“Dear heart, no more than I was!” was Heliet’s answer.
“But has it not occurred to thee, Heliet, now—why might I not have had Rosie?”
“I know not, dear Clarice, any more than Rosie knew, when she was a babe in thine arms, why thou gavest her bitter medicine. Oh, leave all that alone—our Master understands what He is doing.”
It was the middle of September, and about two months after Vivian’s death. Clarice sat sewing, robed in the white weeds of widowhood, in the room which she usually occupied in the Countess’s tower. The garments worn by a widow were at this time extremely strict and very unbecoming, though the period during which they were worn was much less stringent than now. From one to six months was as long as many widows remained in that condition. Heliet had not been seen for an hour or more, and Mistress Underdone, with some barely intelligible remarks very disparaging to “that Nell,” who stood, under her, at the head of the kitchen department, had disappeared to oversee the venison pasty. Clarice was doing something which she had not done for eight years, though hardly aware that she was doing it—humming a troubadour song. Getting past an awkward place in her work, words as well as music became audible—
“And though my lot were hard and bare,
And though my hopes were few,
Yet would I dare one vow to swear
My heart should still be true.”
“Wouldst thou, Clarice?” asked a voice behind her.
Clarice’s delicate embroidery got the worst of it, for it dropped in a heap on the rushes, and nobody paid the slightest attention to it for a considerable time. Nor did any one come near the room until Heliet made her appearance, and she came so slowly, and heralded her approach by such emphatic raps of her crutches on the stone floor, that Clarice could scarcely avoid the conclusion that she was a conspirator in the plot. The head and front of it all, however, was manifestly Earl Edmund, who received Sir Piers with a smile and no other greeting—a distinct intimation that it was not the first time they had met that day.
The wedding—which nobody felt inclined to dispute—was fixed for the fifteenth of October. The Earl wished it to take place when he could be present and give away the bride, and he wanted first a fortnight’s retreat at Ashridge, to which place he had arranged to go on the last day of September. Sir Piers stepped at once into his old position, but the Earl took Ademar with him to Ashridge. He gave the grant of Clarice’s marriage to Piers himself, in the presence of the household, with the remark:—
“It will be better in your hands than mine; and there is no time like the present.”
Into Clarice’s hand her master put a shining pile of gold for the purchase of wedding garments and jewellery.