.—Nay, but in truth there is an eye that wanders, as you say, prodigious languorously upon my lord Constable!” Mr. Petherick went on, narrowing his own watchful gaze: “I congratulate you, Vidame, upon your fair sister … yet, I trust she is as wise as she is fair.… Aye, you say true, and your young wits are quicker than mine; the Lord Constable—my lord Rockhurst is constable, I should inform you, of his Majesty’s Tower and captain of the Yeomen of the Guard—and in sooth the one gentleman about the presence who would dare, and for the mere deviltry of it, to place himself in rivalry with the King … to nip the quarry, as it were, from under Old Rowley’s nose!”

“Old Rowley?” questioned Enguerrand, his dark eyes flashing wide. He had a side smile, as he spoke, for his sister and her astuteness. He could trust Jeanne to be wise.

Petherick coughed behind a lean hand.

“Oh, a name, sir. A name, by which his Majesty’s intimates dare, now and then, to call him—ahem! when not in the presence—a foolish habit. I know not how the absurdity slipped from my tongue.”

“Nay, neither do I,” said the little cool Vidame.

His glance wandered back with sharper set curiosity to the royal circle. Charles had a languid hand amid the curls of the proud, fair beauty, who sat, erect and triumphant, beside him; the young courtier’s thoughts ran back to his own gorgeous monarch, set up as upon an altar, never to be approached save with bent spine, with double-distilled compliments, spoken of with awe, in whispers, as befitted his august essence. _Le Roy Soleil_.… Old Rowley!

* * * * *

Jeanne de Mantes had a pretty, round face with a pointed chin, wide-set, very innocent dark eyes, piquantly contradicted by the dainty, wicked mouth, by every vivacious art and grace that proclaimed one deeply learned already in the art of pleasing. Charles, in truth, looked more often to-night at his sister’s pretty _dame d’honneur_ than at the blond, chill beauty who sat at his right hand; and presently, as he looked, the King’s sardonic face relaxed into a smile. He leaned forward and addressed the lady in French:—

“I hear mounts and marvels, madam, of your skill upon the guitar. Will you not pleasure us with some sweet air of your fingers?”

Instantly every glance fell upon the Frenchwoman; and she, with a start, brought her eyes from their absent fixing of the Lord Constable to the visage of the King. She fluttered. She smiled:—

“Your Majesty commands? ’Tis scarce worthy of such ears.”

Curiously enough the guitar had been brought to-night, by the wish of Madame herself, who deemed that his Majesty might be pleased to hear it. She stretched out a white hand, half turning the head with its wreath of soft black curls toward the young man behind her:—

“My brother!… Vidame!”

It was a languid, sweet call, like the pipe of a waking bird, which augured well for the louder warble. The Vidame was alert; in a twinkling he was at his sister’s side, presenting the guitar with the arrogant grace peculiar to him.

But Charles, full of that curious interest in small things which seems so marked a characteristic of sovereigns—their lives being by fate ordained in view of wide issues—signified by a gesture his desire to examine the new-fashioned instrument, and the Vidame approached the presence.

The silent, grave personage whose seat behind the King, apart from the table, threw him into shadow, looked at the young man at first with indifference; then, of a sudden, piercingly.

With one arm thrown familiarly on the back of the royal chair, he had shown himself mighty indifferent either to the challenging glances lavished upon him, or to the pleasantries that circled round the table, the most audacious winged with a subtle flattery for the royal attention. For the monarch himself, who dropped him ever and anon a confidential word, Lord Rockhurst had but a perfunctory, if quite courteous attention. A deep mood of abstraction had held him. But, now, his interest was vivid, unmistakable. He stared at the Vidame; and, as he stared, surprise seemed to pass into distaste, almost into pain.

The lad paused in his advance, as if held by that intent gaze. Then he tossed his black locks; a sudden fire of resentment leaped and died in his eyes, and with crimson cheeks he came swaggering round the table, and dropped on one knee before the King. Charles glanced curiously from him to his Lord Constable; Rockhurst’s gaze was still resting inscrutably upon the lad.

“Odd’s fish, my lord Rockhurst!” cried the King. “You look at the pretty boy as if you saw a spectre!”

“Even so, your Majesty.”

The sonority of the voice, the strange words, fell impressively in that light atmosphere. Again Enguerrand’s black pupils shot fury. Rockhurst, with the same absorbed air, laid his fingers on a slender chain that hung round his neck, and drew from his breast a gold locket.

Opening and holding it in his hand so that none could view it but himself, he appeared to be contrasting some portrait concealed in it with the countenance of the still kneeling boy.

“Ha!” cried the King, “take heed, ladies; for, as we live, the mystery of my lord Rockhurst’s locket is at length to be solved. A spectre, did you say, my lord?”

The Lord Constable closed the locket with a snap, slipped it back among the laces on his breast, and turned easily upon the King; his frown had vanished.

