The White Rose of Langley Part 49

"I shall send to my Lord, of force," she answered coldly, "and desire that he come and fetch me hence."

"And your sister, the Lady Alianora?"

The child was kneeling by the side of her dead mother, wrapped in unutterable grief. Isabel cast a contemptuous glance upon her.

"No sister of mine!" she said in the same tone. "I cannot be burdened with nameless childre."

For an instant Maude's indignation rose above both her discretion and her sorrow. She cried--"Girl, G.o.d pardon you those cruel words!"--but then with a strong effort she bridled her tongue, and sitting down by the bed, drew the sobbing child's head upon her bosom.

"My poor homeless darling! doth none want thee, my dove?--not even thine own mother's daughter?--Bertram, good husband, thou wilt not let [hinder] me?--Sweet, come then with us, and be our daughter--to whom beside thee G.o.d hath given none. Meseemeth as though He now saith, 'Take this child and nurse it for Me.' Lord, so be it!"

At the end of those four years, men's revenge was satiated, and permission was given for the funeral of the unburied coffin. But they laid her, as they had laid her son, far from the scene of her home, and from the graves of her beloved. The long unused royal vault in the Benedictine Abbey of Reading, in which the latest burial had taken place nearly two hundred years before, was opened to receive its last tenant.

There she sleeps calmly, waiting for the resurrection morning.

Three historical tableaux will complete the story.

First, a quiet little village home, where a knight and his wife are calmly pa.s.sing the later half of life. The knight was rendered useless for battle some years ago by a severe wound, resulting in permanent lameness. In the chimney-corner, distaff in hand, sits the dame,--a small, slight woman, with gentle dark eyes, and a meek, loving expression, which will make her face lovely to the close of life.

Opposite to her, occupied with another distaff, is a tall, fair, queenly girl, who can surely be no daughter of the dame. By the knight's chair, in hunting costume, stands a young man with a very open, pleasant countenance, who is evidently pleading for some favour which the knight and dame are a little reluctant to grant.

"Sir Bertram, not one word would she hear me, but bade me betake me directly unto yourself. So here behold me to beseech your gentleness in favour of my suit."

"Lord de Audley," said the knight, quietly, "this is not the first time by many that I have heard of your name, neither of your goodness. You seek to wed my daughter. But I would have you well aware that she hath no portion: and what, I pray you, shall all your friends and lovers say unto your wedding of a poor knight's portionless daughter?"

"Say! Let them say as they list!" cried the young man. "For portion, I do account Mistress Nell portion and lineage in herself. And they be sorry friends of mine that desire not my best welfare. Her do I love, and only her will I wed."

Bertram looked across at his wife with a smile.

"Must we tell him, Dame?"

"I think we may, husband."

"Then know, Lord James de Audley, that you have asked more than you wist. This maid is no daughter of mine. Wedding her, you should wed not Nell Lyngern, a poor knight's daughter; but the Lady Alianora de Holand, Countess of Kent, of the royal line, whose mother was daughter unto a son of King Edward. Now what say you?"

The young man's face changed painfully.

"Sir, I thank you," he said in a low voice. "I am no man fit to mate with the blood royal. Lady Countess, I cry you mercy for mine ignorance and mine unwisdom."

"Tarry yet a moment, Lord de Audley," said Bertram, smiling again; for the girl's colour came and went, the distaff trembled in her hand, and her eyes sought his with a look of troubled entreaty. "Well, Nell?-- speak out, maiden mine!"

"Father!" she said in an agitated voice, "he loved Nell Lyngern!"

"Come, Lord James," said Bertram, laughing, "methinks you be not going empty away. G.o.d bless you, man and maid!--only, good knight and true, see thou leave not to love Nell Lyngern."

The picture fades away, and another comes on the scene.

The bar of the House of Lords. Peers in their Parliament robes fill all the benches, and at their head sits the Regent,--Prince Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the representative Rationalist of the fifteenth century.

He was no Papist, for he disliked and despised Romish superst.i.tions; yet no Lollard, for he was utterly incapable of receiving the things of the Spirit of G.o.d. Henry the Fifth now lies entombed at Westminster, and on the throne is his little son of nine years old, for whom his uncle Humphrey reigns and rules. There comes forward to the bar a fair-haired, stately woman, robed in the ermine and velvet of a countess. She is asked to state her name and her business. The reply comes in a clear voice.

"My name is Alianora Touchet, Lady de Audley; and I am the only daughter and heir of Sir Edmund de Holand, sometime Earl of Kent, and of Custance his wife, daughter unto Sir Edmund of Langley, Duke of York. I claim the lands and coronets of this my father--the earldom of Kent, and the barony of Wake de Lydel."

Her evidences are received and examined. The case shall be considered, and the pet.i.tioner shall receive her answer that day month. She bows and retires.

