Earl Hubert's Daughter Part 25

Apparently the officers were touched, for they stopped and looked at their chief for further orders.

"Coward loons as ye are!--are ye frightened of a girl?" said Sir Piers with a harsh laugh, and he came forward himself. "Lady Margaret, there is no need to injure you unless you choose. Please yourself. I am going to arrest this young knight."

But for one second, Sir Piers waited himself. Those around mistook it for that knightly courtesy of which there was none in him. They did not know that suddenly, to him, out of Margaret's pleading eyes looked the eyes of the dead sister, Serena de Rievaulx, and it seemed to him as though soft child-fingers held him off for an instant. He had never loved any mortal thing but that dead child.

With one pa.s.sionate, pleading gaze at Sir Piers, Margaret laid her head on the breast of Sir Richard, and sobbed as though her heart were breaking.

"My Lord, my Lord!" came, painfully mixed with long-drawn sobs, from the lips of the young bride. "My own, own Richard! And only two months since we were married!--Have you the heart to part us?" she cried, suddenly turning to Sir Piers. "Did you never love any one?"

"Never, Madam." For once in his life, Sir Piers spoke truth, Never-- except Serena: and not much then.

"Brute!" And with this calumnious epithet--for brutes can love dearly-- Margaret resumed her former att.i.tude.

"Lady Margaret, I must trouble you," said Sir Piers, in tones of hardness veneered with civility.

"My darling, you must let me go," interposed the young Earl of Gloucester, who seemed scarcely less miserable than his bride.

"Magot, my child, we may not stay justice," said the distressed tones of her father.

Yet she held tight until Sir Piers tore her away.

"Look to the damsel," he condescended to say, with a glance at Doucebelle and Bruno. "Oh, ha!--where is the priest that blessed this wedding? I must have him."

"There was no priest," sobbed the Countess, lifting her head from her husband's arm, where she had let it sink: "it was _per verba depresenti_."

"That we will see," was the cool response of Sir Piers. "Take all the priests, Sir Drew.--Now, my Lady!"

"Fare thee well, my jewel," said Earl Hubert, kissing the brow of the Countess. "Poor little Magot!--farewell, too."

"Sir Hubert, my Lord, forgive me! I meant no ill."

"Forgive thee?" said the Earl, with a smile, and again kissing his wife's brow. "I could not do otherwise, my Margaret.--Now, Sir Piers, we are your prisoners."

"These little amenities being disposed of," sneered Sir Piers. "I suppose women must cry over something:--kind, I should think, to give them something to cry about.--March out the prisoners."

Father Nicholas had been discovered in his study, engaged in the deepest meditation on a grammatical crux; and had received the news of his arrest with a blank horror and amazement very laughable in the eyes of Sir Piers. Master Aristoteles was pounding rhubarb with his sleeves turned up, and required some convincing that he was not wanted professionally. Father Warner was no where to be found. The three priests were spared fetters in consideration of their sacred character: both the Earls were heavily ironed. And so the armed band, with their prisoners, marched away from the Castle.

The feelings of the prisoners were diverse. Father Nicholas was simply astonished beyond any power of words to convey. Master Aristoteles was convinced that the recent physical disturbances in the atmosphere were more than enough to account for the whole affair. Earl Hubert felt sure that his old enemy, the Bishop of Winchester, was at the bottom of it.

Earl Richard was disposed to think the same Father Bruno alone looked upwards, and saw G.o.d.

But a.s.suredly no one of them saw the moving cause in that tall, stern, silent Jewish youth, and the last idea that ever entered the mind of Richard de Clare was to a.s.sociate this great grief of his life with the boyish trick he had played on Delecresse two years before.

For the great grief of Richard's life this sorrow was. Through the six-and-twenty years which remained of his mortal span, he never forgot it, and he never forgave it.

It proved the easiest thing in the world to convince King Henry that he had not intended Richard to marry Margaret. Had his dearly-beloved uncle, the Bishop of Valentia, held up before him a black cloth, and said, "This is white," His Majesty would merely have wondered what could be the matter with his eyes.

The next point was to persuade that royal and most deceivable individual that he had entertained an earnest desire to see Richard married to a Princess of Savoy, a cousin of the Queen. This, also, was not difficult. The third lesson instilled into him was that, Richard having thought proper to render this impossible by choosing for himself, he, King Henry, was a cruelly-injured and unpardonably insulted man. His Majesty swallowed them all as glibly as possible. The metal being thus fused to the proper state, the prisoners were brought before their affronted Sovereign in person.