“Nay, no spectre, sire; the merest passing fantasy!”

Charles was shaken with laughter, a noiseless laugh which scarcely wrote itself upon his melancholy features.

“Methought, from your lenten face,” said he, “that you were struck by some memory of past misdeeds.”

“Your Majesty mistakes. No memory; but a warning!”

The King looked puzzled; then, with his usual distaste for prolonged discussion, made a gesture as if he would put the matter on one side.

“But that locket?” And with the words Madame de Mantes flung out a small olive finger. Since English etiquette, it seemed, permitted every one to speak, then she would speak. The matter had become all at once of palpitating interest to her. The portrait in the locket—it was evidently a portrait—he had smiled at it. And such a smile! She took a vow that one day this man should be made to smile thus on her.

“True, true,” said Charles. “Let us see into the secret at last, my merry Rockhurst.”

The Lord Constable flung himself back into his chair.

“Nay, sire,” said he, and the deference of the words became mockery in view of the attitude of the speaker. “Your Majesty has every jurisdiction over me—my goods, my services, my life, are irrevocably yours to dispose of; but my thoughts are mine own. And this locket belongs to my most secret thoughts.”

Curiosity flickered once more for a moment in the royal eye. But through drooping lids the Lord Constable’s gaze was steel-like, and the King shrugged his shoulders with the foreign gesture that cleaved to him through life.

“God’s mercy, my lieges, that ye keep your thoughts to yourselves, at least!” he cried, with an assumed rueful air; “for, between your lost goods and your past services, our exchequer has enough to meet.” He stretched out his hand for the guitar as he spoke, and twanged ignorantly at the strings.

Enguerrand rose with a grin. Charles’s ingratitude toward his ruined loyalists was no secret in France, and the cold gibe was after his heart.

“Then we shall not see the locket?” cried the Frenchwoman, disappointment ringing through her fluted tones.

“How the bird twitters!” cried Charles, good-naturedly. “Nay, my dear, curiosity was ever fatal to your sex. Let us remain in paradise for an hour or so. Sing!”

Jeanne de Mantes had a voice that matched her looks: small, insinuating, sweet; creeping into favour, rather than storming it; docile to a thousand modulations and graces. Now it was the very gaiety of music; anon just a hint of pathos; and every word distinct as a dropping gem. And this accompanied with here a dreamlike fixity of gaze, there an arch roll of the eyes; here again a punctuating dimple, a flash in the peachy, dark face of the whitest teeth in all the world; there a drooping of the lip that positively demanded the consolation of a kiss.

Charles had not been so stirred to enthusiasm for a considerable time. He called for a second ditty, and yet another. This last had an audacious lilt, with a refrain so infectious that the royal listener began to hum it midway and sadly out of tune. Toward the last verse, however, under strokes waxing ever smarter, a string broke with a plaintive sob.

“Ah, _diable_!” involuntarily exclaimed the singer; and his Majesty laughed delightedly. Then his face changed again as he noted the compressed lips of Lady Castlemaine and the glacial anger of Miss Stewart. He rose and broke up the circle. His arm on Rockhurst’s shoulder, he was about to retire, when he paused and hummed a few notes of the last song once more.

“A linnet,” he said, “a positive linnet! Odd’s fish! but we’d have her pipe to us when we might give her our whole attention.”

He spoke low, and flung back a look, that held a certain apprehension, toward Miss Stewart. This latter stood very erect, and bore a studied air of indifference.

“If your lordship will look to it—” he went on, then broke off petulantly under the glance that Rockhurst turned upon him. “Good lack, man! I forget how much of the Puritan there is in thee at times.”

“Your Majesty,” said Rockhurst, in his most stately manner, “will find with ease an apter messenger.”

“Aye,” said the King, cynically. His narrow, dark eye roamed a moment about the room, then rested reflectively upon the fair mask of Enguerrand’s face. The boy turned quickly. Charles raised a beckoning hand.

“Vidame,” said the King, “a word in the hollow of your ear!”

The two drew apart, while Rockhurst moved away to the door to await the King’s pleasure. Charles rejoined him, laughing.

“Faith, if I had such subjects as my cousin Louis, I should be well served. Yes, ’tis your French finger you want for true lightness of touch. My honest Britons are all thumbs. The pretty singer’s brother.… Her own brother, no less! ’Tis a positive little Satan!”

“Aye,” assented Rockhurst, briefly.

The two went down the corridor in silence; then Rockhurst spoke with some abruptness.

“Your Majesty,” said he, “has before this, I think, found it add to his interest in … bird-catching that he should not be the only fowler in the field.”

“How now?” said Charles, halting. The group of attendant pages halted likewise at the end of the gallery.

“I have thought,” said Rockhurst, steadily, “I, also, that I should like that linnet to sing to me.”

Charles frowned; but his favourite pursued unmoved:—

“As I have only my _beaux yeux_, as we used to say abroad, to stake against your Majesty’s overwhelming attractions, I should be flattered indeed, however, were you to have me banned as a marauder.”

