Upon the instant the great earl was incensed out of all proportion to the affront of the seigneur’s existence. He suddenly hated Lemprière only less than he hated Michel de la Forêt. As he still waited irritably for a summons from Elizabeth, he brooded on every word and every look she had given him of late; he recalled her manner to him in the antechapel the day before, and the admiring look she cast on De la Forêt but now. He had seen more in it than mere approval of courage and the self-reliant bearing of a refugee of her own religion.
These were days when the soldier of fortune mounted to high places. He needed but to carry the banner of bravery and a busy sword, and his way to power was not hindered by poor estate. To be gently born was the one thing needful, and Michel de la Forêt was gently born; and he had still his sword, though he chose not to use it in Elizabeth’s service. My lord knew it might be easier for a stranger like De la Forêt, who came with no encumbrance, to mount to place in the struggles of the court, than for an Englishman, whose increasing and ever-bolder enemies were undermining on every hand, to hold his own.
He began to think upon ways and means to meet this sudden preference of the Queen, made sharply manifest, as he waited in the antechamber, by a summons to the refugee to enter the Queen’s apartments. When the refugee came forth again he wore a sword the Queen had sent him, and a packet of Latimer’s sermons were under his arm. Leicester was unaware that Elizabeth herself did not see De la Forêt when he was thus hastily called; but that her lady-in-waiting, the Duke’s Daughter, who figured so largely in the pictures Lemprière drew of his experiences at Greenwich Palace, brought forth the sermons and the sword, with this message from the Queen:
“The Queen says that it is but fair to the sword to be by Michel de la Forêt’s side when the sermons are in his hand, that his choice have every seeming of fairness. For her Majesty says it is still his choice between the Sword and the Book till Trinity Day.”
Leicester, however, only saw the sword at the side of the refugee and the gold-bound book under his arm as he came forth, and in a rage he left the palace and gloomily walked under the trees, denying himself to every one.
To seize De la Forêt, and send him to the Medici, and then rely on Elizabeth’s favor for his pardon, as he had done in the past? That might do, but the risk to England was too great. It would be like the Queen, if her temper was up, to demand from the Medici the return of De la Forêt, and war might ensue. Two women, with two nations behind them, were not to be played lightly against each other, trusting to their common-sense and humor.
As he walked among the trees, brooding with averted eyes, he was suddenly faced by the Seigneur of Rozel, who also was shaken from his discretion and the best interests of the two fugitives he was bound to protect by a late offence against his own dignity. A seed of rancor had been sown in his mind which had grown to a great size, and must presently burst into a dark flower of vengeance. He, Lemprière of Rozel, with three dove-cotes, the perquage, and the office of butler to the Queen, to be called a “farmer,” to be sneered at—it was not in the blood of man, not in the towering vanity of a Lemprière, to endure it at any price computable to mortal mind.
Thus there were in England on that day two fools (there are as many now), and one said: