Brandon answered with a sad little smile from the midst of his reverie.  “It is really not so much the doubt as the certainty of it that troubles me.”  Then, starting to his feet:  “If I thought she had lied to me; if I thought she could wantonly lead me on to suffer so for her, I would kill her, so help me God.”

“Do not think that.  Whatever her faults, and she has enough, there is no man on earth for her but you.  Her love has come to her through a struggle against it because it was her master.  That is the strongest and best, in fact the only, love; worth all the self-made passions in the world.”

“Yes, I believe it.  I know she has faults; even my partiality cannot blind me to them, but she is as pure and chaste as a child, and as gentle, strong and true as—­as—­a woman.  I can put it no stronger.  She has these, her redeeming virtues, along with her beauty, from her plebeian grandmother, Elizabeth Woodville, who, with them, won a royal husband and elevated herself to the throne beside the chivalrous Edward.  This sweet plebeian heritage bubbles up in the heart of Mary, and will not down, but neutralizes the royal poison in her veins and makes a goddess of her.”  Then with a sigh:  “But if her faults were a thousand times as many, and if each fault were a thousand times as great, her beauty would atone for all.  Such beauty as hers can afford to have faults.  Look at Helen and Cleopatra, and Agnes Sorel.  Did their faults make them less attractive?  Beauty covereth more sins than charity—­and maketh more grief than pestilence.”

The last clause was evidently an afterthought.

After his month in Newgate with the hangman’s noose about his neck all because of Mary’s cruel neglect, I wondered if her beauty would so easily atone for her faults.  I may as well tell you that he changed his mind concerning this particular doctrine of atonement.

CHAPTER XI

Louis XII a Suitor

As soon as I could leave Brandon, I had intended to go down to Windsor and give vent to my indignation toward the girls, but the more I thought about it, the surer I felt there had, somehow, been a mistake.  I could not bring myself to believe that Mary had deliberately permitted matters to go to such an extreme when it was in her power to prevent it.  She might have neglected her duty for a day or two, but, sooner or later, her good impulses always came to her rescue, and, with Jane by her side to urge her on, I was almost sure she would have liberated Brandon long ago—­barring a blunder of some sort.

So I did not go to Windsor until a week after Brandon’s release, when the king asked me to go down with him, Wolsey and de Longueville, the French ambassador-special, for the purpose of officially offering to Mary the hand of Louis XII, and the honor of becoming queen of France.

The princess had known of the projected arrangement for many weeks, but had no thought of the present forward condition of affairs, or she would have brought her energies to bear upon Henry long before.  She could not bring herself to believe that her brother would really force her into such wretchedness, and possibly he would never have done so, much as he desired it from the standpoint of personal ambition, had it not been for the petty excuse of that fatal trip to Grouche’s.