The moment she was in the corridor, however, her face resumed its gravity, and she murmured, "Gracious heaven! when will men cease to make me the object of their ambitious schemes?"
In the meanwhile, Sir Thomas Overbury stood by the side of the table, and gazed down upon it with vacant eyes, "Yes," he said at length, "yes, her consent is sure, and this lightness but assumed to cover deeper things. That is clear enough. The rest must be done by Rochester; for doubtless, as she says, she will require courting.--The King, too, must be managed; but that can be done; and then, with his fortunes fixed upon a basis that nothing can shake, allied to Royalty itself, and with his doting monarch's whole life before him, he may indeed do what he will. And I!--Why, is he not my creature, as the King is his? When, too, he owes the rock on which his fortune is planted to my counsels, he must surely show his gratitude.--He is young, warmhearted--yet unhardened by a Court; and, even granted that, in a few years, he be corrupted by the invariable selfishness and baseness of such scenes as these, ere then the eagle shall have soared on high, unless fate clip his wings. Give me three years--but three years; and if with the powers of mind I feel within this brain, and the resolution I know within this heart, I rule not in the council chamber and the senate--why, let them kick me forth as a scurvy cur, unfitted for high places."
Thus thinking, he sat himself down to write again, and did not rise till the sound of the horns warned him that the King and Court were returning.
With shouts, and jests, and laughter of no very courtly and dignified a sort, the royal party came up to the terrace; and James and his favourite, with a number of attendants, mounted the staircase, passed by the room in which Overbury had been writing, and swept on to the royal apartments.
In a minute or two after, Rochester, tall, handsome, and glowing with exercise and merriment, entered the chamber of his secretary, convulsed with laughter, and casting himself into a seat, exclaimed, "By the Lord! Overbury, here has been one of the best jests this morning I have ever seen. Did you remark, yesterday, how the King asked for Jowler, who was not with the pack?--his favourite hound, you know, whose voice, he swears, is a deal sweeter than that of the Italian music-master. Well--to-day, who should make his appearance but Jowler, with a paper tied round his neck."