“Ha! the lad kens me! ’Tis Harry Featherstone as I live.”
Much more altered in these seven years than was Cuthbert Ridley, there rode as a fully-equipped squire in the rear of a splendid knight, Harry Featherstone, the survivor of the dismal Bridge of Wakefield. He was lowering his lance in greeting, but there was no knowing whether it was to Ridley or to Grisell, or whether he recognised her, as she wore her veil far over her face.
This to Grisell closed the whole. She did not see the figure which was more to her than all the rest, for he was among the knights and guards waiting at the Cour des Princes to receive the bride when the final ceremonies of the marriage were to be performed.
Ridley declared his intention of seeking out young Featherstone, but Grisell impressed on him that she wished to remain unknown for the present, above all to Sir Leonard Copeland, and he had been quite sufficiently alarmed by the accusations of sorcery to believe in the danger of her becoming known among the English.
“More by token,” said he, “that the house of this Master Caxton as you call him seems to me no canny haunt. Tell me what you will of making manifold good books or bad, I’ll never believe but that Dr. Faustus and the Devil hatched the notion between them for the bewilderment of men’s brains and the slackening of their hands.”
Thus Ridley made little more attempt to persuade his young lady to come forth to the spectacles of the next fortnight to which he rushed, through crowds and jostling, to behold, with the ardour of an old warrior, the various tilts and tourneys, though he grumbled that they were nothing but child’s play and vain show, no earnest in them fit for a man.
Clemence, however, was all eyes, and revelled in the sight of the wonders, the view of the Tree of Gold, and the champion thereof in the lists of the Hôtel de Ville, and again, some days later, of the banquet, when the table decorations were mosaic gardens with silver trees, laden with enamelled fruit, and where, as an interlude, a whale sixty feet long made its entrance and emitted from its jaws a troop of Moorish youths and maidens, who danced a saraband to the sound of tambourines and cymbals! Such scenes were bliss to the deaf housewife, and would enliven the silent world of her memory all the rest of her life.
The Duchess Isabel had retired to the Grey Sisters, such scenes being inappropriate to her mourning, and besides her apartments being needed for the influx of guests. There, in early morning, before the revels began, Grisell ventured to ask for an audience, and was permitted to follow the Duchess when she returned from mass to her own apartments.
“Ah! my lace weaver. Have you had your share in the revels and pageantries?”
“I saw the procession, so please your Grace.”