And then down from her eyrie, like a vengeful eagle, swoops the old d.u.c.h.ess Joan of York--the sister of Kent, the step-mother of Constance-- who has two pa.s.sions to gratify, her hatred to the memory of the one, and her desire to retain her share of the estates of the other. She draws up her answer to the claim,--astutely disappearing into the background, and pushing forward her simpler sister Margaret, entirely governed by her influence, as the prominent objector. She forgets nothing. She urges the a.s.sent and consent of Henry the Fourth to the marriage of Lucia, the presence of Constance at the ceremony, and every point which can give weight to her objection. She prays, therefore--or Margaret does for her--that the claim of the aforesaid Alianora may be adjudged invalid, and the earldom of Kent extinct.

Lady Audley reappears on the day appointed. It is the same scene again, with Duke Humphrey as president; who informs her, with calm judicial impartiality, that her pet.i.tion is rejected, her claim disallowed, and her name branded with the bar sinister for ever. But as she leaves the bar, denied and humiliated, her hand is drawn gently into another hand, and a voice softly asks her--"Am not I better to thee than ten coronets?"

And so they pa.s.s away.

The second dissolving view has disappeared; and the last slowly grows before our sight.

A dungeon in the Tower of London. There is only a solitary prisoner,--a man of fifty years of age, moderate in stature, but very slightly built, with hands and feet which would be small even in a woman. His face has never been handsome; there are deep furrows in the forehead, and something more than time has turned the brown hair grey, and given to the strongly-marked features that pensive, weary look, which his countenance always wears when in repose. Ask his name of his gaolers, and they will say it is "Sir Henry of Lancaster, the usurper;" but ask it of himself, and a momentary flash lights up the sunken eyes as he answers, "I am the King."

Neither Pharisee nor Sadducee is Henry the Sixth. He is not a Lollard, simply because he never knew what Lollardism was. During his reign it lay dormant--the old Wycliffite plant violently uprooted, the new Lutheran shoots not yet visible above the ground. He was one of the very few men divinely taught without ostensible human agency,--within whom G.o.d is pleased to dwell by His Spirit at an age so early that the dawn of the heavenly instinct cannot be perceived. From the follies, the cruelties, and the iniquities of Romanism he shrank with that Heaven-born instinct; and by the dim flickering light which he had, he walked with G.o.d. His way led over very rough ground, full of rugged stones, on which his weary feet were bruised and torn. But it was the way Home.

And now, to-night, on the 22nd of May, 1471, the prisoner is very worn and weary. He sits with a book before him--a small square volume, in illuminated Latin, with delicately-wrought borders, and occasional full-page illuminations; a Psalter, which came into his hands from those of another prisoner in like case with himself, for the book once belonged to Richard of Bordeaux [Note 2]. He turns slowly over the leaves, now and then reading a sentence aloud:--sentences all of which indicate a longing for home and rest.

"'My soul is also sore vexed; but Thou, O Lord, how long?'

"'Lord, how long wilt Thou look on? Rescue my soul from their destructions, mine only one from the lions.'

"'And now, Lord, what wait I for?'

"'Who shall give me wings like a dove?--and I will flee away, and be at rest!'" [Vulgate version].

At last the prisoner closed the book, and spoke in his own words to his heavenly Friend--the only friend whom he had in all the world, except the wife who was a helpless prisoner like himself.

"Lord G.o.d, Thy will be done! Grant unto me patience to await Thy time; but, O fair Father, I lack rest!"

And just as his voice ceased, the heavy door rolled back, and the messenger of rest came in.

He did not look like a messenger of rest. But all G.o.d's messengers are not angels. And there was little indeed of the angel in this man's composition. His figure would have been tall but for a deformity which his enemies called a hump back, and his friends merely an overgrown shoulder; and his face would have been handsome but for its morose, scowling expression, which by no means betokened an amiable character.

The two cousins stood and looked at each other. The prisoner was the grandson of Henry of Bolingbroke, and the visitor was the grandson of Richard of Conisborough.

There were a few words on each side--contemptuous taunts, and sharp accusations, on the one side,--low, patient replies on the other. Then came a gleam of something flashing in the dim light, and the dagger of the visitor was sheathed in the pale prisoner's heart.

At rest, at last: safe, and saved, and with G.o.d.

It was a cruel, brutal, cold-blooded murder. But was it nothing else?

Was there in it no operation of those Divine wheels which "grind slowly, yet exceeding small?"--no visitation, by Him to whom vengeance belongeth, of the sins of the guilty fathers upon the guiltless son-- vengeance for the broken heart of Richard of Bordeaux, for the judicial murder of Richard of Conisborough, for the dreary imprisoned girlhood of Anne Mortimer, and--last, not least--for the long, slow years of moral torture, ending with the bitter cup forced into the dying hand of the White Rose of Langley?

Note 1. Richard of Conisborough married secondly, and probably chiefly with the view of securing a mother for his children, Maude Clifford, a daughter of the great Lollard House of Clifford of c.u.mberland. She survived him many years.