if I arrive in the morning, you must come to luncheon. Dearest, I am terribly afraid . . ." Davenant read no further; the letter was from Margaret Noyes. If she was "afraid," he was panicstricken. He had known that some day or another she must appear and find him as he was-indigent, disabled, a threadbare dwarf who dragged a crippled body on two sticks; yet he had always put that moment from him. He dare not face it. He had clung passionately to a sweet falsehood; he loved her, that was his sole excuse. All he asked was to go on loving her, the ocean and a continent between them, as before. Well he had known the human impossibility of that fond wish; but he had shut his eyes to the folly of it, closed his ears to reason's warnings, lived entirely in a blind and stolen Present, baffled his conscience with the onrush of an overwhelming joy. And now his time had come; the term of his deception had reached its end.

Margaret's next message was sent from Liverpool, and she awaited his answer at her London address. Davenant broke, wavered, broke utterly. The thing was done and posted. He had been called away to Suffolk-a sudden duty had bidden him indefinitely to Suffolk: a vague place, the first that reached his pen.

After that there were no more letters. He had dealt a death-blow at a pride that matched his own.

Margaret arrived in Weymouth Street. Davenant stood on the curb and watched her. Davenant was there betimes next morning. Every day he made the journey. She passed him and she never knew that it was he. Once her dress brushed by him as she passed. He opened a hand and touched it. The cripple who made that street his beat must have grown familiar to her: a small, threadbare cripple with wasted cheeks and brightly burning eyes.

At all hours he was there, following her and wondering what she did behind the doors she closed on him. He knew her room on the second floor; often he had seen her face at the window; often he watched the light go out up there. Sometimes he saw her moving in the drawing

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room below-receiving guests; wasting an idle moment before the dinner-gong resounded. She drove; she had a horse; there were mornings when she went out with a Baedeker. Sometimes he heard her voice as she went by; a word, a phrase would come to him, occasionally a whole sentence. She had said this and this, he told himself; she was lunching here or shopping there. He tried to reconstruct her whole environment; he watched young men go in, or leave, and he was madly jealous. That whole summer he spent with her; mothlike, abject, eating his heart out in the shadow of her; learning to know the whole external onflow of her active life. What she thought inside, what was happening in her, the white flame of her life that burned beyond the transitory and accidental wrappings that were open to him, he could not reach. In July she disappeared-leaving him in Suffolk: the bitter and haunted refuge that his panic had mapped out for him; the Suffolk of Margaret Noyes.

Time softens pain and makes the direst memory a sweet and blessed friend. The years covered this episode and healed the gaping wounds of it; so that at last he looked back knowing that he possessed the whole body and vision of his desire. All he had longed for was his own. The dream was in his heart, and contact nor misconception mattered much. Her letters still were his; the words she had written would reverberate and sustain him through a century of silence. "Why not the same with her?" he asked himself. "Would not time give him back to her as it had given her back to him; eternally, beyond the reach of corruption, of satiety?" The rose would always linger on her cheek, the violet in her breath, the pity and the music in her voice. She would go down erect, unageing, through the years. Her hair would be always red, the dear freckles always on her face, her lips would tremble, full-fleshed, ripe, and scarlet to eternity; the light would never leave those steadfast eyes. . . . He might not meet her, fold her in his arms, and make a home with her; but he had loved her with an enduring and valiant fidelity.

A

LTHOUGH the sharp cross-fires of Talbot and Joan of Arc are extinct and dramatically forgotten before the first part of Henry VI. ends, there is no want of warring elements to take their place. There must be as much fighting and dying in the second and third parts of this stage-chronicle as there is of eating and drinking in the "Pickwick Papers." The very figures of speech, the allusions from heraldry, the fierce words, the characteristic sanguinary colors, all are patently devised to eke out the idea of the old title of "the Contention" which was theirs. The Rampant Bear and the baiting curs, the hungry kite hovering over the chicken guarded by an equally avid eagle, the crocodile mournful to be cruel, the butcher redhanded over the calf, Cade's ostrich that eats iron, Margery Jourdain's fatal fiend, Beaufort's ominous keen red eyes of malice, Suffolk's "bloody pole" and Illyrian pirate, and the sea-captain's image of unnatural cannibal Sylla to whom he likens Suffolk: what an apparatus of deadly metaphor and murderous imagination it is!

