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Title: The Last Of The Barons, Volume 9.

Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Release Date: March 2005  [EBook #7723]
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[This file was first posted on May 6, 2003]

Edition: 10

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BOOK IX.

THE WANDERERS AND THE EXILES.




CHAPTER I.

HOW THE GREAT BARON BECOMES AS GREAT A REBEL.

Hilyard was yet asleep in the chamber assigned to him as his prison,
when a rough grasp shook off his slumbers, and he saw the earl before
him, with a countenance so changed from its usual open majesty, so
dark and sombre, that he said involuntarily, "You send me to the
doomsman,--I am ready!"

"Hist, man!  Thou hatest Edward of York?"

"An it were my last word, yes!"

"Give me thy hand--we are friends!  Stare not at me with those eyes of
wonder, ask not the why nor wherefore!  This last night gave Edward a
rebel more in Richard Nevile!  A steed waits thee at my gates; ride
fast to young Sir Robert Welles with this letter.  Bid him not be
dismayed; bid him hold out, for ere many days are past, Lord Warwick,
and it may be also the Duke of Clarence, will join their force with
his.  Mark, I say not that I am for Henry of Lancaster,--I say only
that I am against Edward of York.  Farewell, and when we meet again,
blessed be the arm that first cuts its way to a tyrant's heart!"

Without another word, Warwick left the chamber.  Hilyard at first
could not believe his senses; but as he dressed himself in haste, he
pondered over all those causes of dissension which had long
notoriously subsisted between Edward and the earl, and rejoiced that
the prophecy that he had long so shrewdly hazarded was at last
fulfilled.  Descending the stairs he gained the gate, where Marmaduke
awaited him, while a groom held a stout haquenee (as the common
riding-horse was then called), whose points and breeding promised
speed and endurance.

"Mount, Master Robin," said Marmaduke; "I little thought we should
ever ride as friends together!  Mount!--our way for some miles out of
London is the same.  You go into Lincolnshire, I into the shire of
Hertford."

"And for the same purpose?" asked Hilyard, as he sprang upon his
horse, and the two men rode briskly on.

"Yes!"

"Lord Warwick is changed at last?"

"At last!"

"For long?"

"Till death!"

"Good, I ask no more!"

A sound of hoofs behind made the franklin turn his head, and he saw a
goodly troop, armed to the teeth, emerge from the earl's house and
follow the lead of Marmaduke.  Meanwhile Warwick was closeted with
Montagu.

Worldly as the latter was, and personally attached to Edward, he was
still keenly alive to all that touched the honour of his House; and
his indignation at the deadly insult offered to his niece was even
more loudly expressed than that of the fiery earl.

"To deem," he exclaimed, "to deem Elizabeth Woodville worthy of his
throne, and to see in Anne Nevile the only worthy to be his leman!"

"Ay!" said the earl, with a calmness perfectly terrible, from its
unnatural contrast to his ordinary heat, when but slightly chafed,
"ay! thou sayest it!  But be tranquil; cold,--cold as iron, and as
hard!  We must scheme now, not storm and threaten--I never schemed
before!  You are right,--honesty is a fool's policy!  Would I had
known this but an hour before the news reached me!  I have already
dismissed our friends to their different districts, to support King
Edward's cause--he is still king,--a little while longer king!  Last
night, I dismissed them--last night, at the very hour when--O God,
give me patience!"  He paused, and added in a low voice, "Yet--yet--
how long the moments are how long!  Ere the sun sets, Edward, I trust,
will be in my power!"

"How?"

"He goes, to-day, to the More,--he will not go the less for what hath
chanced; he will trust to the archbishop to make his peace with me,--
churchmen are not fathers!  Marmaduke Nevile hath my orders; a hundred
armed men, who would march against the fiend himself, if I said the
word, will surround the More, and seize the guest!"

"But what then?  Who, if Edward, I dare not say the word--who is to
succeed him?"

"Clarence is the male heir."

"But with what face to the people proclaim--"

"There--there it is!" interrupted Warwick.  "I have thought of that,--
I have thought of all things;  my mind seems to have traversed worlds
since daybreak!  True! all commotion to be successful must have a
cause that men can understand.  Nevertheless, you, Montagu--you have a
smoother tongue than I; go to our friends--to those who hate Edward--
seek them, sound them!"

"And name to them Edward's infamy?"

"'S death, dost thou think it?  Thou, a Monthermer and Montagu:
proclaim to England the foul insult to the hearth of an English
gentleman and peer! feed every ribald Bourdour with song and roundel
of Anne's virgin shame! how King Edward stole to her room at the dead
of night, and wooed and pressed, and swore, and--God of Heaven, that
this hand were on his throat!  No, brother, no! there are some wrongs
we may not tell,--tumours and swellings of the heart which are eased
not till blood can flow!"

During this conference between the brothers, Edward, in his palace,
was seized with consternation and dismay on hearing that the Lady Anne
could not be found in her chamber.  He sent forthwith to summon Adam
Warner to his presence, and learned from the simple sage, who
concealed nothing, the mode in which Anne had fled from the Tower.
The king abruptly dismissed Adam, after a few hearty curses and vague
threats; and awaking to the necessity of inventing some plausible
story, to account to the wonder of the court for the abrupt
disappearance of his guest, he saw that the person who could best
originate and circulate such a tale was the queen; and he sought her
at once, with the resolution to choose his confidant in the connection
most rarely honoured by marital trust in similar offences.  He,
however, so softened his narrative as to leave it but a venial error.
He had been indulging over-freely in the wine-cup, he had walked into
the corridor for the refreshing coolness of the air, he had seen the
figure of a female whom he did not recognize; and a few gallant words,
he scarce remembered what, had been misconstrued.  On perceiving whom
he had thus addressed, he had sought to soothe the anger or alarm of
the Lady Anne; but still mistaking his intention, she had hurried into
Warner's chamber; he had followed her thither, and now she had fled
the palace.  Such was his story, told lightly and laughingly, but
ending with a grave enumeration of the dangers his imprudence had
incurred.

Whatever Elizabeth felt, or however she might interpret the
confession, she acted with her customary discretion; affected, after a
few tender reproaches, to place implicit credit in her lord's account,
and volunteered to prevent all scandal by the probable story that the
earl, being prevented from coming in person for his daughter, as he
had purposed, by fresh news of the rebellion which might call him from
London with the early day, had commissioned his kinsman Marmaduke to
escort her home.  The quick perception of her sex told her that,
whatever license might have terrified Anne into so abrupt a flight,
the haughty earl would shrink no less than Edward himself from making
public an insult which slander could well distort into the dishonour
of his daughter; and that whatever pretext might be invented, Warwick
would not deign to contradict it.  And as, despite Elizabeth's hatred
to the earl, and desire of permanent breach between Edward and his
minister, she could not, as queen, wife, and woman, but be anxious
that some cause more honourable in Edward, and less odious to the
people, should be assigned for quarrel, she earnestly recommended the
king to repair at once to the More, as had been before arranged, and
to spare no pains, disdain no expressions of penitence and
humiliation, to secure the mediation of the archbishop.  His mind
somewhat relieved by this interview and counsel, the king kissed
Elizabeth with affectionate gratitude, and returned to his chamber to
prepare for his departure to the archbishop's palace.  But then,
remembering that Adam and Sibyll possessed his secret, he resolved at
once to banish them from the Tower.  For a moment he thought of the
dungeons of his fortress, of the rope of his doomsman; but his
conscience at that hour was sore and vexed.  His fierceness humbled by
the sense of shame, he shrank from a new crime; and, moreover, his
strong common-sense assured him that the testimony of a shunned and
abhorred wizard ceased to be of weight the moment it was deprived of
the influence it took from the protection of a king.  He gave orders
for a boat to be in readiness by the gate of St. Thomas, again
summoned Adam into his presence, and said briefly, "Master Warner, the
London mechanics cry so loudly against thine invention for lessening
labour and starving the poor, the sailors on the wharfs are so
mutinous at the thought of vessels without rowers, that, as a good
king is bound, I yield to the voice of my people.  Go home, then, at
once; the queen dispenses with thy fair daughter's service, the damsel
accompanies thee.  A boat awaits ye at the stairs; a guard shall
attend ye to your house.  Think what has passed within these walls has
been a dream,--a dream that, if told, is deathful, if concealed and
forgotten hath no portent!"

Without waiting a reply, the king called from the anteroom one of his
gentlemen, and gave him special directions as to the departure and
conduct of the worthy scholar and his gentle daughter.  Edward next
summoned before him the warder of the gate, learned that he alone was
privy to the mode of his guest's flight, and deeming it best to leave
at large no commentator on the tale he had invented, sentenced the
astonished warder to three months' solitary imprisonment,--for
appearing before him with soiled hosen!  An hour afterwards, the king,
with a small though gorgeous retinue, was on his way to the More.

The archbishop had, according to his engagement, assembled in his
palace the more powerful of the discontented seigneurs; and his
eloquence had so worked upon them, that Edward beheld, on entering the
hall, only countenances of cheerful loyalty and respectful welcome.
After the first greetings, the prelate, according to the custom of the
day, conducted Edward into a chamber, that he might refresh himself
with a brief rest and the bath, previous to the banquet.

Edward seized the occasion, and told his tale; but however softened,
enough was left to create the liveliest dismay in his listener.  The
lofty scaffolding of hope upon which the ambitious prelate was to
mount to the papal throne seemed to crumble into the dust. The king
and the earl were equally necessary to the schemes of George Nevile.
He chid the royal layman with more than priestly unction for his
offence; but Edward so humbly confessed his fault, that the prelate at
length relaxed his brow, and promised to convey his penitent
assurances to the earl.

"Not an hour should be lost," he said; the only one who can soothe his
wrath is your Highness's mother, our noble kinswoman.  Permit me to
despatch to her grace a letter, praying her to seek the earl, while I
write by the same courier to himself."

"Be it all as you will," said Edward, doffing his surcoat, and dipping
his hands in a perfumed ewer; "I shall not know rest till I have knelt
to the Lady Anne, and won her pardon."

The prelate retired, and scarcely had he left the room when Sir John
Ratcliffe, [Afterwards Lord Fitzwalter.  See Lingard (note, vol. iii.
p. 507, quarto edition), for the proper date to be assigned to this
royal visit to the More,--a date we have here adopted, not, as Sharon
Turner and others place (namely, upon the authority of Hearne's
Fragm., 302, which subsequent events disprove), after the open
rebellion of Warwick, but just before it; that is, not after Easter,
but before Lent.] one of the king's retinue, and in waiting on his
person, entered the chamber, pale and trembling.

"My liege," he said, in a whisper, "I fear some deadly treason awaits
you.  I have seen, amongst the trees below this tower, the gleam of
steel; I have crept through the foliage, and counted no less than a
hundred armed men,--their leader is Sir Marmaduke Nevile, Earl
Warwick's kinsman!"

"Ha!" muttered the king, and his bold face fell, "comes the earl's
revenge so soon?"

"And," continued Ratcliffe, "I overheard Sir Marmaduke say, 'The door
of the Garden Tower is unguarded,--wait the signal!'  Fly, my liege!
Hark! even now I hear the rattling of arms!"

The king stole to the casement; the day was closing; the foliage grew
thick and dark around the wall; he saw an armed man emerge from the
shade,--a second, and a third.

"You are right, Ratcliffe!  Flight--but how?"

"This way, my liege.  By the passage I entered, a stair winds to a
door on the inner court; there I have already a steed in waiting.
Deign, for precaution, to use my hat and manteline."

The king hastily adopted the suggestion, followed the noiseless steps
of Ratcliffe, gained the door, sprang upon his steed, and dashing
right through a crowd assembled by the gate, galloped alone and fast,
untracked by human enemy, but goaded by the foe that mounts the
rider's steed, over field, over fell, over dyke, through hedge, and in
the dead of night reined in at last before the royal towers of
Windsor.




CHAPTER II.

MANY THINGS BRIEFLY TOLD.

The events that followed the king's escape were rapid and startling.
The barons assembled at the More, enraged at Edward's seeming distrust
of them, separated in loud anger.  The archbishop learned the cause
from one of his servitors, who detected Marmaduke's ambush, but he was
too wary to make known a circumstance suspicious to himself.  He flew
to London, and engaged the mediation of the Duchess of York to assist
his own.  [Lingard.  See for the dates, Fabyan, 657.]

The earl received their joint overtures with stern and ominous
coldness, and abruptly repaired to Warwick, taking with him the Lady
Anne.  There he was joined, the same day, by the Duke and Duchess of
Clarence.

The Lincolnshire rebellion gained head: Edward made a dexterous feint
in calling, by public commission, upon Clarence and Warwick to aid in
dispersing it; if they refused, the odium of first aggression would
seemingly rest with them.  Clarence, more induced by personal ambition
than sympathy with Warwick's wrong, incensed by his brother's recent
slights, looking to Edward's resignation and his own consequent
accession to the throne, and inflamed by the ambition and pride of a
wife whom he at once feared and idolized, went hand in heart with the
earl; but not one lord and captain whom Montagu had sounded lent
favour to the deposition of one brother for the advancement of the
next.  Clarence, though popular, was too young to be respected: many
there were who would rather have supported the earl, if an aspirant to
the throne; but that choice forbidden by the earl himself, there could
be but two parties in England,--the one for Edward IV., the other for
Henry VI.

Lord Montagu had repaired to Warwick Castle to communicate in person
this result of his diplomacy.  The earl, whose manner was completely
changed, no longer frank and hearty, but close and sinister, listened
in gloomy silence.

"And now," said Montagu, with the generous emotion of a man whose
nobler nature was stirred deeply, "if you resolve on war with Edward,
I am willing to renounce my own ambition, the hand of a king's
daughter for my son, so that I may avenge the honour of our common
name.  I confess that I have so loved Edward that I would fain pray
you to pause, did I not distrust myself, lest in such delay his craft
should charm me back to the old affection.  Nathless, to your arm and
your great soul I have owed all, and if you are resolved to strike the
blow, I am ready to share the hazard."

The earl turned away his face, and wrung his brother's hand.

"Our father, methinks, hears thee from the grave!" said he, solemnly,
and there was a long pause.  At length Warwick resumed: "Return to
London; seem to take no share in my actions, whatever they be; if I
fail, why drag thee into my ruin?--and yet, trust me, I am rash and
fierce no more.  He who sets his heart on a great object suddenly
becomes wise.  When a throne is in the dust, when from St. Paul's
Cross a voice goes forth to Carlisle and the Land's End, proclaiming
that the reign of Edward the Fourth is past and gone, then, Montagu, I
claim thy promise of aid and fellowship,--not before!"

Meanwhile, the king, eager to dispel thought in action, rushed in
person against the rebellious forces.  Stung by fear into cruelty, he
beheaded, against all kingly faith, his hostages, Lord Welles and Sir
Thomas Dymoke, summoned Sir Robert Welles, the leader of the revolt,
to surrender; received for answer, that Sir Robert Welles would not
trust the perfidy of the man who had murdered his father!--pushed on
to Erpingham, defeated the rebels in a signal battle, and crowned his
victory by a series of ruthless cruelties, committed to the fierce and
learned Earl of Worcester, "Butcher of England."  [Stowe. "Warkworth
Chronicle"--Cont. Croyl.  Lord Worcester ordered Clapham (a squire to
Lord Warwick) and nineteen others, gentlemen and yeomen, to be
impaled, and from the horror the spectacle inspired, and the universal
odium it attached to Worcester, it is to be feared that the unhappy
men were still sensible to the agony of this infliction, though they
appear first to have been drawn, and partially hanged,--outrage
confined only to the dead bodies of rebels being too common at that
day to have excited the indignation which attended the sentence
Worcester passed on his victims.  It is in vain that some writers
would seek to cleanse the memory of this learned nobleman from the
stain of cruelty by rhetorical remarks on the improbability that a
cultivator of letters should be of a ruthless disposition.  The
general philosophy of this defence is erroneous.  In ignorant ages a
man of superior acquirements is not necessarily made humane by the
cultivation of his intellect, on the contrary, he too often learns to
look upon the uneducated herd as things of another clay.  Of this
truth all history is pregnant,--witness the accomplished tyrants of
Greece, the profound and cruel intellect of the Italian Borgias.
Richard III. and Henry VIII. were both highly educated for their age.
But in the case of Tiptoft, Lord Worcester, the evidence of his
cruelty is no less incontestable than that which proves his learning--
the Croyland historian alone is unimpeachable.  Worcester's popular
name of "the Butcher" is sufficient testimony in itself.  The people
are often mistaken, to be sure, but can scarcely be so upon the one
point, whether a man who has sat in judgment on themselves be merciful
or cruel.]

With the prompt vigour and superb generalship which Edward ever
displayed in war, he then cut his gory way to the force which Clarence
and Warwick (though their hostility was still undeclared) had levied,
with the intent to join the defeated rebels.  He sent his herald,
Garter King-at-arms, to summon the earl and the duke to appear before
him within a certain day.  The time expired; he proclaimed them
traitors, and offered rewards for their apprehension.  [One thousand
pounds in money, or one hundred pounds a year in land; an immense
reward for that day.]

