Often my lady would take me apart, and bid me tell her of my lord when he was in Ireland. Of those years she was never tired of hearing; and when my tongue or my thoughts would grow slack she would grow impatient with me. Yet I think my love for her lord pleased her. She was a little lady, and the brightest ever I saw, with cream-pale cheeks and the liveliest of black eyes. I could not wonder that for a time she lulled to sleep my lord’s desires for America. Very pitiful she was towards the havoc their long parting and the trouble and the imprisonment had wrought in him, and would stand a-tiptoes to smooth the wrinkles out with her dainty finger.
The Lord Cecil was now my lord’s friend at court, and to him she writ beseeching that there might be no more voyages, at least for the time.
“I hope for my sake,” she writ, “that you wilt rather draw Walter toward the East than help him forward toward the sunset, if any respect to me or love to him be not forgotten.”
So we remained in peace, and young Walter and I flew our hawks and played at the ball, and fished and swam to our hearts’ content. And dearly as I loved my lord, I came to love his son hardly less. He was a brave lad of Devon, this Walter Raleigh, tall as his father, and nigh as comely, yet innocent and quiet, with the country innocence and quietude, because by reason of the Queen’s displeasure he had abode all his years in those sequestered ways; yet skilled in all such manly and courtly arts as became the son of his father; so that he was as good with a sonnet as at swordplay, and could dance the pavane as prettily as he could loose his goshawk. And for all his innocence was not unfit to face a rough world; and for all his quiet kindliness was as brave and as quick to fight as any gallant ever I saw.
My lord looked on at our comradeship well pleased. I heard him ask my Lady Raleigh one day if we did not make a gallant couple, at which my lady pouted, and said he was loving me in Ireland when she and her Wat were forgotten. “Nay,” said he, “that never was, Sweetlips; but he comforted me something in my loneliness without wife and son.” Then my lady called me to her, and kissed me like a mother, and vowed that she loved me for what I had been to her lord in those Irish years. She changed quickly in her pretty humors; but there was no change in her constancy and kindness towards me any more than in her lord’s love.
After that we went eastward for a season to the village of Bath, to drink at its springs, which had been discovered to be sovereign remedy for many ills. It was my Lady Raleigh’s will to make her lord well again. “As though, Bess,” he said, “you could turn backward the years we have been parted.”
And I left the Manor-house with grief and pain, for never again, I feared, should we have a season of such peace. My lord was not one to abide long in peace; and certainly the Bath waters as they restored his strength restored also his passion for adventure and turmoil, so that my Lady Raleigh in healing him but defeated her desire of keeping him with her. For after a time he seemed no longer quiet and well-content. And he had yet not only his share of the treasure-ship, though I doubt not the greater part was poured in the Queen’s lap, but he had also my Lord Boyle’s purse to draw upon.
Then as he was becoming restive, yea, straining as a hound strains at the leash, and declaring that he would sail before the mast if he might none other way, one of his captains, Popham by name, and a stout old sea-dog from the harbor town of Plymouth, brought him letters writ by a Spanish captain to the King of Spain, and captured by the English ship. Reading them my lord seemed as he would choke with fury. I knew how my lord’s heart turned to Guiana, the golden country. And these letters reported that the Governor of Trinidad had annexed this same wondrous land in the name of King Philip. Then, even my Lady Raleigh saw that it was no use seeking to hold her lord any longer; and she bade him go, with so sweet a grace and so high a spirit that she proved herself even a worthy mate for the Great Captain.
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