"Your patience shames Job the Patriarch," said Master Mervale, "yet, it seems to me, my lord, you do not consider one thing. I grant you that Pevensey and I are your equals neither in estate nor reputation; still, setting modesty aside, is it not possible the Lady Ursula may come, in time, to love one of us?"
"Setting common sense aside," said the marquis, stiffly, "it is possible she may be smitten with the smallpox. Let us hope, however, that she may escape both of these misfortunes."
The younger man refrained from speech for a while. Presently, "You liken love to a plague," he said, "yet I have heard there was once a cousin of the Lady Ursula's--a Mistress Katherine Beaufort--"
"Swounds!" Lord Falmouth had wheeled about, scowled, and then tapped sharply upon the palm of one hand with the nail-bitten fingers of the other. "Ay," said he, more slowly, "there was such a person."
"She loved you?" Master Mervale suggested.
"God help me!" replied the marquis; "we loved each other! I know not how you came by your information, nor do I ask. Yet, it is ill to open an old wound. I loved her; let that suffice." With a set face, he turned away for a moment and gazed toward the high parapets of Longaville, half-hidden by pale foliage and very white against the rain-washed sky; then groaned, and glared angrily into the lad's upturned countenance. "You talk of love," said the marquis; "a love compounded equally of youthful imagination, a liking for fantastic phrases and a disposition for caterwauling i' the moonlight. Ah, lad, lad!--if you but knew! That is not love; to love is to go mad like a star-struck moth, and afterward to strive in vain to forget, and to eat one's heart out in the loneliness, and to hunger--hunger--" The marquis spread his big hands helplessly, and then, with a quick, impatient gesture, swept back the mass of wheat-colored hair that fell about his face. "Ah, Master Mervale," he sighed, "I was right after all,--it is the cruelest plague in the world, and that same smallpox leaves less troubling scars."
"Yet," Master Mervale said, with courteous interest, "you did not marry?"
"Marry!" His lordship snarled toward the sun and laughed. "Look you, Master Mervale, I know not how far y'are acquainted with the business. It was in Cornwall yonder years since; I was but a lad, and she a wench,--Oh, such a wench, with tender blue eyes, and a faint, sweet voice that could deny me nothing! God does not fashion her like every day,--Dieu qui la fist de ses deux mains, saith the Frenchman." The marquis paced the grass, gnawing his lip and debating with himself. "Marry? Her family was good, but their deserts outranked their fortunes; their crest was not the topmost feather in Fortune's cap, you understand; somewhat sunken i' the world, Master Mervale, somewhat sunken. And I? My father--God rest his bones!--was a cold, hard man, and my two elder brothers--Holy Virgin, pray for them!--loved me none too well. I was the cadet then: Heaven helps them that help themselves, says my father, and I ha'n't a penny for you. My way was yet to make in the world; to saddle myself with a dowerless wench--even a wench whose least 'Good-morning' set a man's heart hammering at his ribs--would have been folly, Master Mervale. Utter, improvident, shiftless, bedlamite folly, lad!"