Touched upon the string of his humour, Charles was ever easily appeased. The very impudence of his grave constable’s proposal tickled him. It was not the first time that they had found themselves opposed in rivalry, though scarcely ever before so avowedly. On the last occasion (the King remembered this pleasantly) Rockhurst, for all his _beaux yeux_, had been notoriously displaced; and this, doubtless, was a little stroke of revenge. That was Rockhurst’s way.

“Beware of boasting, my lord Constable!” he exclaimed banteringly.

They were on the threshold of the apartment. Rockhurst made a deep _congé_.

“I never boast, as your Majesty knows. But your Majesty was wont to love a fair wager.”

Charles’s smile widened. He nodded assent, and Rockhurst pursued after a moment’s reflection:—

“Will your Majesty stake the payment of all the arrears due to my yeomen’s company that the linnet’s first song will not be for me? I would wager in return their immediate settlement, out of my own estate, unless your Majesty would impose on me any other stake.”

“Admirable!” said the King. “Yet we would have a more immediate, a more personal, token of victory—if we succeed against your _beaux yeux_,” he put in with a little mockery, “and that is, in addition to the paltry coin, a view of the contents of that locket, my merry Rockhurst.”

Rockhurst hesitated, then bowed. “So be it, sire,” said he.

And hereupon Charles retired, laughing, in cynical anticipation of a good stroke of business. That ever-present question of arrears of pay was a persistent annoyance to the royal conscience.

II

Whitehall Stairs

“Little Satan”—bestowed from lips royal in terms of favour, the nickname cleaved congenially to Enguerrand—entered, into the rôle of King’s Mercury with all the _verve_ expected of him. But he was considerably surprised at the manner in which his embassy was received. To place the most unworthy motives invariably foremost was, he flattered himself, to display a thorough knowledge of woman. He had yet to learn the thousand sensibilities that distinguish even the frail of that elusive sex from the unscrupulous gallant.

As he paused on his announcement, fully expecting to descry in the new recipient of the royal favour at least as much gratification as he himself experienced in being singled out as confidential messenger, he was met by a sudden pouncing movement, expressive only of wrath, by a dark look, actually by a flush.

Had Jeanne de Mantes ever blushed? It might be a matter of doubt. But she could colour high with displeasure; and very becoming it was.

“What, sir?” she cried. “I cannot have understood aright. Is this the Vidame de Joncelles, the French gentilhomme, the servant of Madame Henriette de France—is this my compatriot, my own brother, who comes to make me such a proposition?—It is really not to credit one’s ears!…”

Brother and sister faced each other, strangely alike now in their anger: nostrils quivering over fierce, quick breaths, black eyes flashing into black eyes.

It was the Vidame who could scarce credit his ears. Here was he, the messenger of the King, come to open before one whose devouring ambition, he believed, if anything, exceeded his own, a perspective of boundless possibilities—and he was thus received! He sat before her in the small parlour allotted to her in Whitehall,—an exiguous rounded corner room overlooking the river,—his mouth opened in astonishment, deserted for the nonce by all his pert airs of assurance.

“Nay, Jeanne,” he said at length, “keep this pretty scene for his Majesty, if you will; or rather,” he amended, restored by the sound of his own glib speech, “take my advice, and hold your fits of virtue as cured and over, once for all, for they say that King Charles becomes very easily _ennuyé_. For, with me, whom do you expect to take in?”

Whereupon, at a tangent, Madame de Mantes flew into a new rage.

“And it is this little man who is my brother!” she cried, clasping her hands and surveying Enguerrand from head to foot, with flashing fury; “_this_ is the child who knelt beside me at our mother’s knee!”

She thrust out a lip of utter contempt: “Take thee in? Thou—thou little withered fruit … a stone inside, hard skin without; what art thou to me?”

“What am I to thee—Jeanne? To-day,” he cried, “the stepping-stone to thy fortune, if thou wilt only see it! Now listen to me.”

But even as he spoke, of a sudden his anger cooled before the expression of her face. What if she was in earnest, what of his fortunes then? It was no time to quarrel. He caught his sister round the waist and advanced his lips toward the smooth cheek. But a masterly slap met the endearment.

“I’ll be no stepping-stone to you, nor creature of the English King,” Jeanne announced, half laughing, half crying. “There’s better in London, Master Enguerrand.”

He looked at her with wicked eyes, his face whiter than usual against the three scarlet stripes.

“You’ve had a visit this morning before me!” he cried suddenly; then, with a diabolic flash of intuition, he recalled the long, soft looks she had cast upon Lord Rockhurst.

“A visit?” said the Frenchwoman, swinging herself upon her heel. “Why, yes, that might well be.” She had a private smile, as to the memory of something singularly pleasant.

