There were a few words on each side—contemptuous taunts, and sharp accusations, on the one side,—low, patient replies on the other. Then came a gleam of something flashing in the dim light, and the dagger of the visitor was sheathed in the pale prisoner’s heart.
At rest, at last: safe, and saved, and with God.
It was a cruel, brutal, cold-blooded murder. But was it nothing else? Was there in it no operation of those Divine wheels which “grind slowly, yet exceeding small?”—no visitation, by Him to whom vengeance belongeth, of the sins of the guilty fathers upon the guiltless son—vengeance for the broken heart of Richard of Bordeaux, for the judicial murder of Richard of Conisborough, for the dreary imprisoned girlhood of Anne Mortimer, and—last, not least—for the long, slow years of moral torture, ending with the bitter cup forced into the dying hand of the White Rose of Langley?
Note 1. Richard of Conisborough married secondly, and probably chiefly with the view of securing a mother for his children, Maude Clifford, a daughter of the great Lollard House of Clifford of Cumberland. She survived him many years.
Note 2. The Psalter is still extant, in the British Museum: Cott. Ms. Domit. A. xvii.