So sudden had been Warwick's defection, so rapid the king's movements,
that the earl had not time to mature his resources, assemble his
vassals, consolidate his schemes.  His very preparations, upon the
night on which Edward had repaid his services by such hideous
ingratitude, had manned the country with armies against himself.  Girt
but with a scanty force collected in haste (and which consisted merely
of his retainers in the single shire of Warwick), the march of Edward
cut him off from the counties in which his name was held most dear, in
which his trumpet could raise up hosts.  He was disappointed in the
aid he had expected from his powerful but self-interested brother-in-
law, Lord Stanley.  Revenge had become more dear to him than life:
life must not be hazarded, lest revenge be lost. On still marched the
king; and the day that his troops entered Exeter, Warwick, the females
of his family, with Clarence, and a small but armed retinue, took ship
from Dartmouth, sailed for Calais (before which town, while at anchor,
Isabel was confined of her first-born).  To the earl's rage and dismay
his deputy Vauclerc fired upon his ships.  Warwick then steered on
towards Normandy, captured some Flemish vessels by the way, in token
of defiance to the earl's old Burgundian foe, and landed at Harfleur,
where he and his companions were received with royal honours by the
Admiral of France, and finally took their way to the court of Louis
XI. at Amboise.

"The danger is past forever!" said King Edward, as the wine sparkled
in his goblet.  "Rebellion hath lost its head,--and now, indeed, and
for the first time, a monarch I reign alone!"  [Before leaving
England, Warwick and Clarence are generally said to have fallen in
with Anthony Woodville and Lord Audley, and ordered them to execution,
from which they were saved by a Dorsetshire gentleman.  Carte, who,
though his history is not without great mistakes, is well worth
reading by those whom the character of Lord Warwick may interest,
says, that the earl had "too much magnanimity to put them to death
immediately, according to the common practice of the times, and only
imprisoned them in the castle of Wardour, from whence they were soon
rescued by John Thornhill, a gentleman of Dorsetshire."  The whole of
this story is, however, absolutely contradicted by the "Warkworth
Chronicle" (p. 9, edited by Mr. Halliwell), according to which
authority Anthony Woodville was at that time commanding a fleet upon
the Channel, which waylaid Warwick on his voyage; but the success
therein attributed to the gallant Anthony, in dispersing or seizing
all the earl's ships, save the one that bore the earl himself and his
family, is proved to be purely fabulous, by the earl's well-attested
capture of the Flemish vessels, as he passed from Calais to the coasts
of Normandy, an exploit he could never have performed with a single
vessel of his own.  It is very probable that the story of Anthony
Woodville's capture and peril at this time originates in a
misadventure many years before, and recorded in the "Paston Letters,"
as well as in the "Chronicles."--In the year 1459, Anthony Woodville
and his father, Lord Rivers (then zealous Lancastrians), really did
fall into the hands of the Earl of March (Edward IV.), Warwick and
Salisbury, and got off with a sound "rating" upon the rude language
which such "knaves' sons" and "little squires" had held to those "who
were of king's blood."]




CHAPTER III.

THE PLOT OF THE HOSTELRY--THE MAID AND THE SCHOLAR IN THEIR HOME.

The country was still disturbed, and the adherents, whether of Henry
or the earl, still rose in many an outbreak, though prevented from
swelling into one common army by the extraordinary vigour not only of
Edward, but of Gloucester and Hastings,--when one morning, just after
the events thus rapidly related, the hostelry of Master Sancroft, in
the suburban parish of Marybone, rejoiced in a motley crowd of
customers and topers.

Some half-score soldiers, returned in triumph from the royal camp, sat
round a table placed agreeably enough in the deep recess made by the
large jutting lattice; with them were mingled about as many women,
strangely and gaudily clad.  These last were all young; one or two,
indeed, little advanced from childhood.  But there was no expression
of youth in their hard, sinister features: coarse paint supplied the
place of bloom; the very youngest had a wrinkle on her brow; their
forms wanted the round and supple grace of early years.  Living
principally in the open air, trained from infancy to feats of
activity, their muscles were sharp and prominent, their aspects had
something of masculine audacity and rudeness; health itself seemed in
them more loathsome than disease.  Upon those faces of bronze, vice
had set its ineffable, unmistaken seal.  To those eyes never had
sprung the tears of compassion or woman's gentle sorrow; on those
brows never had flushed the glow of modest shame: their very voices
half belied their sex,--harsh and deep and hoarse, their laughter loud
and dissonant.  Some amongst them were not destitute of a certain
beauty, but it was a beauty of feature with a common hideousness of
expression,--an expression at once cunning, bold, callous, licentious.
Womanless through the worst vices of woman, passionless through the
premature waste of passion, they stood between the sexes like foul and
monstrous anomalies, made up and fashioned from the rank depravities
of both.  These creatures seemed to have newly arrived from some long
wayfaring; their shoes and the hems of their robes were covered with
dust and mire; their faces were heated, and the veins in their bare,
sinewy, sunburned arms were swollen by fatigue.  Each had beside her
on the floor a timbrel, each wore at her girdle a long knife in its
sheath: well that the sheaths hid the blades, for not one--not even
that which yon cold-eyed child of fifteen wore--but had on its steel
the dark stain of human blood!

The presence of soldiers fresh from the scene of action had naturally
brought into the hostelry several of the idle gossips of the suburb,
and these stood round the table, drinking into their large ears the
boasting narratives of the soldiers.  At a small table, apart from the
revellers, but evidently listening with attention to all the news of
the hour, sat a friar, gravely discussing a mighty tankard of huffcap,
and ever and anon, as he lifted his head for the purpose of drinking,
glancing a wanton eye at one of the tymbesteres.

"But an' you had seen," said a trooper, who was the mouthpiece of his
comrades--"an' you had seen the raptrils run when King Edward himself
led the charge!  Marry, it was like a cat in a rabbit burrow!  Easy to
see, I trow, that Earl Warwick was not amongst them!  His men, at
least, fight like devils!"

"But there was one tall fellow," said a soldier, setting down his
tankard, "who made a good fight and dour, and, but for me and my
comrades, would have cut his way to the king."

"Ay, ay, true; we saved his highness, and ought to have been
knighted,--but there's no gratitude nowadays!"

"And who was this doughty warrior?" asked one of the bystanders, who
secretly favoured the rebellion.

"Why, it was said that he was Robin of Redesdale,--he who fought my
Lord Montagu off York."

"Our Robin!" exclaimed several voices.  "Ay, he was ever a brave
fellow--poor Robin!"

"'Your Robin,' and 'poor Robin,' varlets!" cried the principal
trooper.  "Have a care!  What do ye mean by your Robin?"

"Marry, sir soldier," quoth a butcher, scratching his head, and in a
humble voice, "craving your pardon and the king's, this Master Robin
sojourned a short time in this hamlet, and was a kind neighbour, and
mighty glib of the tongue.  Don't ye mind, neighbours," he added
rapidly, eager to change the conversation, "how he made us leave off
when we were just about burning Adam Warner, the old nigromancer, in
his den yonder?  Who else could have done that?  But an' we had known
Robin had been a rebel to sweet King Edward, we'd have roasted him
along with the wizard!"

One of the timbrel-girls, the leader of the choir, her arm round a
soldier's neck, looked up at the last speech, and her eye followed the
gesture of the butcher, as he pointed through the open lattice to the
sombre, ruinous abode of Adam Warner.

"Was that the house ye would have burned?" she asked abruptly.

"Yes; but Robin told us the king would hang those who took on them the
king's blessed privilege of burning nigromancers; and, sure enough,
old Adam Warner was advanced to be wizard-in-chief to the king's own
highness a week or two afterwards."

The friar had made a slight movement at the name of Warner; he now
pushed his stool nearer to the principal group, and drew his hood
completely over his countenance.

"Yea!" exclaimed the mechanic, whose son had been the innocent cause
of the memorable siege to poor Adam's dilapidated fortress, related in
the first book of this narrative"--yea; and what did he when there?
Did he not devise a horrible engine for the destruction of the poor,--
an engine that was to do all the work in England by the devil's help?
--so that if a gentleman wanted a coat of mail, or a cloth tunic; if
his dame needed a Norwich worsted; if a yeoman lacked a plough or a
wagon, or his good wife a pot or a kettle; they were to go, not to the
armourer, and the draper, and the tailor, and the weaver, and the
wheelwright, and the blacksmith,--but, hey presto!  Master Warner set
his imps a-churning, and turned ye out mail and tunic, worsted and
wagon, kettle and pot, spick and span new, from his brewage of vapour
and sea-coal.  Oh, have I not heard enough of the sorcerer from my
brother, who works in the Chepe for Master Stokton, the mercer!--and
Master Stokton was one of the worshipful deputies to whom the old
nigromancer had the front to boast his devices."

"It is true," said the friar, suddenly.

"Yes, reverend father, it is true," said the mechanic, doffing his
cap, and inclining his swarthy face to this unexpected witness of his
veracity.  A murmur of wrath and hatred was heard amongst the
bystanders.  The soldiers indifferently turned to their female
companions.  There was a brief silence; and, involuntarily, the
gossips stretched over the table to catch sight of the house of so
demoniac an oppressor of the poor.

"See," said the baker, "the smoke still curls from the rooftop!  I
heard he had come back.  Old Madge, his handmaid, has bought cimnel-
cakes of me the last week or so; nothing less than the finest wheat
serves him now, I trow.  However, right's right, and--"

"Come back!" cried the fierce mechanic; "the owl hath kept close in
his roost!  An' it were not for the king's favour, I would soon see
how the wizard liked to have fire and water brought to bear against
himself!"

"Sit down, sweetheart," whispered one of the young tymbesteres to the
last speaker--

    "Come, kiss me, my darling,
       Warm kisses I trade for."

"Avaunt!" quoth the mechanic, gruffly, and shaking off the seductive
arm of the  tymbestere--"avaunt!  I have neither liefe nor halfpence
for thee and thine.  Out on thee!--a child of thy years! a rope's end
to thy back were a friend's best kindness!"

The girl's eyes sparkled, she instinctively put her hand to her knife;
then turning to a soldier by her side, she said, "Hear you that, and
sit still?"

"Thunder and wounds!" growled the soldier thus appealed to, "more
respect to the sex, knave; if I don't break thy fool's costard with my
sword-hilt, it is only because Red Grisell can take care of herself
against twenty such lozels as thou.  These honest girls have been to
the wars with us; King Edward grudges no man his jolly fere.  Speak up
for thyself, Grisell!  How many tall fellows didst thou put out of
their pain after the battle of Losecote?"

"Only five, Hal," replied the cold-eyed girl, and showing her
glittering teeth with the grin of a young tigress; "but one was a
captain.  I shall do better next time; it was my first battle, thou
knowest!"

The more timid of the bystanders exchanged a glance of horror, and
drew back.  The mechanic resumed sullenly,--"I seek no quarrel with
lass or lover.  I am a plain, blunt man, with a wife and children, who
are dear to me; and if I have a grudge to the nigromancer, it is
because he glamoured my poor boy Tim.  See!"--and he caught up a blue-
eyed, handsome boy, who had been clinging to his side, and baring the
child's arm, showed it to the spectators; there was a large scar on
the limb, and it was shrunk and withered.

"It was my own fault," said the little fellow, deprecatingly.  The
affectionate father silenced the sufferer with a cuff on the cheek,
and resumed: "Ye note, neighbours, the day when the foul wizard took
this little one in his arms: well, three weeks afterwards--that very
day three weeks--as he was standing like a lamb by the fire, the good
wife's caldron seethed over, without reason or rhyme, and scalded his
arm till it rivelled up like a leaf in November; and if that is not
glamour, why have we laws against witchcraft?"

"True, true!" groaned the chorus.

The boy, who had borne his father's blow without a murmur, now again
attempted remonstrance.  "The hot water went over the gray cat, too,
but Master Warner never bewitched her, daddy."

"He takes his part!--You hear the daff laddy?  He takes the old
nigromancer's part,--a sure sign of the witchcraft; but I'll leather
it out of thee, I will!" and the mechanic again raised his weighty
arm.  The child did not this time await the blow; he dodged under the
butcher's apron, gained the door, and disappeared.  "And he teaches
our own children to fly in our faces!" said the father, in a kind of
whimper.  The neighbours sighed in commiseration.

"Oh," he exclaimed in a fiercer tone, grinding his teeth, and shaking
his clenched fist towards Adam Warner's melancholy house, "I say
again, if the king did not protect the vile sorcerer, I would free the
land from his devilries ere his black master could come to his help."

"The king cares not a straw for Master Warner or his inventions, my
son," said a rough, loud voice.  All turned, and saw the friar
standing in the midst of the circle.  "Know ye not, my children, that
the king sent the wretch neck and crop out of the palace for having
bewitched the Earl of Warwick and his grace the Lord Clarence, so that
they turned unnaturally against their own kinsman, his highness?  But
'Manus malorum suos bonos breaket,'--that is to say, the fists of
wicked men only whack their own bones.  Ye have all heard tell of
Friar Bungey, my children?"

"Ay, ay!" answered two or three in a breath,--"a wizard, it's true,
and a mighty one; but he never did harm to the poor; though they do
say he made a quaint image of the earl, and--"

"Tut, tut!" interrupted the friar, "all Bungey did was to try to
disenchant the Lord Warwick, whom yon miscreant had spellbound.  Poor
Bungey! he is a friend to the people: and when he found that Master
Adam was making a device for their ruin, he spared no toil, I assure
ye, to frustrate the iniquity.  Oh, how he fasted and watched!  Oh,
how many a time he fought, tooth and nail, with the devil in person,
to get at the infernal invention! for if he had that invention once in
his hands, he could turn it to good account, I can promise ye: and
give ye rain for the green blade and sun for the ripe sheaf.  But the
fiend got the better at first; and King Edward, bewitched himself for
the moment, would have hanged Friar Bungey for crossing old Adam, if
he had not called three times, in a loud voice, 'Presto pepranxenon!'
changed himself into a bird, and flown out of the window.  As soon as
Master Adam Warner found the field clear to himself, he employed his
daughter to bewitch the Lord Hastings; he set brother against brother,
and made the king and Lord George fall to loggerheads; he stirred up
the rebellion; and where he would have stopped the foul fiend only
knows, if your friend Friar Bungey, who, though a wizard as you say,
is only so for your benefit (and a holy priest into the bargain), had
not, by aid of a good spirit, whom he conjured up in the island of
Tartary, disenchanted the king, and made him see in a dream what the
villanous Warner was devising against his crown and his people,--
whereon his highness sent Master Warner and his daughter back to their
roost, and, helped by Friar Bungey, beat his enemies out of the
kingdom.  So, if ye have a mind to save your children from mischief
and malice, ye may set to work with good heart, always provided that
ye touch not old Adam's iron invention.  Woe betide ye, if ye think to
destroy that!  Bring it safe to Friar Bungey, whom ye will find
returned to the palace, and journeyman's wages will be a penny a day
higher for the next ten years to come!"  With these words the friar
threw down his reckoning, and moved majestically to the door.

"An' I might trust you!" said Tim's father, laying hold of the friar's
serge.

"Ye may, ye may!" cried the leader of the tymbesteres, starting up
from the lap of her soldier, "for it is Friar Bungey himself!"

A movement of astonishment and terror was universal.  "Friar Bungey
himself!"  repeated the burly impostor.  "Right, lassie, right; and he
now goes to the palace of the Tower, to mutter good spells in King
Edward's ear,--spells to defeat the malignant ones, and to lower the
price of beer.  Wax wobiscum!"

With that salutation, more benevolent than accurate, the friar
vanished from the room; the chief of the tymbesteres leaped lightly on
the table, put one foot on the soldier's shoulder, and sprang through
the open lattice.  She found the friar in the act of mounting a sturdy
mule, which had been tied to a post by the door.

"Fie, Graul Skellet!  Fie, Graul!" said the conjurer "Respect for my
serge.  We must not be noted together out of door in the daylight.
There's a groat for thee.  Vade, execrabilis,--that is, good-day to
thee, pretty rogue!"

"A word, friar, a word.  Wouldst thou have the old man burned,
drowned, or torn piecemeal?  He hath a daughter too, who once sought
to mar our trade with her gittern; a daughter, then in a kirtle that I
would not have nimmed from a hedge, but whom I last saw in sarcenet
and lawn, with a great lord for her fere."  The tymbestere's eyes
shone with malignant envy, as she added, "Graul Skellet loves not to
see those who have worn worsted and say walk in sarcenet and lawn.
Graul Skellet loves not wenches who have lords for their feres, and
yet who shrink from Graul and her sisters as the sound from the
leper."

"Fegs," answered the friar, impatiently, "I know naught against the
daughter,--a pretty lass, but too high for my kisses.  And as for the
father, I want not the man's life,--that is, not very specially,--but
his model, his mechanical.  He may go free, if that can be compassed;
if not, why, the model at all risks.  Serve me in this."

