Sir Mortimer | Page 8

of an hour to
come when that dear and fair lady shall bid me welcome." His eyes
looked into the distance, and the smile had crept to his lips. "It was my
meaning to speak to her to-night before I left the Palace, but this chance
offers better. Will you give me precedence, Henry? let me see and
speak to your sister alone in that same covert of which you tell me?"
"But--but--" stammered Sedley.
Sir Mortimer laughed. "'But ... Dione!' you would say. 'Ah, faithless
poet, forsworn knight!' you would say. Not so, my friend." He looked
far away with shining eyes. "That unknown nymph, that lady whom I
praise in verse, whose poet I am, that Dione at whose real name you all
do vainly guess--it is thy sister, lad! Nay,--she knows me not for her
worshipper, nor do I know that I can win her love. I would try ..."
Sedley's smooth cheek glowed and his eyes shone. He was young; he
loved his sister, orphaned like himself and the neglected ward of a
decaying house; while to his ardent fancy the man above him, superb in

his violet dress, courteous and excellent in all that he did, was a very
Palmerin or Amadis de Gaul. Now, impetuously, he put his hand upon
that other hand touching his shoulder, and drew it to his lips in a caress,
of which, being Elizabethans, neither was at all ashamed. In the dark,
deeply fringed eyes that he raised to his leader's face there was a boyish
and poetic adoration for the sea-captain, the man of war who was yet a
courtier and a scholar, the violet knight who was to lead him up the
heights which long ago the knight himself had scaled.
"Damaris is a fair maid, and good and learned," he said in a whisper,
half shy, half eager. "May you dream as you wish, Sir Mortimer! For
the way to the covert--'tis by yonder path that's all in sunshine."

II
Beneath a great oak-tree, where light and shadow made a checkered
round, Mistress Damaris Sedley sat upon the earth in a gown of
rose-colored silk. Across her knee, under her clasped hands, lay a light
racket, for she had strayed this way from battledore and shuttlecock and
the sprightly company of maids of honor and gentlemen pensioners
engaged thereat. She was a fair lady, of a clear pallor, with a red mouth
very subtly charming, and dark eyes beneath level brows. Her eyes had
depths on depths: to one player of battledore and shuttlecock they were
merely large brown orbs; another might find in them worlds below
worlds; a third, going deeper, might, Actæon-like, surprise the bare
soul. A curiously wrought net of gold caught her dark hair in its meshes,
and pearls were in her ears, and around the white column of her throat
rising between the ruff's gossamer walls. She fingered the racket, idly
listening the while for a foot-fall beyond her round of trees. Hearing it
at last, and taking it for her brother's, she looked up with a proud and
tender smile.
"Fie upon thee for a laggard, Henry!" she began: "I warrant thy Captain
meets not his Dione with so slow a step!" Then, seeing who stood
before her, she left her seat between the oak roots and curtsied low. "Sir
Mortimer Ferne," she said, and rising to her full height, met his eyes

with that deeper gaze of hers.
Ferne advanced, and bending his knee to the short turf, took and kissed
her hand. "Fair and sweet lady," he said, "I made suit to your brother,
and he has given me, his friend, this happy chance. Now I make my
supplication to you, to whom I would be that, and more. All this week
have I vainly sought for speech with you alone. But now these blessed
trees hem us round; there is none to spy or listen--and here is a mossy
bank, fit throne for a faery queen. Will you hear me speak?"
The maid of honor looked at him with rose bloom upon her cheeks, and
in her eyes, although they smiled, a moisture as of half-sprung tears. "Is
it of Henry?" she asked. "Ah, sir, you have been so good to him! He is
very dear to me.... I would that I could thank you--"
As she spoke she moved with him to the green bank, sat down, and
clasped her hands about her knees. The man who on the morrow should
leave behind him court and court ways, and all fair sights such as this,
leaned against the oak and looked down upon her. When, after a little
silence, he began to speak, it was like a right courtier of the day.
"Fair Mistress Damaris," he said,