"But you have grown to the stature of a man, while I——"
"Be content, sweetheart," he would answer. "You are like a yearling colt—nay, 't is filly I mean. How dost spell that same word filly now, Mistress Scholar? With the 'P' and the 'h' it should be, in the Grecian manner. But indeed you will overtake my growth soon enough. When I did first know you, my age to yours was as two to one and more. When I have done with Oxford, it will be but as four to three, and thou older for a woman than I for a man."
"Tell me, then," I said to him one day, after some such talk, "when, last summer, you were at the Court with madam your mother, and I saw you not at all, did you not see many fine ladies and women of great beauty?"
"Ay, many," quoth he, "but none such as you will be. Do but give the colt time."
And when he was gone I would marvel why I cared for the beauty I had not. And since I found no clear answer to the question in my own mind, and ventured to seek it from no other, it was well, maybe, that Ned's long absence at Oxford and in London with the Lady Mary, extending as it did over the better part of four years, put the matter in time clean out of my head. Indeed, even in our quiet corner, we had other matter to consider in those days than the vanity of a half-grown maid.
Now it is only in later times that I have come even to the most partial understanding of the many twists and turns in the fate of our perturbed island, that were then succeeding each other with so bewildering rapidity. This is no public history, or my ignorance would make of it a worse book yet than it promises, and I shall but recall the memory of those unquiet events that affected at this time our quiet life.
That same year of Ned's coming again to Royston, between his leaving Sherborne and going to Oxford, was the time of the late Duke of Monmouth's progress through England, wherein he did take upon himself so much of the state of his royal ancestry as to encourage greatly the fond belief of the common people, particularly in the west country, in that vain story of a certain Black Box, where should be found (did one credit these mystery-mongers) proof indisputable of the marriage of the Duke's mother, Mistress Lucy Walters, with his acknowledged father, King Charles II., then upon the throne. Of the merits of the matter I know nothing, but remember well how Sir Michael would say the wish was father to the thought in the minds of such as dreaded most the coming to the throne of the Papist Duke of York. He had no patience, he said, with those that went after these idle tales; yet he showed much in exhorting, threatening, and persuading those of his own people that seemed most in peril of misleading by these errors. In especial, I do recall something of a disputation between him and Simon Emmet, our steward. This good man was in a measure privileged in his intercourse with Sir Michael, being an old trooper of the first force my father had raised and led for King Charles the Martyr. He was, though Cavalier and Royalist to the marrow, a Protestant of an earnestness well-nigh fanatical.
Simon stood beneath the open window of my bedchamber, on the sward that there sweeps up right to the walls of the house from the park, so that I have often dropped bread to the deer grown bold in their feeding. My father leaned from the window beneath me, smoking a pipe of Virginia tobacco, while I sat gazing over the trees and busied, till my ear was caught by their words, with thought of Oxford and the Court at London. And this is what I heard:
Said Sir Michael Drayton: "Ill will come of this madness, Simon. To uphold the claim of a bastard to the throne you and I have fought for is not the work of a wise man nor a good."
"'T is not so sure the Duke is that," answered Emmet. "I, for one, hold him as well born as the other Duke" (meaning the Duke of York), "and, at any rate, my lord of Monmouth is no Papist."