"And thou wilt teach me the last tricks of the cards, and thy great
art of making phantoms glide by on the wall?"

"Bring the model intact, and I will teach thee more, Graul,--the dead
man's candle, and the charm of the newt; and I'll give thee, to boot,
the Gaul of the parricide that thou hast prayed me so oft for.  Hum!
thou hast a girl in thy troop who hath a blinking eye that well
pleases me; but go now, and obey me.  Work before play, and grace
before pudding!"

The tymbestere nodded, snapped her fingers in the air, and humming no
holy ditty, returned to the house through the doorway.

This short conference betrays to the reader the relations, mutually
advantageous, which subsisted between the conjuror and the
tymbesteres.  Their troop (the mothers, perchance, of the generation
we treat of) had been familiar to the friar in his old capacity of
mountebank, or tregetour, and in his clerical and courtly elevation,
he did not disdain an ancient connection that served him well with the
populace; for these grim children of vice seemed present in every
place, where pastime was gay, or strife was rampant,--in peace, at the
merry-makings and the hostelries; in war, following the camp, and
seen, at night, prowling through the battlefields to dispatch the
wounded and to rifle the slain: in merrymaking, hostelry, or in camp,
they could thus still spread the fame of Friar Bungey, and uphold his
repute both for terrible lore and for hearty love of the commons.

Nor was this all; both tymbesteres and conjuror were fortune-tellers
by profession.  They could interchange the anecdotes each picked up in
their different lines.  The tymbestere could thus learn the secrets of
gentle and courtier, the conjuror those of the artisan and mechanic.

Unconscious of the formidable dispositions of their neighbours, Sibyll
and Warner were inhaling the sweet air of the early spring in their
little garden.  His disgrace had affected the philosopher less than
might be supposed.  True, that the loss of the king's favour was the
deferring indefinitely--perhaps for life--any practical application of
his adored theory; and yet, somehow or other, the theory itself
consoled him.  At the worst, he should find some disciple, some
ingenious student, more fortunate than himself, to whom he could
bequeath the secret, and who, when Adam was in his grave, would teach
the world to revere his name.  Meanwhile, his time was his own; he was
lord of a home, though ruined and desolate; he was free, with his free
thoughts; and therefore, as he paced the narrow garden, his step was
lighter, his mind less absent than when parched with feverish fear and
hope for the immediate practical success of a principle which was to
be tried before the hazardous tribunal of prejudice and ignorance.

"My child," said the sage, "I feel, for the first time for years, the
distinction of the seasons.  I feel that we are walking in the
pleasant spring.  Young days come back to me like dreams; and I could
almost think thy mother were once more by my side!"

Sibyll pressed her father's hand, and a soft but melancholy sigh
stirred her rosy lips.  She, too, felt the balm of the young year; yet
her father's words broke upon sad and anxious musings.  Not to youth
as to age, not to loving fancy as to baffled wisdom, has seclusion
charms that compensate for the passionate and active world!  On coming
back to the old house, on glancing round its mildewed walls,
comfortless and bare, the neglected, weed-grown garden, Sibyll had
shuddered in dismay.  Had her ambition fallen again into its old
abject state?  Were all her hopes to restore her ancestral fortunes,
to vindicate her dear father's fame, shrunk into this slough of actual
poverty,--the butterfly's wings folded back into the chrysalis shroud
of torpor?  The vast disparity between herself and Hastings had not
struck her so forcibly at the court; here, at home, the very walls
proclaimed it.  When Edward had dismissed the unwelcome witnesses of
his attempted crime, he had given orders that they should be conducted
to their house through the most private ways.  He naturally desired to
create no curious comment upon their departure.  Unperceived by their
neighbours, Sibyll and her father had gained access by the garden
gate.  Old Madge received them in dismay; for she had been in the
habit of visiting Sibyll weekly at the palace, and had gained, in the
old familiarity subsisting, then, between maiden and nurse, some
insight into her heart.  She had cherished the fondest hopes for the
fate of her young mistress; and now, to labour and to penury had the
fate returned!  The guard who accompanied them, according to Edward's
orders, left some pieces of gold, which Adam rejected, but Madge
secretly received and judiciously expended.  And this was all their
wealth.  But not of toil nor of penury in themselves thought Sibyll;
she thought but of Hastings,--wildly, passionately, trustfully,
unceasingly, of the absent Hastings.  Oh, he would seek her, he would
come, her reverse would but the more endear her to him!  Hastings came
not.  She soon learned the wherefore.  War threatened the land,--he
was at his post, at the head of armies.

Oh, with what panoply of prayer she sought to shield that beloved
breast!  And now the old man spoke of the blessed spring, the holiday
time of lovers and of love, and the young girl, sighing, said to her
mournful heart, "The world hath its sun,--where is mine?"

The peacock strutted up to his poor protectors, and spread his plumes
to the gilding beams.  And then Sibyll recalled the day when she had
walked in that spot with Marmaduke, and he had talked of his youth,
ambition, and lusty hopes, while, silent and absorbed, she had thought
within herself, "Could the world be open to me as to him,--I too have
ambition, and it should find its goal."  Now what contrast between the
two,--the man enriched and honoured, if to-day in peril or in exile,
to-morrow free to march forward still on his career, the world the
country to him whose heart was bold and whose name was stainless! and
she, the woman, brought back to the prison-home, scorn around her,
impotent to avenge, and forbidden to fly!  Wherefore?--Sibyll felt her
superiority of mind, of thought, of nature,--wherefore the contrast?
The success was that of man, the discomfiture that of woman.  Woe to
the man who precedes his age; but never yet has an age been in which
genius and ambition are safe to woman!

The father and the child turned into their house.  The day was
declining.  Adam mounted to his studious chamber, Sibyll sought the
solitary servant.

"What tidings, oh, what tidings?  The war, you say, is over; the great
earl, his sweet daughter, safe upon the seas, but Hastings--ob,
Hastings! what of him?"

"My bonnibell, my lady-bird, I have none but good tales to tell thee.
I saw and spoke with a soldier who served under Lord Hastings himself;
he is unscathed, he is in London.  But they say that one of his bands
is quartered in the suburb, and that there is a report of a rising in
Hertfordshire."

"When will peace come to England and to me!" sighed Sibyll.




CHAPTER IV.

THE WORLD'S JUSTICE, AND THE WISDOM OF OUR ANCESTORS.

The night had now commenced, and Sibyll was still listening--or,
perhaps, listening not--to the soothing babble of the venerable
servant.  They were both seated in the little room that adjoined the
hall, and their only light came through the door opening on the
garden,--a gray, indistinct twilight, relieved by the few earliest
stars.  The peacock, his head under his wing, roosted on the
balustrade, and the song of the nightingale, from amidst one of the
neighbouring copses, which studded the ground towards the chase of
Marybone, came soft and distant on the serene air.  The balm and
freshness of spring were felt in the dews, in the skies, in the sweet
breath of young herb and leaf; through the calm of ever-watchful
nature, it seemed as if you might mark, distinct and visible, minute
after minute, the blessed growth of April into May.

Suddenly Madge uttered a cry of alarm, and pointed towards the
opposite wall.  Sibyll, startled from her revery, looked up, and saw
something dusk and dwarf-like perched upon the crumbling eminence.
Presently this apparition leaped lightly into the garden, and the
alarm of the women was lessened on seeing a young boy creep stealthily
over the grass and approach the open door.

"Hey, child!" said Madge, rising.  "What wantest thou?"

"Hist, gammer, hist!  Ah, the young mistress?  That's well.  Hist!  I
say again."  The boy entered the room.  "I'm in time to save you.  In
half an hour your house will be broken into, perhaps burned.  The boys
are clapping their hands now at the thoughts of the bonfire.  Father
and all the neighbours are getting ready.  Hark! hark!  No, it is only
the wind!  The tymbesteres are to give note.  When you hear their
bells tinkle, the mob will meet.  Run for your lives, you and the old
man, and don't ever say it was poor Tim who told you this, for Father
would beat me to death.  Ye can still get through the garden into the
fields.  Quick!"

"I will go to the master," exclaimed Madge, hurrying from the room.

The child caught Sibyll's cold hand through the dark.  "And I say,
mistress, if his worship is a wizard, don't let him punish Father and
Mother, or poor Tim, or his little sister; though Tim was once
naughty, and hooted Master Warner.  Many, many, many a time and oft
have I seen that kind, mild face in my sleep, just as when it bent
over me, while I kicked and screamed, and the poor gentleman said,
'Thinkest thou I would harm thee?'  But he'll forgive me now, will he
not?  And when I turned the seething water over myself, and they said
it was all along of the wizard, my heart pained more than the arm.
But they whip me, and groan out that the devil is in me, if I don't
say that the kettle upset of itself!  Oh, those tymbesteres!
Mistress, did you ever see them?  They fright me.  If you could hear
how they set on all the neighbours!  And their laugh--it makes the
hair stand on end!  But you will get away, and thank Tim too?  Oh, I
shall laugh then, when they find the old house empty!"

"May our dear Lord bless thee--bless thee, child," sobbed Sibyll,
clasping the boy in her arms, and kissing him, while her tears bathed
his cheeks.

A light gleamed on the threshold; Madge, holding a candle, appeared
with Warner, his hat and cloak thrown on in haste.  "What is this?"
said the poor scholar.  "Can it be true?  Is mankind so cruel?  What
have I done, woe is me! what have I done to deserve this?"

"Come, dear father, quick," said Sibyll, drying her tears, and wakened
by the presence of the old man into energy and courage.  "But put thy
hand on this boy's head, and bless him; for it is he who has, haply,
saved us."

The boy trembled a moment as the long-bearded face turned towards him,
but when he caught and recognized those meek, sweet eyes, his
superstition vanished, and it was but a holy and grateful awe that
thrilled his young blood, as the old man placed both withered hands
over his yellow hair, and murmured,--

"God shield thy youth!  God make thy manhood worthy!  God give thee
children in thine old age with hearts like thine!"  Scarcely had the
prayer ceased when the clash of timbrels, with their jingling bells,
was heard in the street.  Once, twice, again, and a fierce yell closed
in chorus,--caught up and echoed from corner to corner, from house to
house.

"Run! run!" cried the boy, turning white with terror.

"But the Eureka--my hope--my mind's child!" exclaimed Adam, suddenly,
and halting at the door.

"Eh, eh!" said Madge, pushing him forward.  "It is too heavy to move;
thou couldst not lift it.  Think of thine own flesh and blood, of thy
daughter, of her dead mother!  Save her life, if thou carest not for
thine own!"

"Go, Sibyll, go, and thou, Madge; I will stay.  What matters my life,
--it is but the servant of a thought!  Perish master, perish slave!"

"Father, unless you come with me, I stir not.  Fly or perish, your
fate is mine!  Another minute--Oh, Heaven of mercy, that roar again!
We are both lost!"

"Go, sir, go; they care not for your iron,--iron cannot feel.  They
will not touch that!  Have not your daughter's life upon your soul!"

"Sibyll, Sibyll, forgive me!  Come!" said Warner, conscience-stricken
at the appeal.

Madge and the boy ran forwards; the old woman unbarred the garden-
gate; Sibyll and her father went forth; the fields stretched before
them calm and solitary; the boy leaped up, kissed Sibyll's pale cheek,
and then bounded across the grass, and vanished.

"Loiter not, Madge.  Come!" cried Sibyll.

"Nay," said the old woman, shrinking back, "they bear no grudge to me;
I am too old to do aught but burthen ye.  I will stay, and perchance
save the house and the chattels, and poor master's deft contrivance.
Whist! thou knowest his heart would break if none were by to guard
it."

With that the faithful servant thrust the broad pieces that yet
remained of the king's gift into the gipsire Sibyll wore at her
girdle, and then closed and rebarred the door before they could detain
her.

"It is base to leave her," said the scholar-gentleman.

The noble Sibyll could not refute her father.  Afar they heard the
tramping of feet; suddenly, a dark red light shot up into the blue
air, a light from the flame of many torches.

"The wizard, the wizard!  Death to the wizard, who would starve the
poor!" yelled forth, and was echoed by a stern hurrah.

Adam stood motionless, Sibyll by his side.

"The wizard and his daughter!" shrieked a sharp single voice, the
voice of Graul the tymbestere.

Adam turned.  "Fly, my child,--they now threaten thee.  Come, come,
come!" and, taking her by the hand, he hurried her across the fields,
skirting the hedge, their shadows dodging, irregular and quaint, on
the starlit sward.  The father had lost all thought, all care but for
the daughter's life.  They paused at last, out of breath and
exhausted: the sounds at the distance were lulled and hushed.  They
looked towards the direction of the home they had abandoned, expecting
to see the flames destined to consume it reddening the sky; but all
was dark,--or, rather, no light save the holy stars and the rising
moon offended the majestic heaven.

"They cannot harm the poor old woman; she hath no lore.  On her gray
hairs has fallen not the curse of men's hate!" said Warner.

"Right, Father! when they found us flown, doubtless the cruel ones
dispersed.  But they may search yet for thee.  Lean on me, I am strong
and young.  Another effort, and we gain the safe coverts of the
Chase."

While yet the last word hung on her lips, they saw, on the path they
had left, the burst of torch-light, and heard the mob hounding on
their track.  But the thick copses, with their pale green just budding
into life, were at hand.  On they fled.  The deer started from amidst
the entangled fern, but stood and gazed at them without fear; the
playful hares in the green alleys ceased not their nightly sports at
the harmless footsteps; and when at last, in the dense thicket, they
sunk down on the mossy roots of a giant oak, the nightingales overhead
chanted as if in melancholy welcome.  They were saved!

But in their home, fierce fires glared amidst the tossing torch-light;
the crowd, baffled by the strength of the door, scaled the wall, broke
through the lattice-work of the hall window, and streaming through
room after room, roared forth, "Death to the wizard!"  Amidst the
sordid dresses of the men, the soiled and faded tinsel of the
tymbesteres gleamed and sparkled.  It was a scene the she-fiends
revelled in,--dear are outrage and malice, and the excitement of
turbulent passions, and the savage voices of frantic men, and the
thirst of blood to those everlasting furies of a mob, under whatever
name we know them, in whatever time they taint with their presence,--
women in whom womanhood is blasted!

Door after door was burst open with cries of disappointed rage; at
last they ascended the turret-stairs, they found a small door barred
and locked.  Tim's father, a huge axe in his brawny arm, shivered the
panels; the crowd rushed in, and there, seated amongst a strange and
motley litter, they found the devoted Madge.  The poor old woman had
collected into this place, as the stronghold of the mansion, whatever
portable articles seemed to her most precious, either from value or
association.  Sibyll's gittern (Marmaduke's gift) lay amidst a lumber
of tools and implements; a faded robe of her dead mother's, treasured
by Madge and Sibyll both, as a relic of holy love; a few platters and
cups of pewter, the pride of old Madge's heart to keep bright and
clean; odds and ends of old hangings; a battered silver brooch (a
love-gift to Madge herself when she was young),--these, and suchlike
scraps of finery, hoards inestimable to the household memory and
affection, lay confusedly heaped around the huge grim model, before
which, mute and tranquil, sat the brave old woman.

The crowd halted, and stared round in superstitious terror and dumb
marvel.

The leader of the tymbesteres sprang forward.

"Where is thy master, old hag, and where the bonny maid who glamours
lords, and despises us bold lasses?"

"Alack! master and the damsel have gone hours ago!  I am alone in the
house; what's your will?"

"The crone looks parlous witchlike!" said Tim's father; crossing
himself, and somewhat retreating from her gray, unquiet eyes.  And,
indeed, poor Madge, with her wrinkled face, bony form, and high cap,
corresponded far more with the vulgar notions of a dabbler in the
black art than did Adam Warner, with his comely countenance and noble
mien.

"So she doth, indeed, and verily," said a hump-backed tinker; "if we
were to try a dip in the horsepool yonder it could do no harm."

"Away with her, away!" cried several voices at that humane suggestion.

"Nay, nay," quoth the baker, "she is a douce creature after all, and
hath dealt with me many years.  I don't care what becomes of the
wizard,--every one knows," he added with pride, "that I was one of the
first to set fire to his house when Robin gainsayed it! but right's
right--burn the master, not the drudge!"

This intercession might have prevailed, but unhappily, at that moment
Graul Skellet, who had secured two stout fellows to accomplish the
object so desired by Friar Bungey, laid hands on the model, and, at
her shrill command, the men advanced and dislodged it from its place.
At the same tine the other tymbesteres, caught by the sight of things
pleasing to their wonted tastes, threw themselves, one upon the faded
robe Sibyll's mother had worn in her chaste and happy youth; another,
upon poor Madge's silver brooch; a third, upon the gittern.

