I wept, too, then, though I had been thinking that I had no more tears to shed, and the page that I was to write upon became wet and bleared.
'What have they done to her?' I heard Master Fish inquiring aside of Mistress Ellen, adding low, 'Don't tell me that they tortured her in the Tower, or——' in his mighty indignation he became inarticulate, but made a gesture as if he could kill some one.
'The torturer was Grief, and the instrument that was used was the child's heart,' answered my companion very softly. 'It is a size too big for her weak frame,' she added.
'Aye, aye.' He muttered something which I could not hear, but Mistress Ellen's rejoinder startled me—
'Hair is a mere detail. It began to grow grey when her lover was brought into the Tower, and became white the day we lost our lady.'
Jack Fish began to walk up and down the room in no little agitation. Suddenly he stopped short and returned to me.
'Would it comfort thee, dear,' he said, with great gentleness, 'to know that thou hast been avenged in Sussex, where that brute, Sir Claudius Crossley, in endeavouring to escape from the just punishment of his ill deeds, came into collision with a party of rough fellows, some of whom had once been his devoted followers in deeds of violence, who, turning upon him when he was down, seized and drowned him in the very same pond by the roadside in which he had himself been used to drown witches?'
I shuddered.
'Poor wretch!' I said. 'May God have prepared him for his end!'
'And now,' said my visitor, 'we must look to thee.' For he perceived that his information about Sir Claudius had scarcely enlivened me. 'We must look to thee,' he repeated. 'Thou hast had it a bit rough,' he added tenderly. 'Sometimes the storm of life gathers and breaks upon one all at once—but it spends itself—it spends itself,' he faltered and almost broke down, because for the first time I looked up and he saw my eyes, 'and then, for all the future,' he continued hurriedly, 'there is a great calm. God grant that it may be so with thee, my child!' and he laid his hand tenderly upon my poor spoilt head.