“Surely our Lady’s troubles be over now!” said Maude sanguinely.
On the evening on which that remark was made,—the fifteenth of September—two sisters of Saint Clare sat watching, in a small French convent, by the dying bed of a knight. At the siege of Briac Castle, five days earlier, he had been mortally wounded in the head by a bolt from a crossbow; and his squires bore him into the little convent to die in peace. The sufferer had never fully recovered his consciousness. He seemed but dimly aware of any thing—not fully sensible even to pain. His words were few, incoherent, scarcely intelligible. What the nuns could occasionally disentangle from his low mutterings was something about “blue eyes,” and “watching from the lattice.” The last rites of the Church were administered, but there could be no confession; a crucifix was held before his eyes, but they doubted if he recognised what it was. And about sunset of that autumn evening he died.
So closed the few and evil days of the vain, weak, self-loving Kent. His age was only twenty-six; he left no child but the disinherited Alianora, and his sisters took good care that she should remain disinherited. They pounced upon the lands of the dead brother with an eagerness which would have been rather more decent had it been a little less apparent; and to the widowed Lucia, who was the least guilty party to the conspiracy for which she had been made the decoy, they left little beyond her wardrobe. She was actually reduced to appeal to the King’s mercy for means to live. Henry responded to her piteous petition by the offer of his brother of Dorset as a second husband. Lucia was one of those women who are born actresses, and whose nature it is to do things which seem forced and unnatural to others. She flattered the King with anticipations that she was on the point of complying with his wishes, till the last moment; and then she eloped with Sir Henry de Mortimer, possibly a distant connection of the Earl of March. It may be added, since Lucia now disappears from the story, that she survived her second marriage for fourteen years, and showed herself at her death a most devout member of the orthodox Church, by a will which was from beginning to end a string of bequests for masses, to be sung for the repose of her soul, and of the soul of Kent.
Bertram and Maude, to whom the news came first, scarcely knew how to tell Constance of Kent’s death. At last Maude thought of dressing the little Alianora in daughter’s mourning, and sending her into her mother’s room alone. The gradations of mourning were at that time so distinct and minute that Constance’s practised eye would read the parable in an instant. So they broke in that manner the news they dared not tell her.
For the whole day there was no sign from Constance that she had even noticed the hint. Her voice and manner showed no change. But at night, when the little child of three years old knelt at her mother’s knee for her evening prayer, said Lollard-wise in simple English, they found it had not escaped her. As the child came to the usual “God bless my father and mother,”—which, fatherless as she had always been, she had been taught to say,—Constance quietly checked her, and made her say, “God bless my mother” only. And at the close, little Alianora was instructed to add,—“God pardon my father’s soul.”
Knowing how passionately Constance had once loved Kent, this calm show of indifference puzzled Maude Lyngern sorely. But to the Dowager Lady it was no such riddle.
“Her love is dead, child,” she said, when Maude timidly expressed her surprise. “And when that is verily thus, it were lighter to bid a dead corpse live than a dead love.”
All this time the Lollard persecution slowly waxed hotter and hotter. Men began to thank God when any “heretics” among their friends were permitted to die in their beds, and to whisper in hushed accents that when the Prince of Wales should be King, whose nature was more merciful than his father’s, matters might perchance mend. They little knew what the future was to bring. The worst was not yet over,—was not even to come during the reign of Henry of Bolingbroke.
Seeing that Constance was now restored to her lands, and basking in the sunshine of Court favour, it struck Lady Abergavenny, a niece of Archbishop Arundel, who was a politic woman—as most of his nieces were—that an alliance between her son and Isabel Le Despenser would be a good speculation. And her Ladyship, being moreover a strong-minded woman, whose husband was of very little public and less private consequence, carried her point, and the marriage of Isabel with young Richard Beauchamp took place at Cardiff on the eleventh birthday of the bride.
The ceremony was slightly hastened at the wish of the Dowager Lady Le Despenser. She was anxious not to distress Constance by breaking the news too suddenly to her, but she felt within herself that the golden bowl was nearing its breaking at the fountain, and that the silver cords of her earthly house of this tabernacle were not far from being taken down. She was an old woman,—very old, for a period wherein few lived to old age; she had long outlived her husband, and had seen the funerals of nearly all her children. The greater part even of her earthly treasures were already safe where moth and rust corrupt not, and her own feeling of earnest longing to rejoin them grew daily stronger. It was for the daughter’s sake alone that she cared to live now; the daughter to whom men had left only God and that mother. A new lesson was now to be taught to Constance—to rest wholly upon God.