But in Mistress Anne herself life had never been strong; she was of the fibre of her mother, who had died in youth, crushed by its cruel weight, and to her, living had been so great and terrible a thing. There had not been given to her the will to battle with the Fate that fell to her, the brain to reason and disentangle problems, or the power to set them aside. So while her Grace of Osmonde seemed but to gain greater state and beauty in her ripening, her sister’s frail body grew more frail, and seemed to shrink and age. Yet her face put on a strange worn sweetness, and her soft, dull eyes had a look almost like a saint’s who looks at heaven. She prayed much, and did many charitable works both in town and country. She read her books of devotion, and went much to church, sitting with a reverend face through many a dull and lengthy sermon she would have felt it sacrilegious to think of with aught but pious admiration. In the middle of the night it was her custom to rise and offer up prayers through the dark hours. She was an humble soul who greatly feared and trembled before her God.
“I waken in the night sometimes,” the fair, tall child Daphne said once to her mother, “and Mother Anne is there—she kneels and prays beside my bed. She kneels and prays so by each one of us many a night.”
“’Tis because she is so pious a woman and so loves us,” said young John, in his stately, generous way. The house of Osmonde had never had so fine and handsome a creature for its heir. He o’ertopped every boy of his age in height, and the bearing of his lovely youthful body was masculine grace itself.
The town and the Court knew these children, and talked of their beauty and growth as they had talked of their mother’s.
“To be the mate of such a woman, the father of such heirs, is a fate a man might pray God for,” ’twas said. “Love has not grown stale with them. Their children are the very blossoms of it. Her eyes are deeper pools of love each year.”
CHAPTER XXIII—“In One who will do justice, and demands that it shall be done to each thing He has made, by each who bears His image”
’Twas in these days Sir Jeoffry came to his end, it being in such way as had been often prophesied; and when this final hour came, there was but one who could give him comfort, and this was the daughter whose youth he had led with such careless evilness to harm.
If he had wondered at her when she had been my Lady Dunstanwolde, as her Grace of Osmonde he regarded her with heavy awe. Never had she been able to lead him to visit her at her house in town or at any other which was her home. “’Tis all too grand for me, your Grace,” he would say; “I am a country yokel, and have hunted and drank, and lived too hard to look well among town gentlemen. I must be drunk at dinner, and when I am in liquor I am no ornament to a duchess’s drawing-room. But what a woman you have grown,” he would say, staring at her and shaking his head. “Each time I clap eyes on you ’tis to marvel at you, remembering what a baggage you were, and how you kept from slipping by the way. There was Jack Oxon, now,” he added one day—“after you married Dunstanwolde, I heard a pretty tale of Jack—that he had made a wager among his friends in town—he was a braggart devil, Jack—that he would have you, though you were so scornful; and knowing him to be a liar, his fellows said that unless he could bring back a raven lock six feet long to show them, he had lost his bet, for they would believe no other proof. And finely they scoffed at him when he came back saying that he had had one, but had hid it away for safety when he was drunk, and could not find it again. They so flouted and jeered at him that swords were drawn, and blood as well. But though he was a beauty and a crafty rake-hell fellow, you were too sharp for him. Had you not had so shrewd a wit and strong a will, you would not have been the greatest duchess in England, Clo, as well as the finest woman.”
“Nay,” she answered—“in those days—nay, let us not speak of them! I would blot them out—out.”
As time went by, and the years spent in drink and debauchery began to tell even on the big, strong body which should have served any other man bravely long past his threescore and ten, Sir Jeoffry drank harder and lived more wildly, sometimes being driven desperate by dulness, his coarse pleasures having lost their potency.