The Tangled Skein Part 34

The Cardinal very softly put the key back into the lock, and waited.

Very soon the door was vigorously shaken. His Eminence retired to the further end of the room and called loudly--

"Who goes there?"

"By Our Lady!" came in strong accents from the other side of the locked door, "whoever you may be, an you don't open this door, it shall fall in splinters atop of you."

Time to once more recross the room, and turn a small key, and a second later the Cardinal stood face to face with the Duke of Wess.e.x.

"His Grace of Wess.e.x!" he murmured, with an expression of boundless astonishment.

"Himself in person, my lord," rejoined Wess.e.x, trying with all his might to appear unconcerned before this man, whom he knew to be his deadliest enemy. "Marry!" he added, with well-acted gaiety, "the next moment, an Your Eminence had not released me, I might have lost my temper."

"A precious trifle Your Grace would no doubt have quickly found again,"

said His Eminence with marked suavity. "Ah! I well recollect in my young days being locked in . . . just like Your Grace . . . by a lady who was no less fair."

Had he entertained the slightest doubt as to whether the little dramatic episode just enacted had borne its bitter fruit, he would have seen it summarily dispelled with the first glance which he had cast at Wess.e.x.

The Duke's grave face was deadly pale, and the violent effort which he made to contain himself was apparent in the heavily swollen veins of his temples and the almost imperceptible tremor of his hands. But his voice was quite steady as he said lightly--

"Nay! why should Your Eminence speak of a lady in this case?"

"What have I said?" quoth the Cardinal, throwing up his be-ringed hands in mock alarm. "Nay! Your Grace need have no fear. Discretion is an integral portion of my calling. I was merely indulging in reminiscences.

My purple robes do not, as you know, conceal a priest. Though a prince of the Church, I am an ecclesiastic only in name, and therefore may remember, without a blush, that I was twenty once and very hot-tempered.

The lady in my case put me under lock and key whilst she went to another gallant."

"Again you speak of a lady, my lord," said the Duke, with the same light indifference. "May I ask----"

"Nay, nay! I pray you ask me nothing . . . I saw nothing, believe me . . ."

He paused a moment. Wess.e.x had turned to his dog, who, yawning and stretching, after the manner of his kind, and not the least upset by his recent incarceration, had just appeared in the doorway of the inner room.

"I saw nothing," continued the Cardinal, with a voice full of gentle, good-natured indulgence, "save a charming lady standing here alone, close to that door, when I entered with Her Majesty. What Queen Mary guessed or feared, alas! I cannot tell. The charming lady had just turned the key in the lock . . . and this set me thinking of my own youth and follies. . . . But Your Grace must pardon an old man who has but one affection left in life. Don Miguel is as a son to me----"

"I pray you, my lord," here interrupted Wess.e.x haughtily, "what has the Marquis de Suarez' name to do with me?"

"Only this, my son," rejoined the Cardinal with truly paternal benevolence, "Don Miguel is a stranger in England . . . I had almost hoped that hospitality would prevent Your Grace from flying your hawk after his birds. . . .

"Don Miguel would be hard hit," he added quickly, seeing that Wess.e.x, at the end of his patience, was about to make an angry retort, "for we all know that where His Grace of Wess.e.x desires to conquer, other vows and other lovers are very soon forgotten . . . But the Marquis is young . . . I would like to plead his cause. . . ."

His keen eyes had never for a moment strayed from the proud face of the Duke. He was shrewd enough to know that in speaking thus, he was reaching the outermost limits of His Grace's forbearance. His robes and his age rendered him to a certain extent immune from an actual quarrel with a man of Wess.e.x' physique, nor did fear for his own personal safety ever enter into the far-seeing calculations of this astute diplomatist.

Whatever his weaknesses might be, cowardice was not one of them, and he pursued his own aims boldly and relentlessly.

But he had had to endure a great deal through the personality and the presence of the Duke of Wess.e.x: the humiliation put upon him this very afternoon by Mary Tudor still rankled deeply in his mind, and the vein of cruelty, almost inseparable from his nationality, rendered the present situation peculiarly pleasing to this dissector of human hearts.

Until this moment he had perhaps not quite realized that His Grace of Wess.e.x had been hard hit. Having wilfully put away from his own life every tender sentiment, he did not understand the quick rise of a great and whole-souled pa.s.sion. The Duke had been ever noted for his gallantry, his chivalry, and his numerous and light amourettes, and the Cardinal never imagined that in the daring game which he had planned, and which with the help of the wench Mirrab he was about to play, he would have to reckon with something more serious than a pa.s.sing flirtation.

To his feline disposition, his callous estimate of human nature, his real hatred for this political rival, there was now a delicious satisfaction in dealing a really mortal wound to the man for whose sake he had oft been humiliated.

