Chapter Seven.
Dame Maisenta does not see it.
“With a little hoard of maxims, preaching down a daughter’s heart.”—Tennyson.
Earl Edmund had not been callous to the white, woeful face under one of the bridal wreaths. He set himself to think how most pleasantly to divert the thoughts of Clarice; and the result of his meditations was a request to Father Miles that he would induce the Countess to invite the parents of Clarice on a visit. The Countess always obeyed Father Miles, though had she known whence the suggestion came, she might have been less docile. A letter, tied up with red silk, and sealed with the Countess’s seal, was despatched by a messenger to Dame La Theyn, whom it put into no small flutter of nervous excitement.
A journey to London was a tremendous idea to that worthy woman, though she lived but forty miles from the metropolis. She had never been there in her life. Sir Gilbert had once visited it, and had dilated on the size, splendour, and attractions of the place, till it stood, in the Dame’s eyes, next to going to Heaven. It may, indeed, be doubted if she would not have found herself a good deal more at home in the former place than the latter.
Three sumpter-mules were laden with the richest garments and ornaments in the wardrobes of knight and dame. Two armed servants were on one horse, Sir Gilbert and his wife on another; and thus provided, late in February, they drew bridle at the gate of Whitehall Palace. Clarice had not been told of their coming by the Countess, because she was not sufficiently interested; by the Earl, because he wished it to be a pleasant surprise. She was called out into the ante-chamber one afternoon, and, to her complete astonishment, found herself in the presence of her parents.
The greeting was tolerably warm.
“Why, child, what hast done to thy cheeks?” demanded Sir Gilbert, when he had kissed his palefaced daughter. “’Tis all the smoke—that’s what it is!”
“Nay; be sure ’tis the late hours,” responded the Dame. “I’ll warrant you they go not to bed here afore seven o’ the clock. Eh, Clarice?”
“Not before eight, Dame,” answered Clarice, with a smile.
“Eight!” cried Dame Maisenta. “Eh, deary me! Mine head to a pod of peas, but that’s a hearing! And what time get they up of a morrow?”
“The Lady rises commonly by five or soon after.”
“Saint Wulstan be our aid! Heard I ever the like? Why, I am never abed after three!”
“So thou art become Dame Clarice?” said her father, jovially.
The smile died instantly from Clarice’s lips. “Yes,” she said, drearily.
“Where is thy knight, lass?” demanded her mother.
“You will see him in hall,” replied Clarice. And when they went down to supper she presented Vivian in due form.
No one knew better than Vivian Barkeworth how to adapt himself to his company. He measured his bride’s parents as accurately, in the first five minutes, as a draper would measure a yard of calico. It is not surprising if they were both delighted with him.
The Countess received her guests with careless condescension, the Earl with kind cordiality. Dame La Theyn was deeply interested in seeing both. But her chief aim was a long tête-à-tête discourse with Clarice, which she obtained on the day following her arrival. The Countess, as usual, had gone to visit a shrine, and Clarice, being off duty, took her mother to the terrace, where they could chat undisturbed.
Some of us modern folks would rather shrink from sitting on an open terrace in February; but our forefathers were wonderfully independent of the weather, and seem to have been singularly callous in respect to heat and cold. Dame La Theyn made no objection to the airiness of her position, but settled herself comfortably in the corner of the stone bench, and prepared for her chat with much gusto.
“Well, child,” was the Dame’s first remark, “the good saints have ordered matters rarely for thee. I ventured not to look for such good fortune, not so soon as this. Trust me, but I was rejoiced when I read thy lady’s letter, to hear that thou wert well wed unto a knight, and that she had found all the gear. I warrant thee, the grass grew not under my feet afore Dame Rouse, and Mistress Swetapple, and every woman of our neighbours, down to Joan Stick-i’-th’-Lane, knew the good luck that was come to thee.”
Clarice sat with her hands in her lap looking out on the river. Good luck! Could Dame La Theyn see no further than that!
“Why, lass, what is come to thee?” demanded the Dame, when she found no response. “Sure, thou art not ungrateful to thy lady for her care and goodness! That were a sin to be shriven for.”
