MARGARET’S PRISONER
/They/ made their way upwards through the dell by a winding path that
was all dappled with the sunlight beating through a ramage still
dripping from last night’s storm. The lady and her hound went ahead.
Don Pedro followed, partly because to follow became his condition,
partly because the pathway was scarcely wide enough to admit of their
going abreast.
As they neared the summit, where there was open ground, a lusty male
voice carolled suddenly above them. The actual words of his song have
been lost, and they do not greatly matter. The burden of it was that
life on the rolling sea was a jovial life, a roving life and a rolling
life. It fetched a laugh from Don Pedro whose sea-memories at the
moment were anything but jovial.
At the sound, the girl looked over her shoulder at him, hanging a
moment in her stride, and there was the ghost of a smile on her lips.
It might have been supposed, by one whose shrewdness was less satanic
than the Spaniard’s, that she smiled in sympathy with his laugh,
perceiving the wry humour of it. Don Pedro, however, caught in that
smile something different, something mystifying to which he did not
hold the clue. He was to hold it presently, when the singer disclosed
himself, which was after they had brushed past the last of those wet
branches and stood upon the open moorland all gold and purple in the
morning sunshine.
Don Pedro beheld a tall young gentleman, tawny of head and care-free
of countenance, who hailed her ladyship’s emergence into the open with
a glad cry and a light of gladness in his laughing eyes. He advanced
upon long legs that were cased in thigh-boots of untanned leather; he
rolled a little in his gait--a roll which it is to be feared he
exaggerated, so that all might know him at sight for the terrible
seaman he accounted himself. He was bareheaded, and his wind-tossed
hair, bleached in patches by the same sun which had burnt his skin to
its pleasant tan, increased the fresh young comeliness of his
appearance. He carried a fowling-piece on his shoulder.
Her ladyship’s dog bounded joyously forward to greet him, and for a
moment hampered his own eager advance upon her ladyship, who meanwhile
expressed surprise at his being abroad so early. He explained himself
briefly. There was a fair at Truro, and a company of mummers who it
was said had once played before Her Majesty in London. He had ridden
over betimes to offer to escort her thither if it should be her
pleasure to attend the play which was to be given after dinner in the
yard of the Trevanion Arms. Hearing that she had gone walking, he had
followed on foot, and to improve the occasion he had borrowed
Matthew’s fowling-piece, hoping to take back a hare or a grouse for
his lordship’s supper. From all this, rapidly delivered, he broke off
abruptly to inquire in Heaven’s name who might be her companion.
There were several ways in which her ladyship might have presented her
prisoner. Of these she mischievously chose the least explanatory and
at the same time the most startling.
‘This, Gervase, is Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna, Count of Marcos.’
The young seaman’s eyes grew round; his brows came together. ‘A
Spaniard!’ quoth he, very much as he might have said: ‘A devil!’ And
almost instinctively he swung the fowling-piece from his shoulder to
the crook of his arm, in readiness for action. He repeated his
ejaculation on a higher note: ‘A Spaniard!’
Don Pedro smiled. He commanded upon occasion a smile of melancholy
weariness, and this he now employed. ‘A very wet one, sir,’ he said in
his precise and careful English.
But Sir Gervase scarcely looked at him. His eyes, question-laden, were
chiefly upon her ladyship.
‘How comes a Spaniard here, a God’s name?’
It was Don Pedro who answered him. ‘The sea, in rejecting me, was so
benign as to cast me at the feet of her ladyship.’
Quite apart from his being a Spaniard, Gervase disliked him on the
spot. It is possible that Don Pedro intended that he should, for such
was the dissimilarity mental and physical between these two that in
whatever circumstances they might have met no love is conceivable
between them. There was no man more skilled than Don Pedro in the art
of subtle injury, that injury of tone and glance which is the more to
be resented because allied with civil words which give no ground
whatever for complaint.
‘You mean that you have been shipwrecked?’ Gervase questioned with a
blunt aggressiveness.
Don Pedro’s fine features were illumined by his faint, weary smile. ‘I
expressed it more gallantly, I hope. That is the only difference
between your words and mine.’
The young man came nearer. ‘Well, well,’ said he, with the least
suspicion of swagger. ‘It is fortunate I met you.’
Don Pedro bowed. ‘Sir, your courtesy places me in your debt.’
‘Courtesy?’ quoth Sir Gervase. He uttered a short laugh. ‘You take me
amiss, I think.’ And to avoid any possible further misunderstanding,
he added curtly: ‘I trust no Spaniard.’
Don Pedro looked at him. ‘What Spaniard asks your trust?’ he wondered.
This Sir Gervase disregarded. He came to business. ‘We will begin,’ he
informed her ladyship, ‘by depriving him of his weapons. Come, Sir
Spaniard. Hand them over.’