But what of the one continuing and unresisting chief character, who stands like an uneasy umpire at an angry football match, and sees so many go down and has so many appeals made to his timorous authority, before his own fall closes the play; what of the nervous, disastrous king? Queen Margaret has much to say of his piety, his foolish pity too: But all his mind is bent to holiness, To number Ave-Maries on his beads; His champions are the prophets and apostles;

His weapons, holy saws of sacred writ. The contrast with her own ardent uncompromising temper is always present in the minds of the authors, several and

collective, as one perceives at every stagecrisis. Indeed, she is almost the masculine to his feminine. But apart from this, one cannot help remarking it to be strange that the mysterious ailment, congenital in Henry VI.'s blood, is not turned to more dramatic account. We know how effective a supposed malady, some smouldering fatal ailment, can be made, for we have seen it in greater plays than these. But it was enough, it seems, for those writers who first took their cue from Holinshed, that Henry should be the pious, the hesitating and delicately minded prince, who, intended for a quietist by nature, was buffeted by circumstance and dragged over endless battle-fields at the will of his disastrous queen. Before she appears, in the first part, Henry is young without the spirit of youth; while in the second part he is seen at his weakest, governed by her will, if not without an inert wisdom of his own. His nervous inability as he moves among these decided fighting lords, or stands still while his queen moves, is made there only too intelligible. In the third part, he has become the fugitive king; and then the playgoers' sympathies fly after him, even as they did after Edward II., whose dramatic setting is so curiously like to his. But Henry VI. acquiesces in the fate administered by Heaven: Edward II. is only a ruined Sybarite. The pathos of Edward II.'s fall, as Marlowe designs it, is in his sense of what king's pleasures had been his, and are his no longer. He is sorry for himself, and he thinks of himself and not of his country:

O hadst thou ever been a king, thy heart Pierced deeply with a sense of my distress Could not but take compassion of my state. Stately and proud, in riches and in train Whilom I was, powerful, and full of pomp.

Edward II. says, "Let me be king till night!" and Henry VI., "Let me, for this my lifetime, reign as king." The dramatic treatment is at points so similar in the two conclusions, however, that we must think the same hand drew them in their different predicament.

a

One cannot rehearse half the statetableaux and battle-fields in the second and the third parts of Henry VI. In the second we see war drawing very close to the doors of the English people. The Duke of Gloster's house succeeds to the King's palace, and the Duchess outbraves the Queen, and sorcery is afoot; and St. Albans gives us a scene with a fillip for the miracle-mongers, which is rather like the work of Greene. We have a burlesque premonition of the great wars to follow in the drunkards' duel between Horner and Peter. There the action quickens, and the humiliation-scene of the Duchess leads on swiftly to the murder of the "good Duke Humphrey "-who was popular favorite, though even the stage shows him a coward in his wife's hour of need. Then Marlowe speaks, and speaks at his rarest in the death-scene of the wicked Cardinal, where the second part has one of its great moments. Holinshed's "Capteine of Kent," Jack Cade, otherwise John Mend-All, brings another poor man's bone to the contention; and so ends Act IV. In Act V. we have England fairly sundered at last, York and Lancaster outfacing each other, and the piteous death of Clifford, and an unmistakable, repeated, desperate glimpse of that Richard Plantagenet who was to live and wax in strength thro' two plays more. His triumph was Henry's "day of doom," -fit words to end a tragedy where doom impends like a dark cloud over all the royal ambitions and fatal family revenges and intrigues of its actors, shadowing an elemental creature like Richard of Gloster just as surely as a Clarence, or a little Prince Edward, or a King Edward V.

But we are forgetting Henry VI., that "ghoostlie" man, and his queen. Again it is Holinshed who gives us the colors of the play: tells of the gentleness and "overmuch mildness of the King," and then turns to contrast him with Margaret. For she, "contrariwise, is a ladie of great wit, and no lesse courage; desirous of honour, and furnished with the

gifts of reason, policie and wisdome. But yet," says the Chronicler, "sometime (according to her kind) when she had been fullie bent on a matter," she was "suddenlie like a weather-cocke,—mutable and turning." We hear too, from the same page, an ominous whisper of how when Prince Edward was born "his mother sustained not a little slander and obloquie of the common people."

This whisper is clearly hinted in certain scenes of the second part of the trilogy; and indeed the treatment on the stage of the French princess who became an English queen is not all strictly of a piece, just as the treatment of the French Maid who led her country against the English was not all strictly accorded. In both cases this discrepancy arose from the same thing, the multiple authorship of the triple drama. But in the third part the character of Margaret is rather more consistent; and there her zeal for her son redeems her rage, and her unworthy, unqueenly mockery of York (which quite explains his "She Wolf of France!") is saved by her heroic maternal emotion, her soul's divorce from Henry, and her undaunted front before the terrible Richard Plantagenet. She is introduced in her full symbolic colors at the end of the third part, after Henry-" base, fearful, and despairing Henry "-has virtually given away the birthright of his son and hers. And well her entrance accords with that opening, which unrolls itself with a kind of fierce gayety to a sound of drums and the breaking in of the York faction with white roses in their hats, followed by the Lancaster men, headed by the King, with red roses in theirs.

Here was the proverbial three-sons episode of folk-lore; and the youngest, Richard, is the hero, as in folk-tales usually happens-a darling scene for the general. Battle succeeds battle then, the roses are continually dipped in blood, and we have the "Whole Contention" reduced to the simplest terms, with history written at the sword's point, and the Houses of York and Lancaster visibly overtopping one another on the stage. We follow their armies to Sandal Castle and the Yorkshire fields of war; and there young Clarence tastes the revenge he had foreseen, slaying young Richard; and there