These various attacks roused up all the spirit and wrath of the old
woman: her cries of distress as she darted from one to the other,
striking to the right and left with her feeble arms, her form
trembling with passion, were at once ludicrous and piteous; and these
were responded to by the shrill exclamations of the fierce
tymbesteres, as they retorted scratch for scratch, and blow for blow.
The spectators grew animated by the sight of actual outrage and
resistance; the humpbacked tinker, whose unwholesome fancy one of the
aggrieved tymbesteres had mightily warmed, hastened to the relief of
his virago; and rendered furious by finding ten nails fastened
suddenly on his face, he struck down the poor creature by a blow that
stunned her, seized her in his arms,--for deformed and weakly as the
tinker was, the old woman, now sense and spirit were gone, was as
light as skin and bone could be,--and followed by half a score of his
comrades, whooping and laughing, bore her down the stairs.  Tim's
father, who, whether from parental affection, or, as is more probable,
from the jealous hatred and prejudice of ignorant industry, was bent
upon Adam's destruction, hallooed on some of his fierce fellows into
the garden, tracked the footsteps of the fugitives by the trampled
grass, and bounded over the wall in fruitless chase.  But on went the
more giddy of the mob, rather in sport than in cruelty, with a chorus
of drunken apprentices and riotous boys, to the spot where the
humpbacked tinker had dragged his passive burden.  The foul green pond
near Master Sancroft's hostel reflected the glare of torches; six of
the tymbesteres, leaping and wheeling, with doggerel song and
discordant music, gave the signal for the ordeal of the witch,--

    "Lake or river, dyke or ditch,
     Water never drowns the witch.
     Witch or wizard would ye know?
     Sink or swim, is ay or no.
     Lift her, swing her, once and twice,
       Lift her, swing her o'er the brim,--
     Lille--lera--twice and thrice
       Ha! ha! mother, sink or swim!"

And while the last line was chanted, amidst the full jollity of
laughter and clamour and clattering timbrels, there was a splash in
the sullen water; the green slough on the surface parted with an
oozing gurgle, and then came a dead silence.

"A murrain on the hag! she does not even struggle!" said, at last, the
hump-backed tinker.

"No,--no! she cares not for water.  Try fire!  Out with her! out!"
cried Red Grisell.

"Aroint her! she is sullen!" said the tinker, as his lean fingers
clutched up the dead body, and let it fall upon the margin.  "Dead!"
said the baker, shuddering; "we have done wrong,--I told ye so!  She
dealt with me many a year.  Poor Madge!  Right's right.  She was no
witch!"

"But that was the only way to try it," said the humpbacked tinker;
"and if she was not a witch, why did she look like one?  I cannot
abide ugly folks!"

The bystanders shook their heads.  But whatever their remorse, it was
diverted by a double sound: first, a loud hurrah from some of the mob
who had loitered for pillage, and who now emerged from Adam's house,
following two men, who, preceded by the terrible Graul, dancing before
them, and tossing aloft her timbrel, bore in triumph the captured
Eureka; and, secondly, the blast of a clarion at the distance, while
up the street marched--horse and foot, with pike and banner--a goodly
troop.  The Lord Hastings in person led a royal force, by a night
march, against a fresh outbreak of the rebels, not ten miles from the
city, under Sir Geoffrey Gates, who had been lately arrested by the
Lord Howard at Southampton, escaped, collected a disorderly body of
such restless men as are always disposed to take part in civil
commotion, and now menaced London itself.  At the sound of the clarion
the valiant mob dispersed in all directions, for even at that day mobs
had an instinct of terror at the approach of the military, and a quick
reaction from outrage to the fear of retaliation.

But, at the sound of martial music, the tymbesteres silenced their own
instruments, and instead of flying, they darted through the crowd,
each to seek the other, and unite as for counsel.  Graul, pointing to
Mr. Sancroft's hostelry, whispered the bearers of the Eureka to seek
refuge there for the present, and to bear their trophy with the dawn
to Friar Bungey at the Tower; and then, gliding nimbly through the
fugitive rioters, sprang into the centre of the circle formed by her
companions.

"Ye scent the coming battle?" said the arch-tymbestere.

"Ay, ay, ay!" answered the sisterhood.

"But we have gone miles since noon,--I am faint and weary!" said one
amongst them.

Red Grisell, the youngest of the band, struck her comrade on the
cheek--"Faint and weary, ronion, with blood and booty in the wind!"

The tymbesteres smiled grimly on their young sister; but the leader
whispered "Hush!" and they stood for a second or two with outstretched
throats, with dilated nostrils, with pent breath, listening to the
clarion and the hoofs and the rattling armour, the human vultures
foretasting their feast of carnage; then, obedient to a sign from
their chieftainess, they crept lightly and rapidly into the mouth of a
neighbouring alley, where they cowered by the squalid huts, concealed.
The troop passed on,--a gallant and serried band, horse and foot,
about fifteen hundred men.  As they filed up the thoroughfare, and the
tramp of the last soldiers fell hollow on the starlit ground, the
tymbesteres stole from their retreat, and, at the distance of some few
hundred yards, followed the procession, with long, silent, stealthy
strides,--as the meaner beasts, in the instinct of hungry cunning,
follow the lion for the garbage of his prey.




CHAPTER V.

THE FUGITIVES ARE CAPTURED--THE TYMBESTERES REAPPEAR--MOONLIGHT ON THE
REVEL OF THE LIVING--MOONLIGHT ON THE SLUMBER OF THE DEAD.

The father and child made their resting-place under the giant oak.
They knew not whither to fly for refuge; the day and the night had
become the same to them,--the night menaced with robbers, the day with
the mob.  If return to their home was forbidden, where in the wide
world a shelter for the would-be world-improver?  Yet they despaired
not, their hearts failed them not.  The majestic splendour of the
night, as it deepened in its solemn calm; as the shadows of the
windless trees fell larger and sharper upon the silvery earth; as the
skies grew mellower and more luminous in the strengthening starlight,
inspired them with the serenity of faith,--for night, to the earnest
soul, opens the Bible of the universe, and on the leaves of Heaven is
written, "God is everywhere."

Their hands were clasped each in each, their pale faces were upturned;
they spoke not, neither were they conscious that they prayed, but
their silence was thought, and the thought was worship.

Amidst the grief and solitude of the pure, there comes, at times, a
strange and rapt serenity,--a sleep-awake,--over which the instinct of
life beyond the grave glides like a noiseless dream; and ever that
heaven that the soul yearns for is coloured by the fancies of the fond
human heart, each fashioning the above from the desires unsatisfied
below.

"There," thought the musing maiden, "cruelty and strife shall cease;
there, vanish the harsh differences of life; there, those whom we have
loved and lost are found, and through the Son, who tasted of mortal
sorrow, we are raised to the home of the Eternal Father!"

"And there," thought the aspiring sage, "the mind, dungeoned and
chained below, rushes free into the realms of space; there, from every
mystery falls the veil; there, the Omniscient smiles on those who,
through the darkness of life, have fed that lamp, the soul; there,
Thought, but the seed on earth, bursts into the flower and ripens to
the fruit!"

And on the several hope of both maid and sage the eyes of the angel
stars smiled with a common promise.

At last, insensibly, and while still musing, so that slumber but
continued the revery into visions, father and daughter slept.

The night passed away; the dawn came slow and gray; the antlers of the
deer stirred above the fern; the song of the nightingale was hushed;
and just as the morning star waned back, while the reddening east
announced the sun, and labour and trouble resumed their realm of day,
a fierce band halted before those sleeping forms.

These men had been Lancastrian soldiers, and, reduced to plunder for a
living, had, under Sir Geoffrey Gates, formed the most stalwart part
of the wild, disorderly force whom Hilyard and Coniers had led to
Olney.  They had heard of the new outbreak, headed by their ancient
captain, Sir Geoffrey (who was supposed to have been instigated to his
revolt by the gold and promises of the Lancastrian chiefs), and were
on their way to join the rebels; but as war for them was but the name
for booty, they felt the wonted instinct of the robber, when they
caught sight of the old man and the fair maid.

Both Adam and his daughter wore, unhappily, the dresses in which they
had left the court, and Sibyll's especially was that which seemed to
betoken a certain rank and station.

"Awake, rouse ye!" said the captain of the band, roughly shaking the
arm which encircled Sibyll's slender waist. Adam started, opened his
eyes, and saw himself begirt by figures in rusty armour, with savage
faces peering under their steel sallets.

"How came you hither?  Yon oak drops strange acorns," quoth the chief.

"Valiant sir," replied Adam, still seated, and drawing his gown
instinctively over Sibyll's face, which nestled on his bosom, in
slumber so deep and heavy, that the gruff voice had not broken it,
"valiant sir! we are forlorn and houseless, an old man and a simple
girl.  Some evil-minded persons invaded our home; we fled in the
night, and--"

"Invaded your house! ha, it is clear," said the chief.  "We know the
rest."

At this moment Sibyll woke, and starting to her feet in astonishment
and terror at the sight on which her eyes opened, her extreme beauty
made a sensible effect upon the bravoes.

"Do not be daunted, young demoiselle," said the captain, with an air
almost respectful; "it is necessary thou and Sir John should follow
us, but we will treat you well, and consult later on the ransom ye
will pay us.  Jock, discharge the young sumpter mule; put its load on
the black one.  We have no better equipment for thee, lady; but the
first haquenee we find shall replace the mule, and meanwhile my knaves
will heap their cloaks for a pillion."

"But what mean you?--you mistake us!" exclaimed Sibyll.  "We are poor;
we cannot ransom ourselves."

"Poor!--tut!" said the captain, pointing significantly to the costly
robe of the maiden--"moreover his worship's wealth is well known.
Mount in haste,--we are pressed."  And without heeding the
expostulations of Sibyll and the poor scholar, the rebel put his troop
into motion, and marched himself at their head, with his lieutenant.

Sibyll found the subalterns sterner than their chief; for as Warner
offered to resist, one of them lifted his gisarme, with a frightful
oath, and Sibyll was the first to persuade her father to submit.  She
mildly, however, rejected the mule, and the two captives walked
together in the midst of the troop.

"Pardie!" said the lieutenant, "I see little help to Sir Geoffrey in
these recruits, captain!"

"Fool!" said the chief, disdainfully, "if the rebellion fail, these
prisoners may save our necks.  Will Somers last night was to break
into the house of Sir John Bourchier, for arms and moneys, of which
the knight hath a goodly store.  Be sure, Sir John slinked off in the
siege, and this is he and his daughter.  Thou knowest he is one of the
greatest knights, and the richest, whom the Yorkists boast of; and we
may name our own price for his ransom."

"But where lodge them while we go to the battle?"

"Ned Porpustone hath a hostelry not far from the camp, and Ned is a
good Lancastrian, and a man to be trusted."

"We have not searched the prisoners," said the lieutenant; "they may
have some gold in their pouches."

"Marry, when Will Somers storms a hive, little time does he leave to
the bees to fly away with much money.  Nathless, thou mayest search
the old knight, but civilly, and with gentle excuses."

"And the damsel?"

"Nay! that were unmannerly, and the milder our conduct, the larger the
ransom,--when we have great folks to deal with."

The lieutenant accordingly fell back to search Adam's gipsire, which
contained only a book and a file, and then rejoined his captain,
without offering molestation to Sibyll.

The mistake made by the bravo was at least so far not wholly
unfortunate that the notion of the high quality of the captives--for
Sir John Bourchier was indeed a person of considerable station and
importance (a notion favoured by the noble appearance of the scholar
and the delicate and highborn air of Sibyll)--procured for them all
the respect compatible with the circumstances.  They had not gone far
before they entered a village, through which the ruffians marched with
the most perfect impunity; for it was a strange feature in those civil
wars that the mass of the population, except in the northern
districts, remained perfectly supine and neutral.  And as the little
band halted at a small inn to drink, the gossips of the village
collected round them, with the same kind of indolent, careless
curiosity which is now evinced in some hamlet at the halt of a stage-
coach.  Here the captain learned, however, some intelligence important
to his objects,--namely, the night march of the troop under Lord
Hastings, and the probability that the conflict was already begun.
"If so," muttered the rebel, "we can see how the tide turns, before we
endanger ourselves; and at the worst, our prisoners will bring
something of prize-money."

While thus soliloquizing, he spied one of those cumbrous vehicles of
the day called whirlicotes [Whirlicotes were in use from a very early
period, but only among the great, till, in the reign of Richard II.,
his queen, Anne, introduced side-saddles, when the whirlicote fell out
of fashion, but might be found at different hostelries on the main
roads for the accommodation of the infirm or aged.] standing in the
yard of the hostelry; and seizing upon it, vi et armis, in spite of
all the cries and protestations of the unhappy landlord, he ordered
his captives to enter, and recommenced his march.

As the band proceeded farther on their way, they were joined by fresh
troops of the same class as themselves, and they pushed on gayly,
till, about the hour of eight, they halted before the hostelry the
captain had spoken of.  It stood a little out of the high road, not
very far from the village of Hadley, and the heath or chase of
Gladsmore, on which was fought, some time afterwards, the battle of
Barnet.  It was a house of good aspect, and considerable size, for it
was much frequented by all caravanserais and travellers from the North
to the metropolis.  The landlord, at heart a stanch Lancastrian, who
had served in the French wars, and contrived, no one knew how, to save
moneys in the course of an adventurous life, gave to his hostelry the
appellation and sign of the Talbot, in memory of the old hero of that
name; and, hiring a tract of land, joined the occupation of a farmer
to the dignity of a host. The house, which was built round a spacious
quadrangle, represented the double character of its owner, one side
being occupied by barns and a considerable range of stabling, while
cows, oxen, and ragged colts grouped amicably together in a space
railed off in the centre of the yard.  At another side ran a large
wooden staircase, with an open gallery, propped on wooden columns,
conducting to numerous chambers, after the fashion of the Tabard in
Southwark, immortalized by Chaucer.  Over the archway, on entrance,
ran a labyrinth of sleeping lofts for foot passengers and muleteers;
and the side facing the entrance was nearly occupied by a vast
kitchen, the common hall, and the bar, with the private parlour of the
host, and two or three chambers in the second story.  The whirlicote
jolted and rattled into the yard.  Sibyll and her father were assisted
out of the vehicle, and, after a few words interchanged with the host,
conducted by Master Porpustone himself up the spacious stairs into a
chamber, well furnished and fresh littered, with repeated assurances
of safety, provided they maintained silence, and attempted no escape.

"Ye are in time," said Ned Porpustone to the captain.  "Lord Hastings
made proclamation at daybreak that he gave the rebels two hours to
disperse."

"Pest!  I like not those proclamations.  And the fellows stood their
ground?"

"No; for Sir Geoffrey, like a wise soldier, mended the ground by
retreating a mile to the left, and placing the wood between the
Yorkists and himself.  Hastings, by this, must have remarshalled his
men.  But to pass the wood is slow work, and Sir Geoffrey's crossbows
are no doubt doing damage in the covert.  Come in, while your fellows
snatch a morsel without; five minutes are not thrown away on filling
their bellies."

"Thanks, Ned, thou art a good fellow; and if all else fail, why, Sir
John's ransom shall pay the reckoning.  Any news of bold Robin?"

"Ay, he has 'scaped with a whole skin, and gone back to the North,"
answered the host, leading the way to his parlour, where a flask of
strong wine and some cold meat awaited his guest. "If Sir Geoffrey
Gates can beat off the York troopers, tell him, from me, not to
venture to London, but to fall back into the marshes.  He will be
welcome there, I foreguess; for every northman is either for Warwick
or for Lancaster, and the two must unite now, I trow."

"But Warwick is flown!" quoth the captain.

"Tush! he has only flown as the falcon flies when he has a heron to
fight with,--wheeling and soaring.  Woe to the heron when the falcon
swoops!  But you drink not!"

"No; I must keep the head cool to-day; for Hastings is a perilous
captain.  Thy fist, friend!  If I fall, I leave you Sir John and his
girl to wipe off old scores; if we beat off the Yorkists I vow to Our
Lady of Walsingham an image of wax of the weight of myself."  The
marauder then started up, and strode to his men, who were snatching a
hasty meal on the space before the hostel.  He paused a moment or so,
while his host whispered,--

"Hastings was here before daybreak: but his men only got the sour
beer; yours fight upon huffcap."

"Up, men! to your pikes!  Dress to the right!" thundered the captain,
with a sufficient pause between each sentence.  "The York lozels have
starved on stale beer,--shall they beat huffcap and Lancaster?  Frisk
and fresh-up with the Antelope banner [The antelope was one of the
Lancastrian badges.  The special cognizance of Henry VI. was two
feathers in saltire.], and long live Henry the Sixth!"

The sound of the shout that answered this harangue shook the thin
walls of the chamber in which the prisoners were confined, and they
heard with joy the departing tramp of the soldiers.  In a short time,
Master Porpustone himself, a corpulent, burly fellow, with a face by
no means unprepossessing, mounted to the chamber, accompanied by a
comely housekeeper, linked to him, as scandal said, by ties less
irksome than Hymen's, and both bearing ample provisions, with rich
pigment and lucid clary [clary was wine clarified], which they spread
with great formality on an oak table before their involuntary guest.

