Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/422

400 Damaris, swaying forward, caught at a heavy settle, sank to her knee, and laid her brow against the wood. Cecily, gazing down upon her, saw her cheek glow pure carnation, saw the quivering of the long eyelashes and the happy trembling of the lip. Presently the wave of color fled; she unclosed her eyes, raised her head. "But there was something, was there not, to be borne? God forgive me, I had forgot that I have a brother!"

Cecily, whose courage was ebbing, began to deal in evasions. "Indeed I know not as to thy brother. I am not sure—mayhap I did not hear him named They said so many things—all might not be true."

Damaris arose from the settle. "I will have thy meaning, Cis. 'They said so many things.'—Who are 'they'?"

Cecily bit her lip and dashed away fast-starting tears. "Oh, Damaris, all who have heard—all the court—his friends and thine and his foes. The matter's all abroad. The Queen hath letters from Sir John Nevil—he hath been sent for to the Privy Council—"

"Sir John Nevil hath been sent for?— Why not Sir Mortimer Ferne? Is he ill? Is he wounded?"

Cecily wrung her hands. "Now I must tell thee It is his honor that doth suffer. There is a thing that he did.—He hath confessed, or surely there were no believing Damaris, they call him traitor Ah!"

"Ay, and I'll strike thee again an thou say that again!" cried Damaris. The younger woman shrank before the angry eyes, the disdain of the smiling lips. Abruptly Damaris moved from the frightened girl. Upon the wall, above a dressing-table, hung a Venetian mirror. The maid of honor looked at her image in the glass, then with flying fingers undid and laid aside her ruff, substituting for it a structure of cobweb lace, between whose filmy walls were displayed her white throat and bosom. Around her throat she clasped three rows of pearls, and also wound with pearls her dark-brown hair. Her eyes were very bright, but there was no color in her face. Skilfully she remedied this, until with shining eyes and that false bloom upon her cheeks one would have sworn she was as joyous as she was fair.

Cecily, watching her with a beating heart, at last broke silence: "Oh, Damaris, whither are you going?"

Damaris looked over her shoulder. "After a while I will be sorry that I struck thee, Cis I am going to talk with men." She clasped a gold chain about her slender waist, dashed scented water upon her hands, glanced at her full and sweeping skirts of green silk shot with silver. "I have broken my fan," she said; "wilt lend me thy great plumed one?" Cecily brought the splendid toy. The maid of honor took it from her; then, with a last glance at the mirror, swept towards the door, but on the threshold turned and came back for one moment to her chamber fellow. "Forgive me, Cis," she said, and kissed the girl's wet cheek.

The great anteroom had its usual throng of courtiers, those of a day and those whose ghosts might come to haunt the floors that their mortal feet so oft had trodden. Men of note and worth were there, and men of no other significance than that wrought by rich apparel. Here men brought their dearest hopes and fears, and here they came to flaunt a feather or to tell a traveller's tale. It was the place of deferred hopes and the place of poisoned tongues, and the place in which to suck the last sweet drop in an enemy's cup of trembling. It was the haunt of laughter and of fevered wit and of rivalry in all things, and here the heaviest of heart was not unlike to be the lightest of wit. The spirit of party never left its walls, and Ambition was its chamberlain. The envied and the envious walked there, and there hung the sword of Damocles and the invisible balances. Here, in one corner, might lord it one on whom Fortune broadly smiled, while around him buzzed the gilded parasites, and here, ten feet away, his rival felt the knife turn in his heart. To-morrow—to-morrow's old trick of legerdemain! there the knife, here the smiling face, and for the cloud of sycophants mere change of venue. It was a land of air-castles and rainbow gold, a fool's paradise and the garden where grew most thickly the apples of Sodom. In it were caged all greed, all extravagance, all jealousies; hopes, fears, passions that may be born of and destroy the soul of man; and with-