But here at length her ladyship interposed. ‘You’ll go your ways,
Gervase,’ she informed him lightly, ‘and meddle in matters that
concern you. This is not one of them.’
Momentarily he was rebuffed. ‘What’s that?’ Then he shrugged and
laughed. ‘This does concern me. It is a man’s business. Come, sir,
your weapons.’
But Don Pedro merely smiled, in that easy, weary way of his. ‘You are
too late, sir, by half an hour. These weapons are surrendered already.
I hold them merely on parole and in trust for my captor. I am the Lady
Margaret Trevanion’s prisoner.’
Sir Gervase first grew solemn in astonishment, then loosed his
laughter. In this there was an indiscreet note of contempt which
angered her ladyship and summoned a flush to her cheeks by which the
young man should have taken warning.
‘Midsummer frenzy!’ he crowed. ‘Who ever heard of a man being a
woman’s prisoner?’
‘You have just heard it, sir,’ Don Pedro reminded him.
Her ladyship became disdainful. ‘You are young, Gervase, and the world
lies before you for your instruction. Let us on, Don Pedro.’
‘Young!’ was all that his indignation would permit him to ejaculate.
‘Young, ay!’ she answered him. ‘And beset by all the faults that are
the marks of callowness. You detain me, I think.’
‘It is my intent, by Heaven!’ He stood squarely and angrily in their
way.
Don Pedro might have offered to remove him. But Don Pedro used his
wits. He perceived here, both in her ladyship and in Sir Gervase,
certain symptoms which he thought he recognized. His own situation
bristled with danger; he was very delicately poised; and he must be
careful to do nothing that would disturb his precarious balance. So he
remained aloof from the contention of which he was the subject.
Sir Gervase meanwhile made haste to put aside his own wrath before the
anger in Margaret’s eyes. He perceived betimes his error, though he
did not perceive that her indignation sprang chiefly from the very
fact that he bore himself so ill.
‘Margaret, this is a thing best…’
She broke in upon his pleading tone. ‘I have said that you detain me.’
She was very haughty and peremptory. There was perhaps in her humour a
touch of that perversity inherited from her perverse mother.
‘Margaret!’ His voice quivered with dismay and incredulity; his honest
eyes, so blue against the tan of his face were troubled. ‘I desire
only to serve you; to…’
‘No service is here required; certainly no service such as you
importunately offer.’ And for the third time: ‘Come, Don Pedro,’ she
commanded.
Sir Gervase fell back now, too deeply offended to offer another word.
She moved on, Don Pedro following obediently, and it was upon him that
Sir Gervase vented in his fierce scowl some of his seething anger. The
Spaniard met the scowl with a bow than which nothing could have been
more courteous and deferential.
To Sir Gervase, as he stood there following them with his brooding
eyes, the glory had departed out of that September morning, and the
joy in which he had come seeking Margaret was all withered in his
heart. He accounted himself monstrously ill used by her, and this not
entirely without reason. For a week now he had spent the greater part
of each day in her company, either at the Chase itself or else walking
or riding with her, and the relations between them had been so close
and warm that he was assured his period of probation was at an end and
that soon she would consent to become openly betrothed to him.
There was no coxcombry in the lad. If on the one hand he had begun
confidently to assure himself that she loved him, on the other her
love for him must remain an abiding miracle for which in his own
person and endowments he could find no sufficient cause. It was, like
the unearned gifts which sometimes fall from Fortune’s lap, something
to be accepted in wondering gratitude and without question.
But this morning’s events had destroyed all this again. Clearly she
did not love him. She found in his company beguilement of her
leisures. Time may have hung heavily upon her hands at Trevanion Chase
with that dull bookish father and she was glad to have him ride with
her, hawk with her, escort her upon occasion to Penrhyn or Truro, take
her sailing or fishing in the estuary. But love, real love, for him,
clearly there could be none in her heart, else she would not use him
as she did, would never have humbled him in this fashion, and denied
him what clearly lay within his rights where this shipwrecked Spaniard
was concerned. It was all incredible and exasperating. He was, he
found it necessary to assure himself, a man of some account. The Queen
had knighted him for his part in the action with the Armada, and he
held Her Majesty’s commission, which imposed upon him certain duties
here in Cornwall. The apprehension of this Spaniard washed ashore from
one of the galleons that had escaped the action in the Channel was
clearly within these duties, and Margaret or no Margaret, he would
accomplish it and refuse to be put off by any absurd romantic
surrender to herself which this Spaniard might have made. And not so
absurd, after all, that surrender, reflected Sir Gervase. Far from it.
It was an instance of Spanish craft and Spanish cunning to play upon
the romanticism of a woman for his own ends and the preservation of
his own skin.
