“Then she did recover, Aunt?”
“Ay, but it was for the last time. As the summer drew on, the Lady Queen asked Master Thomas if he thought it well that the little Lady should have change again, and be sent into the country till the heat was past. Master Thomas answered that he reckoned it unnecessary; and the Lady Queen departed, well pleased. But as soon as she was gone, Master Thomas said to me and Julian the Rocker, who were tending our little Lady—‘She will have a better change than to Swallowfield.’ Quoth Julian, ‘Say you so, Master? Whither do you purpose sending her?’ And he said, looking sadly on the child, ‘I purpose sending her? Truly, good Julian, no whither. But ere long time be over, the Lord our God will send for her, by that angel that taketh no bribe to delay execution of His mandate.’ And then I knew his meaning: my darling was to die. But the steps of the angel were very slow. The autumn came and went. The child seemed languid and dull, and the Lord King offered a chasuble of samite to the blessed Edmund of Pontigny at his altar at Canterbury.”
Edmund Rich, afterwards called Saint Edmund of Pontigny, was an Archbishop of Canterbury with whom King Henry the Third was at variance as long as he lived, much in the same way as Henry the Second had been with Becket. Now he was dead, a banished man, the Pope had declared him a saint, and King Henry made humble offerings at his shrine. But it is amusing to find that with respect to this offering at least, his Majesty’s instructions were to buy the samite of the lowest price that could be found!
“It was all of no use,” pursued Avice sorrowfully. “The angel had received the mandate. Great feasts were held at Easter—there were twenty beeves and fifty muttons, fifteen hundred pullets, and six hundred shillings’ worth of bread, beside many other things—but ere one month was over, the feast became a fast. When Saint Philip’s day dawned my darling lay in her bed, with her fair eyes turned up to heaven and her hands folded in prayer; and who may know what she said to God, or yet more what He told to her? She had never been taught to pray; she could not be.” Avice’s only notion of prayer was repeating a form of words, and keeping time by a string of beads. “But I shall always think that in some way beyond our comprehension, my darling could speak to God. And on the evening of the Invention of the Cross”—which is May 3rd—“she spoke to Him in Heaven.”
“And did the Lady Queen sorrow very much, Aunt? I suppose, though, great ladies like her would not care as much as poor people.”
“Wouldst thou, child? Ah, a mother is a mother, let her be a cottager or a queen. And she sorrowed so sorely that for weeks afterwards she lay ill, and all the skill of her physicians could avail nothing. The Lord King, too, fell sick of a tertian fever, which held him many days, and I believe it was out of sheer anguish for his dearest child. He commanded a brass image of her to be placed on the tomb, but ere it was finished he would have one of silver: and he gave fifty shillings a year to the hermit of Charing, for a priest to pray daily for her in the chapel of the hermitage.”
“Do you think she is still in Purgatory, Aunt?”
Avice’s religion, as taught not by the Word of God, but the traditions of men, led her to be doubtful on that point. But her heart broke its way through the bonds.
“What, my white dove? my little unspotted darling, that never wilfully sinned against God and holy Church? Child, if our holy Father the Pope were to tell me himself that she was there, I would not believe him. Do the angels go to Purgatory? Nay, I do verily believe that, seeing her infirmity, Christ our Lord did all the work of salvation for her, and that she sings now before our Father’s face.”
Poor Avice! she could get no further. But we, who know God’s Word, know that there is but one Mediator between God and man, and that He has offered a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. Before Bertha could reply, an answer came unexpectedly from the dark corner.