The bier was placed on a charette, and covered with a pall of black cloth, surmounted by the waxen image then always carried outside the coffin, the face of which was a mask taken from that of the corpse beneath. Two horses drew the charette until about a mile from Wigmore, when four more were added in order to form a more imposing spectacle. Lord Bardolf rode behind the coffin, on the right hand of the young Earl, who was chief mourner, and whose horse was led, at the leader's special request, by Sir Lawrence Madison. It was usual to depute a squire to this work: and it was paying the highest honour in his power to the dead and the living, that Lawrence should demean himself to do it.
The little Earl, seven years old, behaved extremely well, as was admitted and admired by everybody. He really behaved so well, because he felt so little. The true son of Alianora, it was not in his nature to love any creature but Edmund Mortimer, nor even for his own ultimate benefit was he ready to take much trouble. He took the loss of a father at seven years of age, as he afterwards took the loss of a crown at fourteen, with the most philosophical placidity.
At the door of the Abbey Church of St. James at Wigmore, the Benedictine Abbot and his canons met the coffin of the Lord of the Marches of Wales. Over the coffin was a pall of cloth of gold, edged with blue, the colours of the house of Mortimer. It was borne by six squires on each side, but once more Sir Lawrence Madison stepped forward, and took the place of the foremost squire. His hand should be among those which performed the last offices to the brother of his love,—"More than his brothers were to him."
When the bier was set down before the high altar, twenty-five poor men clad in white, according to the number of the years of the dead, came forward to receive the thick wax tapers which they were to hold during the service, standing about the coffin.
Then came the solemn mass, accompanied as it always is, by that grandest of all funeral hymns which, like the inspired hymnal of King David, seems to be inimitable in translated metre:—
"Recordare, Jesu pie,
Quod sum causa taæ viæ;
Ne me perdas ilia die!
"Quærens me sedisti lassus,
Redemisti crucem passus;
Tantus labor non sit cassus."
When the coffin had been lowered into the vault,—to which again, the last office, Lawrence lent his hand—the mourners slowly filed out of the church, each as he passed the vault receiving the sprinkler from the hand of a priest in attendance, and sprinkling the coffin with holy water. They returned to Usk not as they had come, in ceremonial procession, but in a quiet and orderly group.
Considerable time elapsed, and much investigation was necessary, before Lawrence could discover what had become of the relatives whom he had left in the hut at the foot of the castle, eighteen years before. The parents of Beatrice (his old friends Blumond and Philippa) were dead; and having been an only child, she had no near relatives whose assistance could be lent in the matter. For a long while, all that he could ascertain with any certainty was that the present inhabitants of the hut knew nothing of the late ones, and that an old woman, the only person left of those who had dwelt there in Lawrence's childhood, could tell him that his mother was dead, two of his sisters married and gone, and that his father and his brother Simon had been removed to some other estate of their feudal owner—"down yonder," said she, with a nod of her head towards the north, which might take in a large tract of country. What had befallen the younger brother and sister she appeared to have no idea. All to whom Lawrence applied gave him an answer, half awe-struck, half kindly, excepting those whose brains and hearts seemed dulled by hard usage. Most promised to bear the matter in mind, and to make such inquiries as they had opportunity.
Lawrence had never realised the immensity of the change in himself, until he attempted thus to resume the old familiar relations with that stratum of society into which he was born. Through constant association with educated gentlemen, he had become one of them in thought and feeling; but he was never aware how thoroughly, until he tried to be once more that which he had ceased to be. His first thought was that the people of Usk had changed—they were more cold-hearted, and less homely and pleasant, than they had been in his boyhood. He discovered in time that the alteration was not in them, but in himself, and that all they were guilty of was the unavoidable and intuitive recognition that he belonged to the group of masters, and no more to that of serfs. But the discovery was not perfected until one evening, when a dirty, slatternly woman of about thirty years of age presented herself at the porter's lodge of Usk Castle, and demanded in a whining tone to see one Lawrence Madison.
"'Lawrence Madison,' forsooth!" returned the scandalised porter. "Is it thus thou wouldst speak of one of the most gallant knights in England? Mend thy ways, woman, and say Sir Lawrence, and then maybe I can find the time to answer thee."