“And will they get any dinner and supper?” saith Maud.
“Plenty!” he answered: “and right good learning, and play in the convent garden at recreation-time, with such other young damsels as shall be bred up there. They will be merry as crickets, I warrant.”
Kate fetched a great sigh of relief. She told me afterwards that she had felt quite sure we should every one of us be had to separate convents, and never see each other any more.
So matters dropped down again into their wonted course. For over two years, our mother tarried at Skipton, and then she was moved into straiter ward at Pomfret, about six weeks only (Note 2) before Queen Isabel landed with her alien troops under Sir John of Ostrevant, and drave King Edward first from his throne, and finally from this life. Our father came with her. And this will I say, that our mother might have been set free something earlier (Note 3), if every body had done his duty. But folks are not much given to doing their duties, so far as I can see. They are as ready as you please to contend for their rights—which generally seems to mean, “Let me have somebody else’s rights;” ay, they will get up a battle for that at short notice: but who ever heard of a man petitioning, much less fighting, for the right to do his duty? And yet is not that, really and verily, the only right a man has?
It was a gala day for us when our mother returned home, and our brothers and sisters were gathered and sent back to us. Nym (always a little given to romance) drew heart-rending pictures of his utter misery, while in ward; but Roger said it was not so bad, setting aside that it was prison, and we were parted from one another. And Geoffrey, the sensible boy of the family, said that while he would not like a monk’s life on the whole, being idle and useless, yet he did like the quiet and peacefulness of it.
“But I am not secure,” said our mother, “that such quiet is what God would for us, saving some few. Soldiers be not bred by lying of a bed of rose-leaves beside scented waters. And I think the soldiers of Christ will scarce be taught o’ that fashion.”
Diverse likewise were the maids’ fantasies. Meg said she would not have bidden at Shuldham one day longer than she was forced. Joan said she liked not ill at Sempringham, only for being alone. But Isabel, as she sat afore the fire with me on her lap, the even of her coming home—Isabel had ever petted me—and Dame Hilda asked her touching her life at Chicksand—Isabel said, gazing with a far-away look into the red ashes—
“I shall go back to Chicksand, some day, if I may win leave of mine elders.”
“Why, Dame Isabel!” quoth Dame Hilda in some surprise. “Liked you so well as that?”
“Ay, I liked well,” she said, in that dreamy fashion. “Not that I did not miss you all, Dame; and in especial my babe here,—who is no longer a babe”—and she smiled down at me. “And verily, I could see that sins be not shut out by convent walls, but rather shut in. Yet—”