How Master Walgrave fell short of Type.
What the poet had to tell might never have been known had he not chanced to hear me speak to the maiden one day of Turlogh Luinech O’Neill, her father, and the Lady Cantire, her step-dame. He pricked up his ears at the names.
“Hath Fortuna then reserved it to her mortal favourite to discover in my mistress, my paragon of all virtue, the Lady Rose O’Neill? My Hollander, why this churlish secrecy? why told ye not as much before?”
“Why,” said I, “I supposed you knew the name of the lady you call your mistress.”
“Groundling!” said he, “a poet needeth no name but Love and Beauty. But had I known this lady was she you say, I had relieved my mind of a notable piece of news for her ear.”
“Say on, Sir Poet,” said the maiden, who had approached and heard these last words.
“Now then, mistress mine,” said he, “and thank not this voiceless dabbler in ink for the mercy, that travelling not a week before I reached London, I chanced into the company of a stranger, who fell captive to my wit, and displayed so lively a tooth for the sweets of Parnassus—to wit, my poesy—that, hearing I was about to issue the same imprint, prayed me enrich him with a copy. The which I condescended to promise him. Being thus established in a brotherhood of poetic kinship, we opened our hearts one to another. And in our talk he confessed to me that he was an Irish gentleman in the service of one Turlogh Luinech O’Neill, a notable chieftain in the Isle of the Saints; and that he travelled to London on an errand to no less a man than her Majesty’s Secretary of State to report to him the death and burial of one Lady Cantire, an aged servant of her Majesty, and sometime wife to the said Turlogh.”
This was news indeed; and the maiden’s face flushed with many mingled emotions as she heard it.
“Can it be true?” said she. “Sir Poet, tell me briefly what else this gentleman had to tell of my father?”
“Nay, mistress mine, I can remember little else; for I was thinking not of his master, but his poetic tooth; not of his defunct mistress, but of my living muse. Yet, stay, he told me the old man was desolate, his sons being all established elsewhere, and his one daughter lost. By which I take it, he spoke of thy celestial self. And strange indeed if the loss of such a one were not as blindness itself to one who hath looked in they resplendent face.”