“Why should we be such fools as to go to Oakham when my Lord is in Bermondsey?”
“Bermondsey!” Clarice was surprised. “You never know anything!” said Vivian. “Of course he is come to town.”
Clarice received the snubbing in silence. “You are so taken up with that everlasting brat of yours,” added Rose’s affectionate father, “that you never know what anybody else is doing.”
There had been a time when Clarice would have defended herself against such accusations. She was learning now that she suffered least when she received them in meek silence. The only way to deal with Vivian Barkeworth was to let him alone.
Two long letters went to the Pope that February; one was from the Countess, the other from the Earl. They are both yet extant, and they show the character of each as no description could set it forth.
The Countess’s letter is a mixture of pious demureness and querulous selfishness. She tells the Pope that all her life she has intensely desired to be a nun: that she is, unhappily, in the irreligious position of a matron, and, moreover, is the suffering wife of an impious husband. This sinful man requires of her—of her, a soul devoted to religion—that she shall behave as if she belonged to the wicked world which holds himself within its thrall, and shall sacrifice God to him. She humbly and fervently entreats the holy Father to grant her a divorce from these bonds of matrimony which so cruelly oppress her, and to set her soul free that it may soar upwards unrestrained. It is the letter of a woman who did wish to serve God, but who was incapable of recognising that it was possible to do it without shutting herself up in stone walls, and starving body and soul alike.
The Earl’s letter is of an entirely different calibre. He tells the Pope in his turn that he is wedded to a woman whom he dearly loves, and who resolutely keeps him at arm’s length. She will not make a friend of him, nor behave as a good wife ought to do. This is all he asks of her; he is as far as can be from wishing to be unkind to her or to cross her wishes. He only wants her to live with him on reasonable and ordinary terms. But she—and here the Earl’s irrepressible humour breaks out; he must see the comical side even of his own sorest trouble, and certainly this had its comical side—she will not sit next to him at table, but insists on putting her confessor between; she will not answer Yes or No to his simplest question, but invariably returns the answer through a third person. When she goes into her private apartments, she turns the key in his face. Does the holy Father think this is the way that a rational wife ought to behave to her own husband? and will he not remonstrate with her, and induce her to use him a little more kindly and reasonably than she does? The Earl’s letter is that of an injured and justly provoked man; of a man who loves his wife too well to coerce or quarrel with her, and who thoroughly perceives the absurdity of his position no less than its pain. Yet he does feel the pain bitterly, and he would do anything to end it.
This letter to the Patriarch of Christendom was his last hope. Entreaties, remonstrances, patient tenderness, loving kindness, all had proved vain. Now:—
“He had set his life upon a cast,
And he must run the hazard of the die.”
Weary and miserable weeks they were, during which Earl Edmund waited the Pope’s answer. It came at last. The Pope replied as only a Romish priest could be expected to reply. For the human anguish of the one he had no sympathy; for the quasi-religious sorrows of the other he had very much. He decreed, in the name of God, a full divorce between Edmund Earl of Cornwall, and Margaret his wife, coldly admonishing the Earl to take the Lord’s chastening in good part, and to let the griefs of earth lift his soul towards Heaven.