1. Which Baulks at an Estranging Sea
Here, then, let us end the lovers' comedy, after a good precedent, with supper as the denouement. Chacun ira souper: la comédie ne peut pas mieux finir.
For epilogue, Cynthia Allonby was duly married to Edward Musgrave, and he made her a fair husband, as husbands go. That was the upshot of Pevensey's death and Marlowe's murder: as indeed, it was the outcome of all the earlier-recorded heart-burnings and endeavors and spoiled dreams. Through generation by generation, traversing just three centuries, I have explained to you, my dear Mrs. Grundy, how divers weddings came about: and each marriage appears, upon the whole, to have resulted satisfactorily. Dame Melicent and Dame Adelaide, not Florian, touched the root of the matter as they talked together at Storisende: and the trio's descendants could probe no deeper.
But now we reach the annals of the house of Musgrave: and further adventuring is blocked by R. V. Musgrave's monumental work The Musgraves of Matocton. The critical may differ as to the plausibility of the family tradition (ably defended by Colonel Musgrave, pp. 33-41) that Mistress Cynthia Musgrave was the dark lady of Shakespeare's Sonnets, and that this poet, also, in the end, absolved her of intentional malice. There is none, at any event, but may find in this genealogical classic a full record of the highly improbable happenings which led to the emigration of Captain Edward Musgrave, and later of Cynthia Musgrave, to the Colony of Virginia; and none but must admire Colonel Musgrave's painstaking and accurate tracing of the American Musgraves who descended from this couple, down to the eve of the twentieth century.
It would be supererogatory, therefore, for me to tell you of the various Musgrave marriages, and to re-dish such data as is readily accessible on the reference shelves of the nearest public library, as well as in the archives of the Colonial Dames, of the Society of the Cincinnati, and of the Sons and Daughters of various wars. It suffices that from the marriage of Edward Musgrave and Cynthia Allonby sprang this well-known American family, prolific of brave gentlemen and gracious ladies who in due course, and in new lands, achieved their allotted portion of laughter and anguish and compromise, very much as their European fathers and mothers had done aforetime.
So I desist to follow the line of love across the Atlantic; and, for the while at least, make an end of these chronicles. My pen flags, my ink runs low, and (since Florian wedded twice) the Dizain of Marriages is completed.
2. Which Defers to Various Illusions
I have bound up my gleanings from the fields of old years into a modest sheaf; and if it be so fortunate as to please you, my dear Mrs. Grundy,--if it so come about that your ladyship be moved in time to desire another sheaf such as this,--why, assuredly, my surprise will be untempered with obduracy. The legends of Allonby have been but lightly touched upon: and apart from the Aventures d'Adhelmar, Nicolas de Caen is thus far represented in English only by the Roi Atnaury (which, to be sure, is Nicolas' masterpiece) and the mutilated Dizain des Reines and the fragmentary Roman de Lusignan.