It did not make a mope of him, but came in spasms that almost drove him wild. He would at times pace the room and cry out: "Jesu! Caskoden, what shall I do? She will be the wife of the French king, and I shall sit in the wilderness and try every moment to imagine what she is doing and thinking. I shall find the bearing of Paris, and look in her direction until my brain melts in my effort to see her, and then I shall wander in the woods, a suffering imbecile, feeding on roots and nuts. Would to God one of us might die. If it were not selfish, I should wish I might be the one."
I said nothing in answer to these outbursts, as I had no consolation to offer.
We had two or three of our little meetings of four, dangerous as they were, at which Mary, feeling that each time she saw Brandon might be the last, would sit and look at him with glowing eyes that in turn softened and burned as he spoke. She did not talk much, but devoted all her time and energies to looking with her whole soul. Never before or since was there a girl so much in love. A young girl thoroughly in love is the most beautiful object on earth—beautiful even in ugliness. Imagine, then, what it made of Mary!
Growing partly, perhaps, out of his unattainability—for he was as far out of her reach as she out of his—she had long since begun to worship him. She had learned to know him so well, and his valiant defense of her in Billingsgate, together with his noble self-sacrifice in refusing to compromise her in order to save himself, had presented him to her in so noble a light that she had come to look up to him as her superior. Her surrender had been complete, and she found in it a joy far exceeding that of any victory or triumph she could imagine.
I could not for the life of me tell what would be the outcome of it all. Mary was one woman in ten thousand, so full was she of feminine force and will—a force which we men pretend to despise, but to which in the end we always succumb.
Like most women, the princess was not much given to analysis; and, I think, secretly felt that this matter of so great moment to her would, as everything else always had, eventually turn itself to her desire. She could not see the way, but, to her mind, there could be no doubt about it; fate was her friend; always had been, and surely always would be.
With Brandon it was different; experience as to how the ardently hoped for usually turns out to be the sadly regretted, together with a thorough face-to-face analysis of the situation, showed him the truth, all too clearly, and he longed for the day when he should go, as a sufferer longs for the surgeon's knife that is to relieve him of an aching limb. The hopelessness of the outlook had for the time destroyed nearly all of his combativeness, and had softened his nature almost to apathetic weakness. It would do no good to struggle in a boundless, fathomless sea; so he was ready to sink and was going to New Spain to hope no more.
Mary did not see what was to prevent the separation, but this did not trouble her as much as one would suppose, and she was content to let events take their own way, hoping and believing that in the end it would be hers. Events, however, continued in this wrong course so long and persistently that at last the truth dawned upon her and she began to doubt; and as time flew on and matters evinced a disposition to grow worse instead of better, she gradually, like the sundial in the moonlight, awakened to the fact that there was something wrong; a cog loose somewhere in the complicated machinery of fate—the fate which had always been her tried, trusted and obedient servant.
The trouble began in earnest with the discovery of our meetings in Lady Mary's parlor. There was nothing at all unusual in the fact that small companies of young folk frequently spent their evenings with her, but we knew well enough that the unusual element in our parties was their exceeding smallness. A company of eight or ten young persons was well enough, although it, of course, created jealousy on the part of those who were left out; but four—two of each sex—made a difference in kind, however much we might insist it was only in degree; and this we soon learned was the king's opinion.
You may be sure there was many a jealous person about the court ready to carry tales, and that it was impossible long to keep our meetings secret among such a host as then lived in Greenwich palace.