Part 8 (1/2)
Sir John was silent; he bowed his head, in acquiescence perhaps, in meditation it may have been; but he stayed silent.
”Yet,” said she, ”there is something here which I must keep no longer: for here are all the letters you ever writ me.”
Whereupon she handed Sir John a little packet of very old and very faded papers. He turned them awkwardly in his hand once or twice; then stared at them; then at the lady.
”You have kept them--always?” he cried.
”Yes,” she responded, wistfully; ”but I must not be guilty of continuing such follies. It is a villainous example to my grandchildren,” Dame Sylvia told him, and smiled. ”Farewell.”
Sir John drew close to her and took her hands in his. He looked into her eyes for an instant, holding himself very erect,--and it was a rare event when Sir John looked any one squarely in the eyes,--and he said, wonderingly, ”How I loved you!”
”I know,” she murmured. Sylvia Vernon gazed up into his bloated old face with a proud tenderness that was half-regretful. A quavering came into her gentle voice. ”And I thank you for your gift, my lover,--O brave true lover, whose love I was not ever ashamed to own! Farewell, my dear; yet a little while, and I go to seek the boy and girl we know of.”
”I shall not be long, madam,” said Sir John. ”Speak a kind word for me in Heaven; for I shall have sore need of it.”
She had reached the door by this. ”You are not sorry that I came?”
Sir John answered, very sadly: ”There are many wrinkles now in your dear face, my lady; the great eyes are a little dimmed, and the sweet laughter is a little cracked; but I am not sorry to have seen you thus.
For I have loved no woman truly save you alone; and I am not sorry.
Farewell.” And for a moment he bowed his unreverend gray head over her shrivelled fingers.
3. ”_This Pitch, as Ancient Writers do Report, doth Defile_”
”Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to the vice of lying!”
chuckled Sir John, and leaned back rheumatically in his chair and mumbled over the jest.
”Yet it was not all a lie,” he confided, as if in perplexity, to the fire; ”but what a coil over a youthful green-sickness 'twixt a lad and a wench more than forty years syne!
”I might have had money of her for the asking,” he presently went on; ”yet I am glad I did not; which is a parlous sign and smacks of dotage.”
He nodded very gravely over this new and alarming phase of his character.
”Were it not a quaint conceit, a merry tickle-brain of Fate,” he asked of the leaping flames, after a still longer pause, ”that this mountain of malmsey were once a delicate stripling with apple cheeks and a clean breath, smelling of civet, and as mad for love, I warrant you, as any Amadis of them all? For, if a man were to speak truly, I did love her.
”I had the special marks of the pestilence,” he a.s.sured a particularly incredulous--and obstinate-looking coal,--a grim, black fellow that, lurking in a corner, scowled forbiddingly and seemed to defy both the flames and Sir John. ”Not all the flagons and apples in the universe might have comforted me; I was wont to sigh like a leaky bellows; to weep like a wench that hath lost her grandam; to lard my speech with the f.a.g-ends of ballads like a man milliner; and did, indeed, indite sonnets, canzonets, and what not of mine own elaboration.
”And Moll did carry them,” he continued; ”plump brown-eyed Moll, that hath married Hodge the tanner, and reared her tannerkins, and died long since.”
But the coal remained incredulous, and the flames crackled merrily.
”Lord, Lord, what did I not write?” said Sir John, drawing out a paper from the packet, and deciphering by the firelight the faded writing.
Read Sir John:
”_Have pity, Sylvia? Cringing at thy door Entreats with dolorous cry and clamoring, That mendicant who quits thee nevermore; Now winter chills the world, and no birds sing In any woods, yet as in wanton Spring He follows thee; and never will have done, Though nakedly he die, from following Whither thou leadest.
”Canst thou look upon His woes, and laugh to see a G.o.ddess' son Of wide dominion, and in strategy