"Eat, your worship, eat!" cried mine host, heartily.  "Eat, lady-
bird,--nothing like eating to kill time and banish care.  Fortune of
war, Sir John,--fortune of war, never be daunted!  Up to-day, down to-
morrow.  Come what may--York or Lancaster--still a rich man always
falls on his legs.  Five hundred or so to the captain; a noble or two,
out of pure generosity, to Ned Porpustone (I scorn extortion), and you
and the fair young dame may breakfast at home to-morrow, unless the
captain or his favourite lieutenant is taken prisoner; and then, you
see, they will buy off their necks by letting you out of the bag.
Eat, I say,--eat!"

"Verily," said Adam, seating himself solemnly, and preparing to obey,
"I confess I'm a hungered, and the pasty hath a savoury odour; but I
pray thee to tell me why I am called Sir John.  Adam is my baptismal
name."

"Ha! ha! good--very good, your honour--to be sure, and your father's
name before you.  We are all sons of Adam, and every son, I trow, has
a just right and a lawful to his father's name."

With that, followed by the housekeeper, the honest landlord, chuckling
heartily, rolled his goodly bulk from the chamber, which he carefully
locked.

"Comprehendest thou yet, Sibyll?"

"Yes, dear sir and father, they mistake us for fugitives of mark and
importance; and when they discover their error, no doubt we shall go
free.  Courage, dear father!"

"Me seemeth," quoth Adam, almost merrily, as the good man filled his
cup from the wine flagon, "me seemeth that, if the mistake could
continue, it would be no weighty misfortune; ha! ha!"  He stopped
abruptly in the unwonted laughter, put down the cup; his face fell.
"Ah, Heaven forgive me!--and the poor Eureka and faithful Madge!"

"Oh, Father! fear not; we are not without protection.  Lord Hastings
is returned to London,--we will seek him; he will make our cruel
neighbours respect thee.  And Madge--poor Madge!--will be so happy at
our return, for they could not harm her,--a woman, old and alone; no,
no, man is not fierce enough for that."

"Let us so pray; but thou eatest not, child."

"Anon, Father, anon; I am sick and weary.  But, nay--nay, I am better
now,--better.  Smile again, Father.  I am hungered, too; yes, indeed
and in sooth, yes.  Ah, sweet Saint Mary, give me life and strength,
and hope and patience, for his dear sake!"

The stirring events which had within the last few weeks diversified
the quiet life of the scholar had somewhat roused him from his wonted
abstraction, and made the actual world a more sensible and living
thing than it had hitherto seemed to his mind; but now, his repast
ended, the quiet of the place (for the inn was silent and almost
deserted) with the fumes of the wine--a luxury he rarely tasted--
operated soothingly upon his thought and fancy, and plunged him into
those reveries, so dear alike to poet and mathematician.  To the
thinker the most trifling external object often suggests ideas, which,
like Homer's chain, extend, link after link; from earth to heaven.
The sunny motes, that in a glancing column came through the lattice,
called Warner from the real day,--the day of strife and blood, with
thousands hard by driving each other to the Hades,--and led his
scheming fancy into the ideal and abstract day,--the theory of light
itself; and the theory suggested mechanism, and mechanism called up
the memory of his oracle, old Roger Bacon; and that memory revived the
great friar's hints in the Opus magnus,--hints which outlined the
grand invention of the telescope; and so, as over some dismal
precipice a bird swings itself to and fro upon the airy bough, the
schoolman's mind played with its quivering fancy, and folded its calm
wings above the verge of terror.

Occupied with her own dreams, Sibyll respected those of her father;
and so in silence, not altogether mournful, the morning and the noon
passed, and the sun was sloping westward, when a confused sound below
called Sibyll's gaze to the lattice, which looked over the balustrade
of the staircase into the vast yard.  She saw several armed men, their
harness hewed and battered, quaffing ale or wine in haste, and heard
one of them say to the landlord,--

"All is lost!  Sir Geoffrey Gates still holds out, but it is butcher
work.  The troops of Lord Hastings gather round him as a net round the
fish!"

Hastings!--that name!--he was at hand! he was near! they would be
saved!  Sibyll's heart beat loudly.

"And the captain?" asked Porpustone.

"Alive, when I last saw him; but we must be off.  In another hour all
will be hurry and skurry, flight and chase."  At this moment from one
of the barns there emerged, one by one, the female vultures of the
battle.  The tymbesteres, who had tramped all night to the spot, had
slept off their fatigue during the day, and appeared on the scene as
the neighbouring strife waxed low, and the dead and dying began to
cumber the gory ground.  Graul Skellet, tossing up her timbrel, darted
to the fugitives and grinned a ghastly grin when she heard the news,--
for the tymbesteres were all loyal to a king who loved women, and who
had a wink and a jest for every tramping wench!  The troopers tarried
not, however, for further converse, but, having satisfied their
thirst, hurried and clattered from the yard.  At the sight of the
ominous tymbesteres Sibyll had drawn back, without daring to close the
lattice she had opened; and the women, seating themselves on a bench,
began sleeking their long hair and smoothing their garments from the
scraps of straw and litter which betokened the nature of their
resting-place.

"Ho, girls!" said the fat landlord, "ye will pay me for board and bed,
I trust, by a show of your craft.  I have two right worshipful lodgers
up yonder, whose lattice looks on the yard, and whom ye may serve to
divert."

Sibyll trembled, and crept to her father's side.

"And," continued the landlord, "if they like the clash of your
musicals, it may bring ye a groat or so, to help ye on your journey.
By the way, whither wend ye, wenches?"

"To a bonny, jolly fair," answered the sinister voice of Graul,--

    "Where a mighty SHOWMAN dyes
       The greenery into red;
     Where, presto! at the word
       Lies his Fool without a head;
     Where he gathers in the crowd
       To the trumpet and the drum,
     With a jingle and a tinkle,
       Graul's merry lasses come!"

As the two closing lines were caught by the rest of the tymbesteres,
striking their timbrels, the crew formed themselves into a semicircle,
and commenced their dance.  Their movements, though wanton and
fantastic, were not without a certain wild grace; and the address with
which, from time to time, they cast up their instruments and caught
them in descending, joined to the surprising agility with which, in
the evolutions of the dance, one seemed now to chase, now to fly from,
the other, darting to and fro through the ranks of her companions,
winding and wheeling,--the chain now seemingly broken in disorder, now
united link to link, as the whole force of the instruments clashed in
chorus,--made an exhibition inexpressibly attractive to the vulgar.

The tymbesteres, however, as may well be supposed, failed to draw
Sibyll or Warner to the window; and they exchanged glances of spite
and disappointment.

"Marry," quoth the landlord, after a hearty laugh at the diversion, "I
do wrong to be so gay, when so many good friends perhaps are lying
stark and cold.  But what then?  Life is short,--laugh while we can!"

"Hist!" whispered his housekeeper; "art wode, Ned?  Wouldst thou have
it discovered that thou hast such quality birds in the cage--noble
Yorkists--at the very time when Lord Hastings himself may be riding
this way after the victory?"

"Always right, Meg,--and I'm an ass!" answered the host, in the same
undertone.  "But my good nature will be the death of me some day.
Poor gentlefolks, they must be unked dull, yonder!"

"If the Yorkists come hither,--which we shall soon know by the
scouts,--we must shift Sir John and the damsel to the back of the
house, over thy tap-room."

"Manage it as thou wilt, Meg; but thou seest they keep quiet and snug.
Ho, ho, ho! that tall tymbestere is supple enough to make an owl hold
his sides with laughing.  Ah! hollo, there, tymbesteres, ribaudes,
tramps, the devil's chickens,--down, down!"

The host was too late in his order.  With a sudden spring, Graul, who
had long fixed her eye on the open lattice of the prisoners, had
wreathed herself round one of the pillars that supported the stairs,
swung lightly over the balustrade; and with a faint shriek the
startled Sibyll beheld the tymbestere's hard, fierce eyes, glaring
upon her through the lattice, as her long arm extended the timbrel for
largess.  But no sooner had Sibyll raised her face than she was
recognized.

"Ho, the wizard and the wizard's daughter!  Ho, the girl who glamours
lords, and wears sarcenet and lawn!  Ho, the nigromancer who starves
the poor!"

At the sound of their leader's cry, up sprang, up climbed the hellish
sisters!  One after the other, they darted through the lattice into
the chamber.

"The ronions! the foul fiend has distraught them!" groaned the
landlord, motionless with astonishment; but the more active Meg,
calling to the varlets and scullions, whom the tymbesteres had
collected in the yard, to follow her, bounded up the stairs, unlocked
the door, and arrived in time to throw herself between the captives
and the harpies, whom Sibyll's rich super-tunic and Adam's costly gown
had inflamed into all the rage of appropriation.

"What mean ye, wretches?" cried the bold Meg, purple with anger.  "Do
ye come for this into honest folk's hostelries, to rob their guests in
broad day--noble guests--guests of mark!  Oh, Sir John!  Sir John!
what will ye think of us?"

"Oh, Sir John! Sir John!" groaned the landlord, who had now moved his
slow bulk into the room.  "They shall be scourged, Sir John!  They
shall be put in the stocks, they shall be brent with hot iron, they--"

"Ha, ha!" interrupted the terrible Graul, "guests of mark! noble
guests, trow ye!  Adam Warner, the wizard, and his daughter, whom we
drove last night from their den, as many a time, sisters, and many, we
have driven the rats from charnel and cave."

"Wizard!  Adam!  Blood of my life!" stammered the landlord, "is his
name Adam after all?"

"My name is Adam Warner," said the old man, with dignity, "no wizard--
a humble scholar, and a poor gentleman, who has injured no one.
Wherefore, women--if women ye are--would ye injure mine and me?"

"Faugh, wizard!" returned Graul, folding her arms.  "Didst thou not
send thy spawn, yonder, to spoil our mart with her gittern?  Hast thou
not taught her the spells to win love from the noble and young?  Ho,
how daintily the young witch robes herself!  Ho, laces and satins, and
we shiver with the cold, and parch with the heat--and--doff thy tunic,
minion!"

And Graul's fierce gripe was on the robe, when the landlord interposed
his huge arm, and held her at bay.

"Softly, my sucking dove, softly!  Clear the room and be off!"

"Look to thyself, man.  If thou harbourest a wizard against law,--a
wizard whom King Edward hath given up to the people,--look to thy
barns,--they shall burn; look to thy cattle,--they shall rot; look to
thy secrets,--they shall be told.  Lancastrian, thou shalt hang!  We
go! we go!  We have friends amongst the mailed men of York.  We go,--
we will return!  Woe to thee, if thou harbourest the wizard and the
succuba!"

With that Graul moved slowly to the door.  Host and housekeeper,
varlet, groom, and scullion made way for her in terror; and still, as
she moved, she kept her eyes on Sibyll, till her sisters, following in
successive file, shut out the hideous aspect: and Meg, ordering away
her gaping train, closed the door.

The host and the housekeeper then gazed gravely at each other.  Sibyll
lay in her father's arms breathing hard and convulsively.  The old
man's face bent over her in silence.  Meg drew aside her master.  "You
must rid the house at once of these folks.  I have heard talk of yon
tymbesteres; they are awsome in spite and malice.  Every man to
himself!"

"But the poor old gentleman, so mild, and the maid, so winsome!"

The last remark did not over-please the comely Meg.  She advanced at
once to Adam, and said shortly,--

"Master, whether wizard or not is no affair of a poor landlord, whose
house is open to all; but ye have had food and wine,--please to pay
the reckoning, and God speed ye; ye are free to depart."

"We can pay you, mistress!" exclaimed Sibyll, springing up.  "We have
moneys yet.  Here, here!" and she took from her gipsire the broad
pieces which poor Madge's precaution had placed therein, and which the
bravoes had fortunately spared.

The sight of the gold somewhat softened the housewife.  "Lord Hastings
is known to us," continued Sibyll, perceiving the impression she had
made; "suffer us to rest here till he pass this way, and ye will find
yourselves repaid for the kindness."

"By my troth," said the landlord, "ye are most welcome to all my poor
house containeth; and as for these tymbesteres, I value them not a
straw.  No one can say Ned Porpustone is an ill man or inhospitable.
Whoever can pay reasonably is sure of good wine and civility at the
Talbot."

With these and many similar protestations and assurances, which were
less heartily re-echoed by the housewife, the landlord begged to
conduct them to an apartment not so liable to molestation; and after
having led them down the principal stairs, through the bar, and thence
up a narrow flight of steps, deposited them in a chamber at the back
of the house, and lighted a sconce therein, for it was now near the
twilight.  He then insisted on seeing after their evening meal, and
vanished with his assistant.  The worthy pair were now of the same
mind; for guests known to Lord Hastings it was worth braving the
threats of the tymbesteres; especially since Lord Hastings, it seems,
had just beaten the Lancastrians.

But alas! while the active Meg was busy on the hippocras, and the
worthy landlord was inspecting the savoury operations of the kitchen,
a vast uproar was heard without.  A troop of disorderly Yorkist
soldiers, who had been employed in dispersing the flying rebels,
rushed helter-skelter into the house, and poured into the kitchen,
bearing with them the detested tymbesteres, who had encountered them
on their way.  Among these soldiers were those who had congregated at
Master Sancroft's the day before, and they were well prepared to
support the cause of their griesly paramours.  Lord Hastings himself
had retired for the night to a farmhouse nearer the field of battle
than the hostel; and as in those days discipline was lax enough after
a victory, the soldiers had a right to license.  Master Porpustone
found himself completely at the mercy of these brawling customers, the
more rude and disorderly from the remembrance of the sour beer in the
morning, and Graul Skellet's assurances that Master Porpustone was a
malignant Lancastrian.  They laid hands on all the provisions in the
house, tore the meats from the spit, devouring them half raw; set the
casks running over the floors; and while they swilled and swore, and
filled the place with the uproar of a hell broke loose, Graul Skellet,
whom the lust for the rich garments of Sibyll still fired and stung,
led her followers up the stairs towards the deserted chamber.  Mine
host perceived, but did not dare openly to resist the foray; but as he
was really a good-natured knave, and as, moreover, he feared ill
consequences might ensue if any friends of Lord Hastings were spoiled,
outraged,--nay, peradventure murdered,--in his house, he resolved, at
all events, to assist the escape of his guests.  Seeing the ground
thus clear of the tymbesteres, he therefore stole from the riotous
scene, crept up the back stairs, gained the chamber to which he had so
happily removed his persecuted lodgers, and making them, in a few
words, sensible that he was no longer able to protect them, and that
the tymbesteres were now returned with an armed force to back their
malice, conducted them safely to a wide casement only some three or
four feet from the soil of the solitary garden, and bade them escape
and save themselves.

"The farm," he whispered, "where they say my Lord Hastings is
quartered is scarcely a mile and a half away; pass the garden wicket,
leave Gladsmore Chase to the left hand, take the path to the right,
through the wood, and you will see its roof among the apple-blossoms.
Our Lady protect you, and say a word to my lord on behalf of poor
Ned."

Scarce had he seen his guests descend into the garden before he heard
the yell of the tymbesteres, in the opposite part of the house, as
they ran from room to room after their prey.  He hastened to regain
the kitchen; and presently the tymbesteres, breathless and panting,
rushed in, and demanded their victims.

"Marry," quoth the landlord, with the self-possession of a cunning old
soldier-"think ye I cumbered my house with such cattle after pretty
lasses like you had given me the inkling of what they were?  No wizard
shall fly away with the sign of the Talbot, if I can help it.  They
skulked off I can promise ye, and did not even mount a couple of
broomsticks which I handsomely offered for their ride up to London."

"Thunder and bombards!" cried a trooper, already half-drunk, and
seizing Graul in his iron arms, "put the conjuror out of thine head
now, and buss me, Graul, buss me!"

Then the riot became hideous; the soldiers, following their comrade's
example, embraced the grim glee-women, tearing and hauling them to and
fro, one from the other, round and round, dancing, hallooing,
chanting, howling, by the blaze of a mighty fire,--many a rough face
and hard hand smeared with blood still wet, communicating the stain to
the cheeks and garb of those foul feres, and the whole revel becoming
so unutterably horrible and ghastly, that even the veteran landlord
fled from the spot, trembling and crossing himself.  And so, streaming
athwart the lattice, and silvering over that fearful merry-making,
rose the moon.

But when fatigue and drunkenness had done their work, and the soldiers
fell one over the other upon the floor, the tables, the benches, into
the heavy sleep of riot, Graul suddenly rose from amidst the huddled
bodies, and then, silently as ghouls from a burial-ground, her sisters
emerged also from their resting-places beside the sleepers.  The dying
light of the fire contended but feebly with the livid rays of the
moon, and played fantastically over the gleaming robes of the
tymbesteres.  They stood erect for a moment, listening, Graul with her
finger on her lips; then they glided to the door, opened and reclosed
it, darted across the yard, scaring the beasts that slept there; the
watch-dog barked, but drew back, bristling, and showing his fangs, as
Red Grisell, undaunted, pointed her knife, and Graul flung him a red
peace-sop of meat.  They launched themselves through the open
entrance, gained the space beyond, and scoured away to the
battlefield.

