For Guenllian's heart yearned over her darlings, and especially over Anne.
"Eh, good lack!" laughed Lady Agnes, "he shall neither make nor mell with them. My Lord Charlton is not he that should befool him a-laking with childre. 'Tis the mother he loveth, not them. And in good sooth, he is scantly the man for one of her high estate: but—there! you wit, Mistress Wenteline, love is a leveller."
"Love?" said Guenllian inquiringly to her own heart—not to Lady Agnes. Ay, she knew, better than her companion could tell her, of what material Alianora was made. She was likely enough to
"Crawl to the next shrub or bramble vile,
Though from the cedar's stately arm she fell."
"And look you," pursued Lady Agnes, breaking in upon Guenllian's sorrowful thoughts, "truly it hath been a great trouble unto my Lady, the coming down. She looked to be one day Queen of England, and should have been, had my sometime Lord (whom God pardon) been more wary and witful. Do but think, to aventure himself afore his army in an Irish habit—was it not thus he did? Any man with his wits in his head should have wist he might as well have writ his death-warrant. And now all that lost! Dear, dear, what a misaventure! Verily, I do think my Lady of March sore to pity, I warrant you. To lose a crown, and spoil an whole wardrobe, all of a blow—well, as to the losing her baron, the world holdeth more than one man—" Lady Agnes had found it so—"but in very deed it should sorrowfully grudge me to be in like case."
Guenllian made no answer. She only threw open the door of the Lady Anne's apartments, and motioned to the new disposer of the child's destiny to enter. If she thought that both the Countess and the Lady Agnes Mortimer mistook their pearls for pebbles, and their pebbles for pearls, she gave no hint of doing so.
The funeral procession set forth, and the lonely and sorrowful child who had been one of his dearest treasures, followed the coffin of the dead father. Lady Agnes Mortimer had taken Anne's future into her own hands, and being Guenllian's nominal superior, the latter was bound to obey. She was about to deliver the child into the yet more nominal care of the Countess, to be plunged, when she grew a little older, into all those pomps and vanities of this wicked world which her father had foreseen and feared for her. So sorrowfully reckoned Guenllian ap Evan: but the God of Roger Mortimer reckoned very differently. The lot He had prepared for Anne was far away from pomp and vanity,—a long, eventless, monotonous imprisonment in Windsor Castle, with her sister and brothers,—the bitter disappointment of an attempted and almost successful rescue, for the lot of Roger Mortimer seemed to pursue his children—an imprisonment straiter and sadder than before, until that one of them whom the usurper had really cause to fear, Roger's bright little namesake, his own true son, fervent and energetic like himself, died in his weary prison; till a greater King than Henry of Bolingbroke undrew the bolts, and set the prisoner free. Then the other three were allowed to come forth. The King was not afraid of Edmund,—dreamy, indolent, ease-loving Edmund—nor of Alianora, who shared his character. He gave to Edmund, to ensure his safe keeping, a wife of a different type from himself, a daughter of the Romish House of Stafford, and a grand-daughter of Gloucester. Alianora was handed over to the care of the heir of Courtenay, ever a Lancastrian House. The most wary and cautious men sometimes blunder. And surely it was in a moment of blunder that that wariest and coldest-hearted of English kings and statesmen permitted Anne Mortimer,—the heir of Duke Lionel of Clarence if her brother should die issueless, as he did—to wed the loyal and true-hearted Richard of Conisborough, a Prince of the Blood, in whose eyes Richard of Bordeaux, whose godson he was, was the King, and Henry of Bolingbroke a usurper. Richard of Conisborough was the one love of Anne Mortimer's true heart. Every fibre of that sterling character—silent, shy, undemonstrative, but deep and loyal to the heart's core,—wound itself around him by whose side she dwelt in a dream of bliss for three short years, and then God called her away from the evil to come. He lies—murdered, or rather martyred—in the precincts of "God's House" at Southampton, she in the Abbey Church of King's Langley. They have met in the Garden of God. And if a text were to be engraven on the tomb of Anne Mortimer, it might well be this,—"I will be a God to thee, and to thy seed after thee."
She was the mother of all our kings. When one grand climacteric of years had rolled round from the death of Roger Mortimer at Kenles, the Lancastrian episode was over, and the grandson of Anne Mortimer sat upon the throne of England. The cup of success, dashed so frequently from Roger, came to his children's lips at last. But the one point in which success would have been dearest to his heart has never come. Is it yet in reserve for some descendant of his blood?—or shall the rival sister nations only see eye to eye, when He shall come who is the Desire of all nations—when the Lord shall bring again Zion? One event happened, of a different character, before Lord Bardolf and Lady Mortimer set forth, which greatly astonished every body in Trim Castle, and the person most concerned more than any other.
Lawrence Madison was slowly creeping back to ordinary life, and was now able to sit up most of the day, propped with pillows; and with some difficulty, and a helping arm, to walk the length of the chamber. Lord Bardolf had shown a particular wish to see him, and to hear the story of the Earl's death from his lips, and had pressed Mr. Robesart to allow the prudence of his doing so before the physician was quite ready to admit it. The latter, however, was overruled by his superior, and Lord Bardolf had his wish. The tale was told, at what cost to Lawrence he best knew.
"And now," said Lord Bardolf, when he paused, exhausted, and Guenllian held a cup of wine to his white weary lips, "methinks, Master Madison, you have scantly yet told all. We heard of a young squire that, in the thickest of the fight, stood o'er his Lord's body, and well-nigh gave his own life that the foe should not touch the same. Was it thus, pray you, or no?"