Clarice turned her wan face towards her mother.
“Grateful!” she said. “For what should I be thankful to her? Dame, she has torn me away from the only one in the world that I loved, and has forced me to wed a man whom I alike fear and hate. Do you think that matter for thankfulness, or does she!”
“Tut, tut!” said the Dame. “Do not ruffle up thy feathers like a pigeon that has got bread-crumbs when he looked for corn! Why, child, ’tis but what all women have to put up with. We all have our calf-loves and bits of maidenly fancies, but who ever thought they were to rule the roast? Sure, Clarice, thou hast more sense than so?”
“Dame, pardon me, but you understand not. This was no light love of mine—no passing fancy that a newer one might have put out. It was the one hope and joy of my whole life. I had nothing else to live for.”
To Clarice’s horror, the rejoinder to her rhetoric was what the Dame herself would have called “a jolly laugh.”
“Dear, dear, how like all young maids be!” cried the mother. “Just the very thought had I when my good knight my father sent away Master Pride, and told me I must needs wed with thy father, Sir Gilbert. That is twenty years gone this winter Clarice, and I swear to thee I thought mine heart was broke. Look on me now. Look I like a woman that had brake her heart o’ love? I trow not, by my troth!”
No; certainly no one would have credited that rosy, comfortable matron with having broken her heart any number of years ago.
“And thou wilt see, too, when twenty years be over, Clarice, I warrant thee thou shalt look back and laugh at thine own folly. Deary me, child! Folks cannot weep for ever and the day after. Wait till thou art forty, and then see if thy trouble be as sore in thy mind then as now.”
Forty! Should she ever be forty? Clarice fondly hoped not. And would any lapse of years change the love which seemed to her interwoven with every fibre of her heart? That heart cried out and said, Impossible! But Dame La Theyn heard no answer.
“When thou hast dwelt on middle earth (Note 1), child, as long as I have, thou wilt look on things more in proportion. There be other affairs in life than lovemaking. Women spend not all their days thinking of wooing, and men still less. I warrant thee thy lover, whoso he be, shall right soon comfort himself with some other damsel. Never suspect a man of constancy, child. They know not what the word means.”
Clarice’s inner consciousness violently contradicted this sweeping statement. But she kept silence still.
“Ah, I see!” said her mother, laughing. “Not a word dost thou credit me. I may as well save my breath to cool my porridge. Howsoe’er, Clarice, when thou hast come to forty years, if I am yet alive, let me hear thy thoughts thereupon. Long ere that time come, as sure as eggs be eggs, thou shalt be a-reading the same lesson to a lass of thine, if it please God so to bless thee. And she’ll not believe thee a word, any more than thou dost me. Eh, these young folks, these young folks! truly, they be rare fun for us old ones. They think they’ve gotten all the wisdom that ever dwelt in King Solomon’s head, and we may stand aside and doff our caps to them. Good lack!—but this world is a queer place, and a merry!”
Clarice thought she had not found it a merry locality by any means.
“And what ails thee at thy knight, child? He is as well-favoured and tall of his hands as e’er a one. Trust me, but I liked him well, and so said thy father. He is a pleasant fellow, no less than a comely. What ails thee at him?”
“Dame, I cannot feel to trust him.”
“Give o’er with thy nonsense! Thou mayest trust him as well as another man. They are all alike. They want their own way, and to please themselves, and if they’ve gotten a bit of time and thought o’er they’ll maybe please thee at after. That’s the way of the world, child. If thou art one of those silly lasses that look for a man who shall never let his eyes rove from thee, nor never make no love to nobody else, why, thou mayest have thy search for thy pains. Thou art little like to catch that lark afore the sky falls.”
Clarice thought that lark had been caught for her, and had been torn from her.
