Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/179

. 9, 1862.] “Do you mean as his spy?”

“Yes;” Sampson replied stoutly: “and from this time you must be his servant, too. There are several of us in England always: always one at least where there are Brabant, or Swiss, or French silk-weavers and knitters: and there will be always one or more wherever this poor Queen is detained.”

“Does she know this?”

“She does: but she has, in every new place, to learn to whom to trust. You must get into her presence—”

“I cannot, Sampson! I never can. How should I be ever face to face with a Queen in a castle?”

“Perhaps it may be in this wood: but I will see to that. Wherever it is, you will have to catch her eye with that device within the medal.—‘When?’ Some day very soon.”

“You must not leave the medal with me meantime, Sampson. I cannot undertake the charge.”

“You must. You may be sent for when I am absent. Moreover, there will be strangers in the neighbourhood, now that the Queen has returned; and, perhaps, one or two may be lodged in this house; and you may have to show some one of them that you are to be trusted.”

“Not in my father’s house,” Polly declared. “Not while my poor mother is mourning this child. I have yielded much to you, Sampson. I have got bewildered,—I fear I might say lost,—among you and your friends—”

“Not lost, but saved, as you will find when the French and the Spaniards come.” “But I will not plot about Popes and Queens under my father’s roof. Our own little affairs,—a village girl marrying one lover or another, and being married by priest or parson, secretly or openly,—all that is one thing; and plots which might bring my father to prison, or the gallows, are another. I cannot keep the medal here.”

The creak of the harvest waggon in the lane,—a sound so joyous in former years,—now struck upon her heart. Her parents must be coming home. As they arrived at the door, Sampson carried his point about the medal. He departed by the other door, pointing to the case as it lay on the child’s bed. Polly had but just time to hide it in her dress.

It was a dreary evening. The mother said incessantly that she should never forgive herself for going out that day. In the unreasonableness of grief, she said that perhaps her child would not have died if she had been beside him; and the farmer moodily observed that he was of that opinion too. Polly explained how there was nothing to be done; how lonely she had felt, and yet how certain that the child’s last hour had come: and she wept bitterly over the hardship of being made, in a manner, finally answerable for the death of the child who had been kept alive so long at least as much by her tender nursing as by her mother’s. She supposed it was the effect of a new grief upon a stern man, which made her father what he was that night, and afterwards. He scarcely spoke: he would receive nothing from her hand, he seemed to fear,—perhaps to hate her. She wondered whether he could have been made suspicious of her secret marriage. She thought not, as his manner was not that of an angry man: but, whenever the priest should give her leave to tell, she hardly thought she dared do it, if her father continued to watch her as he did. He would not say a word of what he intended to do about burying his child,—the supreme difficulty in the day of the dispersion of the clergy. There lay the little body, at first on its bed, and then in a rude coffin made in the woodcutter’s shed; and even the mother did not know where it was to be put underground. Her husband had muttered that it was enough that his child had been bewitched in its lifetime: it should have a safe sleep now, and an easy grave.

The village gossips had much to say that summer night, for her Grace had returned to the Castle. It seemed like a sudden return; for strange men had been up at the Castle two days before, very busy among the furniture of her Grace’s apartments; so that it was supposed that everything was to be new hung and beautified before her return: yet here she was, before the rooms could have been even put in proper order.

She was more stately and graceful than ever. So the gentlemen in her train agreed; and such was the feeling of the country people, however they might express it. Seeing her ride by, with her grave countenance, her courteous greeting to the people, and her dignified manner to her own servants, the by-standers could not have believed, if they had been told, that she had given way to passion so lately, and had even appealed to the wayside crowd for rescue.

The Countess had hastened forwards within the last hour, and was now awaiting her guest at the great entrance. She made, with some carelessness, the requisite apology for the Earl’s absence, and the introduction of Sir Francis Knollys as his temporary substitute: and she was not sorry to be dismissed from attendance at the door of Mary’s apartments. She had had too little time for effacing the signs of the handiwork of the messengers from London, and she did not desire to witness her Grace’s indignation on finding how her desks and cabinets had been dealt with. If the Lady Bess had entered, she would have found that some diligent hands had restored the disorder which she had partly retrieved. The apartment had the air of having been rifled the night before. As Mary glanced round from open drawer to door ajar, she lifted her hands piteously, and sank on the nearest couch. It might seem strange that she could at such a moment admit a servant to report of garments and hangings: but the gay needleman of her suite desired admittance, and at once obtained it.

“Your Grace must take heart,” he said, smiling. “There is no harm done.”

“How is that possible? Tell me in a word how great the misfortune is.”

“There is no misfortune, madam. I must speak, as you say, in one word; and that word is that all is safe.”

“My papers safe?”

“They are—safely burned two days ago. If your Grace has heard,” he continued, smiling, “of any seizure of papers, that is true also. What