“What was she like?” asked Philippa.
Mother Joan passed her hand slowly over the features of her niece.
“Like, and not like,” she said. “Thy features are sharper cut than hers; and though in thy voice there is a sound of hers, it is less soft and low. Hers was like the wind among the strings of an harp hanging on the wall. Thy colouring I cannot see. But if thou be like her, thine hair is glossy, and of chestnut hue; and thine eyes are dark and mournful.”
“Tell me about her, Aunt, I pray you,” said Philippa.
Joan La Despenser smoothed down her monastic habit, and leaned her head back against the wall. There was evidently some picture of memory’s bringing before her sightless eyes, and her voice itself had a lower and softer tone as she spoke of the dead sister. But her first words were not of her.
“Holy Virgin!” she said, “when thou didst create the world, wherefore didst thou make women? For women have but two fates: either they are black-souled, like the tigress Isabelle, and then they prosper and thrive, as she did; or else they are white snowdrops, like our dead darling, and then they are martyrs. A few die in the cradle—those whom thou lovest best; and what fools are we to weep for them! Ah me! things be mostly crooked in this world. Is there another, me wondereth, where they grow straight?—where the black-souled die on the gibbets, and the white-souled wear the crowns? I would like to die, and change to that Golden Land, if there be. Methinks it is far off.”
It was a Land “very far off.” And over the eyes of Joan La Despenser the blinding film of earth remained; for she had not drunk of the Living Water.
“The founder of our house,”—thus Mother Joan began her narrative,—“was my grandfather’s father, slain, above an hundred years ago, at the battle of Evesham. He left an infant son, not four years old when he died. This was my grandfather, Hugh Le Despenser, Earl of Winchester, who at the age of twenty-five advanced the fortunes of his house by wedding a daughter of Warwick, Isabel, the young widow of the Lord de Chaworth, and the mother’s mother of Alianora of Lancaster. Thou and thy father’s wife, therefore, are near akin. This Isabel (after whom thy mother was named) was a famed beauty, and brought moreover a very rich dower. My grandfather and she had many children, but I need only speak of one—my hapless father.
“King Edward of Caernarvon loved my father dearly. In truth, so did Edward of Westminster, who bestowed on him, ere he was fully ten years old, the hand of his grand-daughter, my mother, Alianora de Clare, who brought him in dower the mighty earldom of Gloucester. The eldest of us was Hugh my brother; then came I; next followed my other brothers, Edward, Gilbert, and Philip; and last of all, eight years after me, came Isabel thy mother.
“From her birth this child was mine especial care. I was alway a thoughtful, quiet maiden, more meet for cloister than court; and I well remember, though ’tis fifty years ago, the morrow when my baby-sister was put into mine arms, and I was bidden to have a care of her. Have a care of her! Had she never passed into any worse care than mine—well-a-day! Yet, could I have looked forward into the future, and have read Isabel’s coming history, I might have thought that the wisest and kindest course I could take would be to smother her in her cradle.