“I warrant me that it is your purpose to visit before long that interesting pile they call the Tower of London. Have a care, _ma sœur_,” and his trembling lips could scarce articulate the sneer,—had he not hated that man at very first sight,—“it is there, they say, that heads are lost in England!”

“Out of my room!” she ordered.

He laughed in what was almost a convulsion of rage. To what post, to what favours, might he not have aspired, with such a beginning! Meanwhile it is always the messenger of unwelcome news who bears the blame. _Malédiction!_ His hand on the door-latch, he sent his last shaft with deadly purport to wound:—

“O Jeanne, and I had never thought thee the woman to submit to a rival! Call to mind, _ma toute belle_, milord’s smile as he gazed at the face in the locket.”

Madame de Mantes heard the furious laughter echo down the passage as the door closed. She stood in the middle of her little room nibbling at her finger. ’Twas true! He had smiled at the locket, and with what tenderness! Ah, that was very different from the mocking twist of the lips with which he had wittily courted her only an hour ago. How! a king was to be sacrificed to him, and the man dared to haggle over the full surrender of his heart! ’Twould be monstrous!

* * * * *

“Ah, there’s my Little Satan,” said the King. But his long, gloomy face relaxed into no mirth: he had had a tedious morning, and of all things Charles could least endure tedium. The lady who had been first in favour so long that her chain had become well-nigh as heavy as that of matrimony itself, had made him such a scene as his own good and faithful queen would never have permitted herself to make. And another lady, whom for some time the volatile royal fancy had pursued in vain, had shown herself more hopelessly obdurate than usual. Between chiding Palmer and elusive Stewart, Charles was as near ill-humour as his easy temper would allow—and he was therefore, characteristically, ready for any diversion to this unwonted hue of his sky. The sight of the little Vidame’s pallid, handsome face at the end of the audience room put him in mind at once of the whim he had indulged in overnight for the lady of the guitar; a linnet that trilled, a little quail for roundness and compactness.

For an _entremet_, according to the new-fangled French jargon of banqueting, Madame de Mantes was certainly not a dish to be despised; and, to add spice to it, there was that presumptuous fellow’s wager. Actually a wager!—Those arrears of pay had been forced upon the royal memory altogether too often of late. So, with a gesture, Charles waved his usual circle aside; and those that formed it saw, with astonishment and the virulent spite of the courtier, the King withdraw with the unknown French boy into the embrasure of the windows overlooking the Thames.

Some bethought themselves that his Majesty had noticed the creature already on the previous night; and whispers began to circulate.

One inventive personage declared he knew (upon positive authority) that the little Vidame had come on an important secret mission of the French King anent the necessity of Romanising the English Church without delay. “Vidame, mark you, is an old French ecclesiastical title,” he was good enough to explain. “He holds his lands in feu from some mighty Archbishopric—formerly a Vidame was a kind of ecclesiastical marshal—does not this furnish food for reflection, my lords? But—” “Pooh,” cried an airy gallant (who had a French tilt to his moustache), “our good Dorset has ever Rome in his head. Why, man, a Vidame and his Bishop, it is well known, always hate each other cordially as ever fox and wolf; ’tis always between them, who shall have the fattest share of church booty! Nay, then, are you so simple? Have you looked at that smooth cheek, those rich curls? Why, ’tis the most piquant matter—some Fair Audacity in disguise! No more Vidame than your lordship’s self; but, believe me, some cosy little chanoinesse, sheltering her gentle lapses under the comfortable wing of Mother Church.”—“Hearken to Follett and his follies!” interposed a third, a frank-faced youth, the sap of whose English generous common-sense had not yet been withered by courtly poisons. “Nay, neither envoy nor canoness, my lords, but as tough a youth as ever I came across. I tried a fall with him, in the Cockpit,—having heard him brag of a trick of Breton wrestling,—and by my soul, the lad is steel and bow-string; he had me on my back in a twinkling and jeered at me till, for a moment, I saw him in red! But I like the lad; he has mettle, for all his whey face. Heard you not what his Majesty calls him: his Little Satan!—Old Rowley hath some bit of devil’s work for him this morning. And that’s the nut of the mystery.”

“Well, Vidame,” said the King, as soon as they were out of earshot, “let us now arrange the hour when we are again to hear your melodious sister warble, as though she were a bird and found our dull skies as bright as those of France.”

Enguerrand’s lips trembled. His pale cheek grew paler still.

But he had by no means been prepared to reveal his diplomatic failure. His plan was to temporise, in the hope of eventual success. But his sensitive acuteness nosed a trail of bitter temper under all Charles’s urbanity; and, flustered, he hesitated a second. The King drew his great eyebrows together.

“Madame requires pressing, it seems. She is perhaps hoarse to-day.”

Enguerrand foresaw how, in another moment, by a gesture of that languid white hand, the insignificant personality of Jeanne—and with it his own equally futile existence—would be swept from Charles’s horizon. Biting his lips, he cast about, but vainly, in his own brain, for a word which would keep the King’s fickle humour at least a little longer on the same bent.

