“Master Kay, are you my friend?”
“Hear me vow it, madam.”
“Alas! what vow?”
“That I am your friend.”
“Can you so perjure yourself? Are you not the King’s friend?”
“O, yes, indeed!”
“How can you be his friend and mine?”
“Why, as the bee’s the flower’s friend. I carry messages of love.”
“Does he ask mine of me?”
“Just that, madam--only your love, no more.”
“No more? You say well. Why, truly my love were a little thing to be
valued at no more than a man’s base desire.”
“The man is the King, madam. His desire is great like himself.”
“The King is the man, sir, and the man is hateful to me. Will you tell
him so, and be indeed my friend?”
“It would serve you ill, madam.”
“Will he force me? Alack! I will kill myself.”
“Nay, that you shall not, save you hold your breath and die of your
own sweetness like a rose. No other way, be assured. He will wear you
in his bosom first.”
“God! Dear Master Kay, good Master Kay, sweet, gentle friend, let me
kill myself!”
“I must not.”
“But to leap from the wall! It is a little way--but a step, and to
save me hell? You would not have me burn for ever?”
“I would have you reasonable, madam.”
She had fallen on her knees to him, this Maud Fitzwalter, fair
daughter of Robert the Baron, who was to come to head the revolt
against the infamous King. Her long white fingers plucked at his
sleeves; her eyes sought his eyes imploringly. He drank of them,
lusting in their passionate appeal. She was called Madelon la Belle,
and to see her was to think of spring, with its crab-blossoms against
a blue sky, its glow and youth and waywardness. There is a lack of the
sense of symmetry in Love that makes his sweetest faces out of
drawing; and yet one never doubts but that they are Love’s faces, as
endearing as they are faulty, and for their very faultiness most
lovable. His drawing, I say, may be defective, but he knows the trick
of lip and eyelash to a curve and how to snare men’s hearts thereby.
And so, while we criticise his work, saying that this or that line
goes astray, we would not have it turned by a hair’s breadth nearer
the truth, lest we should miss love in aiming at perfection.
Such a face was Maud’s, framed in its yellow braids so long that,
parted from her forehead and plaited in with a cord of gold, they
almost touched the ground when she stood up. For the rest her simple
tunic was green, and clasped loosely at the hips by a belt of jewelled
gold, the slack of which hung low. Madelon la Belle she was called, or
Passerose, for the sweetness of her Saxon face and the Saxon blue of
her eyes. But most of all she herself loved her name of Maid Marian,
given her in those green holts and brakes of Sherwood whither she had
followed her own true love, the outlawed Earl, and whence, in a dire
moment, she had been ravished by the cursed King. He had seen her
loveliness and coveted it, and where John coveted was no safety for
wife or virgin. And so it had befallen that once, when abiding in her
father’s castle of Dunmow, the Baron being absent, he had come,
shedding in his hot haste his smooth phrases and courtly wiles, and
had torn her from her shelter and carried her to London to his Tower
on the Thames. And there he kept her fast, not doubting but that she
would yield to him in time, and glooming ever a little and a little
more as her obduracy held him aloof.
This Kay was one of the King’s minions, whom he would send to bribe or
threaten the lovely captive into surrender. The fellow was no better
than a maquereau, who tasted passion by deputy. He was confident, in
the soft persuasiveness of his voice, in the irresistibility of his
figure and finery, of the ultimate success of his mediation. His hair,
rolled about his ears, was scented; his tunic, short beyond custom,
was of gold-embroidered crimson, and his hose were like-hued. A
curt-manteau, of cloth of gold lined with green, hung about his
shoulders, and on his feet were boots of green cloth, the upper part
of lattice-work, embossed at each crossing with a little leopard’s
head in gold. He had no real heart of tenderness or mercy. He was a
mere painted mask, as bowelless as the Elf-maiden herself.
“I would have you reasonable, madam,” he said.
She rose and stood away from him.
“Is it not in reason to guard one’s virtue?” she said, panting.
“Nay,” he answered; “but if you guard it alone and weaponless, and the
thief come in well-armed and strong of body? It were reason better to
yield it with a good grace.”
She threw herself upon a bench wailing, “O, hence, thou beast!” And so
she lay writhing--“Only to die--and they will not let me die!”
She sought and cried for death perpetually; she knew she was lost,
lacking that kind friend. Was it not pitiful? she whom life had so
favoured and love so moulded. She sought him, moaning and wringing her
hands, at barred windows, in dusky corners; she entreated her gaolers
to have pity on her, to put poison into her food, to lend her a
weapon, or a pathway to the battlements whence she might cast herself
down. Her every prayer but increased their watchfulness; Death was
excluded from her as jealously as if he had been her outlawed lover
himself.
On this day her desperation had risen to a pitch scarce endurable.