“And what matter?” continued Dame La Theyn. “If a man likes his wife the best, and treats her reasonable kind, as the most do—and I make no doubt thine shall—why should he not have his little pleasures? Thou canst do a bit on thine own account. But mind thou, keep on the windward side o’ decency. ’Tis no good committing o’ mortal sin, and a deal o’ trouble to get shriven for it. Mind thy ways afore the world! And let not thy knight get angered with thee, no more. But I’ll tell thee, Clarice, thou wilt anger him afore long, to carry thyself thus towards him. Of course a man knows he must put up with a bit of perversity and bashfulness when he is first wed; because he can guess reasonable well that the maid might not have chose him her own self. But it does not do to keep it up. Thou must mind thy ways, child.”
Clarice was almost holding her breath. Whether horror or disgust were the feeling uppermost in her mind, she would have found difficult to tell. Was this her mother, who gave her such counsel? And were all women like that? One other distinct idea was left to her—that there was an additional reason for dying—to get out of it all.
“Thou art but a simple lass, I can see,” reflectively added Dame La Theyn. “Thou hast right the young lass’s notions touching truth, and faith, and constancy, and such like. All a parcel of moonshine, child! There is no such thing, not in this world. Some folks be a bit worse than others, but that’s all. I dare reckon thy knight is one of the better end. At any rate, thou wilt find it comfortable to think so.”
Clarice was inwardly convinced that Vivian belonged to the scrag end, so far as character went.
“That’s the true way to get through the world, child. Shut thy eyes to whatever thou wouldst not like to see. Nobody’ll admire thee more for having red rims to ’em. And, dear heart, where’s the good? ’Tis none but fools break their hearts. Wise folks jog on jollily. And if there’s somewhat to forgive on the one side, why, there’ll be somewhat on the other. Thou art not an angel—don’t fancy it. And if he isn’t neither—”
Of that fact Clarice felt superlatively convinced.
“The best way is not to expect it of him, and thou wilt be the less disappointed. So get out thy ribbons and busk thee, and let’s have no more tears shed. There’s been a quart too much already.”
A slight movement of nervous impatience was the sole reply.
“Eh, Clarice? Ne’er a word, trow?”
Then she turned round a wan, set, distressed face, with fervent determination glowing in the eyes.
“Mother! I would rather die, and be out of it!”
“Be out of what, quotha?” demanded Dame La Theyn, in astonished tones.
“This world,” said Clarice, through her set teeth. “This hard, cold, cruel, miserable, wicked world. Is there only one of two lives before me—either to harden into stone and crush other hearts, or to be crushed by the others that have got hard before me? Oh, Mother, Mother! is there nothing in the world for a woman but that?—God, let me die before I come to either!”
“Deary, deary, deary me!” seemed to be all that Dame La Theyn felt herself capable of saying.
“A few weeks ago,” Clarice went on, “before—this, there was a higher and better view of life given to me. One that would make one’s crushed heart grow softer, and not harder; that was upward and not downward; that led to Heaven and God, not to Hell and Satan. There is no hope for me in this life but the hope of Heaven. For pity’s sake let me keep that! If every other human creature is going down—you seem to think so—let me go higher, not lower. Because my life has been spoiled for me, shall I deliberately poison my own soul? May God forbid it me! If I am to spend my life with demons, let my spirit live with God.”
The feelings of Dame La Theyn, on hearing this speech from Clarice, were not capable of expression in words.
In her eyes, as in those of all Romanists, there were two lives which a man or woman could lead—the religious and the secular. To lead a religious life meant, as a matter of course, to go into the cloister. Matrimony and piety were simply incompatible. Clarice was a married woman: ergo, she could not possibly be religious. Dame La Theyn’s mind, to use one of her favourite expressions, was all of a jumble with these extraordinary ideas of which her daughter had unaccountably got hold. “What on earth is the child driving at? is she mad?” thought her mother.
“What dost thou mean, child?” inquired the extremely puzzled Dame. “Thou canst not go into the cloister—thou art wed. Dear heart, but I never reckoned thou hadst any vocation! Thou shouldst have told thy lady.”
“I do not want the cloister,” said Clarice. “I want to do God’s will. I want to belong to God.”
“Why, that is the same thing!” responded the still perplexed woman.
“The Lord Earl is not a monk,” replied Clarice. “And I am sure he belongs to God, for he knows Him better than any priest that I ever saw.”
