Chapter 7 The Hounds of God by Rafael Sabatini
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 recognised. 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 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 consequence 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 Esteban 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 Esteban de Mendoza was probably the only one who had not thirsted for the blood of the Princess Elizabeth. When danger to her was most threatening from the activities of Renaud, it was Don Esteban 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 Esteban 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.