A Lady of Quality<br />Being a Most Curious, Hitherto Unknown History, as Related by Mr. Isaac Bicke by Frances Hodgson Burnett (e ink epub reader .TXT) 📗

sun was deepening and mellowing towards its setting, they and their retinue entered Camylott.  The bells pealed from the grey belfry of the old church; the villagers came forth in clean smocks and Sunday cloaks of scarlet, and stood in the street and by the roadside curtseying and baring their heads with rustic cheers; little country girls with red cheeks threw posies before the horses’ feet, and into the equipage itself when they were of the bolder sort.  Their chariot passed beneath archways of flowers and boughs, and from the battlements of the Tower of Camylott there floated a flag in the soft wind.

“God save your Graces,” the simple people cried.  “God give your Graces joy and long life!  Lord, what a beautiful pair they be.  And though her Grace was said to be a proud lady, how sweetly she smiles at a poor body.  God love ye, madam!  Madam, God love ye!”

Her Grace of Osmonde leaned forward in her equipage and smiled at the people with the face of an angel.

“I will teach them to love me, Gerald,” she said.  “I have not had love enough.”

“Has not all the world loved you?” he said.

“Nay,” she answered, “only you, and Dunstanwolde and Anne.”

Late at night they walked together on the broad terrace before the Tower.  The blue-black vault of heaven above them was studded with myriads of God’s brilliants; below them was spread out the beauty of the land, the rolling plains, the soft low hills, the forests and moors folded and hidden in the swathing robe of the night; from the park and gardens floated upward the freshness of acres of thick sward and deep fern thicket, the fragrance of roses and a thousand flowers, the tender sighing of the wind through the huge oaks and beeches bordering the avenues, and reigning like kings over the seeming boundless grassy spaces.

As lovers have walked since the days of Eden they walked together, no longer duke and duchess, but man and woman—near to Paradise as human beings may draw until God breaks the chain binding them to earth; and, indeed, it would seem that such hours are given to the straining human soul that it may know that somewhere perfect joy must be, since sometimes the gates are for a moment opened that Heaven’s light may shine through, so that human eyes may catch glimpses of the white and golden glories within.

His arm held her, she leaned against him, their slow steps so harmonising the one with the other that they accorded with the harmony of music; the nightingales trilling and bubbling in the rose trees were not affrighted by the low murmur of their voices; perchance, this night they were so near to Nature that the barriers were o’erpassed, and they and the singers were akin.

“Oh! to be a woman,” Clorinda murmured.  “To be a woman at last.  All other things I have been, and have been called ‘Huntress,’ ‘Goddess,’ ‘Beauty,’ ‘Empress,’ ‘Conqueror,’—but never ‘Woman.’  And had our paths not crossed, I think I never could have known what ’twas to be one, for to be a woman one must close with the man who is one’s mate.  It must not be that one looks down, or only pities or protects and guides; and only to a few a mate seems given.  And I—Gerald, how dare I walk thus at your side and feel your heart so beat near mine, and know you love me, and so worship you—so worship you—”

She turned and threw herself upon his breast, which was so near.

“Oh, woman! woman!” he breathed, straining her close.  “Oh, woman who is mine, though I am but man.”

“We are but one,” she said; “one breath, one soul, one thought, and one desire.  Were it not so, I were not woman and your wife, nor you man and my soul’s lover as you are.  If it were not so, we were still apart, though we were wedded a thousand times.  Apart, what are we but like lopped-off limbs; welded together, we are—this.”  And for a moment they spoke not, and a nightingale on the rose vine, clambering o’er the terrace’s balustrade, threw up its little head and sang as if to the myriads of golden stars.  They stood and listened, hand in hand, her sweet breast rose and fell, her lovely face was lifted to the bespangled sky.

“Of all this,” she said, “I am a part, as I am a part of you.  To-night, as the great earth throbs, and as the stars tremble, and as the wind sighs, so I, being woman, throb and am tremulous and sigh also.  The earth lives for the sun, and through strange mysteries blooms forth each season with fruits and flowers; love is my sun, and through its sacredness I may bloom too, and be as noble as the earth and that it bears.”

CHAPTER XXI—An heir is born

In a fair tower whose windows looked out upon spreading woods, and rich lovely plains stretching to the freshness of the sea, Mistress Anne had her abode which her duchess sister had given to her for her own living in as she would.  There she dwelt and prayed and looked on the new life which so beauteously unfolded itself before her day by day, as the leaves of a great tree unfold from buds and become noble branches, housing birds and their nests, shading the earth and those sheltering beneath them, braving centuries of storms.

To this simile her simple mind oft reverted, for indeed it seemed to her that naught more perfect and more noble in its high likeness to pure Nature and the fulfilling of God’s will than the passing days of these two lives could be.

“As the first two lived—Adam and Eve in their garden of Eden—they seem to me,” she used to say to her own heart; “but the Tree of Knowledge was not forbidden them, and it has taught them naught ignoble.”

