“A very pretty sermon,” said the Queen. “Yet I do not think that our Gregory could very long endure a wife given over to such high-minded talking. He prefers to hear himself do the fine talking.”
Followed a silence, vexed only on the purposeless September winds; but I believe that neither of these two slept with profundity.
About dawn one of the Queen’s attendants roused Sir Gregory Darrell and conducted him into the hedged garden of Ordish, where Ysabeau walked in tranquil converse with Lord Berners. The old man was in high good-humor.
“My lad,” said he, and clapped Sir Gregory upon the shoulder, “you have, I do protest, the very phoenix of sisters. I was never happier.” And he went away chuckling.
The Queen said in a toneless voice, “We ride for Blackfriars now.”
Darrell responded, “I am content, and ask but leave to speak, briefly, with Dame Rosamund before I die.”
Then the woman came more near to him. “I am not used to beg, but within this hour you encounter death, and I have loved no man in all my life saving only you, Sir Gregory Darrell. Nor have you loved any person as you loved me once in France. Oh, today, I may speak freely, for with you the doings of that boy and girl are matters overpast. Yet were it otherwise—eh, weigh the matter carefully! for I am mistress of England now, and England would I give you, and such love as that slim, white innocence has never dreamed of would I give you, Gregory Darrell—No, no! ah, Mother of God, not you!” The Queen clapped one hand upon his lips.
“Listen,” she quickly said; “I spoke to tempt you. But you saw, and you saw clearly, that it was the sickly whim of a wanton, and you never dreamed of yielding, for you love this Rosamund Eastney, and you know me to be vile. Then have a care of me! The strange woman am I, of whom we read that her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death. Hoh, many strong men have been slain by me, and in the gray time to come will many others be slain by me, it may be; but never you among them, my Gregory, who are more wary, and more merciful, and who know that I have need to lay aside at least one comfortable thought against eternity.”
“I concede you to have been unwise—” he hoarsely began.
About them fell the dying leaves, of many glorious colors, but the air of this new day seemed raw and chill.
Then Rosamund came through the opening in the hedge. “Now, choose,” she said; “the woman offers life and high place and wealth, and it may be, a greater love than I am capable of giving you. I offer a dishonorable death within the moment.”
And again, with that peculiar and imperious gesture, the man flung back his head, and he laughed. Said Gregory Darrell:
“I am I! and I will so to live that I may face without shame not only God, but also my own scrutiny.” He wheeled upon the Queen and spoke henceforward very leisurely. “I love you; all my life long I have loved you, Ysabeau, and even now I love you: and you, too, dear Rosamund, I love, though with a difference. And every fibre of my being lusts for the power that you would give me, Ysabeau, and for the good which I would do with it in the England which I or blustering Roger Mortimer must rule; as every fibre of my being lusts for the man that I would be could I choose death without debate. And I think also of the man that you would make of me, my Rosamund.
“The man! And what is this man, this Gregory Darrell, that his welfare should be considered?—an ape who chatters to himself of kinship with the archangels while filthily he digs for groundnuts! This much I know, at bottom.
“Yet more clearly do I perceive that this same man, like all his fellows, is a maimed god who walks the world dependent upon many wise and evil counsellors. He must measure, to a hair’s-breadth, every content of the world by means of a bloodied sponge, tucked somewhere in his skull, a sponge which is ungeared by the first cup of wine and ruined by the touch of his own finger. He must appraise all that he judges with no better instruments than two bits of colored jelly, with a bungling makeshift so maladroit that the nearest horologer’s apprentice could have devised a more accurate device. In fine, each man is under penalty condemned to compute eternity with false weights, to estimate infinity with a yardstick: and he very often does it, and chooses his own death without debate. For though, ‘If then I do that which I would not I consent unto the law,’ saith even an Apostle; yet a braver Pagan answers him, ‘Perceive at last that thou hast in thee something better and more divine than the things which cause the various effects and, as it were, pull thee by the strings.’
“There lies the choice which every man must face—whether rationally, as his reason goes, to accept his
