The Tangled Skein Part 39

"A woman?" asked His Eminence. "What woman?"

"Nay, my lord, I couldn't see distinctly," replied the soldier, "but she was dressed all in white, and ran very quickly along the terrace not far from this window."

"Then Your Grace will perhaps be able to tell us . . ." suggested the Cardinal with utmost benevolence.

"I can tell Your Eminence nothing," replied Wess.e.x coldly. "I was in this room all the time and saw no woman near."

"Your Grace was here?" said His Eminence in gentle tones of profound astonishment, "alone with Don Miguel de Suarez? . . . The woman . . ."

"There was no woman here," rejoined the Duke of Wess.e.x firmly, "and I was alone with Don Miguel de Suarez."

There was dead silence now, the moon, pale, inquisitive, brilliant, peeped in through the window to see what was amiss. She saw a number of men recoiling, awestruck, from a small group composed of a dead man and of the first gentleman in the land self-confessed as a murderer. No one dared to speak, the moment was too solemn, too terrible, for any speech save a half-smothered sigh of horror.

The captain of the guard was the first to recollect his duty.

"Your Grace's sword . . ." he began, somewhat shamefacedly.

"Ah yes! I had forgot," said Wess.e.x quietly, as he rose to his feet. He drew his sword from its sheath, and with one quick, sudden wrench, broke the blade across his knee. Then he threw the pieces of steel on the ground.

"I am ready to follow you, friend captain," he said, with all the hauteur, all the light, easy graciousness so peculiar to himself.

The groups parted silently, almost respectfully, as His Grace of Wess.e.x pa.s.sed out of the room--a prisoner.

PART IV

HIS GRACE OF WESs.e.x

CHAPTER x.x.x

THOUGHTS

In the loneliness and silence of the Tower, the Duke of Wess.e.x had had enough leisure to think.

One fatal autumn afternoon, and what a change in the destinies of his life! Yesterday he was the first gentleman in England, loved by many, feared by a few, reverenced by all as the perfect embodiment of national pride and national grandeur--almost a king.

And to-day?

But of himself, his own obvious fate, the shame and disgrace of his present position, he thought very little. Ever an easy-going philosopher, he had as yet kept the insouciance of the gamester who has staked and lost and is content to retire from the board. One thing more, remember! Life in those days was not the priceless treasure which later civilization would have us believe it. There was a greater simplicity of faith, a more childlike cert.i.tude in the great truths of futurity, which we in our epoch are so ready to cavil at.

If nations and individuals committed excesses of unparalleled cruelty in the name of their respective creeds, if men hated each other, tortured each other, destroyed one another, it was because they misunderstood the teachings of religion, and not because they ignored or disbelieved them.

The cruelties themselves are unjustifiable, the mind of twentieth-century civilization can but gaze at them in mute horror, history can but record and deplore. But the religion which prompted them--for it was religion--was not the feeble, anaemic plaything of an effete generation in search of new excitements; it was strong and virile, alike in the atrocity of its crimes and the sublimity of its virtues.

Thus with a man like Wess.e.x. Life had been pleasant, of course, a bed of roses worthy even of one of our modern sybarites, but to him only the episode, which higher thoughts and Christian belief have ever suggested that it should be.

Perhaps it would be too much to say that faith alone caused him to look lightly upon this sudden, tragic ending of his brilliant career, but it undoubtedly helped him to preserve that easy and unembittered frame of mind of the philosopher, who, with life, loses that which hath but little value.

And now indeed, what worth would life have for him? This is where thoughts became bitter and cruel, not over death, not over disgrace, but over the treachery of a woman and the flight of an illusion. What did it all mean?

Sometimes now, when he sat looking straight before him at the cold grey walls of his prison, he seemed to see that strange dual personality mocking him with all the witchlike elusiveness which had mystified and tortured him from the first.

His "f.a.n.n.y"! that beautiful vision of innocent girlhood; arch, coquettish, tender yet pa.s.sionate, the clear depths of those blue eyes, the purity of that radiant smile!

And then she! Ursula Glynde! with bare shoulder and breast, cheeks flushed, but not with shame, eyes moist, yet not with tears, submitting with feeble, hoa.r.s.e protests to the masterful touch of an insolent Spaniard, only to take revenge later with the elemental barbarity of the street wench, too drunk to understand her crime.

Every fibre within him cried out that this was not the woman who had plucked a marguerite petal by petal, and quivered with delight at sound of the nightingale's voice among the willows; not the woman on whose soft girlish cheeks he had loved to call forth, with an ardent gaze or a bold word, a tender blush of rosy red, not the woman whom in one brief second he had learnt to love, whom in one mad, heavenly moment he had kissed.

Every sense in him clamoured for the belief that it had all been an ugly dream, an autumn madness from which he would presently wake at her feet.

Every sense! yet his eyes had seen her! his ears had heard her respond to her name, when uttered roughly by the man who seemed to be her master.

The truth itself never once dawned upon him. The whole trick had been managed with such devilish cunning, every piece in the intricate mechanism of that intrigue had been so carefully adjusted, that it would have required superhuman insight, or the cold, calculating mind of an unemotional mathematician, to have hit upon its natural explanation.

Wess.e.x possessed neither. He was just a man touched for the first time in his life with the strongest pa.s.sion of which human creatures are capable. He loved a woman with all the ardour, all the unreasoning instincts, all the sublime weakness and folly of which a loyal and strong heart is capable. That woman had proved a liar and a wanton in his sight.

He was forced to believe that; had he not seen her? Which of us hath ever really grasped the fact that one human being may be fas.h.i.+oned line for line, feature for feature, exactly like another? Yet such a thing is. Nature hath every freak. Why not that one?

He thought of everything, of every solution, of every possibility.

Heaven help him! of every excuse, but never of that. That Nature, in one of those wayward moods in which no one would dare deny that she at times indulges, had fas.h.i.+oned a kitchen wench as a lifelike replica of one of the most beautiful women in England--that one simple, indisputable, easily verified fact, never once entered his tortured mind.

She was mad! yes!--irresponsible for her own actions, yes!--wilfully wanton! no! a thousand times no! Hers was a dual nature, wherein angels and devils alternately held sway!

He, poor fool, had fallen under the spell of the angels, and the devils had then turned him away from his shrine, shattered his illusions, shown him his idol's feet of clay, then dared him ever to wors.h.i.+p again, ever to forget the mud which cloyed the bottom of the limpid stream.

With Harry Plantagenet for sole companion, during the brief days which preceded his trial, Wess.e.x had indeed leisure for his thoughts. The faithful animal knew quite well that his master suffered and could not now be comforted, but he would sit for hours with his wise head resting on Wess.e.x' knee, his gentle eyes fixed in mute sympathy upon the grave face of the Duke.

He knew better than any one that his master was in serious trouble, for when they were alone together, when no one was there who could see, no one but this true and silent companion, then philosophy, pride, and bitterness would fly to the winds and a few hot tears would ease the oppression which made Wess.e.x' heart ache almost to breaking.

And Harry Plantagenet, when he saw those tears, would curl himself up and go to sleep. With his keen, canine instinct, he felt no doubt only that an atmosphere of peace and rest had descended on the gloomy Tower prison.

The faithful creature could not understand that it was the visit of the angel of sorrow, who, in pa.s.sing, had lulled a weary man's agonizing soul with the gentle, soothing touch of his wing.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

MARYE, THE QUEENE

Thus day followed day, whilst in the great world without, England was preparing to see her premier lord arraigned before his peers on a charge of murder. And in one of the smaller chambers of her own private apartments at Hampton Court, Mary Tudor sat alone, praying and thinking, thinking and praying again.