Could she but be brought to take her golden chance, Jeanne would hold her own against any adversary but relentless Time—Enguerrand knew his sister well enough to feel certain of that. So promising an opportunity, and to see it wrecked by a mood of monstrous folly!

His eye wandered desperately from the King’s face, whereon was writ coming dismissal, to the dull prospect which lay beyond the window: a leaden river under a leaden sky—merely to see the huddled, cloaked wayfarers in the boats gliding past made one shiver.

Suddenly the boy’s eyes narrowed; he drew close to the window, peered eagerly down; nay, he was not mistaken! Yonder, indeed, went Jeanne … Jeanne and her woman, and at the water stairs a boat lay in wait for them. In a flash he understood; he had been right in his surmise! Moved by an inspiration born of the very genius for intrigue, he cried eagerly, but under his breath, arresting the King’s attention even as he was moving wearily away:—

“Nay, your Majesty, my sister is not hoarse, at least to my knowledge—I found her not in her apartment, and now I perceive the reason. The lady is not hoarse … yet seems like to become so presently! How will her sweet notes sound, I wonder, after her water journey, this bitter day!”

“Odd’s fish!” said the King. “What prate is this, sir?”

Yet, curiosity drew him to approach the window in his turn. Through the Whitehall water gate, down the King’s own stairs, a figure, wrapped in a rose and grey mantle daintily held up to show little close tripping feet, a small dame was picking her way down the miry steps. Behind her a waiting woman in russet carried what appeared to be a lute case. Charles turned a look, half quizzical, half interrogative, upon the Vidame.

“And is indeed that pink-and-grey bird our fair singer of last evening?”

“Even so, sire,” said Enguerrand, bowing low to conceal the agitation of his countenance.

“Satan, my little friend,” said the King, more genially, “can you inform me whither she may be winging her flight, from the very stairs sacred to our own passage? Not that such ordinance can be enforced upon birds.”

“I notice, your Majesty,” said Enguerrand, now turning candid eyes full upon the King, “the skiff is heading down river. I believe your Majesty’s Tower lies somewhere in that direction.”

“Ha!” said the King. His deep eye lightened for a second ominously. But as rapidly as it came, anger vanished from his countenance; and with it the last traces of his moody, weary humour. “Odd’s fish!” he ejaculated, “I had forgot! To the Tower, say you, Vidame? Nay, then, that minds me my Lord Constable and myself had a merry wager touching a singing-bird. _Ma foi_, he is early with the decoy and the lime twig!”

He paused. The Vidame looked at him in astonishment—a king to wager with a subject! A king—and to let himself be crossed in his pleasure and to find in the circumstance food for indulgent laughter. And the man lodged so conveniently in his Tower! Joncelle’s vindictive young soul had been all afire to see the Lord Constable consigned to one of his own cells. If the Tower of London was not Charles’s Bastille, for the disposal of inconvenient courtiers, where was the use of it? If a king made no use of his prerogatives, where was the use of royalty?—The Vidame had yet much to learn.

Pulling his full underlip between finger and thumb, Charles stared alternately out of the window at the picture of grey river, vanishing skiff, and brooding sky, and at Enguerrand’s delicate white face. Beneath the boy’s tensely still attitude it was easy to divine quiver of nerves, fierce eagerness.

“Why, now,” said the King at last, somewhat maliciously, “we are not too proud to be taught by our subject. Our Lord Constable and ourself had, as I said, a wager who should capture the linnet’s next song. My Lord Rockhurst is an old soldier: he trusts no one. We sent a messenger: we therefore stand to lose.”

The colour rushed to the Vidame’s face. He dropped his lids to hide the tears of mortification that sprang to his eyes. Had the fate of some battle, the issue of some diplomatic mission, been at stake, he might almost have felt less keenly the reproach of his failure. To be King’s Mercury, to set off so gaily, on so high a flight, and fall so quickly, so hopelessly—no situation could have been more exquisitely painful to the Vidame de Joncelles. (Poor, pious mother! could she have read, that moment, into the soul of her son, she might well have thought that the house she had so carefully kept swept and garnished was indeed invaded by the seven devils.)

The King’s glance, however, was not unkind. “Nay, now,” he continued, in ever more good-natured tones, “all is not lost yet. This infamous Rockhurst of ours laid too tempting a stake that I should let him carry off the prize without an effort. What say you, Little Satan? Have you a mind to see the Tower? Your great father has been pretty busy there these five hundred years. It should be of interest to his little son.”

He flung out his long, careless hand, as he spoke, toward the boy, and Enguerrand, dropping on one knee, kissed it with sudden passion. Something about that hitherto dormant part of his young anatomy, his heart, was stirred. He had felt himself dominated by that very carelessness and good nature against which but a little while ago he had inwardly railed; caught a hint of a truer royalty in this careless King than in all the pompous tyranny of his cousin of France.

