"The times," replied Lady William Pawlet, "do not teach charity. Thou art nobly patient, but I have not yet learnt to hush my railing. All, all gone and an empty life! Madonna! how can one support the burden! Oh, to be a man and go forward in the front ranks to die as Lord Falkland did! But to be a woman—a woman who must wait till she die of remembering!"
"There is no answer to be made—none," said the Countess; "the heart knoweth its own bitterness."
"And we sit here in poverty, bereaved and desolate, and Oliver Cromwell hath my Lord Worchester's estates and the thanks of Parliament," continued Lady William, following out thoughts too bitter to be kept silent. "Loyalty now must go barefoot and impudent knavery swell in high places! I will go abroad to the Queen in Paris—she too is desolate and maybe can employ me about her person, for I will no longer be a charge on you, madam. Will you not," she added, in a more timid tone, "come too?"
"I will not, willingly," replied the elder lady firmly, "ever see Her Majesty again. Nor yet the King. Thank God I can keep my loyalty and wish His Majesty a safe deliverance from all his present perils, but this I know, that were he to taste the bitterest death and she the bitterest widowhood, both, in the extreme hour of their misery, could endure no greater torment than to remember Lord Strafford and how he died."
She spoke quietly without raised voice or flushed cheek, yet so intensely, that Jane Pawlet, who had never heard her mention this subject before, was horrified and awed.
"The world is upside down, I think," she murmured. "It all seems to me so unreal—I doubt it can be more strange in hell."
"You are young," replied the Countess, "and may live to think of all this as a clouded dream. But my life is over."
"You have been the wife of a great man," cried Lady William Pawlet, "and you have children."
"Whom I must see grow up as landless exiles, bearing an attainted name," said Lady Strafford, with a stern smile.
"But you have fulfilled yourself," returned the other, "while I have been, and am, useless. Ah me, how differently I dreamed it!"