“Curse me not! curse me not!” cried Isabel, awed by his very silence. “It was but a brief frenzy. Evil counsel, evil passion! I was maddened that my boy had lost a crown. I repented, I repented! Clarence shall yet be true. He hath promised it, vowed it to me; hath written to Gloucester to retract all,—to—”
“Woman! Clarence is in Edward’s camp!”
Isabel started to her feet, and uttered a shriek so wild and despairing, that at least it gave to her father’s lacerated heart the miserable solace of believing the last treason had not been shared. A softer expression—one of pity, if not of pardon—stole over his dark face.
“I curse thee not,” he said; “I rebuke thee not. Thy sin hath its own penance. Ill omen broods on the hearth of the household traitor! Never more shalt thou see holy love in a husband’s smile. His kiss shall have the taint of Judas. From his arms thou shalt start with horror, as from those of thy wronged father’s betrayer,—perchance his deathsman! Ill omen broods on the cradle of the child for whom a mother’s ambition was but a daughter’s perfidy. Woe to thee, wife and mother! Even my forgiveness cannot avert thy doom!”
“Kill me! kill me!” exclaimed Isabel, springing towards him; but seeing his face averted, his arms folded on his breast,—that noble breast, never again her shelter,—she fell lifeless on the floor. [As our narrative does not embrace the future fate of the Duchess of Clarence, the reader will pardon us if we remind him that her first-born (who bore his illustrious grandfather’s title of Earl of Warwick) was cast into prison on the accession of Henry VII., and afterwards beheaded by that king. By birth, he was the rightful heir to the throne. The ill-fated Isabel died young (five years after the date at which our tale has arrived). One of her female attendants was tried and executed on the charge of having poisoned her. Clarence lost no time in seeking to supply her place. He solicited the hand of Mary of Burgundy, sole daughter and heir of Charles the Bold. Edward’s jealousy and fear forbade him to listen to an alliance that might, as Lingard observes, enable Clarence “to employ the power of Burgundy to win the crown of England;” and hence arose those dissensions which ended in the secret murder of the perjured duke.]
The earl looked round, to see that none were by to witness his weakness, took her gently in his arms, laid her on her couch, and, bending over her a moment, prayed to God to pardon her.
He then hastily left the room, ordered her handmaids and her litter, and while she was yet unconscious, the gates of the town opened, and forth through the arch went the closed and curtained vehicle which bore the ill-fated duchess to the new home her husband had made with her father’s foe! The earl watched it from the casement of his tower, and said to himself,—
“I had been unmanned, had I known her within the same walls. Now forever I dismiss her memory and her crime. Treachery hath done its worst, and my soul is proof against all storms!”
At night came messengers from Clarence and Edward, who had returned to Warwick town, with offers of pardon to the earl, with promises of favour, power, and grace. To Edward the earl deigned no answer; to the messenger of Clarence he gave this: “Tell thy master I had liefer be always like myself than like a false and a perjured duke, and that I am determined never to leave the war till I have lost mine own life, or utterly extinguished and put down my foes.” [Hall.]
After this terrible defection, neither his remaining forces, nor the panic amongst them which the duke’s desertion had occasioned, nor the mighty interests involved in the success of his arms, nor the irretrievable advantage which even an engagement of equivocal result with the earl in person would give to Edward, justified Warwick in gratifying the anticipations of the enemy,—that his valour and wrath would urge him into immediate and imprudent battle.