As she had been wont to watch her sister from behind the ivy of her chamber windows, so she often watched her now, though there was no fear in her hiding, only tenderness, it being a pleasure to her full of wonder and reverence to see this beautiful and stately pair go lovingly and in high and gentle converse side by side, up and down the terrace, through the paths, among the beds of flowers, under the thick branched trees and over the sward’s softness.

“It is as if I saw Love’s self, and dwelt with it—the love God’s nature made,” she said, with gentle sighs.

For if these two had been great and beauteous before, it seemed in these days as if life and love glowed within them, and shone through their mere bodies as a radiant light shines through alabaster lamps.  The strength of each was so the being of the other that no thought could take form in the brain of one without the other’s stirring with it.

“Neither of us dare be ignoble,” Osmonde said, “for ’twould make poor and base the one who was not so in truth.”

“’Twas not the way of my Lady Dunstanwolde to make a man feel that he stood in church,” a frivolous court wit once said, “but in sooth her Grace of Osmonde has a look in her lustrous eyes which accords not with scandalous stories and playhouse jests.”

And true it was that when they went to town they carried with them the illumining of the pure fire which burned within their souls, and bore it all unknowing in the midst of the trivial or designing world, which knew not what it was that glowed about them, making things bright which had seemed dull, and revealing darkness where there had been brilliant glare.

They returned not to the house which had been my Lord of Dunstanwolde’s, but went to the duke’s own great mansion, and there lived splendidly and in hospitable state.  Royalty honoured them, and all the wits came there, some of those gentlemen who writ verses and dedications being by no means averse to meeting noble lords and ladies, and finding in their loves and graces material which might be useful.  ’Twas not only Mr. Addison and Mr. Steele, Dr. Swift and Mr. Pope, who were made welcome in the stately rooms, but others who were more humble, not yet having won their spurs, and how these worshipped her Grace for the generous kindness which was not the fashion, until she set it, among great ladies, their odes and verses could scarce express.

“They are so poor,” she said to her husband.  “They are so poor, and yet in their starved souls there is a thing which can less bear flouting than the dull content which rules in others.  I know not whether ’tis a curse or a boon to be born so.  ’Tis a bitter thing when the bird that flutters in them has only little wings.  All the more should those who are strong protect and comfort them.”

She comforted so many creatures.  In strange parts of the town, where no other lady would have dared to go to give alms, it was rumoured that she went and did noble things privately.  In dark kennels, where thieves hid and vagrants huddled, she carried her beauty and her stateliness, the which when they shone on the poor rogues and victims housed there seemed like the beams of the warm and golden sun.

Once in a filthy hovel in a black alley she came upon a poor girl dying of a loathsome ill, and as she stood by her bed of rags she heard in her delirium the uttering of one man’s name again and again, and when she questioned those about she found that the sufferer had been a little country wench enticed to town by this man for a plaything, and in a few weeks cast off to give birth to a child in the almshouse, and then go down to the depths of vice in the kennel.

“What is the name she says?” her Grace asked the hag nearest to her, and least maudlin with liquor.  “I would be sure I heard it aright.”

“’Tis the name of a gentleman, your ladyship may be sure,” the beldam answered; “’tis always the name of a gentleman.  And this is one I know well, for I have heard more than one poor soul mumbling it and raving at him in her last hours.  One there was, and I knew her, a pretty rosy thing in her country days, not sixteen, and distraught with love for him, and lay in the street by his door praying him to take her back when he threw her off, until the watch drove her away.  And she was so mad with love and grief she killed her girl child when ’twas born i’ the kennel, sobbing and crying that it should not live to be like her and bear others.  And she was condemned to death, and swung for it on Tyburn Tree.  And, Lord! how she cried his name as she jolted on her coffin to the gallows, and when the hangman put the rope round her shuddering little fair neck.  ‘Oh, John,’ screams she, ‘John Oxon, God forgive thee!  Nay, ’tis God should be forgiven for letting thee to live and me to die like this.’  Aye, ’twas a bitter sight!  She was so little and so young, and so affrighted.  The hangman could scarce hold her.  I was i’ the midst o’ the crowd and cried to her to strive to stand still, ’twould be the sooner over.  But that she could not.  ‘Oh, John,’ she screams, ‘John Oxon, God forgive thee!  Nay, ’tis God should be forgiven for letting thee to live and me to die like this!’”

Till the last hour of the poor creature who lay before her when she heard this thing, her Grace of Osmonde saw that she was tended, took her from her filthy hovel, putting her in a decent house and going to her day by day, until she received her last breath, holding her hand while the poor wench lay staring up at her beauteous face and her great deep eyes, whose lustrousness held such power to sustain, protect, and comfort.

“Be not afraid, poor soul,” she said, “be not afraid.  I will stay near thee.  Soon all will end in sleep, and if thou wakest, sure there will be Christ who died, and wipes all tears away.  Hear me say it to thee for a prayer,” and she bent low and said it soft and clear into the deadening ear, “He wipes all tears away—He wipes all tears away.”

The great strength she had used in the old days to conquer and subdue, to win her will and to defend her way, seemed now a power but to protect the suffering and uphold the weak, and this she did, not alone in hovels but in the brilliant court and world of fashion, for