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) 📗

there she found suffering and weakness also, all the more bitter and sorrowful since it dared not cry aloud.  The grandeur of her beauty, the elevation of her rank, the splendour of her wealth would have made her a protector of great strength, but that which upheld all those who turned to her was that which dwelt within the high soul of her, the courage and power of love for all things human which bore upon itself, as if upon an eagle’s outspread wings, the woes dragging themselves broken and halting upon earth.  The starving beggar in the kennel felt it, and, not knowing wherefore, drew a longer, deeper breath, as if of purer, more exalted air; the poor poet in his garret was fed by it, and having stood near or spoken to her, went back to his lair with lightening eyes and soul warmed to believe that the words his Muse might speak the world might stay to hear.

From the hour she stayed the last moments of John Oxon’s victim she set herself a work to do.  None knew it but herself at first, and later Anne, for ’twas done privately.  From the hag who had told her of the poor girl’s hanging upon Tyburn Tree, she learned things by close questioning, which to the old woman’s dull wit seemed but the curiousness of a great lady, and from others who stood too deep in awe of her to think of her as a mere human being, she gathered clues which led her far in the tracing of the evils following one wicked, heartless life.  Where she could hear of man, woman, or child on whom John Oxon’s sins had fallen, or who had suffered wrong by him, there she went to help, to give light, to give comfort and encouragement.  Strangely, as it seemed to them, and as if done by the hand of Heaven, the poor tradesmen he had robbed were paid their dues, youth he had led into evil ways was checked mysteriously and set in better paths; women he had dragged downward were given aid and chance of peace or happiness; children he had cast upon the world, unfathered, and with no prospect but the education of the gutter, and a life of crime, were cared for by a powerful unseen hand.  The pretty country girl saved by his death, protected by her Grace, and living innocently at Dunstanwolde, memory being merciful to youth, forgot him, gained back her young roses, and learned to smile and hope as though he had been but a name.

“Since ’twas I who killed him,” said her Grace to her inward soul, “’tis I must live his life which I took from him, and making it better I may be forgiven—if there is One who dares to say to the poor thing He made, ‘I will not forgive.’”

Surely it was said there had never been lives so beautiful and noble as those the Duke of Osmonde and his lady lived as time went by.  The Tower of Camylott, where they had spent the first months of their wedded life, they loved better than any other of their seats, and there they spent as much time as their duties of Court and State allowed them.  It was indeed a splendid and beautiful estate, the stately tower being built upon an eminence, and there rolling out before it the most lovely land in England, moorland and hills, thick woods and broad meadows, the edge of the heather dipping to show the soft silver of the sea.

Here was this beauteous woman chatelaine and queen, wife of her husband as never before, he thought, had wife blessed and glorified the existence of mortal man.  All her great beauty she gave to him in tender, joyous tribute; all her great gifts of mind and wit and grace it seemed she valued but as they were joys to him; in his stately households in town and country she reigned a lovely empress, adored and obeyed with reverence by every man or woman who served her and her lord.  Among the people on his various estates she came and went a tender goddess of benevolence.  When she appeared amid them in the first months of her wedded life, the humble souls regarded her with awe not unmixed with fear, having heard such wild stories of her youth at her father’s house, and of her proud state and bitter wit in the great London world when she had been my Lady Dunstanwolde; but when she came among them all else was forgotten in their wonder at her graciousness and noble way.

“To see her come into a poor body’s cottage, so tall and grand a lady, and with such a carriage as she hath,” they said, hobnobbing together in their talk of her, “looking as if a crown of gold should sit on her high black head, and then to hear her gentle speech and see the look in her eyes as if she was but a simple new-married girl, full of her joy, and her heart big with the wish that all other women should be as happy as herself, it is, forsooth, a beauteous sight to see.”

“Ay, and no hovel too poor for her, and no man or woman too sinful,” was said again.

“Heard ye how she found that poor wench of Haylits lying sobbing among the fern in the Tower woods, and stayed and knelt beside her to hear her trouble?  The poor soul has gone to ruin at fourteen, and her father, finding her out, beat her and thrust her from his door, and her Grace coming through the wood at sunset—it being her way to walk about for mere pleasure as though she had no coach to ride in—the girl says she came through the golden glow as if she had been one of God’s angels—and she kneeled and took the poor wench in her arms—as strong as a man, Betty says, but as soft as a young mother—and she said to her things surely no mortal lady ever said before—that she knew naught of a surety of what God’s true will might be, or if His laws were those that have been made by man concerning marriage by priests saying common words, but that she surely knew of a man whose name was Christ, and He had taught love and helpfulness and pity, and for His sake, He having earned our trust in Him, whether He was God or man, because He hung and died in awful torture on the Cross—for His sake all of us must love and help and pity—‘I you, poor Betty,’ were her very words, ‘and you me.’  And then she went to the girl’s father and mother, and so talked to them that she brought them to weeping, and begging Betty to come home; and also she went to her sweetheart, Tom Beck, and made so tender a story to him of the poor pretty wench whose love for him had brought her to such trouble, that she stirred him up to falling in love again, which is not man’s way at such times, and in a week’s time he and Betty went to church together, her Grace setting them up in a cottage on the estate.”