They were tried in inverse order, according to importance. Father Bruno could prove, without much difficulty, that the obnoxious marriage had taken place, on the showing of the prosecution itself, before he had entered the household. His penalty was the light one of discharge from the Countess's service. That he deserved no penalty at all was not taken into consideration. The Crown could not so far err as to bring a charge against an entirely innocent man. The verdict, therefore, in Father Bruno's case resembled that of the famous jury who returned as theirs, "Not Guilty, but we hope he won't do it again."

Master Aristoteles was next placed in the dock, and had the honour of amusing the Court. His a.s.severations of innocent ignorance were so mixed up with dissertations on the virtues of savin and betony, and lamenting references to the last eclipse which might have warned him of what was coming on him, that the Court condescended to relax into a smile, and let the simple man go with the light sentence of six months'

imprisonment. At a subsequent period in his life, Master Aristoteles was wont to say that this sentence was the best thing that ever happened to him, since the enforced meditation and idleness had enabled him to think out his grand discovery that the dust which gathered on beams of chestnut wood was an infallible specific for fever. He had since treated three fever patients in this manner, and not one of them had died. Whether the patients would have recovered without the dust, and with being so much let alone, Master Aristoteles did not concern himself.

Next came Father Nicholas. A light sentence also sufficed for him, not on account of his innocence, but because his friend the Abbot of Ham was a friend of the Bishop of Winchester.

Earl Hubert of Kent was then tried. The animus of his accusers was plainly shown, for they brought up again all the old hackneyed charges on account of which he had been pardoned years before--for some of them more than once. The affront offered to the King by the Earl's marriage with Margaret of Scotland, the fact that she and his third wife were within the forbidden degrees, and that no dispensation had been obtained; these were renewed, with all the other disproved and spiteful accusations of old time. But the head and front of the offending, in this instance, was of course the marriage of his daughter. It did not make much difference that Hubert calmly swore that he had never known of the marriage, either before or after, except what he had learned from the simple statement of the Countess his wife, to the effect that it had been contracted at Bury Saint Edmund's, during his absence at Merton.

The fervent intercession of Hubert's friends, moved by the pa.s.sionate entreaties of the Countess, did not make much difference either; but what did make a good deal was that the Earl (who knew his royal master) offered a heavy golden bribe for pardon of the crime he had not committed. King Henry thereupon condescended to announce that in consideration of the effect produced upon his compa.s.sionate heart by the piteous intercession of the prisoner's friends,--

"His fury should abate, and he The crowns would take."

Earl Hubert therefore received a most gracious pardon, and was permitted to return (minus the money) to the bosom of his distracted family.

But the heaviest vengeance fell on the young head of Richard de Clare, and through him on the fair girl with the cedar hair, whose worst crime was that she had loved him. It was not vengeance that could be weighed like Hubert's coins, or told on the clock like the imprisonment of his physician. It was counted out, throb by throb, in the agony of two human hearts, one fiercely stabbed and artificially healed, and the other left to bleed to death like a wounded doe.

The King's first step was to procure a solemn Papal sentence of divorce between Richard and Margaret. Their consent, of course, was neither asked nor thought needful. His Majesty's advisers allowed him--and Richard--a little rest then, before they thought it necessary to do any thing more.

The result of the trial was to leave Father Bruno homeless. He returned to his monastery at Lincoln, and sought the leave of his Superior to be transferred to the Convent of the Order at Norwich. His heart still yearned over Belasez, with a tenderness which was half of Heaven and half of earth. Yet he knew that in all probability he would never find it possible to cross her path. Well! let him do what he could, and leave the rest with G.o.d. If He meant them to meet, meet they must, though Satan and all his angels combined to bar the way.

"Wife!"

"May thy beard be shaven! I was just dropping off. Well?"

It had taken Abraham a long while to summon up his courage to make what he felt would be to Licorice an unwelcome communication. He was rather dismayed to find it so badly received at the first step.

"Do go on, thou weariest of old jackdaws! I'm half asleep."

"I have spoken to the child, Licorice."

"As if thou couldst not have said that half an hour ago! Well, how do matters stand?"

"There is one person in particular whom she is sorry to leave."

"Of course there is! I saw that as plain as the barber's pole across the street. Didn't I tell thee so? Is it some young Christian gallant, and who is he? Blessed be the memory of Abraham our father!--why did we ever let that girl go to Bury?"

"It is not as thou art fearing, wife. But--it is worse."

"Worse!" Licorice seemed wide awake enough now. "Why, what could there be worse, unless she had married a Christian, or had abjured her faith?"

"Wife, this is worse. She has seen--him."

"De Malpas?" The name was almost hissed from the lips of Licorice.

"The same. It was to be, Licorice. Adonai knows why! But it is evident they were fated to meet."

"What did the viper tell her?"

"I do not gather that he told her any thing, except that she brought a face to his memory that he had known of old. She fancies--and so of course does he--that it was her sister."