Whether the inexplicable Stuart charm, which Charles, black-visaged, saturnine, cynical as he was, possessed no less than his romantically beautiful father and his handsome, winning brother of York, had seized the more potently upon Enguerrand’s nature that had hitherto been brazened in self-conceit and self-interest against all external influence, the fact was that in that touch of his lips, the Vidame de Joncelles devoted himself to a master.

Charles stepped back into the room, called up his gentleman-in-waiting, and gave instant order for his barge. As he turned pleasantly then to receive the _congées_ of the dismissed audience, a fine-looking young man strode quickly into the room, made his way up, and bowing so low that his profuse, fair ringlets fell in a cascade on either side of his cheek, presented a letter for the royal hand. Enguerrand, standing close, heard the messenger’s murmured words.

“From Miss Stewart, your Grace.”

The whole circle stepped back and grew wide while the King read. And many a look of envy was cast upon the newcomer as Charles, thrusting the sheet into his breast, turned a complacent countenance upon him.

“Vastly well, Sir Paul,” said Charles, with a little nod.

The young man visibly swelled with triumph. The Vidame’s busy brain worked at high speed: Miss Stewart? That was the great fair girl who gave the King such cold return for his notice last night.… Rumour about Court had it, as Enguerrand knew, that she was playing a high game.…

As a man might look upon one who threatened to rob him of a mistress’s smile, so Enguerrand glared at the messenger who had evidently succeeded in his task. But his own hour was not yet over. In high good humour, Charles beckoned him again to his side.

“Come,” said he, “or we shall be too late. Tide waits not for kings; and linnets will sing only when the mood takes them.”

* * * * *

Enguerrand, seated in the royal barge, felt his heart swell with pride. He was alone in attendance, save for the tall officer of guards, whose face, impassive and dark as bronze over the folds of the red horse cloak, looked forth with the indifference of the man under orders, upon this last whim of the master. The French boy’s blood was tingling with excitement. The raw airs, the bleak aspect of the waterway, the shadow of the towering masonry from which they were just emerging, dark with its story of royal tragedy, failed to depress a spirit otherwise susceptible to physical impressions.

His failure, after all, had become more profitable than success. He was on sudden terms of intimacy with a monarch whom he was eager to serve; and in conjunction with the Stuart himself, he was about to inflict at least discomfiture upon the man for whom at first sight he had conceived hatred.

He was still child enough, moreover, to feel a titillating sense of gratification in watching the skill and vigour of the royal watermen, the like of which was undreamed of on French rivers; in feeling that it was partly for him these stalwart backs bowed in rhythmic measure, that the oars swept the waters, green now to his closer vision; that it was, in a way, before his own passage that the craft hastily opened out to leave a wide channel, and that every head was uncovered.

Charles’s face had fallen into its habitual expression in repose, of somewhat bitter melancholy; and the journey was traversed in silence, until, just in front of the archway of London Bridge, the sweep of the tide, which had been for some time at the full, began to tell decidedly against them. The barge came almost to a standstill.

The King roused himself from his abstraction and flung a rueful smile over his shoulder at Enguerrand: “Said I not well? The tide waits not for kings.”

The watermen caught the phrase, and as if stung in their pride of office fell to at the oars with a fury which sent the sweat rolling down each weather-beaten cheek.

“Our wily friend,” proceeded Charles, “chose his hour with judgment. The bird has as easy a flight as the dove to the ark. We stand to be beaten, after all, by my Lord Constable.”

Beaten! Never, if his oarsmen died for it. The brawny arms shot out in unison; the backs bent and straightened with the rage of defiance; they shot the bridge in triumph, the contentious waters vainly swirling and lapping against the sides of the barge.

As they emerged into the gentler stream beyond, there was a moment’s pause, and every man of the crew, dashing the salt sweat from his eyes, turned involuntarily toward the royal visage. The slight smile of approbation on Charles’s lips seemed ample guerdon for the feat; indeed, as in the case of most saturnine countenances, its momentary relaxation had a rare charm. They fell upon the oars again, and presently the mighty pile of the Tower seemed to engulf them into its dark shades.

If Whitehall, stained with the blood of a king, shed a gloom about it, even while holding the most irresponsible court in the world, what sinister shroud enveloped these walls to every imaginative mind. The stones of the dungeon, tradition said, had been first cemented in lime and blood; and enough blood had since been poured out within those gates to stain the moats forever crimson.

The water gates swung back, and the King’s barge glided in. Charles’s face bore an air of pleasant anticipation, unwonted good fortune. He was certain to be amused, whichever way events turned; certain at least of some novel sensation.