Meanwhile, Sibyll and her father were still under the canopy of
heaven, they had scarcely passed the garden and entered the fields,
when they saw horsemen riding to and fro in all directions.  Sir
Geoffrey Gates, the rebel leader, had escaped; the reward of three
hundred marks was set on his head, and the riders were in search of
the fugitive.  The human form itself had become a terror to the hunted
outcasts; they crept under a thick hedge till the horsemen had
disappeared, and then resumed their way.  They gained the wood; but
there again they halted at the sound of voices, and withdrew
themselves under covert of some entangled and trampled bushes.  This
time it was but a party of peasants, whom curiosity had led to see the
field of battle, and who were now returning home.  Peasants and
soldiers both were human, and therefore to be shunned by those whom
the age itself put out of the pale of law.  At last the party also
left the path free; and now it was full night.  They pursued their
way, they cleared the wood; before them lay the field of battle; and a
deeper silence seemed to fall over the world!  The first stars had
risen, but not yet the moon.  The gleam of armour from prostrate
bodies, which it had mailed in vain, reflected the quiet rays; here
and there flickered watchfires, where sentinels were set, but they
were scattered and remote.  The outcasts paused and shuddered, but
there seemed no holier way for their feet; and the roof of the
farmer's homestead slept on the opposite side of the field, amidst
white orchard blossoms, whitened still more by the stars.  They went
on, hand in hand,--the dead, after all, were less terrible than the
living.  Sometimes a stern, upturned face, distorted by the last
violent agony, the eyes unclosed and glazed, encountered them with its
stony stare; but the weapon was powerless in the stiff hand, the
menace and the insult came not from the hueless lips; persecution
reposed, at last, in the lap of slaughter.  They had gone midway
through the field, when they heard from a spot where the corpses lay
thickest piled, a faint voice calling upon God for pardon; and,
suddenly, it was answered by a tone of fiercer agony,--that did not
pray, but curse.

By a common impulse, the gentle wanderers moved silently to the spot.

The sufferer in prayer was a youth scarcely passed from boyhood: his
helm had been cloven, his head was bare, and his long light hair,
clotted with gore, fell over his shoulders.  Beside him lay a strong-
built, powerful form, which writhed in torture, pierced under the arm
by a Yorkist arrow, and the shaft still projecting from the wound,--
and the man's curse answered the boy's prayer.

"Peace to thy parting soul, brother!" said Warner, bending over the
man.

"Poor sufferer!" said Sibyll to the boy; "cheer thee, we will send
succour; thou mayest live yet!"

"Water! water!--hell and torture!--water, I say!" groaned the man;
"one drop of water!"

It was the captain of the maurauders who had captured the wanderers.

"Thine arm! lift me! move me!  That evil man scares my soul from
heaven!" gasped the boy.

And Adam preached penitence to the one that cursed, and Sibyll knelt
down and prayed with the one that prayed.  And up rose the moon!

Lord Hastings sat with his victorious captains--over mead, morat, and
wine--in the humble hall of the farm.

"So," said he, "we have crushed the last embers of the rebellion!
This Sir Geoffrey Gates is a restless and resolute spirit; pity he
escapes again for further mischief.  But the House of Nevile, that
overshadowed the rising race, hath fallen at last,--a waisall, brave
sirs, to the new men!"

The door was thrown open, and an old soldier entered abruptly.

"My lord! my lord!  Oh, my poor son! he cannot be found!  The women,
who ever follow the march of soldiers, will be on the ground to
despatch the wounded, that they may rifle the corpses!  O God! if my
son, my boy, my only son--"

"I wist not, my brave Mervil, that thou hadst a son in our bands; yet
I know each man by name and sight.  Courage!  Our wounded have been
removed, and sentries are placed to guard the field."

"Sentries!  O my lord, knowest thou not that they wink at the crime
that plunders the dead?  Moreover, these corpse-riflers creep
stealthily and unseen, as the red earth-worms, to the carcass.  Give
me some few of thy men, give me warrant to search the field!  My son,
my boy--not sixteen summers--and his mother!"

The man stopped, and sobbed.

"Willingly!" said the gentle Hastings, "willingly!  And woe to the
sentries if it be as thou sayest!  I will go myself and see!  Torches
there--what ho!--the good captain careth even for his dead!--Thy son!
I marvel I knew him not!  Whom served he under?"

"My lord! my lord! pardon him!  He is but a boy--they misled him! he
fought for the rebels.  He crossed my path to-day, my arm was raised;
we knew each other, and he fled from his father's sword!  Just as the
strife was ended I saw him again, I saw him fall!--Oh, mercy, mercy!
do not let him perish of his wounds or by the rifler's knife, even
though a rebel!"

"Homo sum!" quoth the noble chief; "I am a man; and, even in these
bloody times, Nature commands when she speaks in a father's voice!
Mervil, I marked thee to-day!  Thou art a brave fellow.  I meant thee
advancement; I give thee, instead, thy son's pardon, if he lives; ten
Masses if he died as a soldier's son should die, no matter under what
flag,--antelope or lion, pierced manfully in the breast, his feet to
the foe!  Come, I will search with thee!"

The boy yielded up his soul while Sibyll prayed, and her sweet voice
soothed the last pang; and the man ceased to curse while Adam spoke of
God's power and mercy, and his breath ebbed, gasp upon gasp, away.
While thus detained, the wanderers saw not pale, fleeting figures,
that had glided to the ground, and moved, gleaming, irregular, and
rapid, as marsh-fed vapours, from heap to heap of the slain.  With a
loud, wild cry, the robber Lancastrian half sprung to his feet, in the
paroxysm of the last struggle, and then fell on his face, a corpse!

The cry reached the tymbesteres, and Graul rose from a body from which
she had extracted a few coins smeared with blood, and darted to the
spot; and so, as Adam raised his face from contemplating the dead,
whose last moments he had sought to soothe, the Alecto of the
battlefield stood before him, her knife bare in her gory arm.  Red
Grisell, who had just left (with a spurn of wrath--for the pouch was
empty) the corpse of a soldier, round whose neck she had twined her
hot clasp the day before, sprang towards Sibyll; the rest of the
sisterhood flocked to the place, and laughed in glee as they beheld
their unexpected prey.  The danger was horrible and imminent; no pity
was seen in those savage eyes.  The wanderers prepared for death--
when, suddenly, torches flashed over the ground.  A cry was heard,
"See, the riflers of the dead!"  Armed men bounded forward, and the
startled wretches uttered a shrill, unearthly scream, and fled from
the spot, leaping over the carcasses, and doubling and winding, till
they had vanished into the darkness of the wood.

"Provost!" said a commanding voice, "hang me up those sentinels at
day-break!"

"My son! my boy! speak, Hal,--speak to me.  He is here, he is found!"
exclaimed the old soldier, kneeling beside the corpse at Sibyll's
feet.

"My lord! my beloved! my Hastings!"  And Sibyll fell insensible before
the chief.




CHAPTER VI.

THE SUBTLE CRAFT OF RICHARD OF GLOUCESTER.

It was some weeks after the defeat of Sir Geoffrey Gates, and Edward
was at Shene, with his gay court.  Reclined at length within a
pavilion placed before a cool fountain, in the royal gardens, and
surrounded by his favourites, the king listened indolently to the
music of his minstrels, and sleeked the plumage of his favourite
falcon, perched upon his wrist. And scarcely would it have been
possible to recognize in that lazy voluptuary the dauntless soldier,
before whose lance, as deer before the hound, had so lately fled, at
bloody Erpingham, the chivalry of the Lancastrian Rose; but remote
from the pavilion, and in one of the deserted bowling alleys, Prince
Richard and Lord Montagu walked apart, in earnest conversation.  The
last of these noble personages had remained inactive during these
disturbances, and Edward had not seemed to entertain any suspicion of
his participation in the anger and revenge of Warwick.  The king took
from him, it is true, the lands and earldom of Northumberland, and
restored them to the Percy, but he had accompanied this act with
gracious excuses, alleging the necessity of conciliating the head of
an illustrious House, which had formally entered into allegiance to
the dynasty of York, and bestowed upon his early favourite, in
compensation, the dignity of marquis.  [Montagu said bitterly of this
new dignity, "He takes from me the Earldom and domains of
Northumberland, and makes me a Marquis, with a pie's nest to maintain
it withal."--STOWE: Edward IV.--Warkworth Chronicle.]  The politic
king, in thus depriving Montagu of the wealth and the retainers of the
Percy, reduced him, as a younger brother, to a comparative poverty and
insignificance, which left him dependent on Edward's favour, and
deprived him, as he thought, of the power of active mischief; at the
same time more than ever he insisted on Montagu's society, and
summoning his attendance at the court, kept his movements in watchful
surveillance.

"Nay, my lord," said Richard, pursuing with much unction the
conversation he had commenced, "you wrong me much, Holy Paul be my
witness, if you doubt the deep sorrow I feel at the unhappy events
which have led to the severance of my kinsmen!  England seems to me to
have lost its smile in losing the glory of Earl Warwick's presence,
and Clarence is my brother, and was my friend; and thou knowest,
Montagu, thou knowest, how dear to my heart was the hope to win for my
wife and lady the gentle Anne."

"Prince," said Montagu, abruptly, "though the pride of Warwick and the
honour of our House may have forbidden the public revelation of the
cause which fired my brother to rebellion, thou, at least, art privy
to a secret--"

"Cease!" exclaimed Richard, in great emotion, probably sincere, for
his face grew livid, and its muscles were nervously convulsed.  "I
would not have that remembrance stirred from its dark repose.  I would
fain forget a brother's hasty frenzy, in the belief of his lasting
penitence."  He paused and turned his face, gasped for breath, and
resumed: "The cause justified the father; it had justified me in the
father's cause, had Warwick listened to my suit, and given me the
right to deem insult to his daughter injury to myself."

"And if, my prince," returned Montagu, looking round him, and in a
subdued whisper, "if yet the hand of Lady Anne were pledged to you?"

"Tempt me not, tempt me not!" cried the prince, crossing himself.
Montagu continued,--

"Our cause, I mean Lord Warwick's cause, is not lost, as the king
deems it."

"Proceed," said Richard, casting down his eyes, while his countenance
settled back into its thoughtful calm.

"I mean," renewed Montagu, "that in my brother's flight, his retainers
were taken by surprise.  In vain the king would confiscate his lands,
--he cannot confiscate men's hearts.  If Warwick to-morrow set his
armed heel upon the soil, trowest thou, sagacious and clear-judging
prince, that the strife which would follow would be but another field
of Losecote?   [The battle of Erpingham, so popularly called, in
contempt of the rebel lions runaways.]  Thou hast heard of the honours
with which King Louis has received the earl.  Will that king grudge
him ships and moneys?  And meanwhile, thinkest thou that his favourers
sleep?"

"But if he land, Montagu," said Richard, who seemed to listen with an
attention that awoke all the hopes of Montagu, coveting so powerful an
ally--"if he land, and make open war on Edward--we must say the word
boldly--what intent can he proclaim?  It is not enough to say King
Edward shall not reign; the earl must say also what king England
should elect!"

"Prince," answered Montagu, "before I reply to that question,
vouchsafe to hear my own hearty desire and wish.  Though the king has
deeply wronged my brother, though he has despoiled me of the lands,
which were, peradventure, not too large a reward for twenty victories
in his cause, and restored them to the House that ever ranked amongst
the strongholds of his Lancastrian foe, yet often when I am most
resentful, the memory of my royal seigneur's past love and kindness
comes over me,--above all, the thought of the solemn contract between
his daughter and my son; and I feel (now the first heat of natural
anger at an insult offered to my niece is somewhat cooled) that if
Warwick did land, I could almost forget my brother for my king."

"Almost!" repeated Richard, smiling.

"I am plain with your Highness, and say but what I feel.  I would even
now fain trust that, by your mediation, the king may be persuaded to
make such concessions and excuses as in truth would not misbeseem him,
to the father of Lady Anne, and his own kinsman; and that yet, ere it
be too late, I may be spared the bitter choice between the ties of
blood and my allegiance to the king."

"But failing this hope (which I devoutly share),--and Edward, it must
be owned, could scarcely trust to a letter,--still less to a
messenger, the confession of a crime,--failing this, and your brother
land, and I side with him for love of Anne, pledged to me as a bride,
--what king would he ask England to elect?"

"The Duke of Clarence loves you dearly, Lord Richard," replied
Montagu.  "Knowest thou not how often he hath said, 'By sweet Saint
George, if Gloucester would join me, I would make Edward know we were
all one man's sons, who should be more preferred and promoted than
strangers of his wife's blood?'"  [Hall.]

Richard's countenance for a moment evinced disappointment; but he said
dryly: "Then Warwick would propose that Clarence should be king?--and
the great barons and the honest burghers and the sturdy yeomen would,
you think, not stand aghast at the manifesto which declares, not that
the dynasty of York is corrupt and faulty, but that the younger son
should depose the elder,--that younger son, mark me! not only unknown
in war and green in council, but gay, giddy, vacillating; not subtle
of wit and resolute of deed, as he who so aspires should be!--Montagu,
a vain dream!"--Richard paused and then resumed, in a low tone, as to
himself, "Oh, not so--not so are kings cozened from their thrones! a
pretext must blind men,--say they are illegitimate, say they are too
young, too feeble, too anything, glide into their place, and then, not
war--not war.  You slay them not,--they disappear!"  The duke's face,
as he muttered, took a sinister and a dark expression, his eyes seemed
to gaze on space.  Suddenly recovering himself as from a revery, he
turned, with his wonted sleek and gracious aspect, to the startled
Montagu, and said, "I was but quoting from Italian history, good my
lord,--wise lore, but terrible and murderous.  Return we to the point.
Thou seest Clarence could not reign, and as well," added the prince,
with a slight sigh,--"as well or better (for, without vanity, I have
more of a king's mettle in me), might I--even I--aspire to my
brother's crown!"  Here he paused, and glanced rapidly and keenly at
the marquis; but whether or not in these words he had sought to sound
Montagu, and that glance sufficed to show him it were bootless or
dangerous to speak more plainly, he resumed with an altered voice,
"Enough of this: Warwick will discover the idleness of such design;
and if he land, his trumpets must ring to a more kindling measure.
John Montagu, thinkest thou that Margaret of Anjou and the
Lancastrians will not rather win thy brother to their side?  There is
the true danger to Edward,--none elsewhere."

"And if so?" said Montagu, watching his listener's countenance.
Richard started, and gnawed his lip.  "Mark me," continued the
marquis, "I repeat that I would fain hope yet that Edward may appease
the earl; but if not, and, rather than rest dishonoured and aggrieved,
Warwick link himself with Lancaster, and thou join him as Anne's
betrothed and lord, what matters who the puppet on the throne?--we and
thou shall be the rulers; or, if thou reject," added the marquis,
artfully, as he supposed, exciting the jealousy of the duke, "Henry
has a son--a fair, and they say, a gallant prince--carefully tutored
in the knowledge of our English laws, and who my lord of Oxford,
somewhat in the confidence of the Lancastrians, assures me would
rejoice to forget old feuds, and call Warwick 'father,' and my niece
'Lady and Princess of Wales.'"

With all his dissimulation, Richard could ill conceal the emotions of
fear, of jealousy, of dismay, which these words excited.

"Lord Oxford!" he cried, stamping his foot.  "Ha, John de Vere,
pestilent traitor, plottest thou thus?  But we can yet seize thy
person, and will have thy head."

Alarmed at this burst, and suddenly made aware that he had laid his
breast too bare to the boy, whom he had thought to dazzle and seduce
to his designs, Montagu said falteringly, "But, my lord, our talk is
but in confidence: at your own prayer, with your own plighted word of
prince and of kinsman, that whatever my frankness may utter should not
pass farther.  Take," added the nobleman, with proud dignity--"take my
head rather than Lord Oxford's; for I deserve death, if I reveal to
one who can betray the loose words of another's intimacy and trust!"

"Forgive me, my cousin," said Richard, meekly; "my love to Anne
transported me too far.  Lord Oxford's words, as you report them, had
conjured up a rival, and--but enough of this.  And now," added the
prince, gravely, and with a steadiness of voice and manner that gave a
certain majesty to his small stature, "now as thou hast spoken openly,
openly also will I reply.  I feel the wrong to the Lady Anne as to
myself; deeply, burningly, and lastingly, will it live in my mind; it
may be, sooner or later, to rise to gloomy deeds, even against Edward
and Edward's blood.  But no, I have the king's solemn protestations of
repentance; his guilty passion has burned into ashes, and he now
sighs--gay Edward--for a lighter fere.  I cannot join with Clarence,
less can I join with the Lancastrians.  My birth makes me the prop of
the throne of York,--to guard it as a heritage (who knows?) that may
descend to mine,--nay, to me!  And, mark me well if Warwick attempt a
war of fratricide, he is lost; if, on the other hand, he can submit
himself to the hands of Margaret, stained with his father's gore, the
success of an hour will close in the humiliation of a life.  There is
a third way left, and that way thou hast piously and wisely shown.
Let him, like me, resign revenge, and, not exacting a confession and a
cry of peccavi, which no king, much less King Edward the Plantagenet,
can whimper forth, let him accept such overtures as his liege can
make.  His titles and castles shall be restored, equal possessions to
those thou hast lost assigned to thee, and all my guerdon (if I can so
negotiate) as all my ambition, his daughter's hand.  Muse on this, and
for the peace and weal of the realm so limit all thy schemes, my lord
and cousin!"

