“Art thou hurt, child?” whispered the breathless woman.
“No, mother.”
“Come, then. No other choice is ours but death and outrage. We must take shelter where we can.”
She seized his hand—he was a pretty, delicate boy of eleven—and together they entered among the trees. All was strange and voiceless there, yet the leaves were not so full-grown but that the moonlight penetrating might help them a little on their way. It sparkled softly on the woman’s girdle, and on her little turbaned cap, and on the jewels, which she had not thought in her haste to remove or hide, clasped about her white neck; it peopled the glades with moving phantoms, mystic and watchful. She felt the little hand in hers clutch and quiver, and squeezed it, drearily responsive.
“Better,” she said, “these thousand spectres than a single sword of the usurper.”
She was only thirty-four, and of those years she had spent five in the Tower. Yet, born as she was a child of sorrow, always the sport of faction, her baby rattle the roll of drums, her games real warriors and real warfare, her indomitable spirit, wasting itself for ever in fruitless struggles and on timorous souls, refused still to acknowledge its own eclipse. She had fought, had she known it, her weak husband’s cause to within sight of the end, but the fire in her heart, though in the full front of this disaster, was not yet wholly extinguished. Only a tragic woe lined her beautiful face, and she clung half hysterically to this one shadow out of all her dreams which remained to her.
She had been a child herself when her gentle boy was born. They were even now more like brother and mothering sister than son and parent. What hope remained to her was centred entirely in him and his passionate preservation. She carried him into the woods, as a frightened woodcock bears its fledgling, with one only instinct—to put as far and as obscure an interval as possible between their enemies and themselves.
Yet, in the end, worn with grief and terror and the actual fatigues of that bloody day, they faltered and sunk down exhausted at the lip of a little clearing situated but a few hundred yards within the forest-edge. There was a mossy bank there, and on it, under the shadow of a spreading oak-tree, they fell and clung together.
“Neddy, my babe, my little woeful prince!” wept the mother. “There, hide thee thy face within my bosom, and try to sleep. It shall force my bursting heart to still itself to be thy quiet pillow.”
The boy obeyed, crying silently. Yet, so it happened that, spent with emotion, in a little a merciful oblivion overtook him, and, listening to his regular breathing as to soft music, the woman too sank presently drowned in a sea of forgetfulness. And there they lay at peace in the quiet night, with moss for their bedding and green leaves for their canopy.