That he loved her, and that very dearly, was patent to the most superficial observer. Maude, who was not very observant of others, used to notice how his eyes followed her wherever she went, brightened at the sound of her step, and kindled eagerly when she spoke. The Dowager saw it too, with considerable disapproval; and thought it desirable to turn her observations to profit by a grave admonition to her son upon the sin and folly of idolatry. She meant rightly enough, yet it sounded harsh and cruel, when she bluntly reminded him that Constance manifestly cared nothing for him.
Le Despenser’s lip quivered with pain.
“Let be, fair Mother,” he said gently. “It may be yet, one day, that my Lady’s heart shall come home to God and me, and that she shall then say unto me, ‘I love thee.’”
Did that day ever come? Ay, it did come; but not during his day. The time came when no music could have been comparable to the sound of his voice—when she would have given all the world for one glimpse of his smile—when she felt, like Avice, as though she could have climbed and rent the heavens to have won him back to her. But the heavens had closed between them before that day came. While they journeyed side by side in this mortal world, he never heard her say, “I love thee.”
The news received during the next few months was not likely to make Constance feel more at home at Cardiff than before. It was one constant funeral wail. On the 24th of March, 1394, her aunt Constanca, Duchess of Lancaster, died of the plague at Leicester; in the close of May, of the same disease, the beloved Lollard Queen; and on the first of July her cousin, Mary Countess of Derby. Constance grew so restless, that when orders came for her husband to attend the King at Haverford, where he was about to embark on his journey to Ireland, she determined to go there also.
“I can breathe better any whither than at Cardiff!” she said confidentially to Maude.
But in truth it was not Cardiff from which he fled, but her own restless spirit. The vine had been transplanted, and its tendrils refused to twine round the strange boughs offered for its support.
The Princess found her father at Haverford, but the pair were very shy of one another. The Duke was beginning to discover that he had made a blunder, that his fair young wife’s temper was not all sunshine, and that his intended plaything was likely to prove his eventual tyrant. Constance, on her part, felt a twinge of conscience for her pettish desertion of him in his old age; for to her apprehension he was now an old man: and she was privately conscious that she could not honestly plead any preconsideration for her husband. She had merely pleased herself, both in going and staying, and she knew it. But she spent her whole life in gathering apples of Sodom, and flinging away one after another in bitter disappointment. Yet the next which offered was always grasped as eagerly as any that had gone before it.
Perhaps it was due to some feeling of regret on the Duke’s part that he invited his daughter and son-in-law to return with him. Constance accepted the offer readily. The Duke was Regent all that winter, during the King’s absence in Ireland; and, as was usual, he took up his residence in the royal Palace of Westminster. Constance liked her visit to Westminster; she was nearly as tired of Langley as of Cardiff, and this was something new. And a slight bond of union sprang up between herself and her husband; for she made him, as well as Maude, the confidant of all her complaints and vexations regarding her step-mother. Le Despenser was satisfied if she would make a friend of him about anything, and he was anxious to shield her from every annoyance in his power.
It appeared to Maude, who had grown into a quiet, meditative woman, that the feeling of the Duchess towards her step-daughter was not far from positive hatred. She seemed to seek occasions to mortify her, and to manufacture quarrels which it would have been no trouble to avoid. It was some time before Maude could discern the cause. But one day, in a quiet talk with Bertram Lyngern, still her chief friend, she asked him whether he had noticed it.