With these words the prince pressed the hand of the marquis, and
walked slowly towards the king's pavilion.

"Shame on my ripe manhood and lore of life," muttered Montagu, enraged
against himself, and deeply mortified.  "How sentence by sentence and
step by step yon crafty pigmy led me on, till all our projects, all
our fears and hopes, are revealed to him who but views them as a foe.
Anne betrothed to one who even in fiery youth can thus beguile and
dupe!  Warwick decoyed hither upon fair words, at the will of one whom
Italy (boy, there thou didst forget thy fence of cunning!) has taught
how the great are slain not, but disappear! no, even this defeat
instructs me now.  But right, right! the reign of Clarence is
impossible, and that of Lancaster is ill-omened and portentous; and
after all, my son stands nearer to the throne than any subject, in his
alliance with the Lady Elizabeth.  Would to Heaven the king could yet
--But out on me! this is no hour for musing on mine own aggrandizement;
rather let me fly at once and warn Oxford--imperilled by my
imprudence--against that dark eye which hath set watch upon his life."

At that thought, which showed that Montagu, with all his worldliness,
was not forgetful of one of the first duties of knight and gentleman,
the marquis hastened up the alley, in the opposite direction to that
taken by Gloucester, and soon found himself in the courtyard, where a
goodly company were mounting their haquenees and palfreys, to enjoy a
summer ride through the neighbouring chase.  The cold and half-
slighting salutations of these minions of the hour, which now
mortified the Nevile, despoiled of the possessions that had rewarded
his long and brilliant services, contrasting forcibly the reverential
homage he had formerly enjoyed, stung Montagu to the quick.

"Whither ride you, brother Marquis?" said young Lord Dorset
(Elizabeth's son by her first marriage), as Montagu called to his
single squire, who was in waiting with his horse.  "Some secret
expedition, methinks, for I have known the day when the Lord Montagu
never rode from his king's palace with less than thirty squires."

"Since my Lord Dorset prides himself on his memory," answered the
scornful lord, "he may remember also the day when, if a Nevile mounted
in haste, he bade the first Woodville he saw hold the stirrup."

And regarding "the brother marquis" with a stately eye that silenced
and awed retort, the long-descended Montagu passed the courtiers, and
rode slowly on till out of sight of the palace; he then pushed into a
hand-gallop, and halted not till he had reached London, and gained the
house in which then dwelt the Earl of Oxford, the most powerful of all
the Lancastrian nobles not in exile, and who had hitherto temporized
with the reigning House.

Two days afterwards the news reached Edward that Lord Oxford and
Jasper of Pembroke--uncle to the boy afterwards Henry VII.--had sailed
from England.

The tidings reached the king in his chamber, where he was closeted
with Gloucester.  The conference between them seemed to have been warm
and earnest, for Edward's face was flushed, and Gloucester's brow was
perturbed and sullen.

"Now Heaven be praised!" cried the king, extending to Richard the
letter which communicated the flight of the disaffected lords.  "We
have two enemies the less in our roiaulme, and many a barony the more
to confiscate to our kingly wants.  Ha, ha! these Lancastrians only
serve to enrich us.  Frowning still, Richard? smile, boy!"

"Foi de mon ame, Edward," said Richard, with a bitter energy,
strangely at variance with his usual unctious deference to the king,
"your Highness's gayety is ill-seasoned; you reject all the means to
assure your throne, you rejoice in all the events that imperil it.  I
prayed you to lose not a moment in conciliating, if possible, the
great lord whom you own you have wronged, and you replied that you
would rather lose your crown than win back the arm that gave it you."

"Gave it me! an error, Richard! that crown was at once the heritage of
my own birth and the achievement of my own sword.  But were it as you
say, it is not in a king's nature to bear the presence of a power more
formidable than his own, to submit to a voice that commands rather
than counsels; and the happiest chance that ever befell me is the
exile of this earl.  How, after what hath chanced, can I ever see his
face again without humiliation, or he mine without resentment?"

"So you told me anon, and I answered, if that be so, and your Highness
shrinks from the man you have injured, beware at least that Warwick,
if he may not return as a friend, come not back as an irresistible
foe.  If you will not conciliate, crush!  Hasten by all arts to
separate Clarence from Warwick.  Hasten to prevent the union of the
earl's popularity and Henry's rights.  Keep eye upon all the
Lancastrian lords, and see that none quit the realm where they are
captives, to join a camp where they can rise into leaders.  And at the
very moment I urge you to place strict watch upon Oxford, to send your
swiftest riders to seize Jasper of Pembroke, you laugh with glee to
hear that Oxford and Pembroke are gone to swell the army of your
foes!"

"Better foes out of my realm than in it," answered Edward, dryly.

"My liege, I say no more," and Richard rose.  "I would forestall a
danger; it but remains for me to share it."

The king was touched.  "Tarry yet, Richard," he said; and then, fixing
his brother's eye, he continued, with a half smile and a heightened
colour, "though we knew thee true and leal to us, we yet know also,
Richard, that thou hast personal interest in thy counsels.  Thou
wouldst by one means or another soften or constrain the earl into
giving thee the hand of Anne.  Well, then, grant that Warwick and
Clarence expel King Edward from his throne, they may bring a bride to
console thee for the ruin of a brother."

"Thou hast no right to taunt or to suspect me, my liege," returned
Richard, with a quiver in his lip.  "Thou hast included me in thy
meditated wrong to Warwick; and had that wrong been done--"

"Peradventure it had made thee espouse Warwick's quarrel?"

"Bluntly, yes!" exclaimed Richard, almost fiercely, and playing with
his dagger.  "But" (he added, with a sudden change of voice) "I
understand and know thee better than the earl did or could.  I know
what in thee is but thoughtless impulse, haste of passion, the habit
kings form of forgetting all things save the love or hate, the desire
or anger, of a moment.  Thou hast told me thyself, and with tears, of
thy offence; thou hast pardoned my boy's burst of anger; I have
pardoned thy evil thought; thou hast told me thyself that another face
has succeeded to the brief empire of Anne's blue eye, and hast further
pledged me thy kingly word, that if I can yet compass the hand of a
cousin dear to me from childhood, thou wilt confirm the union."

"It is true," said Edward.  "But if thou wed thy bride, keep her aloof
from the court,--nay, frown not, my boy, I mean simply that I would
not blush before my brother's wife!"

Richard bowed low in order to conceal the expression of his face, and
went on without further notice of the explanation.  "And all this
considered, Edward, I swear by Saint Paul, the holiest saint to
thoughtful men, and by Saint George, the noblest patron to high-born
warriors, that thy crown and thine honour are as dear to me as if they
were mine own.  Whatever sins Richard of Gloucester may live to
harbour and repent, no man shall ever say of him that he was a
recreant to the honour of his country [so Lord Bacon observes of
Richard, with that discrimination, even in the strongest censure, of
which profound judges of mankind are alone capable, that he was "a
king jealous of the honor of the English nation"], or slow to defend
the rights of his ancestors from the treason of a vassal or the sword
of a foreign foe.  Therefore, I say again, if thou reject my honest
counsels; if thou suffer Warwick to unite with Lancaster and France;
if the ships of Louis bear to your shores an enemy, the might of whom
your reckless daring undervalues, foremost in the field in battle,
nearest to your side in exile, shall Richard Plantagenet be found!"
These words, being uttered with sincerity, and conveying a promise
never forfeited, were more impressive than the subtlest eloquence the
wily and accomplished Gloucester ever employed as the cloak to guile,
and they so affected Edward, that he threw his arms around his
brother; and after one of those bursts of emotion which were frequent
in one whose feelings were never deep and lasting, but easily aroused
and warmly spoken, he declared himself really to listen to and adopt
all means which Richard's art could suggest for the better maintenance
of their common weal and interests.

And then, with that wondrous, if somewhat too restless and over-
refining energy which belonged to him, Richard rapidly detailed the
scheme of his profound and dissimulating policy.  His keen and
intuitive insight into human nature had shown him the stern necessity
which, against their very will, must unite Warwick with Margaret of
Anjou.  His conversation with Montagu had left no doubt of that peril
on his penetrating mind.  He foresaw that this union might be made
durable and sacred by the marriage of Anne and Prince Edward; and to
defeat this alliance was his first object, partly through Clarence,
partly through Margaret herself.  A gentlewoman in the Duchess of
Clarence's train had been arrested on the point of embarking to join
her mistress.  Richard had already seen and conferred with this lady,
whose ambition, duplicity, and talent for intrigue were known to him.
Having secured her by promises of the most lavish dignities and
rewards, he proposed that she should be permitted to join the duchess
with secret messages to Isabel and the duke, warning them both that
Warwick and Margaret would forget their past feud in present sympathy,
and that the rebellion against King Edward, instead of placing them on
the throne, would humble them to be subordinates and aliens to the
real profiters, the Lancastrians.  [Comines, 3, c. 5; Hall;
Hollinshed]  He foresaw what effect these warnings would have upon the
vain duke and the ambitious Isabel, whose character was known to him
from childhood.  He startled the king by insisting upon sending, at
the same time, a trusty diplomatist to Margaret of Anjou, proffering
to give the princess Elizabeth (betrothed to Lord Montagu's son) to
the young Prince Edward.  ["Original Letters from Harleian
Manuscripts.  Edited by Sir H. Ellis (second series).]  Thus, if the
king, who had, as yet, no son, were to die, Margaret's son, in right
of his wife, as well as in that of his own descent, would peaceably
ascend the throne.  "Need I say that I mean not this in sad and
serious earnest?" observed Richard, interrupting the astonished king.
"I mean it but to amuse the Anjouite, and to deafen her ears to any
overtures from Warwick.  If she listen, we gain time; that time will
inevitably renew irreconcilable quarrel between herself and the earl.
His hot temper and desire of revenge will not brook delay.  He will
land, unsupported by Margaret and her partisans, and without any fixed
principle of action which can strengthen force by opinion."

"You are right, Richard," said Edward, whose faithless cunning
comprehended the more sagacious policy it could not originate.  "All
be it as you will."

"And in the mean while," added Richard, "watch well, but anger not,
Montagu and the archbishop.  It were dangerous to seem to distrust
them till proof be clear; it were dull to believe them true.  I go at
once to fulfil my task."




CHAPTER VII.

WARWICK AND HIS FAMILY IN EXILE.

We now summon the reader on a longer if less classic journey than from
Thebes to Athens, and waft him on a rapid wing from Shene to Amboise.
We must suppose that the two emissaries of Gloucester have already
arrived at their several destinations,--the lady has reached Isabel,
the envoy Margaret.

In one of the apartments appropriated to the earl in the royal palace,
within the embrasure of a vast Gothic casement, sat Anne of Warwick;
the small wicket in the window was open, and gave a view of a wide and
fair garden, interspersed with thick bosquets and regular alleys, over
which the rich skies of the summer evening, a little before sunset,
cast alternate light and shadow.  Towards this prospect the sweet face
of the Lady Anne was turned musingly.  The riveted eye, the bended
neck, the arms reclining on the knee, the slender fingers interlaced,
--gave to her whole person the character of revery and repose.

In the same chamber were two other ladies; the one was pacing the
floor with slow but uneven steps, with lips moving from time to time,
as if in self-commune, with the brow contracted slightly: her form and
face took also the character of revery, but not of repose.

The third female (the gentle and lovely mother of the other two) was
seated, towards the centre of the room, before a small table, on which
rested one of those religious manuscripts, full of the moralities and
the marvels of cloister sanctity, which made so large a portion of the
literature of the monkish ages.  But her eye rested not on the Gothic
letter and the rich blazon of the holy book.  With all a mother's fear
and all a mother's fondness, it glanced from Isabel to Anne, from Anne
to Isabel, till at length in one of those soft voices, so rarely
heard, which makes even a stranger love the speaker, the fair countess
said,--

"Come hither, my child Isabel; give me thy hand, and whisper me what
hath chafed thee."

"My mother," replied the duchess, "it would become me ill to have a
secret not known to thee, and yet, methinks, it would become me less
to say aught to provoke thine anger!"

"Anger, Isabel!  Who ever knew anger for those they love?"

"Pardon me, my sweet mother," said Isabel, relaxing her haughty brow,
and she approached and kissed her mother's cheek.

The countess drew her gently to a seat by her side.

"And now tell me all,--unless, indeed, thy Clarence hath, in some
lover's hasty mood, vexed thy affection; for of the household secrets
even a mother should not question the true wife."

Isabel paused, and glanced significantly at Anne.

"Nay, see!" said the countess, smiling, though sadly, "she, too, hath
thoughts that she will not tell to me; but they seem not such as
should alarm my fears, as thine do.  For the moment ere I spoke to
thee, thy brow frowned, and her lip smiled.  She hears us not,--speak
on."

"Is it then true, my mother, that Margaret of Anjou is hastening
hither?  And can it be possible that King Louis can persuade my lord
and father to meet, save in the field of battle, the arch-enemy of our
House?"

"Ask the earl thyself, Isabel; Lord Warwick hath no concealment from
his children.  Whatever he doth is ever wisest, best, and
knightliest,--so, at least, may his children always deem!"

Isabel's colour changed and her eye flashed.  But ere she could
answer, the arras was raised, and Lord Warwick entered.  But no longer
did the hero's mien and manner evince that cordial and tender
cheerfulness which, in all the storms of his changeful life, he had
hitherto displayed when coming from power and danger, from council or
from camp, to man's earthly paradise,--a virtuous home.

Gloomy and absorbed, his very dress--which, at that day, the Anglo-
Norman deemed it a sin against self-dignity to neglect--betraying, by
its disorder, that thorough change of the whole mind, that terrible
internal revolution, which is made but in strong natures by the
tyranny of a great care or a great passion, the earl scarcely seemed
to heed his countess, who rose hastily, but stopped in the timid fear
and reverence of love at the sight of his stern aspect; he threw
himself abruptly on a seat, passed his hand over his face, and sighed
heavily.

That sigh dispelled the fear of the wife, and made her alive only to
her privilege of the soother.  She drew near, and placing herself on
the green rushes at his feet, took his hand and kissed it, but did not
speak.

The earl's eyes fell on the lovely face looking up to him through
tears, his brow softened, he drew his hand gently from hers, placed it
on her head, and said in a low voice,--"God and Our Lady bless thee,
sweet wife!"

Then, looking round, he saw Isabel watching him intently; and, rising
at once, he threw his arm round her waist, pressed her to his bosom,
and said, "My daughter, for thee and thine day and night have I
striven and planned in vain.  I cannot reward thy husband as I would;
I cannot give thee, as I had hoped, a throne!"

"What title so dear to Isabel," said the countess, "as that of Lord
Warwick's daughter?"

Isabel remained cold and silent, and returned not the earl's embrace.

Warwick was, happily, too absorbed in his own feelings to notice those
of his child.  Moving away, he continued, as he paced the room (his
habit in emotion, which Isabel, who had many minute external traits in
common with her father, had unconsciously caught from him),--

"Till this morning I hoped still that my name and services, that
Clarence's popular bearing and his birth of Plantagenet, would suffice
to summon the English people round our standard; that the false Edward
would be driven, on our landing, to fly the realm; and that, without
change to the dynasty of York, Clarence, as next male heir, would
ascend the throne.  True, I saw all the obstacles, all the
difficulties,--I was warned of them before I left England; but still I
hoped.  Lord Oxford has arrived, he has just left me.  We have gone
over the chart of the way before us, weighed the worth of every name,
for and against; and, alas! I cannot but allow that all attempt to
place the younger brother on the throne of the elder would but lead to
bootless slaughter and irretrievable defeat."

"Wherefore think you so, my lord?" asked Isabel, in evident
excitement.  "Your own retainers are sixty thousand,--an army larger
than Edward, and all his lords of yesterday, can bring into the
field."

"My child," answered the earl, with that profound knowledge of his
countrymen which he had rather acquired from his English heart than
from any subtlety of intellect, "armies may gain a victory, but they
do not achieve a throne,--unless, at least, they enforce a slavery;
and it is not for me and for Clarence to be the violent conquerors of
our countrymen, but the regenerators of a free realm, corrupted by a
false man's rule."

"And what then," exclaimed Isabel,--"what do you propose, my father?
Can it be possible that you can unite yourself with the abhorred
Lancastrians, with the savage Anjouite, who beheaded my grandsire,
Salisbury?  Well do I remember your own words,--'May God and Saint
George forget me, when I forget those gray and gory hairs!'"

