“And you?” asked Isabel, looking directly at her.
“Madam, I have no opinion,” replied Mary; and took herself to task for the lie.
CHAPTER III
SWEET BONDAGE
SPRING that year made battle royal with cold winds. Together they fought for the mastery. Yet where they gained in strength she gained in insistence. Driven away she yet returned again and again, till at length they were weary of the fight, and fled before her to return no more.
The victory hers she reigned supreme and triumphant, flung her snowy mantle over fruit trees, kissed to full awakening the flowers in copse and field, roused to chorus of warblings the birds’ song in the hedges. Knowing her reign late and soon to pass to that of summer she lost no moment of it once established. The south and west winds, now her subjects, sang softly among the trees and grasses at her bidding. The sun, king of all, crowned his reigning queen.
Peregrine sat in the castle garden at the foot of the white sundial which stood at the edge of the velvet grass sward. Around him were flower-beds brilliant with colour. Here were masses of small purple campanula covering the stone border between flower-bed and flagged path; clumps of anemones many-hued, named for St. Brigid; narcissi golden-eyed trembling in the soft air; forget-me-nots blue as the sky or Our Lady’s robe; scillas deeper dyed; tulips chalice-shaped, gold, crimson, and white,—a very riot of colour, gay as the sweet mad call of spring.
Beyond lay the park, the trees clean and fresh in their vesture of new leaves; and beyond that again the open spaces of the moorland. Peregrine, looking thereat, saw its freedom, remembered his own. A prisoner now, he laughed, yet without bitterness. Ten short weeks to change a man, yet he found himself changed.
Peregrine set himself to think. Yet this he found no easy task. He could see himself as he was ten weeks agone, fancied the mental image as clear-cut as a cameo, a good likeness withal. He could see himself as he was now, the outlines dimmed truly, blurred by some curious mist of thought, yet sufficiently clear to know that here was a different man from the sharp-cut cameo. To the change, the manner of its happening, he found it no easy task to bring clear thought. Once a freeman scorning all thought of thraldom, now a prisoner exulting in his bonds. That the bonds which held him differed from those that had held his sire he was very certain. Custom had bound his sire, he had his own word for it. Here was no custom to hold him, but bonds infinitely sweeter, light yet inflexible as iron. He would not be free of them if he could.
What was he? A prisoner in very sooth. Yet more,—a Jester who failed to jest; a man seeking for art, for guile, wherein to hide his heart, yet clothing it ever in truth, though truth carved to poetic fancy.