“I used all my wit and all my tenderest words to make a picture that would fire and touch him, Gerald,” her Grace said, sitting at her husband’s side, in a great window, from which they often watched the sunset in the valley spread below; “and that with which I am so strong sometimes—I know not what to call it, but ’tis a power people bend to, that I know—that I used upon him to waken his dull soul and brain.  Whose fault is it that they are dull?  Poor lout, he was born so, as I was born strong and passionate, and as you were born noble and pure and high.  I led his mind back to the past, when he had been made happy by the sight of Betty’s little smiling, blushing face, and when he had kissed her and made love in the hayfields.  And this I said—though ’twas not a thing I have learned from any chaplain—that when ’twas said he should make an honest woman of her, it was my thought that she had been honest from the first, being too honest to know that the world was not so, and that even the man a woman loved with all her soul, might be a rogue, and have no honesty in him.  And at last—’twas when I talked to him about the child—and that I put my whole soul’s strength in—he burst out a-crying like a schoolboy, and said indeed she was a fond little thing and had loved him, and he had loved her, and ’twas a shame he had so done by her, and he had not meant it at the first, but she was so simple, and he had been a villain, but if he married her now, he would be called a fool, and laughed at for his pains.  Then was I angry, Gerald, and felt my eyes flash, and I stood up tall and spoke fiercely: ‘Let them dare,’ I said—‘let any man or woman dare, and then will they see what his Grace will say.’”

Osmonde drew her to his breast, laughing into her lovely eyes.

“Nay, ’tis not his Grace who need be called on,” he said; “’tis her Grace they love and fear, and will obey; though ’tis the sweetest, womanish thing that you should call on me when you are power itself, and can so rule all creatures you come near.”

“Nay,” she said, with softly pleading face, “let me not rule.  Rule for me, or but help me; I so long to say your name that they may know I speak but as your wife.”

“Who is myself,” he answered—“my very self.”

“Ay,” she said, with a little nod of her head, “that I know—that I am yourself; and ’tis because of this that one of us cannot be proud with the other, for there is no other, there is only one.  And I am wrong to say, ‘Let me not rule,’ for ’tis as if I said, ‘You must not rule.’  I meant surely, ‘God give me strength to be as noble in ruling as our love should make me.’  But just as one tree is a beech and one an oak, just as the grass stirs when the summer wind blows over it, so a woman is a woman, and ’tis her nature to find her joy in saying such words to the man who loves her, when she loves as I do.  Her heart is so full that she must joy to say her husband’s name as that of one she cannot think without—who is her life as is her blood and her pulses beating.  ’Tis a joy to say your name, Gerald, as it will be a joy”—and she looked far out across the sun-goldened valley and plains, with a strange, heavenly sweet smile—“as it will be a joy to say our child’s—and put his little mouth to my full breast.”

“Sweet love,” he cried, drawing her by the hand that he might meet the radiance of her look—“heart’s dearest!”

She did not withhold her lovely eyes from him, but withdrew them from the sunset’s mist of gold, and the clouds piled as it were at the gates of heaven, and they seemed to bring back some of the far-off glory with them.  Indeed, neither her smile nor she seemed at that moment to be things of earth.  She held out her fair, noble arms, and he sprang to her, and so they stood, side beating against side.

“Yes, love,” she said—“yes, love—and I have prayed, my Gerald, that I may give you sons who shall be men like you.  But when I give you women children, I shall pray with all my soul for them—that they may be just and strong and noble, and life begin for them as it began not for me.”

* * * * *

In the morning of a spring day when the cuckoos cried in the woods, and May blossomed thick, white and pink, in all the hedges, the bells in the grey church-steeple at Camylott rang out a joyous, jangling peal, telling all the village that the heir had been born at the Tower.  Children stopped in their play to listen, men at their work in field and barn; good gossips ran out of their cottage door, wiping their arms dry, from their tubs and scrubbing-buckets, their honest red faces broadening into maternal grins.

“Ay, ’tis well over, that means surely,” one said to the other; “and a happy day has begun for the poor lady—though God knows she bore herself queenly to the very last, as if she could have carried her burden for