One day the queen summoned Jane and put her to the question. Now, Jane thought the truth was made only to be told, a fallacy into which many good people have fallen, to their utter destruction; since the truth, like every other good thing, may be abused.
Well! Jane told it all in a moment, and Catherine was so horrified that she was like to faint. She went with her hair-lifting horror to the king, and poured into his ears a tale of imprudence and debauchery well calculated to start his righteous, virtue-prompted indignation into a threatening flame.
Mary, Jane, Brandon and myself were at once summoned to the presence of both their majesties and soundly reprimanded. Three of us were ordered to leave the court before we could speak a word in self-defense, and Jane had enough of her favorite truth for once. Mary, however, came to our rescue with her coaxing eloquence and potent, feminine logic, and soon convinced Henry that the queen, who really counted for little with him, had made a mountain out of a very small mole-hill. Thus the royal wrath was appeased to such an extent that the order for expulsion was modified to a command that there be no more quartette gatherings in Princess Mary's parlor. This leniency was more easy for the princess to bring about, by reason of the fact that she had not spoken to her brother since the day she went to see him after Wolsey's visit, and had been so roughly driven off. At first, upon her refusal to speak to him—after the Wolsey visit—Henry was angry on account of what he called her insolence; but as she did not seem to care for that, and as his anger did nothing toward unsealing her lips, he pretended indifference. Still the same stubborn silence was maintained. This soon began to amuse the king, and of late he had been trying to be on friendly terms again with his sister through a series of elephantine antics and bear-like pleasantries, which were the most dismal failures—that is, in the way of bringing about a reconciliation. They were more successful from a comical point of view. So Henry was really glad for something that would loosen the tongue usually so lively, and for an opportunity to gratify his sister from whom he was demanding such a sacrifice, and for whom he expected to receive no less a price than the help of Louis of France, the most powerful king of Europe, to the imperial crown.
Thus our meetings were broken up, and Brandon knew his dream was over, and that any effort to see the princess would probably result in disaster for them both; for him certainly.
The king upon that same day told Mary of the intercepted letter sent by her to Brandon at Newgate, and accused her of what he was pleased to term an improper feeling for a low-born fellow.
Mary at once sent a full account of the communication in a letter to Brandon, who read it with no small degree of ill comfort as the harbinger of trouble.
"I had better leave here soon, or I may go without my head," he remarked. "When that thought gets to working in the king's brain, he will strike, and I—shall fall."
Letters began to come to our rooms from Mary, at first begging Brandon to come to her, and then upbraiding him because of his coldness and cowardice, and telling him that if he cared for her as she did for him, he would see her, though he had to wade through fire and blood. That was exactly where the trouble lay; it was not fire and blood through which he would have to pass; they were small matters, mere nothings that would really have added zest and interest to the achievement. But the frowning laugh of the tyrant, who could bind him hand and foot, and a vivid remembrance of the Newgate dungeon, with a dangling noose or a hollowed-out block in the near background, were matters that would have taken the adventurous tendency out of even the cracked brain of chivalry itself. Brandon cared only to fight where there was a possible victory or ransom, or a prospect of some sort, at least, of achieving success. Bayard preferred a stone wall, and thought to show his brains by beating them out against it, and in a sense he could do it. * * * What a pity this senseless, stiff-kneed, light-headed chivalry did not beat its brains out several centuries before Bayard put such an absurd price upon himself.
So every phase of the question which his good sense presented told Brandon, whose passion was as ardent though not so impatient as Mary's, that it would be worse than foolhardy to try to see her. He, however, had determined to see her once more before he left, but as it could, in all probability, be only once, he was reserving the meeting until the last, and had written Mary that it was their best and only chance.
This brought to Mary a stinging realization of the fact that Brandon was about to leave her and that she would lose him if something were not done quickly. Now for Mary, after a life of gratified whims, to lose the very thing she wanted most of all—that for which she would willingly have given up every other desire her heart had ever coined—was a thought hardly to be endured. She felt that the world would surely collapse. It could not, would not, should not be.