He felt a thrill of real and cruel delight in seeing this haughty Englishman half broken under the strain of this mental torture, which his slanderous words helped to aggravate. With half-closed eyes His Eminence was watching the quiver of the proud lip, ever ready with laughter and jest, the tremor of the slender hands, that peculiar stiffening of the whole figure which denotes a fierce struggle 'twixt raging pa.s.sion and iron self-control. Was it not a joy to watch this gaping wound, into which he himself was pouring a deadly poison with a steady and unerring hand?

The game had become doubly interesting now, and so much more important.

The Duke, obviously deeply in love with Lady Ursula, would certainly never turn to another woman again. If the intrigue contrived by His Eminence and the Marquis de Suarez succeeded in accordance with their expectations, then not only would His Grace be parted from the lady in accordance with Queen Mary's ultimatum, but he would probably bury his disillusionment and sorrow on some remote estate of his, far from Court and political strife.

Chance had indeed been kind to the envoys of the King of Spain.

Chance, and the natural sequence of events, skilfully guided by the Cardinal's gentle hands.

But His Eminence was clever enough to know exactly how far he might dare venture. For the moment he certainly had said enough. The Duke seemed partly dazed and had altogether forgotten his presence.

Without a sound the Cardinal glided out of the room.

The closing of the door roused Wess.e.x from the torpor into which he had fallen. The hall looked sombre and dreary, the wax tapers flickered feebly in their sockets, whilst strange shadows seemed to jeer at him from the dark corners around. He would not look up at the gallery, the steps whereon she stood, for it seemed to him as if some mocking witch wearing her face and her golden hair would look down at him from there, and laugh and sneer, until she finally faded from his sight in the arms of the Marquis de Suarez.

"Other vows and other lovers," he mused, whilst trying to shut away from his eyes the h.e.l.lish visions which tortured him. "So my beautiful f.a.n.n.y is not mine at all . . . but the Spaniard's . . . or another's . . .

what matter whose? Not true and proud, but a frisky wench, ready for intrigue, of whom these foreigners speak with a coa.r.s.e laugh and a shrug of the shoulders."

"Harry Plantagenet, my friend," he added, as the dog, seeming to feel the presence of sorrow, gave his master's hand a gentle lick, "His Grace of Wess.e.x has been made a fool of by a woman. . . . Ah, fortune! fickle fortune! one or two turns of your relentless wheel and a host of illusions . . . the last I fear me . . . have been scattered to the winds. . . . Shall we go, old Harry? Meseems you are the only honest person in this poison-infected Court. We'll not stay in it, friend, I promise you. . . . I am thirsting for the pure air of our Devon moors.

. . . Come, now . . . we must to bed . . . and sleep. . . . Not dream, old Harry! . . . whatever else we do . . . for G.o.d's sake, let us not dream. . . ."

CHAPTER XXVI

THE PROVOCATION

When Ursula finally succeeded in escaping from her room, where she had been forcibly confined--almost a prisoner--in the charge of two waiting-women, she returned to the hall, vaguely hoping that Wess.e.x would still be there. She found no one. The closet door was open; taking one of the wax tapers in her hand she peeped into the inner room and saw that it was empty.

On the fur rug, on the floor, was still the impress of Harry Plantagenet's body, as he had curled himself up patiently to wait and sleep.

A sudden draught extinguished the taper and left the small room in total darkness; to her overwrought nerves it seemed cold and lonely, like a newly opened grave. Wess.e.x had gone because he had heard that she had deceived him. The slanders uttered against her had found credence in his heart. Thus she mused, guessing at the truth, perhaps not even realizing how much he had suffered.

She would not go back to her room just yet. She knew that she could not rest. Though the room was empty there seemed something of him still in it, even in its cold and deserted aspect.

She lingered here, sitting in the chair where he had sat and heard. She could not cry, she would not give way, for she wished to think.

Therefore she lingered.

Thus fate worked its will in this strange history of that night.

Wess.e.x did not know that she had returned. After the Cardinal had left him he waited awhile, but he never guessed that she would come back. Had he not heard that her kindest favours had been the Spaniard's, ere his n.o.ble Grace had come across her path? With that almost morbid humility which is such a peculiar and inalienable characteristic of a great love, he thought it quite natural that she should love Don Miguel, or any other man, rather than him, and now he was only too willing to suppose that she had gone to her favoured gallant, leaving him in the ridiculous and painful position in which she had wantonly placed him.

He had waited in a desultory fas.h.i.+on, not really hoping that she would come. Then, as silence began to fall more and more upon the Palace, and the clock in the great tower boomed the midnight hour, he had finally turned his steps towards his own apartments.

To reach them he had to go along the cloisters, and traverse the great audience chamber, which lay between his suite of rooms and that occupied by the Cardinal de Moreno and Don Miguel de Suarez.

As he entered the vast room he was unpleasantly surprised to see the young Spaniard standing beside the distant window.