“Child, child! Did I not tell thee, afore ever thou earnest into this house, that thy Lord was a man full of queer fancies, and all manner of strange things? Don’t thee go and get notions into thine head, for mercy’s sake! Thou must live either in the world or the cloister. Who ever heard of a wedded woman devote to religion? Thou canst not have both—’tis nonsense. Is that one of thy Lord’s queer notions? Sure, these friars never taught thee so?”
“The friars never taught me anything. Father Bevis tried to help me, but he did not know how. My Lord was the only one who understood.”
“Understood? Understood what?”
“Who understood me, and who understood God.”
“Clarice, what manner of tongue art thou talking? ’Tis none I never learned.”
No, for Clarice was beginning to lisp the language of Canaan, and “they that kept the fair were men of this world.” What wonder if she and her thoroughly time-serving mother found it impossible to understand each other?
“I cannot make thee out, lass. If thou wert aware afore thou wert wed that thou hadst a vocation, ’twas right wicked of thee not to tell thy confessor and thy mistress, both. But I cannot see how it well could, when thou wert all head o’er ears o’ love with some gallant or other—the saints know whom. I reckon it undecent, in very deed, Clarice, to meddle up a love-tale with matters of religion. I do wonder thou hast no more sense of fitness and decorum.”
“It were a sad thing,” said Clarice quietly, “if only irreligious people might love each other.”
“Love each other! Dear heart, thy brains must be made o’ forcemeat! Thou hast got love, and religion, and living, and all manner o’ things, jumbled up together in a pie. They’ve nought to do with each other, thou silly lass.”
“If religion has nought to do with living, Dame, under your good pleasure, what has it to do with?”
A query which Dame La Theyn found it as difficult to comprehend as to answer. In her eyes, religion was a thing to take to church on Sunday, and life was restricted to the periods when people were not in church. When she laid up her Sunday gown in lavender, she put her religion in with it. Of course, nuns were religious every day, but nobody else ever thought of such an unreasonable thing. Clarice’s new ideas, therefore, to her, were simply preposterous and irrational.
“Clarice!” she said, in tones of considerable surprise, “I do wonder what’s come o’er thee! This is not the lass I sent to Oakham. Have the fairies been and changed thee, or what on earth has happened to thee? I cannot make thee out!”
“I hardly know what has happened to me,” was the answer, “but I think it is that I have gone nearer God. He ploughed up my heart with the furrow of bitter sorrow, and then He made it soft with the dew of His grace. I suppose the seed will come next. What that is I do not know yet. But my knowing does not matter if He knows.”
The difference which Dame La Theyn failed to understand was the difference between life and death. The words of the Earl had been used as a seed of life, and the life was growing. It is the necessity of life to grow, and it is an impossibility that death should appreciate life.
“Well!” was the Dame’s conclusion, delivered as she rose from the stone bench, in a perplexed and disappointed tone, “I reckon thou wilt be like to take thine own way, child, for I cannot make either head or tail of thy notions. Only I do hope thou wilt not set up to be unlike everybody else. Depend upon it, Clarice, a woman never comes to no good when she sets up to be better than her neighbours. It is bad enough in anybody, but ’tis worser in a woman than a man. I cannot tell who has stuck thy queer notions into thee—whether ’tis thy Lord, or thy lover, or who; but I would to all the saints he had let thee be. I liked thee a deal better afore, I can tell thee. I never had no fancy for philosophy and such.”
“Mother,” said Clarice softly, “I think it was God.”
“Gently, child! No bad language, prithee.” Dame La Theyn looked upon pious language as profanity when uttered in an unconsecrated place. “But if it were the Almighty that put these notions into thy head, I pray He’ll take ’em out again.”
“I think not,” quietly replied Clarice.
