"Oh, Matilda, what would you have done in a room eight feet by ten, and in the dark most of the time—your bread and water given without a word—your attendant deaf and dumb to you—no way to tell the passage of time—no way of knowing how the seasons went, but by the more severe cold—if you had been, like Cluny, really buried alive, what would you have done?"
"I would have died."
"Cluny composed psalms and hymns, and tried to sing; he did not lose heart or hope quite, the gaoler told father, for nearly four years. Then his health and strength gave out, and his heart failed, but he never ceased praying. They heard him at midnight, but Cluny did not know what hour it was. And to the last moment he kept his faith in God. He was sure God would deliver him, though He sent an angel to open the prison doors. He was expecting deliverance the day it came. He had had a message from beyond, and his mother had brought it. Now did I not do right to marry him when, and how, he wished?"
"Yes," she answered, but her face and voice showed her to be painfully affected. "Jane, I cannot bear to lose you. I shall have no one to love me, no one to quarrel with," she added.
"You will have Cymlin."
"Cymlin is Cymlin; he is not you. I will say no more. When a woman is married, all is over. She must tag after her lord, even over seas and into barbarous places. If the Indians kill you, it will be said that you were in the way of duty; but I have noticed how often people take the way they want to take, and then call it the way of Duty. I shall not marry Cymlin until he can show me the way of peace and pleasantness."
Then Jane rose to go, and Matilda tied her bonnet-strings, and straightened out her ribbons and her gloves, doing these trifling services with a long-absent tenderness that filled Jane's heart with pleasure. "Good-bye, dear!" she said with a kiss; "I will come as often as I can."
"Very kind of you, Lady Neville," answered Matilda with a curtsy and a tearful mockery; "very kind indeed! But will your ladyship consider—" then she broke down and threw her arms round Jane, and called her "a dear, sweet, little Baggage" and bade her give Cluny some messages of hope and congratulation, and so parted with her in a strange access of affection. But true friendship has these moods of the individual and would not be true without them.
Jane walked home through the city, and its busy turmoil struck her as never before. What a vain show it was!—a passing show, constantly changing. And suddenly there was the galloping of horsemen, and the crowd stood still, and drew a little aside, while Cromwell, at the head of his guards, rode at an easy canter down the street. Every man bared his head as the grand, soldierly figure passed by. He saw Jane, and a swift smile chased away for a moment the sorrowful gravity of his face. But he left behind him a penetrating atmosphere of coming calamity. All souls sensitive to spiritual influences went onward with a sigh, and the clairvoyant saw—as George Fox did—the wraith of fast approaching affliction. The man was armed from head to feet, and his sword had never failed him, but it was not with flesh and blood he had now to contend. The awful shadows of the supernatural world darkened the daylight round him, and people saw his sad face and form as through a mist, dimly feeling all the chill foreboding of something uncertain, yet of certain fatality.
His glorious life was closing like a brilliant sun setting in a stormy sky. He had been recently compelled to tell his last Parliament some bitter truths, for danger was pressing on every side. Protestants in the Grisons, in Piedmont and Switzerland, were a prey to the Spanish papists, and their helper, Pope Alexander the Seventh, and the Protestant Dutch—preferring profit to godliness—were providing ships to transport Charles Stuart and his army to English soil.