"Ah! you press me hard. Your lordship is a skilful player," said the Cardinal, intently studying the board. "As for me, you see I seem to move my pawns somewhat aimlessly. For the moment, I wish to part His Grace of Wessex from Lady Ursula . . . after that—we shall see."
Everingham was silent. A truly bitter conflict was raging in his simple heart. Loyalty to his friend, love for his country, and an overwhelming anxiety for its welfare, cried out loudly within him. The very thought of meeting Wessex face to face at this moment was terrible to him, and yet he would not undo what he had already done, and would not thwart the Spaniard's tortuous schemes by betraying them to the Duke.
The purpose which he had in view blinded him to everything save the hope of its ultimate achievement. At this moment he felt that, if Wessex shared Mary Tudor's throne with her, so much that was great and good would come to England thereby, that all petty considerations of temporary disloyalty, or the reputation of one innocent woman, would quickly vanish into insignificance.
The very feelings of remorse and of shame which he was experiencing at this moment strengthened him in his faith, for he was suffering keenly and acutely to the very depths of his honest heart, and he imagined that he was earning a crown of martyrdom thereby; he believed that by trampling on his own prejudices and jeopardizing his friendship with the man he loved and honoured best in all the world, he was adding to the cause, which he held to be sacred, the additional lustre of self-sacrifice.
His Eminence no doubt knew all this. With his intimate knowledge of the foibles of mankind, he found it an easy task enough to probe the inner thoughts of the transparent soul before him. He divined the young man's doubts and fears, the battle waged within him betwixt an abstruse political aim and his own upright nature. The game was continued in silence, Everingham's state of mind being revealed in the one bitter sigh—
"Ah! I go away with a heavy heart, feeling that I have helped to commit a treachery."
The Cardinal looked benevolently compassionate. At heart he was more than glad to think that this blundering Englishman would be well out of the way. Could he have foreseen the marvellous turn by which Fate meant to aid him in his intrigue, he would never have made overtures to so clumsy an ally as Lord Everingham. But at the time he had been driven into a corner through the furious jealousy of the Queen, who had well-nigh staggered him.
His Eminence then did not know how to act. For the first time in his life he had been completely outwitted by the events which he himself had helped to bring about. They had shaped themselves in exact opposition to his keenest expectations. How to part Wessex from Lady Ursula, with whom his volatile Grace was probably by then more than half in love, became an almost insolvable problem.
The Queen's ultimatum was almost a fiat. His Eminence saw himself and his retinue ignominiously quitting the English Court and returning—baffled, vanquished, humbled—to the throne of an infuriated monarch, who never forgave and always knew how to punish.
In despair the Cardinal had turned to an ally. He knew that His Grace was quite inaccessible. Towards all the foreign ambassadors the Duke of Wessex was always ensconced behind a barrier of unbendable hauteur and of frigid reserve. It would have been impossible to attack the lady of his choice openly, and in offering his own help to Everingham His Eminence vaguely hoped to arrive at some half-hidden mystery, a secret perhaps in His Grace's life which would have helped him to strike in the dark.