"But how--tell me how," cried Seymour, "I can see you again--how write to you?"
"See me?" replied Arabella, hastily; "I know not; chance and fortune must favour us. But as to writing, you may trust Ida Mara with anything."
"Ida Mara!--who is she?" asked her lover.
"One of my gentlewomen," replied Arabella, in a gay tone; "the only one, indeed, except two little maids that wait on her and me. But here is Sir Harry West," she continued, turning towards the old knight as he approached, "he will tell you more about her, for on my truth I think the girl is in love with him, and he with her. Is it not so, Sir Harry?--we speak of Ida Mara."
Good Sir Harry West made no denial of the fact, but told the lady that the Queen was about to retire; and Arabella followed him towards the terrace; but, as she went, she took care that Seymour should have so full a description of the fair Italian, that he could find no difficulty in distinguishing her from the other attendants at the Court. Walking by her side, he crossed the terrace with her towards the Queen, but took his leave before she joined the royal circle, and was soon lost to her sight amongst the various groups that were scattered over the ground.
The Court and the courtiers still, for several hours, prolonged their revels in the halls of Theobalds; and cups of wine were drunk, and scenes of folly enacted, which I will not pause to enumerate or describe. Laughter, and song, and gaming, and many a vice, and many an absurdity, had there to take place before morning; but for Arabella Stuart, the day ended with the walk in the gardens.
[CHAPTER XXI.]
The reader does not require to be informed, that the aspect of London in those days was very different from that which it shows at present. The great fire had not yet swept away that foul nest of narrow streets and tall houses, in which the plague lingered, almost as pertinaciously as in the lanes of an Oriental city; nor had the increasing population yet spread itself over the fields, or swallowed up the villages, by which the great metropolis of England was surrounded in former times, but which have been gradually covered with the mansions of succeeding races of the fashionable world, and fringed by the snug villas of commercial men, till the town is so gradually blended with the country, that it is scarcely possible to say where the one ends and the other begins.
Those large squares which have retained, in some instances to the present day, the name of fields, were then fields indeed. Boys and girls went a-Maying where balls and suppers are now held; and within about a quarter of a mile of Lincoln's Inn, a small, tall-chimneyed house, four stories high on one side, and two on another, with a round tower of brick-work added to contain the staircase, which seemed to have been forgotten in the original construction, rose in the midst of a garden, very near the spot where gentlemen in curious wigs and black gowns now hurry about to plead the cause of the rich, but not in general of the poor, if they can help it.
At the garden gate of this house, in the beginning of August, a coach stopped one day about three of the clock, and two ladies with the usual masks on their faces descended, and walked with a quick pace towards the door in the round tower. Before they reached it, however, that door was opened by the small page whom we have seen accompanying Master Weston, otherwise Doctor Foreman, and who, when at home, had the office, which he performed most acutely, of looking through a small loophole in the tower, to examine strictly all the personages who approached the Doctor's house.