Lord Herbert was of a very different temperament.  He had hope enough in his one single nature to serve the whole castle, if only it could have been shared.  The veil between him and the future glowed as if on fire with mere radiance, and about to vanish in flame.  It was not that he more than one of the rest imagined he could see through it.  For him it was enough that beyond it lay the luminous.  His eyes, to those that looked on him, were lighted with its reflex.

Such as he, are, by those who love them not, misjudged as shallow.  Depth to some is indicated by gloom, and affection by a persistent brooding—­as if there were no homage to the past of love save sighs and tears.  When they meet a man whose eyes shine, whose step is light, on whose lips hovers a smile, they shake their heads and say, ’There goes one who has never loved, and who therefore knows not sorrow.’  And the man is one of those over whom death has no power; whom time nor space can part from those he loves; who lives in the future more than in the past!  Has not his being ever been for the sake of that which was yet to come?  Is not his being now for the sake of that which it shall be?  Has he not infinitely more to do with the great future than the little past?  The Past has descended into hell, is even now ascending glorified, and will, in returning cycle, ever and again greet our faith as the more and yet more radiant Future.

But even lord Herbert had his moments of sad longing after his dainty Molly.  Such moments, however, came to him, not when he was at home with his wife, but when he rode alone by his troops on a night march, or when, upon the eve of an expected battle, he sought sleep that he might fight the better on the morrow.

CHAPTER XXIV.

The great Mogul.

One evening, Tom Fool, and a groom, his particular friend, were taking their pastime after a somewhat selfish fashion, by no means newly discovered in the castle—­that of teasing the wild beasts.  There was one in particular, a panther, which, in a special dislike to grimaces, had discovered a special capacity for being teased.  Betwixt two of the bars of his cage, therefore, Tom was busy presenting him with one hideous puritanical face after another, in full expectation of a satisfactory outburst of feline rancour.  But to their disappointment, the panther on this occasion seemed to have resolved upon a dignified resistance to temptation, and had withdrawn in sultry displeasure to the back of his cage, where he lay sideways, deigning to turn neither his back nor his face towards the inferior animal, at whom to cast but one glance, he knew, would be to ruin his grand Oriental sulks, and fly at the hideous ape-visage insulting him in his prison.  It was tiresome of the brute.  Tom Fool grew more daring and threw little stones at him, but the panther seemed only to grow the more imperturbable, and to heed his missiles as little as his grimaces.