And so the scene closed. Neither had understood the other, so far, at least, as spiritual matters were concerned. But in respect to the secular question Dame La Theyn could enter into Clarice’s thoughts more than she chose to allow. The dialogue stirred within her faint memories—not quite dead—of that earlier time when her tears had flowed for the like cause, and when she had felt absolutely certain that she could never be happy again. But her love had been of a selfish and surface kind, and the wound, never more than skin-deep, had healed rapidly and left no scar. Was it surprising if she took it for granted that her daughter’s was of the same class, and would heal with equal rapidity and completeness? Beside this, she thought it very unwise policy to let Clarice perceive that she did understand her in any wise. It would encourage her in her folly, Dame La Theyn considered, if she supposed that so wise a person as her mother could have any sympathy with such notions. So she wrapped herself complacently in her mantle of wisdom, and never perceived that she was severing the last strand of the rope which bound her child’s heart to her own.
“O, purblind race of miserable men!”
How strangely we all spend our lives in the anxious labour of straining out gnats, while we scarcely detect the moment when we swallow the camel!
A long private conversation between Clarice’s parents resulted the next day in Sir Gilbert taking her in hand. His comprehension was even less than her mother’s, though it lay in a different direction.
“Well, Clarice, my dame tells me thou art not altogether well pleased with thy wedding. What didst thou wish otherwise, lass?”
“The man,” said Clarice, shortly enough.
“What, is not one man as good as another?” demanded her father.
“Not to me, Sir,” said his daughter.
“I am afeared, Clarice, thou hast some romantic notions. They are all very pretty to play with, but they don’t do for this world, child. Thou hast better shake them out of thine head, and be content with thy lot.”
“It is a bad world, I know,” replied Clarice. “But it is hard to be content, when life has been emptied and spoiled for one.”
“Folly, child, folly!” said Sir Gilbert. “Thou mayest have as many silk gowns now as thou couldst have had with any other knight; and I dare be bound Sir Vivian should give thee a gold chain if thou wert pining for it. Should that content thee?”
“No, Sir.”
Sir Gilbert was puzzled. A woman whose perfect happiness could not be secured by a gold chain was an enigma to him.
“Then what would content thee?” he asked.
“What I can never have now,” answered Clarice. “It may be, as time goes on, that God will make me content without it—content with His will, and no more. But I doubt if even He could do that just yet. The wisest physician living cannot heal a wound in a minute. It must have its time.”
Sir Gilbert tried to puzzle his way through this speech.
“Well, child, I do not see what I can do for thee.”
“I thank you for wishing it, fair Sir. No, you can do nothing. No one can do anything for me, except let me alone, and pray to God to heal the wound.”
“Well, lass, I can do that,” said her father, brightening. “I will say the rosary all over for thee once in the week, and give a candle to our Lady. Will that do thee a bit of good, eh?”
Clarice had an instinctive feeling, that while the rosary and the candle might be a doubtful good, the rough tenderness of her father was a positive one. Little as Sir Gilbert could enter into her ideas, his affection was truer and more unselfish than that of her mother. Neither of them was very deeply attached to her; but Sir Gilbert’s love could have borne the harder strain of the two. Clarice began to recognise the fact with touched surprise.
“Fair Sir, I shall be very thankful for your prayers. It will do me good to be loved—so far as anything can do it.”
Sir Gilbert was also discovering, with a little astonishment himself, that his only child lay nearer to his heart than he had supposed. His heart was a plant which had never received much cultivation, either from himself or any other; and love, even in faint throbs, was a rather strange sensation. It made him feel as if something were the matter with him, and he could not exactly tell what. He patted Clarice’s shoulder, and smoothed down her hair.
“Well, well, child! I hope all things will settle comfortably by and by. But if they should not, and in especial if thy knight were ever unkindly toward thee—which God avert!—do not forget that thou hast a friend in thine old father. Maybe he has not shown thee over much kindliness neither, but I reckon, my lass, if it came to a pull, there’d be a bit to pull at.”
Neither Sir Gilbert nor Dame Maisenta ever fully realised the result of that visit. It found Clarice indifferent to both, but ready to reach out a hand to either who would clasp it with any appearance of tenderness and compassion. It left her with a heart closed for ever to her mother, but for ever open to her father.
Note 1. This mediaeval term for the world had its rise in the notion that earth stood midway between Heaven and Hell, the one being as far below as the other was above.