‘Do not speak so loud,’ she said. ‘I am sure you are as incautious as a boy. Indeed, I wish you would harry the nest, as you say, and carry me off with you, for I am tired of never seeing you, except by stealth; and then it makes me so anxious and so fretful not to know where you are, or when we shall meet, for weeks and months together.’
‘My dear,’ he answered, gravely, ‘it is in the Queen’s service and that of our religion. It must triumph at last, as sure as those stars are shining above our heads. You and I have vowed to devote our lives, if need be, to the good cause. If worst should come to worst, we shall not be separated for long. There are no partings up there, Mary.’
He pressed her tenderly to his side, and pointed to the sky, in which star after star were now glimmering forth.
She drew her hand across her eyes, and kissed him fervently once more.
‘I shall be missed,’ she said. ‘I must stay no longer. It is very hard not to see you again for such a time! Well, well, duty before all. And now, have you the packet from the cardinal? What say the Guises to the last communication?’
‘They dare not even write,’ he answered. ‘Though I acted my part well, and looked such a masterful beggar, that even you, Mary, would have flung me an alms, they searched me when I landed at the port of Leith, scrip, wallet, and all; nay, they broke my staff across, lest it should be hollow, and filled with papers—I would I might have done it myself over the knave’s pate that could be so wary. No; the despatches must travel by word of mouth; and that is a better trick than even Randolph has learned yet, with all his cunning. Listen, Mary. They trust you, my pretty one, because you belong to me—this is for the Queen’s private ear alone.’
Maxwell was a man of honour. He would stay to hear no more. It was enough that his dearest hopes had withered in a breath. That the edifice he had been building insensibly for so long, decking it with all his fancies, and furnishing it, so to speak, with the most precious gifts of his affections, and the warmest feelings of the heart, had crumbled into dust at a moment’s notice. He would not, for that, intrude upon another’s secrets; and although the delay of a few moments might have placed him in possession of matters that would have insured his own aggrandizement, and enabled him to take a fearful revenge on the two by whom he felt so cruelly injured, yet he stole noiselessly away, placing his hands upon his ears, that he might not, inadvertently, hear another word of their communications.
Where is the man who can consistently shape his conduct upon a train of reasoning independent of his feelings, at least where those feelings are vitally concerned? It never occurred to him that he had no right to listen at all. The question was one of life and death to him, and he felt justified in arriving by any means at a certainty. Such is human nature in the best of us. Principle is principle, and honour is honour, only so long as circumstances are not too overwhelming, or necessity too urgent. Conscience is the only guide who never yet lost his way.
We will not follow Walter Maxwell as he left the Abbey garden for the solitude of his own chamber, never utterly dreary and forlorn till to-night. He had a brave, stout heart, that could strive against any odds, and scorned to flinch from any amount of pain. Perhaps these suffer most in proportion to their strength.