III

The Linnet’S Song

Jeanne de Mantes sat sidewise in the deep window-seat of the parlour in the constable’s Tower, her dark eyes roaming about her with a curiosity not unmixed with a kind of awe. The room, dark with ancient oak to its blackened ceiling, with its huge depth of wall, its aspect of strength, silence, antiquity, resembled no apartment that she had ever entered. True, she had never penetrated into the Bastille, and true, she was here of her own free will and free to leave at her caprice; yet a small shiver crept over her. There seemed to her something ominous, something fated, about the place. All said and done, it was a prison. What should bring hither those who lived for freedom and joy?

She glanced almost timidly at the man who stood, one elbow propped on the embrasure, gazing down at her with inscrutable yet perhaps mocking eyes. He matched his Tower, she thought, in the something dark and melancholy which, though he might smile and court, yet remained as undisturbed as the sombreness of the room by the leaping firelight or the early spring flowers on the table.

Their glances met. In the light that fell upon her from grey skies and grey wall, the texture of her face showed flawless; richly coloured, at once soft and firm, it glowed like some southern fruit out of the cold setting. Her lips were parted: forgotten, in the momentary feeling of strangeness, all the modish airs and graces of the Louvre. She looked like a child, Rockhurst thought. He smiled at her, suddenly, kindly; sat down on the window-seat beside her and took her little amber-tinted hand in his.

“This is a rude place for such a one as you,” he said; “and you look about you like some creature caught against its will. Nay, you shall but sing me a song, and take your flight again forthwith, if you so wish it.”

All the woman in her awoke, petulant, displeased. Chivalry in love, a man who could desire and yet spare—that was not at all to her French taste. She drew her hands quickly from his and tossed her head.

“How so,” she cried in her pretty foreign English. “Fortwit’ after my song? But now, at once, if you prefer! Your lordship is quick tired!”

She sprang from the seat as she spoke. But he, stretching a lazy arm, caught her by her yielding waist.

“I said, if you wish it, Mignonne. In love I am no highwayman, but a courteous dealer.”

She feigned to struggle, brushing his cheek with her curls; then gave him all the candour of her eyes and the glint of a smile from her wicked lips; upon which, suddenly, he kissed them.

“Ah! highwayman, after all!” she mocked.

He drew her close to him, laughing silently.

“Milord Constable,” said she, “if one of your soldiers down there should chance to look up, it is all over with … your reputation.”

Again he laughed, struck by the audacious humour of the soft creature within the circle of his arm.

“Madame,” said he, then, with unexpected gravity, “my soldiers have long ceased to look up. My reputation is too well established to be worth looking to.”

Piqued, she thrust him from her with a quick gesture. It is one thing to be quickly conquered; it is another to be classed among the easy conquests.

“You’re insolent, milord!” she said, with out-thrust lip.

“My pretty one,” he answered her, “anger becomes you vastly; but as for myself, I have a preference for the dimpled smile.”

He let his arm drop from her carelessly. She stood looking down at him, fascinated, taunted, uncertain.

“Believe me,” he went on in the same tone, half condescending, half caressing, “I am much older than you; I have had experience—life becomes much pleasanter, its few good hours vastly easier of discovery, if we agree to take certain things for granted. And, as example is ever better than preaching, let us put my theory in practice. I, now, take it for granted,” as he spoke his fine teeth flashed a second in a wider smile, “that you are all virtue, yet that you harbour for my unworthy self an amiable passion which excuses, nay, commands, a gentle lapse. You on your side take it for granted that I am consumed with an ardour unknown hitherto in my existence. Come, does not that place us instantly on a delightful footing? And this being so: why, then, come back to my side.”

She palpitated between fury and the extraordinary attraction which drew her to him. Her breast heaved, her eye first lightened, then melted. She took an unwilling step, then paused. Almost a sob rose in her throat. In another moment she would have flung herself on his breast, as he sat awaiting her with that air of amused certainty that was in itself at once part of his fascination for her and an insult to her every instinct of pride, when suddenly she perceived that his eye had become fixed and distant. The insolent wretch had already dropped her from his thoughts; she was not worth to him even that pause of expectation!

Staring through the south window, up the river toward that gloomy bridge through the arches of which she had come to him, his attention was absorbed, his glance had gained a hawk-like keenness; the lines of his face were set. Whatever he beheld without, it was something that evoked far keener interest in him than the woman who had come to his call, in preference to that of a king. This was too much!

“Adieu, milord,” she cried in a high, strained voice. But, womanlike, she must see what it was, without there, on that hideous river, that he was looking at.

The royal barge, with its standard and pennants, its flash of scarlet and the long swing of red-and-gold oars, was already masked under the shadow of the battlements; nothing but the long stretch of water, dotted with black craft, met the searching of her angry eyes.

What is it, she asked herself; his fair one, in some well-known boat? Ah! the owner perhaps of that face in the locket, which even his King was not to see? What in the name of all decent pride was Jeanne de Mantes doing here? Yet even as she moved again to leave him, with what dignity she might, the incomprehensible being turned to her again—turned with a smile so winning, a glance so warm and caressing, a voice so tender, that the young woman lost her footing on her momentary plane of dignity, and found herself floundering again between a tearful desire for surrender and that hot anger which only a real love is able to kindle.

