“Decidedly,” said he, “your lordship is past master in the art of wooing; no university in the world would refuse you a degree.”
The marquis frowned. He was a great bluff man, with wheat-colored hair, and was somewhat slow-witted. After a little he found the quizzical, boyish face that mocked him irresistible, and he laughed, and unbent from the dignified reserve which he had for a while maintained portentously.
“Master Mervale,” said the marquis, “I will be frank with you, for you appear a lad of good intelligence, as lads run, and barring a trifle of affectation and a certain squeamishness in speech. When I would go exploring into a woman’s heart, I must pay my way in the land’s current coinage of compliments and high-pitched protestations. Yes, yes, such sixpenny phrases suffice the seasoned traveler, who does not ostentatiously display his gems while traveling. Now, in courtship, Master Mervale, one traverses ground more dubious than the Indies, and the truth, Master Mervale, is a jewel of great price.”
Master Mervale raised his eyebrows. “The truth?” he queried, gently. “Now how, I wonder, did your lordship happen to think of that remote abstraction.” For beyond doubt, Lord Falmouth’s wooing had been that morning of a rather florid sort.
However, “It would surely be indelicate,” the marquis suggested, “to allow even truth to appear quite unclothed in the presence of a lady?” He smiled and took a short turn on the grass. “Look you, Master Mervale,” said he, narrowing his pale-blue eyes to slits, “I have, somehow, a disposition to confidence come upon me. Frankly, my passion for the Lady Ursula burns more mildly than that which Antony bore the Egyptian; it is less a fire to consume kingdoms than a candle wherewith to light a contented home; and quite frankly, I mean to have her. The estates lie convenient, the families are of equal rank, her father is agreed, and she has a sufficiency of beauty; there are, in short, no obstacles to our union save you and my lord of Pevensey, and these, I confess, I do not fear. I can wait, Master Mervale. Oh, I am patient, Master Mervale, but, I own, I cannot brook denial. It is I, or no one. By Saint Gregory! I wear steel at my side, Master Mervale, that will serve for other purposes save that of opening oysters!” So he blustered in the spring sunlight, and frowned darkly when Master Mervale appeared the more amused than impressed.
“Your patience shames Job the Patriarch,” said Master Mervale, “yet, it seems to me, my lord, you do not consider one thing. I grant you that Pevensey and I are your equals neither in estate nor reputation; still, setting modesty aside, is it not possible the Lady Ursula may come, in time, to love one of us?”
“Setting common sense aside,” said the marquis, stiffly, “it is possible she may be smitten with the smallpox. Let us hope, however, that she may escape both of these misfortunes.”
The younger man refrained from speech for a while. Presently, “You liken love to a plague,” he said, “yet I have heard there was once a cousin of the Lady Ursula’s—a Mistress Katherine Beaufort—”
“Swounds!” Lord Falmouth had wheeled about, scowled, and then tapped sharply upon the palm of one hand with the nail-bitten fingers of the other. “Ay,” said he, more slowly, “there was such a person.”
“She loved you?” Master Mervale suggested.
“God help me!” replied the marquis; “we loved each other! I know not how you came by your information, nor do I ask. Yet, it is ill to open an old wound. I loved her; let that suffice.” With a set face, he turned away for a moment and gazed toward the high parapets of Longaville, half-hidden by pale foliage and very white against the rain-washed sky; then groaned, and glared angrily into the lad’s upturned countenance. “You talk of love,” said the marquis; “a love compounded equally of youthful imagination, a liking for fantastic phrases and a disposition for caterwauling i’ the moonlight. Ah, lad, lad!—if you but knew! That is not love; to love is to go mad like a star-struck moth, and afterward to strive in vain to forget, and to eat one’s heart out in the loneliness, and to hunger—hunger—” The marquis spread his big hands helplessly, and then, with a quick, impatient gesture, swept back the mass of wheat-colored hair that fell about his face. “Ah, Master Mervale,” he sighed, “I was right after all—it is the cruelest plague in the world, and that same smallpox leaves less troubling scars.”
“Yet,” Master Mervale said, with courteous interest, “you did not marry?”
“Marry!” His lordship snarled toward the sun and laughed. “Look you, Master Mervale, I know not how far y’are acquainted with the business. It was in Cornwall yonder years since; I was but a lad, and she a wench—Oh, such a wench, with tender blue eyes, and a faint, sweet voice that could deny me nothing! God does not fashion her like every day—Dieu qui la fist de ses deux mains, saith the Frenchman.” The marquis paced the grass, gnawing his lip and debating with himself. “Marry? Her family was good, but their deserts outranked their fortunes; their crest was not the topmost feather in Fortune’s cap, you understand; somewhat sunken i’ the world, Master Mervale, somewhat sunken. And I? My father—God rest his bones!—was a cold, hard man, and my two elder brothers—Holy Virgin, pray for them!—loved me none too well. I was the cadet then: Heaven helps them that help themselves, says my father, and I ha’n’t a penny for you. My way was yet to make in the world; to saddle myself with a dowerless wench—even a wench whose least ‘Good morning’ set a man’s heart hammering at his ribs—would have been folly, Master Mervale. Utter, improvident, shiftless, bedlamite folly, lad!”
“H’m!” Master Mervale cleared his throat, twirled his mustachios, and smiled at some unspoken thought. “We pay for our follies
