“Why, lass, what is come to thee?” demanded the Dame, when she found no response. “Sure, thou art not ungrateful to thy lady for her care and goodness! That were a sin to be shriven for.”
Clarice turned her wan face towards her mother.
“Grateful!” she said. “For what should I be thankful to her? Dame, she has torn me away from the only one in the world that I loved, and has forced me to wed a man whom I alike fear and hate. Do you think that matter for thankfulness, or does she!”
“Tut, tut!” said the Dame. “Do not ruffle up thy feathers like a pigeon that has got bread-crumbs when he looked for corn! Why, child, ’tis but what all women have to put up with. We all have our calf-loves and bits of maidenly fancies, but who ever thought they were to rule the roast? Sure, Clarice, thou hast more sense than so?”
“Dame, pardon me, but you understand not. This was no light love of mine—no passing fancy that a newer one might have put out. It was the one hope and joy of my whole life. I had nothing else to live for.”
To Clarice’s horror, the rejoinder to her rhetoric was what the Dame herself would have called “a jolly laugh.”
“Dear, dear, how like all young maids be!” cried the mother. “Just the very thought had I when my good knight my father sent away Master Pride, and told me I must needs wed with thy father, Sir Gilbert. That is twenty years gone this winter Clarice, and I swear to thee I thought mine heart was broke. Look on me now. Look I like a woman that had brake her heart o’ love? I trow not, by my troth!”
No; certainly no one would have credited that rosy, comfortable matron with having broken her heart any number of years ago.
“And thou wilt see, too, when twenty years be over, Clarice, I warrant thee thou shalt look back and laugh at thine own folly. Deary me, child! Folks cannot weep for ever and the day after. Wait till thou art forty, and then see if thy trouble be as sore in thy mind then as now.”
Forty! Should she ever be forty? Clarice fondly hoped not. And would any lapse of years change the love which seemed to her interwoven with every fibre of her heart? That heart cried out and said, Impossible! But Dame La Theyn heard no answer.