Thus, after long and careful deliberation, Sir Gervase took his
resolve. He would follow them to the Chase, and relieve Lord Garth and
his daughter of this undesirable guest, whatever the subsequent
consequences to himself. That done, he would go seek Sir Francis
Drake, or any other leader about to put forth in quest of fresh
adventure, and bring to the enterprise that fine ship of his own which
Sir John Killigrew was fitting for him.
Thus you behold him come striding into the hall at Trevanion Chase,
and not to be detained there by old Martin, who was the master of his
lordship’s comparatively meagre household. He thrust the fowling-piece
into the servant’s hands, brushed him and his remonstrances aside, and
stalked into the library, where Margaret and her prisoner were
closeted with the Earl.
Sufficiently vexed and perturbed was his lordship already. Here was no
mere question of one of those momentary interruptions which never
failed to irritate him, but a matter likely to be fruitful of all
manner of disturbances and likely to keep the peace he desired for his
household in hourly danger of being shattered. The dim remaining
perceptions of the obligations of his station, however, had been
stimulated by the link which at the very outset Don Pedro had sought
to establish through his father’s acquaintance with the Earl in the
distant days of Queen Mary’s reign. This had lent his lordship grace
to dissemble at least some part of his dismay at the intrusion and all
the inconveniences which it adumbrated.
The spare, grey-faced old recluse had looked up from under his shaggy
brows with almost friendly eyes, and a faint smile moved under the
narrow, square-cut beard, once auburn but now almost white.
‘Oh, yes. I remember Don Estebán de Mendoza. I remember him very
well. He was your father, eh?’ The smile broadened a little. ‘I had
reason to esteem him.’
He fell into abstraction pondering events that were abruptly dragged
from the tomb of oblivion. He recalled that of all the Spaniards at
the Court of Queen Mary, Don Estebán de Mendoza was probably the only
one who did not thirst for the blood of the Princess Elizabeth. When
danger to her was most threatening from the activities of Renaud, it
was he who had warned the Lord Admiral, and this warning was so timely
as to have been perhaps the means of preserving Her Grace’s life.
It was his recollection of this that prompted his next words. ‘The son
of Don Estebán de Mendoza stands in no great peril in England. There
must be a score of gentlemen ready to serve you for your father’s
sake. The Queen, herself, once reminded of the past, should stand your
friend, as your father once stood hers.’
‘It is possible,’ said Don Pedro, ‘that they may prefer to remember
that I commanded a galleon of the Armada. Recent events must ever be
more present than remote ones. And in any case, between me and those
gentlemen who might befriend me lies almost the whole of England,
where it is not humanly possible to-day that a Spaniard should be
loved.’
It was at this point that Sir Gervase broke unbidden upon the
conference in that musty library, bringing with him into it some of
the vigorous freshness of the moorlands and the sea. He was a little
excited and extremely vehement, both of which were conditions which
his lordship detested. By virtue of the Queen’s commission which he
held, he proposed to relieve Lord Garth at once of this unwelcome
intruder. He announced the intention rather than offered a service,
which again was not the happiest way to deal with his lordship.
His lordship administered a reproof. ‘This commission which you hold
from Her Grace gives you no right to break in upon me when I am
private. I excuse it because I perceive the zeal by which you are
moved. But this zeal, Gervase, is misplaced and unnecessary. Don Pedro
has already surrendered himself a prisoner.’
‘To Margaret! To a woman!’ cried Sir Gervase, and accounted it
superfluous to do more than state the fact. Its absurdity was
self-revealing. ‘Let him surrender himself to the justices at Truro,
until order can be taken about him. By your leave, my lord, I will
myself escort him thither now.’
‘And risk having him torn in pieces in the streets,’ said her
ladyship. ‘That would be chivalrous.’
‘There would be no danger of it if he went with me. You could trust to
my escort.’
‘I should prefer to trust to these walls,’ he was answered.
They made Sir Gervase more and more impatient.
‘But it is fantastic!’ he insisted. ‘Who ever heard of a woman holding
a prisoner? And how is she to hold him?’
It was Don Pedro who answered, smoothly urbane. ‘It is honour, sir,
that holds a prisoner who has given his parole. I am bound more
securely by that than by all the chains with which your Truro gaol
could load me.’
This, of course, was not easily answered without using an
offensiveness difficult to justify. Gervase was still seeking grounds
upon which to dispute with them, when Margaret swept all argument
aside with the reminder that her bedraggled prisoner was weak and
faint, wet, cold, and hungry, and that, whatever might ultimately be
resolved about him, commonest humanity dictated that their immediate
care should be to feed and clothe and rest him.
His lordship, who perceived thus the possibility of an early return to
the study of the _Phaedo_ and the Socratic arguments upon the
immortality of the soul, seized the opportunity of putting an end to
all discussion and delivering his library from its invaders.