Part 21 (2/2)

”No fear of that!” I said. ”Farewell, good cousin marquis! I cannot weep at your going, since it brings you happiness. And we have it on excellent authority that the laughter of fools is as the crackling of thorns under a pot. Accordingly, I bid you G.o.d-speed in a discreet silence.”

I stood fumbling my cousin's gold as he went forward into the night; but she did not follow.

”I am sorry--” she began. She paused and the lithe fingers fretted with her horse's mane.

I said: ”Madonna, earlier in this crowded night, you told me of love's nature: must my halting commentary prove the glose upon your text? Look, then, to be edified while the fool is delivered of his folly. For upon the maternal side, love was born of the ocean, madonna, and the ocean is but salt water, and salt water is but tears; and thus may love claim love's authentic kin with sorrow. Ay, certainly, madonna, Fate hath ordained for her diversion that through sorrow alone we lovers may attain to the true Castle of Content.”

There was a long silence, and the wind wailed among the falling, tattered leaves. ”Had I but known--” said Adeliza, very sadly.

I said: ”Madonna, go forward and G.o.d speed you! Yonder your lover waits for you, and the world is exceedingly fair; here is only a fool. As for this new Marquis of Falmouth, let him trouble you no longer. 'Tis an Eastern superst.i.tion that we lackbrains are endowed with peculiar gifts of prophecy: and as such, I predict, very confidently, madonna, that you will see and hear no more of him in this life.”

I caught my breath. In the moonlight she seemed G.o.d's master-work. Her eyes were big with half-comprehended sorrow, and a slender hand stole timorously toward me. I laughed, seeing how she strove to pity my great sorrow and could not, by reason of her great happiness. I laughed and was content. ”As surely as G.o.d reigns in Heaven,” I cried aloud, ”I am content, and this moment is well purchased with a marquisate!”

Indeed, I was vastly uplift and vastly pleased with my own n.o.bleness, just then, and that condition is always a comfort.

More alertly she regarded me; and in her eyes I saw the anxiety and the wonder merge now into illimitable pity. ”That, too!” she said, smiling sadly. ”That, too, O son of Thomas Allonby!” And her mothering arms were clasped about me, and her lips clung and were one with my lips for a moment, and her tears were wet upon my cheek. She seemed to s.h.i.+eld me, making of her breast my sanctuary.

”My dear, my dear, I am not worthy!” said Adeliza, with a tenderness I cannot tell you of; and presently she, too, was gone.

I mounted the lamed horse, who limped slowly up the river bank; very slowly we came out from the glare of the crackling fire into the cool darkness of the autumn woods; very slowly, for the horse was lamed and wearied, and patience is a discreet virtue when one journeys toward curses and the lash of a dog-whip: and I thought of many quips and jests whereby to soothe the anger of Monsieur de Puysange, and I sang to myself as I rode through the woods, a n.o.bleman no longer, a tired Jack-pudding whose tongue must save his hide.

Sang I:

_”The towers are fallen; no laughter rings Through the rafters, charred and rent; The ruin is wrought of all goodly things In the Castle of Content.

”Ei ho! Ei ho! the Castle of Content, Rased in the Land of Youth, where mirth was meant!

Nay, all is ashes 'there; and all in vain Hand-shadowed eyes turn backward, to regain Disastrous memories of that dear domain,-- Ei ho! the vanished Castle of Content!”_

MAY 27, 1559

_”'O welladay!' said Beichan then, 'That I so soon have married thee!

For it can be none but Susie Pie, That sailed the sea for love of me.'”_

_How Will Sommers encountered the Marchioness of Falmouth in the Cardinal's house at Whitehall, and how in Windsor Forest that n.o.ble lady died with the fool's arms about her, does not concern us here. That is matter for another tale.

You are not, though, to imagine any scandal. Barring an affair with Sir Henry Rochford, and another with Lord Norreys, and the brief interval in 1525 when the King was enamored of her, there is no record that the marchioness ever wavered from the choice her heart had made, or had any especial reason to regret it.

So she lived and died, more virtuously and happily than most, and found the marquis a fair husband, as husbands go; and bore him three sons and a daughter.

But when the ninth Marquis of Falmouth died long after his wife, in the November of 1557, he was survived by only one of these sons, a junior Stephen, born in 1530, who at his father's demise succeeded to the t.i.tle.

The oldest son, Thomas, born 1531, had been killed in Wyatt's Rebellion in 1554; the second, George, born 1526, with a marked look of the King, was, in February, 1556, stabbed in a disreputable tavern brawl.

Now we have to do with the tenth Marquis of Falmouth's suit for the hand of Lady Ursula Heleigh, the Earl of Brudenel's co-heiress. You are to imagine yourself at Longaville Court, in Suss.e.x, at a time when Anne Bullen's daughter was very recently become Queen of England._

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