“Nay, that you shall not, save you hold your breath and die of your own sweetness like a rose. No other way, be assured. He will wear you in his bosom first.”
“God! Dear Master Kay, good Master Kay, sweet, gentle friend, let me kill myself!”
“I must not.”
“But to leap from the wall! It is a little way—but a step, and to save me hell! You would not have me burn for ever?”
“I would have you reasonable, madam.”
She had fallen on her knees to him, this Maud Fitzwalter, fair daughter of Robert the Baron, who was to come to head the revolt against the infamous King. Her long white fingers plucked at his sleeves; her eyes sought his eyes imploringly. He drank of them, lusting in their passionate appeal. She was called Madelon la Belle, and to see her was to think of spring, with its crab-blossoms against a blue sky, its glow and youth and waywardness. There is a lack of the sense of symmetry in Love that makes his sweetest faces out of drawing; and yet one never doubts but that they are Love’s faces, as endearing as they are faulty and for their very faultiness most lovable. His drawing, I say, may be defective, but he knows the trick of lip and eyelash to a curve and how to snare men’s hearts thereby. And so, while we criticise his work, saying that this or that line goes astray, we would not have it turned by a hair’s breadth nearer the truth, lest we should miss love in aiming at perfection.
Such a face was Maud’s, framed in its yellow braids so long that, parted from her forehead and plaited in with a cord of gold, they almost touched the ground when she stood up. For the rest her simple tunic was green, and clasped loosely at the hips by a belt of jewelled gold, the slack of which hung low. Madelon la Belle she was called, or Passerose, for the sweetness of her Saxon face and the Saxon blue of her eyes. But most of all she herself loved her name of Maid Marian, given her in those green holts and brakes of Sherwood whither she had followed her own true love, the outlawed Earl, and whence, in a dire moment, she had been ravished by the cursed King. He had seen her loveliness and coveted it, and where John coveted was no safety for wife or virgin. And so it had befallen that once, when abiding in her father’s castle of Dunmow, the Baron being absent, he had come, shedding in his hot haste his smooth phrases and courtly wiles, and had torn her from her shelter and carried her to London to his Tower on the Thames. And there he kept her fast, not doubting but that she would yield to him in time, and glooming ever a little and a little more as her obduracy held him aloof.
This Kay was one of the King’s minions, whom he would send to bribe or threaten the lovely captive into surrender. The fellow was no better than a maquereau, who tasted passion by deputy. He was confident, in the soft persuasiveness of his voice, in the irresistibility of his figure and finery, of the ultimate success of his mediation. His hair, rolled about his ears, was scented; his tunic, short beyond custom, was of gold-embroidered crimson, and his hose were like-hued. A curt-manteau, of cloth of gold lined with green, hung about his shoulders, and on his feet were boots of green cloth, the upper part of lattice-work, embossed at each crossing with a little leopard’s head in gold. He had no real heart of tenderness or mercy. He was a mere painted mask, as bowelless as the Elf-maiden herself.
“I would have you reasonable, madam,” he said.
She rose and stood away from him.