The Cloister and the Hearth Part 128

But one day, as if tired with his importuning, she turned on him, and said with a look and accent, I should in vain try to convey--

"Find me my boy's father!"

CHAPTER Lx.x.xIV

"MISTRESS, they all say he is dead."

"Not so. They feed me still with hopes."

"Ay, to your face, but behind your back they all say he is dead."

At this revelation Margaret's tears began to flow.

Luke whimpered for company. He had the body of a man, but the heart of a girl.

"Prithee, weep not so, sweet mistress," said he. "I'd bring him back to life, an' I could, rather than see thee weep so sore."

Margaret said she thought she was weeping because they were so double-tongued with her.

She recovered herself, and laying her hand on his shoulder, said solemnly, "Luke, he is not dead. Dying men are known to have a strange sight. And listen, Luke! My poor father, when he was a-dying, and I, simple fool, was so happy, thinking he was going to get well altogether, he said to mother and me--he was sitting in that very chair where you are now, and mother was as might be here, and I was yonder making a sleeve--said he, 'I see him! I see him!' Just so. Not like a failing man at all, but all o' fire. 'Sore disfigured--on a great river--coming this way.'

"Ah, Luke, if you were a woman, and had the feeling for me you think you have, you would pity me, and find him for me. Take a thought! The father of my child!"

"Alack, I would, if I knew how," said Luke. "But how can I?"

"Nay, of course you cannot. I am mad to think it. But, oh, if any one really cared for me, they _would_; that is all I know."

Luke reflected in silence for some time.

"The old folk all say dying men can see more than living wights. Let me think: for my mind cannot gallop like thine. On a great river? Well, the Maas is a great river." He pondered on.

"Coming this way? Then if it 'twas the Maas, he would have been here by this time, so 'tis not the Maas. The Rhine is a great river, greater than the Maas; and very long. I think it will be the Rhine."

"And so do I, Luke; for Denys bade him come down the Rhine. But even if it is, he may turn off before he comes anigh his birthplace. He does not pine for me as I for him; that is clear. Luke, do you not think he has deserted me?" She wanted him to contradict her; but he said "It looks very like it; what a fool he must be!"

"What do we know?" objected Margaret, imploringly.

"Let me think again," said Luke. "I cannot gallop."

The result of this meditation was this. He knew a station about sixty miles up the Rhine, where all the public boats put in; and he would go to that station, and try and cut the truant off. To be sure he did not even know him by sight; but as each boat came in he would mingle with the pa.s.sengers, and ask if one Gerard was there. "And, mistress, if you were to give me a bit of a letter to him; for, with us being strangers, mayhap a won't believe a word I say."

"Good, kind, thoughtful Luke, I will (how I have undervalued thee!). But give me till supper-time to get it writ." At supper she put a letter into his hand with a blush: it was a long letter tied round with silk after the fashion of the day, and sealed over the knot.

Luke weighed it in his hand, with a shade of discontent, and said to her very gravely, "Say your father was not dreaming, and say I have the luck to fall in with this man, and say he should turn out a better bit of stuff than I think him, and come home to you then and there--what is to become o' me?"

Margaret coloured to her very brow. "Oh, Luke, Heaven will reward thee.

And I shall fall on my knees and bless thee; and I shall love thee all my days, sweet Luke; as a mother does her son. I am so old by thee: trouble ages the heart. Thou shalt not go: 'tis not fair of me; Love maketh us to be all self."

"Humph!" said Luke. "And if," resumed he, in the same grave way, "yon scapegrace shall read thy letter, and hear me tell him how thou pinest for him, and yet, being a traitor, or a mere idiot, will not turn to thee--what shall become of me then? Must I die a bachelor, and thou fare lonely to thy grave, neither maid, wife, nor widow?"

Margaret panted with fear and emotion at this terrible piece of good sense, and the plain question that followed it. But at last she faltered out, "If, which our Lady be merciful to me, and forbid--Oh!"

"Well, mistress?"

"If he should read my letter, and hear thy words--and, sweet Luke, be just and tell him what a lovely babe he hath, fatherless, fatherless. Oh Luke, can he be so cruel?"

"I trow not: but if?"

"Then he will give thee up my marriage lines, and I shall be an honest woman; and a wretched one; and my boy will not be a b.a.s.t.a.r.d: and, of course, then we _could_ both go into any honest man's house that would be troubled with us: and even for thy goodness this day, I will--I will--ne'er be so ungrateful as go past thy door to another man's."

"Ay, but will you come in at mine? Answer me that!"

"Oh, ask me not! Some day, perhaps, when my wounds leave bleeding. Alas, I'll try. If I don't fling myself and my child into the Maas. Do not go, Luke! do not think of going! 'Tis all madness from first to last."

But Luke was as slow to forego an idea as to form one.

His reply showed how fast love was making a man of him. "Well," said he, "madness is something any way; and I am tired of doing nothing for thee: and I am no great talker. To-morrow, at peep of day, I start. But, hold, I have no money. My mother, she takes care of all mine; and I ne'er see it again."

Then Margaret took out Catherine's gold angel, which had escaped so often, and gave it to Luke; and he set out on his mad errand.

It did not however seem so mad to him as to us. It was a superst.i.tious age: and Luke acted on the dying man's dream, or vision, or illusion, or whatever it was, much as we should act on respectable information.

But Catherine was downright angry when she heard of it. To send the poor lad on such a wild-goose chase! "But you are like a many more girls; and mark my words: by the time you have worn that Luke fairly out, and made him as sick of you as a dog, you will turn as fond on him as a cow on a calf, and 'Too late' will be the cry."

The Cloister

The two friars reached Holland from the south just twelve hours after Luke started up the Rhine.

Thus, wild-goose chase or not, the parties were nearing each other, and rapidly too. For Jerome, unable to preach in low Dutch, now began to push on towards the coast, anxious to get to England as soon as possible.

And, having the stream with them, the friars would in point of fact have missed Luke by pa.s.sing him in full stream below his station, but for the incident which I am about to relate.

About twenty miles above the station Luke was making for, Clement landed to preach in a large village; and towards the end of his sermon he noticed a grey nun weeping.

He spoke to her kindly, and asked her what was her grief. "Nay," said she, "'tis not for myself flow these tears; 'tis for my lost friend. Thy words reminded me of what she was, and what she is, poor wretch. But you are a Dominican, and I am a Franciscan nun."

"It matters little, my sister, if we are both Christians and if I can aid thee in aught."

The nun looked in his face, and said, "These are strange words, but methinks they are good; and thy lips are oh most eloquent. I will tell thee our grief."

She then let him know that a young nun, the darling of the convent, and her bosom friend, had been lured away from her vows, and, after various gradations of sin, was actually living in a small inn as chambermaid, in reality as a decoy, and was known to be selling her favours to the wealthier customers. She added, "Anywhere else we might by kindly violence force her away from perdition. But this innkeeper was the servant of the fierce baron on the height there, and hath his ear still, and he would burn our convent to the ground, were we to take her by force."

"Moreover, souls will not be saved by brute force," said Clement.