Neither Sir Gilbert nor Dame Maisenta ever fully realised the result of that visit. It found Clarice indifferent to both, but ready to reach out a hand to either who would clasp it with any appearance of tenderness and compassion. It left her with a heart closed for ever to her mother, but for ever open to her father.
Note 1. This mediaeval term for the world had its rise in the notion that earth stood midway between Heaven and Hell, the one being as far below as the other was above.
Chapter Eight.
The Shadow of the Future.
In His name was struck the blow
That hath laid thy old life low
In a garb of blood-red woe.
A very eventful year was 1291 in England and over all the civilised world. It was the end of the Crusades, the Turks driving the Christians from Acre, the last place which they held in Palestine. It opened with the submission of the Scottish succession to the arbitrament of Edward the First, and it closed with the funeral of his mother, Queen Eléonore of Provence—a woman whom England was not able to thank for one good deed during her long and stormy reign. She had been a youthful beauty, she wrote poetry, and she had never scandalised the nation by any impropriety of womanly conduct. But these three statements close the list of her virtues. She was equally grasping, unscrupulous, and extravagant. In her old age she retired to the Convent of Amesbury, where her two granddaughters, Mary of England, and Alianora of Bretagne, were nuns already, for the desirable purpose of “making her salvation.” Perhaps she thought she had made it when the summons came to her in the autumn of 1291. No voice had whispered to her, all through her long life of nearly eighty years, that if that ever were to be—
“Jesus Christ has done it all
Long, long ago.”