“This is very charming and proper, Mistress Corbet, and like a true daughter of the Church,” put in Mr. Buxton, “but I shall be obliged to you if you will not in future kiss priests’ hands nor call them Father in the presence of the servants—at least not in my house.”
“Ah!” she said, “you were always prudent. Have you seen his secret doors?” she went on to Anthony. “The entire Catholic Church might play hare and hounds with the Holy Father as huntsman and the Cardinals as the whips, through Mr. Buxton’s secret labyrinths.”
“Wait until you are hare, and it is other than Holy Church that is a-hunting,” said Mr. Buxton, “and you will thank God for my labyrinths, as you call them.”
Then she greeted Isabel with great warmth.
“Why, my dear,” she said, “you are not the little Puritan maiden any longer. We must have a long talk to-night; and you shall tell me everything.”
“Mistress Mary is not so greatly changed,” said Isabel, smiling. “She always would be told everything.”
It was strange to Anthony to meet Mary again after so long, and to find her so little changed, as Isabel had said truly. He himself had passed through so much since they had last met at Greenwich over six years ago—his conversion, his foreign sojourn, and, above all, the bewildering and intoxicating sweetness of his ordination and priestly life. And yet he felt as close to Mary as ever, knit in a bond of wonderful good fellowship and brotherhood such as he had never felt to any other in just that kind and degree. He watched her, warm and content, as she talked across the polished oak and beneath the gleam of the candles; and listened, charmed by her air and her talk.
“There is not so much news of her Grace,” she said, “save that she is turning soldier in her old age. She rode out to Tilbury, you know, the other day, in steel cuirass and scarlet; out to see her dear Robin and the army; and her royal face was all smiles and becks, and lord! how the soldiers cheered! But if you had seen her as I did, in her room when she first buckled on her armour, and the joints did not fit—yes, and heard her! there were no smiles to spare then. She lodged at Mr. Rich’s, you know, two nights; but he would be Mr. Poor, I should suppose, by the time her Grace left him; for he will not see the worth of a shoelace again of all that he expended on her.”
“You see,” remarked Mr. Buxton to Isabel, “how fortunate we are in having such a friend of her Grace’s with us. We hear all the cream of the news, even though it be a trifle sour sometimes.”
“A lover of her Grace,” said Mary, “loves the truth about her, however bitter. But then I have no secret passages where I may hide from my sovereign!”