“How now! Adieu, say you? From your lips, sweet, that is a word I hope never to hear.”

“Why should I remain, milord?” she said feebly. “You care not to keep me.”

“I care so much that I will not let you go.” He came after her quickly into the room. “Why, you foolish child, how can you escape from the Tower so long as its constable means to hold you? Do you not know, I have but to call a word, and the drawbridge is raised, the portcullis dropped over the waterway—that I have the right of imprisonment here, that there are secret places where I can hide my wilful prisoners? Nay, sweet one, are we not well together here?—You shall sing to me!”

Stirred with an emotion which, hitherto only playing with life, she had never known before, she murmured, blushing and trembling:—

“Sing! _Eh, mon Dieu_, you hold to it, then?”

“Why,” he answered her, “was it not singing that you caught my heart?”

Delicately flattered, she suffered herself to be led to a cushioned seat by the deep hearth; and she was already stretching out her arms to receive the guitar, when something in his air struck her quick apprehension, something at once of eagerness for her compliance, yet of indifference toward herself. He shot restless glances toward the window, seemed to strain his ear as if for some expected signal. When his eye swept over her, it was with an impatience other than that of the fond lover. She took the instrument from his hand, and watched him with a new, critical closeness as he flung himself upon the settle opposite to her.

In a tone which ill concealed irritability, he cried to her:—

“Begin—begin, little bird!”

Here was some odd mystery. She folded her hands across the polished olive-wood.

“Heavens!” she exclaimed, and it was her turn now to mock. “What a passion for music has your lordship!”

His eye shot anger upon her, beneath contracted brow. She felt at last that she had power, and her smile widened.

“You and your song,” said he, “are inseparable. By your graciousness I hold you mine for a little while, nor will I be defrauded of any of the sweetness you can give.”

The words seemed charmingly chosen; but again the underlying, unknown purpose was perceptible. A quick inspiration came to her: here was the moment to bargain; and Enguerrand, the little impertinent one, should know of her easy triumph before this grey English day had turned to the murky English night.

“If I sing,” she said, “I must have my guerdon.”

Amusement and relief sprang together into his look:—

“Nay, then, pretty one; make your own terms. Pearls for those shell-like ears—gems for that throat—”

She shook her head till the ringlets danced.

“Speak, then,” he went on impatiently. “What jewel, what bauble?”

She bent forward with a new, adorable softness, coaxing.

“A mere trifle, indeed, milord. I but ask for that locket of yours with which you were pleased to excite the curiosity of Whitehall last night.”

“How now!” said Rockhurst. He started, and turned the lightning of his glance, the thunder-cloud of his brow, upon her, a man whom it was not good to offend, and she quailed an instant. Then her hot blood rose in jealous passion:—

“So vastly precious? Why, then, generous milord Constable, suppose I put a high price upon my song; are you so ungallant?”

“Little madame,” retorted he, drily, “since you set a price on your favour, you would be as vastly disappointed with this poor trinket as Eve with the taste of her apple. Continue to desire it,” he went on, falling back into his tone of light cynicism. “To long for anything unattainable is one of the spices of existence.”

The firelight leaped on her angry face. She sprang to her feet, dashing aside the guitar, which fell on the stone floor with sonorous wail.

“If I could flatter myself I was helping to provide milord’s tedium with such a spice,” she cried, “my immediate departure would have a double charm!”

[Illustration: She felt at last that she had power.]

She reached a trembling hand toward her cloak. He, outstretched on the settle, watched her, without moving. At this moment, grave sounds, a trumpet call, followed by dull roll of kettledrum, rose from without into the momentary silence of the room. Stone wall and vault gave back the echo. There was a hurried tramp of feet, sharp cries of command. The Frenchwoman’s hand was arrested in mid-air. She looked in startled query at her host, who was slowly gathering his long limbs together preparatory to rising. He met her glance with one that struck her excited fancy as sinister, and she gave a cry like a child:—

“Let me out of this horrible place! You have no right to keep me here!”

He caught her wrist with a grasp gentle yet relentless.

“Your password, Jeanne, shall be a song—however short, but one stave, a few notes! Your song I must have!”

He picked up the guitar, and again pressed it upon her. She put her hand to her throat with a sob, flung a piteous glance around her like a trapped thing, and struck a faltering chord. Then, in a sudden revulsion, her courage rose again.

“Pah!” she cried, “’tis out of tune! _Eh, bien non!_ I will not sing! I am French; you have no right to hold me here!”

“By the Lord!” said Rockhurst, a gleam of genuine admiration leaping to his eye, “but I like your spirit! Be dumb, then, sweetheart. You shall pay me by and by. Nay,” he added, smiling on her bewilderment, “let thy mantle lie where it is; for, prithee, I would have thee assist me to receive his Majesty.”

“His Majesty?” she cried, in f