“My Lord, will you tell me all?”
The Earl took her hand and looked kindly at her. “Dame, he is dead.”
Mistress Underdone raised her hands with an exclamation of shocked surprise, to which Heliet’s look of horror formed a fitting corollary. Clarice was conscious only of a confused medley of feelings, from which none but a sense of amazement stood out in the foreground. Then the Earl quietly told her that, in leaping a wide ditch, Vivian had been thrown from his horse, and had never spoken more.
No one tried to comfort Clarice. Pitifully they all felt that comfort was not wanted now. The death of Rosie had been a crushing blow; but Vivian’s, however sudden, could hardly be otherwise than a relief. The only compassion that any one could feel was for him, for whom there was—
“No reckoning made, but sent to his account
With all his imperfections on his head.”
The very fact that she could not regret him on her own account lay a weight on Clarice’s conscience, though it was purely his own fault. Severely as she tried to judge herself, she could recall no instance in which, so far as such a thing can be said of any human sinner, she had not done her duty by that dead man. She had obeyed him in letter and spirit, however distasteful it had often been to herself; she had consulted his wishes before her own; she had even honestly tried to love him, and he had made it impossible. Now, she could not resist the overwhelming consciousness that his death was to her a release from her fetters—a coming out of prison. She was free from the perpetual drag of apprehension on the one hand, and of constantly endeavouring on the other to please a man who was determined not to be pleased. The spirit of the uncaged bird awoke within her—a sense of freedom, and light, and rest, such as she had not known for those eight weary years of her married slavery.
Yet the future was no path of roses to the eyes of Clarice. She was not free in the thirteenth century, in the sense in which she would have been free in the nineteenth, for she had no power to choose her own lot. All widows were wards of the Crown; and it was not at all usual for the Crown to concern its august self respecting their wishes, unless they bought leave to comply with them at a very costly price. By a singular perversion of justice, the tax upon a widow who purchased permission to remarry or not, at her pleasure, was far heavier than the fine exacted from a man who married a ward of the Crown without royal licence. The natural result of this arrangement was that the ladies who were either dowered widows or spinster heiresses very often contracted clandestine marriages, and their husbands quietly endured the subsequent fine and imprisonment, as unavoidable evils which were soon over, and well worth the advantage which they purchased.
It seemed, however, as if blessings, no less than misfortunes, were not to come single to Clarice Barkeworth. A few weeks after Vivian’s death, the Earl silently put a parchment into her hand, which conveyed to her the information that King Edward had granted to his well-beloved cousin, Edmund, Earl of Cornwall, the marriage of Clarice, widow of Vivian Barkeworth, knight, with the usual proviso that she was not to marry one of the King’s enemies. This was, indeed, something for which to be thankful. Clarice knew that her future was as safe in her master’s hands as in her own.
“Ah!” said Heliet, when that remark was made to her, “if we could only have felt, dear heart, that it was as safe in the hands of his Master!”
“Was I very faithless, Heliet?” said Clarice, with tears in her eyes.