"Naught shall come between!" he would cry. "Naught under God's Heaven—naught on Gods' earth! No man, nor fate, nor devil!"
For he had borne his burden too long, and even for his strength and endurance its heaviness had been too great.
In these weeks of solitude at Camylott he thought much of him who had passed from earth, of the years they had been friends, of the days they had ridden through the green lanes together or walked in the Long Gallery, he himself but a child, the other his mature and affectionate companion. He had loved and been beloved, and now he was gone, leaving behind him no memory which was not tender and full of affectionate reverence.
"Never," was Osmonde's thought, "in all the years we knew each other did I hear him utter a thought which was ungenerous or unjust. You, my lord," he found himself saying aloud one day, "have sure left earth's regrets behind and see with clearer eyes than ours. A man—loving as you yourself loved, yearning as you yourself yearned—you will but pity with a tender soul."
And he could but remember his last interview with Mistress Anne on his bidding farewell to Dunstan's Wolde after the funeral obsequies.
"'Tis a farewell I bid the place," he had said, "though I may see it again. I came here as a boy, and in the first years of my young manhood, and he was always here to bid me welcome. One of my earliest memories"—they stood in the large saloon together, and he raised his eyes to a picture near them—"one of my first recollections here is of this young face with its blushing cheeks, and of my lord's sorrowful tenderness as he told me that she had died and that his little son—who, had he lived, might have been as myself—had died with her."
Whereupon Mistress Anne, with innocent tears and lowered voice, told him a story of how the night before her lord had been laid to rest, his widow had sat by his side through the slow hours, and had stroked his cold hands and spoken softly to him as if he could feel her lovingness, and on the morning before he left her, she had folded in his clasp a miniature of his young dead wife and a lock of her soft hair and her child's.
"And 'twas, indeed, a tender, strange thing to see and hear," said Anne, "for she said with such noble gentleness, that 'twas the first sweet lady who had been his wife—not herself—and that when she and her child should run to meet him in heaven he would forget that they had ever parted—and all would be well. Think you it will be so, your Grace?" her simple, filled eyes lifted to him appealingly.
"There is no marrying or giving in marriage, 'tis said," answered his Grace, "and she whom he loved first—in his youth—surely——"
Mistress Anne's eyes dwelt upon him in quiet wondering.