The Line of Love. Dizain des Mariages

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 in this world, my lord, but I sometimes think that we pay even more dearly for our wisdom.'

'Ah, lad, lad!' the marquis cried, in a gust of anger; 'I dare say, as your smirking hints, it was a coward's act not to snap fingers at fate and fathers and dare all! Well! I did not dare. We parted—in what lamentable fashion is now of little import—and I set forth to seek my fortune. Ho, it was a brave world then, Master Mervale, for all the tears that were scarce dried on my cheeks! A world wherein the heavens were as blue as a certain woman's eyes,—a world wherein a likely lad might see far countries, waggle a good sword in Babylon and Tripolis and other ultimate kingdoms, beard the Mussulman in his mosque, and at last fetch home—though he might never love her, you understand—a soldan's daughter for his wife,—

With more gay gold about her middle Than would buy half Northumberlee.'

His voice died away. He sighed and shrugged. 'Eh, well!' said the marquis; 'I fought in Flanders somewhat— in Spain—what matter where? Then, at last, sickened in Amsterdam, three years ago, where a messenger comes to haul me out of bed as future Marquis of Falmouth. One brother slain in a duel, Master Mervale; one killed in Wyatt's Rebellion; my father dying, and—Heaven rest his soul!—not over-eager to meet his Maker. There you have it, Master Mervale,—a right pleasant jest of Fortune's perpetration,—I a marquis, my own master, fit mate for any woman in the kingdom, and Kate—my Kate who was past human praising!—vanished.'

'Vanished?' The lad echoed the word, with wide eyes.

'Vanished in the night, and no sign nor rumor of her since! Gone to seek me abroad, no doubt, poor wench! Dead, dead, beyond question, Master Mervale!' The marquis swallowed, and rubbed his lips with the back of his hand. 'Ah, well!' said he; 'it is an old sorrow!'

The male animal shaken by strong emotion is to his brothers an embarrassing rather than a pathetic sight. Master Mervale, lowering his eyes discreetly, rooted up several tufts of grass before he spoke. Then, 'My lord, you have known of love,' said he, very slowly; 'does there survive no kindliness for aspiring lovers in you who have been one of us? My lord of Pevensey, I think, loves the Lady Ursula, at least, as much as you ever loved this Mistress Katherine; of my own adoration I do not speak, save to say that I have sworn never to marry any other woman. Her father favors you, for you are a match in a thousand; but you do not love her. It matters little to you, my lord, whom she may wed; to us it signifies a life's happiness. Will not the memory of that Cornish lass—the memory of moonlit nights, and of those sweet, vain aspirations and foiled day-dreams that in boyhood waked your blood even to such brave folly as now possesses us,—will not the memory of these things soften you, my lord?'

But Falmouth by this time appeared half regretful of his recent outburst, and somewhat inclined to regard his companion as a dangerously plausible young fellow who had very unwarrantably wormed himself into Lord Falmouth's confidence. Falmouth's heavy jaw shut like a trap.

'By Saint Gregory!' said he; 'if ever such notions soften me at all, I pray to be in hell entirely melted! What I have told you of is past, Master Mervale; and a wise man does not meditate unthriftily upon spilt milk.'

'You are adamant?' sighed the boy.

'The nether millstone,' said the marquis, smiling grimly, 'is in comparison a pillow of down.'

'Yet—yet the milk was sweet, my lord?' the boy suggested, with a faint answering smile.

'Sweet!' The marquis' voice had a deep tremor.

'And if the choice lay between Ursula and Katherine?'

'Oh, fool!—Oh, pink-cheeked, utter ignorant fool!' the marquis groaned. 'Did I not say you knew nothing of love?' 

'Heigho!' Master Mervale put aside all glum-faced discussion, with a little yawn, and sprang to his feet. 'Then we can but hope that somewhere, somehow, Mistress Katherine yet lives and in her own good time may reappear. And while we speak of reappearances—surely the Lady Ursula is strangely tardy in making hers?'

The marquis' jealousy when it slumbered slept with an open ear. 'Let us join them,' he said, shortly, and he started through the gardens with quick, stiff strides.

2. Song-guerdon

They went westward toward the summer pavilion. Presently the marquis blundered into the green gloom of the maze, laid out in the Italian fashion, and was extricated only by the superior knowledge of Master Mervale, who guided Falmouth skilfully and surely through manifold intricacies, to open daylight.

Afterward they came to a close-shaven lawn, where the summer pavilion stood beside the brook that widened here into an artificial pond, spread with lily-pads and fringed with rushes. The Lady Ursula sat with the Earl of Pevensey beneath a burgeoning maple-tree. Such rays as sifted through into their cool retreat lay like splotches of wine upon the ground, and there the taller grass-blades turned to needles of thin silver; one palpitating beam, more daring than the rest, slanted straight toward the little head of the Lady Ursula, converting her hair into a halo of misty gold, that appeared out of place in this particular position. She seemed a Bassarid who had somehow fallen heir to an aureole; for otherwise, to phrase it sedately, there was about her no clamant suggestion of saintship. At least, there is no record of any saint in the calendar who ever looked with laughing gray-green eyes upon her lover and mocked at the fervor and trepidation of his speech. This the Lady Ursula now did; and, manifestly, enjoyed the doing of it.

Within the moment the Earl of Pevensey took up the viol that lay beside them, and sang to her in the clear morning. He was sunbrowned and very comely, and his big, black eyes were tender as he sang to her sitting there in the shade. He himself sat at her feet in the sunlight.

Sang the Earl of Pevensey:

'Ursula, spring wakes about us— 
Wakes to mock at us and flout us 
That so coldly do delay: 
When the very birds are mating, 
Pray you, why should we be waiting— 
We that might be wed to-day!