There had been signs that the royal patience was near exhausted. And
it was late spring without--she could see it through her window across
the green flats that stretched beyond the moat, beyond her prison. Its
sweetness reminded her of past days in the forest, so that her heart
came near to breaking. Her lips whispered the words of the little glad
song that she and her Robin had often sung together:
“Summer is a comin’ in,
Loud sing cuckoo.
Groweth seed and bloweth mead,
And springeth the wood now.
Sing cuckoo, cuckoo.”
“Sing cuckoo,” she wept, “the wanton’s shame! O, Robin, my Robin!” She
would never see him again--could never wish to. In a few hours,
perhaps, she would be a thing for his scorn, a thing that not death,
found too late, could cleanse.
In the evening came the King himself, with his frowning eyes and grim
jaw that, with the thick beard clipped close on it, looked like a
bulldog’s. He was in a furious mood, his Queen having vexed him, and
flashed and scintillated like a scaled devil in the light of the dozen
torches he brought.
“How now,” he thundered, “thou rever’s doxy! Still obdurate?”
Her very heart shook; but she stood up to him bravely.
“Plunge thy knife into my breast, Sir King,” she said, “and with my
last sigh I will praise thee.”
“What!” he snarled--“so much in love with Death? We’ll see to it thy
desire’s whetted in his fondling. He shall prick thee here and there
before ye close. Away with her to the Watch Tower!”
It was at least a respite, and she had dreaded the instant worst. This
Watch, or Round Turret, rose from the north-east angle of the great
Keep. He had her there at his mercy. Her cries might rise to heaven,
but could not penetrate the dense fabric below. In this chill, high
dungeon they imprisoned the girl. Its cold, its dreadful loneliness,
scant food, and the silent guard should break her spirit, the wretch
thought. He would taste her submission to the dregs, then fling her to
his lackeys to teach her what it meant to flout her King. She answered
by starving herself; on which came Kay, the silky-tongued, and warned
her smoothly that such contumacy could only invite its swift reprisal.
She would not be permitted so to slip through her royal lover’s hands.
Whereat she ate all that they would give her, and despaired the more.
There was no escape, none. Locked in as she was, she knew that her
every movement was canvassed by hidden eyes, her every sigh recorded.
And Robin made no sign.
One day it moved her to hear unwonted sounds rising from the outer
ward below, into which the public were admitted on occasion of State
festivities, executions, and so forth. The multitudinous jollity of
voices, soaring above the whine of bugle and tap of drum, proclaimed
it a May-day revel, when the whole place was delivered over to sport
and merriment.
She could not see from her high, narrow window, sunk deep in the wall;
but the babble flowing in on a shaft of sunlight made her heart warm
as it had never felt for days. Some spirit of release seemed to ride
in on the happy music, some emotion that made her bosom heave and her
eyes fill thick with tears.
She was standing, drinking in the merry noise, when her lids blinked
involuntarily, and, with a swish and smack on the ceiling of her cell,
something alighted at her feet. She fancied on the instant that a bird
had flown in and struck against the stone; but, looking down quickly,
she saw that it was a broken arrow--one of a dear, familiar pattern.
With a gasp she stooped, snatched at it, and stood listening. There
was no sign of any one having observed. With swift trembling fingers
she detached a strand of green worsted which was knotted about the
shaft under the quill, and found beneath a folded scrap of parchment,
which, on being opened, revealed a glutinous smear of brown substance,
and just these four woeful words written above:
“_Poor Robin’s Pledge. Farewell._”
It was her death-warrant.
So sweet and tragic, her heart near stopped from its sorrow as she
read it. She knew at once what it was--a mortal Arab poison, given
long years ago to her woodland lover by a follower of the Lion King.
It might serve him in a sore need, had been the words accompanying the
gift--to taste it was death. And once Robin had shown it to her,
proposing, half-playfully, that they should pledge one another in its
Lethe were Fate ever to dispart them.
And so she knew that her last hope was dead before her. Robin could
not come. He was hurt; he was ill; the guards were too many for them,
the Fates too strong, and their only refuge at last was in death. He
had sent some one of his cunning archers, Will Scarlet belike, to take
advantage of this merrymaking to speed the message, and, when she had
realised all that it meant to her, she fell on her knees with a
bursting prayer of gratitude to the Providence, to the dear lover,
between whom her honour was held safe from the despoiler.
She never doubted that her Robin meant to share the pledge. Likely his
dear spirit was waiting for her now, eager to link with hers in the
green woods where first their loves were spoken. Fearful of
interruption, she put her lips to the poison, and died with his name
on them.
That evening came Master Kay to the cell, with a sick smile on his
mouth, and in his hands a tray of comfortable things, including a
flask of drugged wine. The King’s patience was exhausted.
But when he saw what had happened he stole out, and fled to join the
refractory Barons, of whom was Fitzwalter, father of Madelon la Belle.
And in the meantime Robin did not die. The poison that was to kill him
came years later from the hand of his kinswoman, the Prioress of
Kirklees. Women will take things so literally.