"I can see that you are in earnest," he said, picking up the ball at his feet, "though I cannot see why a man should not covet a king's crown as well as a king's wife." He struck the ball.
"You are young," said Gilbert, "to ride atilt through all the Ten Commandments at once."
"Young!" exclaimed the boy, keeping the ball up. "So was David when he killed the giant! So was Hercules when he strangled the serpents, as you told me the other day. Young!" he cried a second time, with forcibly concentrated contempt. "You should know, Master Gilbert, that a Plantagenet of thirteen years is the match of any other man of twenty. As I can beat you at tennis, though you are six years older than I, so I can beat you in other matters, and with the Queen herself, even though she is half in love with you already, as all the court is saying; and she shall belong to me some day, though I have to slay that dish-faced prayer-master of a king to get her."
Gilbert was no more morally timid than he was physically a coward, but he looked round with some anxiety as the boy uttered his outrageous boast.
The place they had chosen for their game was the deep and shady corner where the church made a right angle with the royal palace. The grass was cropped during several hours every morning by a dozen sheep and lambs kept in a stable at the other end of the castle-yard during the rest of the day. The springing turf was kept fresh even in summer's drought by the deep shadows. The church wall, built of well-hewn blocks of stone, was flat and smooth, and was strengthened at regular intervals by buttresses springing straight up from the sloping penthouse of masonry, some two yards high. The interval between the last buttress and the wall of the palace made an admirable court, and, indeed, the tennis-courts of later days all seem to have been modelled upon just such corners of old church architecture. The wall of the palace was also smooth and almost without windows on that side. There was one on the lower floor, at a considerable distance from the corner, but the other was at least four or five yards from the ground, just above the point where Gilbert and Henry were playing, and was made in Norman fashion of two round arches springing from the rough-hewn capital of a small stone column between them. Gilbert had often noticed this window, though it was above an ordinary side glance, as he played the ball at the other wall; and even as he turned now, he looked instinctively behind him and towards the distant lower window.
A sweet low laugh rang out into the summer air just above his head. He looked up to meet the sound, and young Henry missed the ball and turned his eyes in the same direction. His bluff, boyish face blushed scarlet, but Gilbert turned slowly pale, stepped back, and took his round pointed cap from his fair hair in acknowledgment of the Queen's presence.
"You were listening, Madam," cried the boy, red in his anger. "But I am glad you did, since you have heard the truth."
The Queen laughed again, and drew back her head as if to see whether there were any one in the room behind her, her white hand lying over the stone sill, meanwhile, as if to show that she was not going away. Gilbert even thought that the slender fingers tapped the stone ledge in a reassuring way. Then she looked out again. A few late flowers and sweet herbs grew in an earthenware trough in one division of the window. There was sweet basil and rosemary, and a bit of ivy that tried to find a hold upon the slender column, and, partly missing it, hung down over the window-ledge. A single monthly rose made a point of colour among the sweet green things.
The Queen was still smiling as she rested her elbows upon the sill and her chin on her folded hands. She was near enough to the tennis-players to be heard by them if she spoke in a low tone.
"Are you angry because Master Gilbert is frightened?" she asked, looking at Henry. "Or are you frightened because his lordship, the Count of Anjou, is angry?" she inquired, turning her eyes to Gilbert.
He smiled at her way of opening the conversation, but Henry thought that she was laughing at him and grew redder than ever. Not deigning to answer, he picked up the ball and served it over the penthouse to himself, striking it back cleverly enough. The Queen laughed again as he kept his face resolutely turned from her.
"Will you teach me to play, if I come down to you?" she asked, looking at the back of his head.
"It is no game for women," answered the boy, rudely, and still keeping the ball up.
"Will you give me a lesson, Master Gilbert?"
The laughing eyes were suddenly grave as they turned to the young Englishman, the smiling lips grew tender, and the voice was gentle. Without turning round, Henry felt the change and knew that she was looking at his friend; he served the ball with a vicious stroke that brought it back too high for him. Without turning his head to see where it had rolled, the angry boy walked off, picked up his tunic, which lay on the turf at a little distance, threw it over his arm, jammed his pointed cap upon his head with his other hand, and departed in offended dignity.
The Queen smiled as she looked after him, but did not laugh again.
"Will you teach me to play tennis?" she asked of Gilbert, who was hesitating as to what he should do. "You have not answered me yet."
"I shall at all times do your Grace's bidding," answered Gilbert, inclining his head a little and making a gesture with the hand that held his cap as if to put himself at her disposal.
"At all times?" she asked quietly.
Gilbert looked up quickly, fearing lest he might be tricked into a promise he did not understand, and he did not answer at once. But she would not repeat the question.
"Wait," she said, before he spoke. "I am coming down."
With an almost imperceptible gesture, like a greeting, she disappeared. Gilbert began to walk up and down, his hands behind him, his eyes on the ground, and he did not see the tennis-ball which Henry had lost until he almost stumbled over it. The boy's words had roused an entirely new train of ideas in his mind. Perhaps no man could be so free from vanity as not to be pleased, even against his will, with the thought that the most beautiful living woman, and she a queen, was in love with him. But whatever satisfaction of that sort Gilbert may have felt was traversed in an opposite direction by the cool sense of his own indifference. And besides, that was a simple age in which sins were called by their own names and were regarded with a sort of semi— religious, respectful abhorrence by most honest gentlemen; and what was only the general expression of a narrow but high morality had been branded upon Gilbert's soul during the past months in letters that were wounds by the ever-present memory of his own mother's shame.
The confusion of his reflections was simplified by the appearance of Queen Eleanor. At the window of the lower story, which opened to the ground, she stepped out, looked up and down the deserted yard, and then came towards him. Gilbert had been long enough in Paris to understand that Queen Eleanor had not the slightest regard for the set rules, formal prejudices, and staid traditions of her husband's court; and when King Louis gravely protested against her dressing herself in man's mail, bestriding his own favourite charger, and tilting at the Saracen quintain in the yard, she hinted with more or less good or ill nature, according to her mood, that her possessions were considerably more extensive than the kingdom of France, and that what she had been taught to do by William of Aquitaine was necessarily right, and beyond the criticism of Louis Capet, who was descended from a Paris butcher. Nevertheless, the Englishman had some reasonable doubts and misgivings at finding himself, a humble squire, alone in that quiet corner with the most beautiful and most powerful of reigning queens. But she, whose quick intuition was a gift almost beyond nature, knew what he felt before she had reached his side. She spoke quite naturally and as if such a meeting were an everyday occurrence.
[Illustration: "PERHAPS THAT IS ONE REASON WHY I LIKE YOU"]