Here Isabel was interrupted by a faint cry from Anne, who, unobserved
by the rest, and hitherto concealed from her father's eye by the deep
embrasure of the window, had risen some moments before, and listened,
with breathless attention, to the conversation between Warwick and the
duchess.

"It is not true, it is not true!" exclaimed Anne, passionately.
"Margaret disowns the inhuman deed."

"Thou art right, Anne," said Warwick; "though I guess not how thou
didst learn the error of a report so popularly believed that till of
late I never questioned its truth.  King Louis assures me solemnly
that that foul act was done by the butcher Clifford, against
Margaret's knowledge, and, when known, to her grief and anger."

"And you, who call Edward false, can believe Louis true?"

"Cease, Isabel, cease!" said the countess.  "Is it thus my child can
address my lord and husband?  Forgive her, beloved Richard."

"Such heat in Clarence's wife misbeseems her not," answered Warwick.
"And I can comprehend and pardon in my haughty Isabel a resentment
which her reason must at last subdue; for think not, Isabel, that it
is without dread struggle and fierce agony that I can contemplate
peace and league with mine ancient foe; but here two duties speak to
me in voices not to be denied: my honour and my hearth, as noble and
as man, demand redress, and the weal and glory of my country demand a
ruler who does not degrade a warrior, nor assail a virgin, nor corrupt
a people by lewd pleasures, nor exhaust a land by grinding imposts;
and that honour shall be vindicated, and that country shall be
righted, no matter at what sacrifice of private grief and pride."

The words and the tone of the earl for a moment awed even Isabel; but
after a pause, she said suddenly, "And for this, then, Clarence hath
joined your quarrel and shared your exile?--for this,--that he may
place the eternal barrier of the Lancastrian line between himself and
the English throne?"

"I would fain hope," answered the earl, calmly, "that Clarence will
view our hard position more charitably than thou.  If he gain not all
that I could desire, should success crown our arms, he will, at least,
gain much; for often and ever did thy husband, Isabel, urge me to
stern measures against Edward, when I soothed him and restrained.
Mort Dieu! how often did he complain of slight and insult from
Elizabeth and her minions, of open affront from Edward, of parsimony
to his wants as prince,--of a life, in short, humbled and made bitter
by all the indignity and the gall which scornful power can inflict on
dependent pride.  If he gain not the throne, he will gain, at least,
the succession in thy right to the baronies of Beauchamp, the mighty
duchy, and the vast heritage of York, the vice-royalty of Ireland.
Never prince of the blood had wealth and honours equal to those that
shall await thy lord.  For the rest, I drew him not into my quarrel;
long before would he have drawn me into his; nor doth it become thee,
Isabel, as child and as sister, to repent, if the husband of my
daughter felt as brave men feel, without calculation of gain and
profit, the insult offered to his lady's House.  But if here I
overgauge his chivalry and love to me and mine, or discontent his
ambition and his hopes, Mort Dieu! we hold him not a captive.  Edward
will hail his overtures of peace; let him make terms with his brother,
and return."

"I will report to him what you say, my lord," said Isabel, with cold
brevity and, bending her haughty head in formal reverence, she
advanced to the door.  Anne sprang forward and caught her hand.

"Oh, Isabel!" she whispered, "in our father's sad and gloomy hour can
you leave him thus?" and the sweet lady burst into tears.

"Anne," retorted Isabel, bitterly, "thy heart is Lancastrian; and
what, peradventure, grieves my father hath but joy for thee."

Anne drew back, pale and trembling, and her sister swept from the
room.

The earl, though he had not overheard the whispered sentences which
passed between his daughters, had watched them closely, and his lip
quivered with emotion as Isabel closed the door.

"Come hither, my Anne," he said tenderly; "thou who hast thy mother's
face, never hast a harsh thought for thy father."

As Anne threw herself on Warwick's breast, he continued, "And how
camest thou to learn that Margaret disowns a deed that, if done by her
command, would render my union with her cause a sacrilegious impiety
to the dead?"

Anne coloured, and nestled her head still closer to her father's
bosom.  Her mother regarded her confusion and her silence with an
anxious eye.

The wing of the palace in which the earl's apartments were situated
was appropriated to himself and household, flanked to the left by an
abutting pile containing state-chambers, never used by the austere and
thrifty Louis, save on great occasions of pomp or revel; and, as we
have before observed, looking on a garden, which was generally
solitary and deserted.  From this garden, while Anne yet strove for
words to answer her father, and the countess yet watched her
embarrassment, suddenly came the soft strain of a Provencal lute;
while a low voice, rich, and modulated at once by a deep feeling and
an exquisite art that would have given effect to even simpler words,
breathed--

    THE LAY OF THE HEIR OF LANCASTER

    "His birthright but a father's name,
       A grandsire's hero-sword,
     He dwelt within the stranger's land,
       The friendless, homeless lord!"

    "Yet one dear hope, too dear to tell,
       Consoled the exiled man;
     The angels have their home in heaven
       And gentle thoughts in Anne."

At that name the voice of the singer trembled, and paused a moment;
the earl, who at first had scarcely listened to what he deemed but the
ill-seasoned gallantry of one of the royal minstrels, started in proud
surprise, and Anne herself, tightening her clasp round her father's
neck, burst into passionate sobs.  The eye of the countess met that of
her lord; but she put her finger to her lips in sign to him to listen.
The song was resumed--

    "Recall the single sunny time,
       In childhood's April weather,
     When he and thou, the boy and girl,
       Roved hand in band together."

    "When round thy young companion knelt
       The princes of the isle;
     And priest and people prayed their God,
       On England's heir to smile."

The earl uttered a half-stifled exclamation, but the minstrel heard
not the interruption, and continued,--

    "Methinks the sun hath never smiled
       Upon the exiled man,
     Like that bright morning when the boy
       Told all his soul to Anne."

    "No; while his birthright but a name,
       A grandsire's hero--sword,
     He would not woo the lofty maid
       To love the banished lord."

    "But when, with clarion, fife, and drum,
       He claims and wins his own;
     When o'er the deluge drifts his ark,
       To rest upon a throne."

    "Then, wilt thou deign to hear the hope
       That blessed the exiled man,
     When pining for his father's crown
       To deck the brows of Anne?"

The song ceased, and there was silence within the chamber, broken but
by Anne's low yet passionate weeping.  The earl gently strove to
disengage her arms from his neck; but she, mistaking his intention,
sank on her knees, and covering her face with her hands, exclaimed,--

"Pardon! pardon! pardon him, if not me!"

"What have I to pardon?  What hast thou concealed from me?  Can I
think that thou hast met, in secret, one who--"

"In secret!  Never, never, Father!  This is the third time only that I
have heard his voice since we have been at Amboise, save when--save
when--"

"Go on."

"Save when King Louis presented him to me in the revel under the name
of the Count de F----, and he asked me if I could forgive his mother
for Lord Clifford's crime."

"It is, then, as the rhyme proclaimed; and it is Edward of Lancaster
who loves and woos the daughter of Lord Warwick!"

Something in her father's voice made Anne remove her hands from her
face, and look up to him with a thrill of timid joy.  Upon his brow,
indeed, frowned no anger, upon his lip smiled no scorn.  At that
moment all his haughty grief at the curse of circumstance which drove
him to his hereditary foe had vanished.  Though Montagu had obtained
from Oxford some glimpse of the desire which the more sagacious and
temperate Lancastrians already entertained for that alliance, and
though Louis had already hinted its expediency to the earl, yet, till
now, Warwick himself had naturally conceived that the prince shared
the enmity of his mother, and that such a union, however politic, was
impossible; but now indeed there burst upon him the full triumph of
revenge and pride.  Edward of York dared to woo Anne to dishonour,
Edward of Lancaster dared not even woo her as his wife till his crown
was won!  To place upon the throne the very daughter the ungrateful
monarch had insulted; to make her he would have humbled not only the
instrument of his fall, but the successor of his purple; to unite in
one glorious strife the wrongs of the man and the pride of the
father,--these were the thoughts that sparkled in the eye of the king-
maker, and flushed with a fierce rapture the dark cheek, already
hollowed by passion and care.  He raised his daughter from the floor,
and placed her in her mother's arms, but still spoke not.

"This, then, was thy secret, Anne," whispered the countess; "and I
half foreguessed it, when, last night, I knelt beside thy couch to
pray, and overheard thee murmur in thy dreams."

"Sweet mother, thou forgivest me; but my father--ah, he speaks not.
One word!  Father, Father, not even his love could console me if I
angered thee!"

The earl, who had remained rooted to the spot, his eyes shining
thoughtfully under his dark brows, and his hand slightly raised, as if
piercing into the future, and mapping out its airy realm, turned
quickly,--

"I go to the heir of Lancaster; if this boy be bold and true, worthy
of England and of thee, we will change the sad ditty of that scrannel
lute into such a storm of trumpets as beseems the triumph of a
conqueror and the marriage of a prince!"




CHAPTER VIII.

HOW THE HEIR OF LANCASTER MEETS THE KING-MAKER.

In truth, the young prince, in obedience to a secret message from the
artful Louis, had repaired to the court of Amboise under the name of
the Count de F----.  The French king had long before made himself
acquainted with Prince Edward's romantic attachment to the earl's
daughter, through the agent employed by Edward to transmit his
portrait to Anne at Rouen; and from him, probably, came to Oxford the
suggestion which that nobleman had hazarded to Montagu; and now that
it became his policy seriously and earnestly to espouse the cause of
his kinswoman Margaret, he saw all the advantage to his cold
statecraft which could be drawn from a boyish love.  Louis had a well-
founded fear of the warlike spirit and military talents of Edward IV.;
and this fear had induced him hitherto to refrain from openly
espousing the cause of the Lancastrians, though it did not prevent his
abetting such seditions and intrigues as could confine the attention
of the martial Plantagenet to the perils of his own realm.  But now
that the breach between Warwick and the king had taken place; now that
the earl could no longer curb the desire of the Yorkist monarch to
advance his hereditary claims to the fairest provinces of France,--
nay, peradventure, to France itself,--while the defection of Lord
Warwick gave to the Lancastrians the first fair hope of success in
urging their own pretensions to the English throne, he bent all the
powers of his intellect and his will towards the restoration of a
natural ally and the downfall of a dangerous foe.  But he knew that
Margaret and her Lancastrian favourers could not of themselves suffice
to achieve a revolution,--that they could only succeed under cover of
the popularity and the power of Warwick, while he perceived all the
art it would require to make Margaret forego her vindictive nature and
long resentment, and to supple the pride of the great earl into
recognizing as a sovereign the woman who had branded him as a traitor.

Long before Lord Oxford's arrival, Louis, with all that address which
belonged to him, had gradually prepared the earl to familiarize
himself to the only alternative before him, save that, indeed, of
powerless sense of wrong and obscure and lasting exile.  The French
king looked with more uneasiness to the scruples of Margaret; and to
remove these, he trusted less to his own skill than to her love for
her only son.

His youth passed principally in Anjou--that court of minstrels--young
Edward's gallant and ardent temper had become deeply imbued with the
southern poetry and romance.  Perhaps the very feud between his House
and Lord Warwick's, though both claimed their common descent from John
of Gaunt, had tended, by the contradictions in the human heart, to
endear to him the recollection of the gentle Anne.  He obeyed with joy
the summons of Louis, repaired to the court, was presented to Anne as
the Count de F----, found himself recognized at the first glance (for
his portrait still lay upon her heart, as his remembrance in its
core), and, twice before the song we have recited, had ventured,
agreeably to the sweet customs of Anjou, to address the lady of his
love under the shade of the starlit summer copses.  But on this last
occasion, he had departed from his former discretion; hitherto he had
selected an hour of deeper night, and ventured but beneath the lattice
of the maiden's chamber when the rest of the palace was hushed in
sleep.  And the fearless declaration of his rank and love now hazarded
was prompted by one who contrived to turn to grave uses the wildest
whim of the minstrel, the most romantic enthusiasm of youth.

Louis had just learned from Oxford the result of his interview with
Warwick.  And about the same time the French king had received a
letter from Margaret, announcing her departure from the castle of
Verdun for Tours, where she prayed him to meet her forthwith, and
stating that she had received from England tidings that might change
all her schemes, and more than ever forbid the possibility of a
reconciliation with the Earl of Warwick.

The king perceived the necessity of calling into immediate effect the
aid on which he had relied, in the presence and passion of the young
prince.  He sought him at once; he found him in a remote part of the
gardens, and overheard him breathing to himself the lay he had just
composed.

"Pasque Dieu!" said the king, laying his hand on the young man's
shoulder, "if thou wilt but repeat that song where and when I bid
thee, I promise that before the month ends Lord Warwick shall pledge
thee his daughter's hand; and before the year is closed thou shalt sit
beside Lord Warwick's daughter in the halls of Westminster."

And the royal troubadour took the counsel of the king.

The song had ceased; the minstrel emerged from the bosquets, and stood
upon the sward, as, from the postern of the palace, walked with a slow
step, a form from which it became him not, as prince or as lover, in
peace or in war, to shrink.  The first stars had now risen; the light,
though serene, was pale and dim.  The two men--the one advancing, the
other motionless--gazed on each other in grave silence.  As Count de
F----, amidst the young nobles in the king's train, the earl had
scarcely noticed the heir of England.  He viewed him now with a
different eye: in secret complacency, for, with a soldier's weakness,
the soldier-baron valued men too much for their outward seeming, he
surveyed a figure already masculine and stalwart, though still in the
graceful symmetry of fair eighteen.

"A youth of a goodly presence," muttered the earl, "with the dignity
that commands in peace, and the sinews that can strive against
hardship and death in war."

He approached, and said calmly: "Sir minstrel, he who woos either fame
or beauty may love the lute, but should wield the sword.  At least, so
methinks had the Fifth Henry said to him who boasts for his heritage
the sword of Agincourt."

"O noble earl!" exclaimed the prince, touched by words far gentler
than he had dared to hope, despite his bold and steadfast mien, and
giving way to frank and graceful emotion, "O noble earl! since thou
knowest me; since my secret is told; since, in that secret, I have
proclaimed a hope as dear to me as a crown and dearer far than life,
can I hope that thy rebuke but veils thy favour, and that, under Lord
Warwick's eye, the grandson of Henry V. shall approve himself worthy
of the blood that kindles in his veins?"

"Fair sir and prince," returned the earl, whose hardy and generous
nature the emotion and fire of Edward warmed and charmed, "there are,
alas! deep memories of blood and wrong--the sad deeds and wrathful
words of party feud and civil war--between thy royal mother and
myself; and though we may unite now against a common foe, much I fear
that the Lady Margaret would brook ill a closer friendship, a nearer
tie, than the exigency of the hour between Richard Nevile and her
son."

"No, Sir Earl, let me hope you misthink her.  Hot and impetuous, but
not mean and treacherous, the moment that she accepts the service of
thine arm she must forget that thou hast been her foe; and if I, as my
father's heir, return to England, it is in the trust that a new era
will commence.  Free from the passionate enmities of either faction,
Yorkist and Lancastrian are but Englishmen to me.  Justice to all who
serve us, pardon for all who have opposed."

The prince paused, and, even in the dim light, his kingly aspect gave
effect to his kingly words.  "And if this resolve be such as you
approve; if you, great earl, be that which even your foes proclaim, a
man whose power depends less on lands and vassals--broad though the
one, and numerous though the other--than on well-known love for
England, her glory and her peace, it rests with you to bury forever in
one grave the feuds of Lancaster and York!  What Yorkist who hath
fought at Towton or St. Albans under Lord Warwick's standard, will
lift sword against the husband of Lord Warwick's daughter?  What
Lancastrian will not forgive a Yorkist, when Lord Warwick, the kinsman
of Duke Richard, becomes father to the Lancastrian heir, and bulwark
to the Lancastrian throne?  O Warwick, if not for my sake, nor for the
sake of full redress against the ingrate whom thou repentest to have
placed on my father's throne, at least for the sake of England, for
the healing of her bleeding wounds, for the union of her divided
people, hear the grandson of Henry V., who sues to thee for thy
daughter's hand!"

The royal wooer bent his knee as he spoke.  The mighty subject saw and
prevented the impulse of the prince who had forgotten himself in the
lover; the hand which he caught he lifted to his lips, and the next
moment, in manly and soldierlike embrace, the prince's young arm was
thrown over the broad shoulder of the king-maker.




CHAPTER IX.

THE INTERVIEW OF EARL WARWICK AND QUEEN MARGARET.

Louis hastened to meet Margaret at Tours; thither came also her father
Rene, her brother John of Calabria, Yolante her sister, and the Count
of Vaudemonte.  The meeting between the queen and Rene was so touching
as to have drawn tears to the hard eyes of Louis XI.; but, that
emotion over, Margaret evinced how little affliction had humbled her
high spirit, or softened her angry passions: she interrupted Louis in
every argument for reconciliation with Warwick.  "Not with honour to
myself and to my son," she exclaimed, "can I pardon that cruel earl,
the main cause of King Henry's downfall! in vain patch up a hollow
peace between us,--a peace of form and parchment!  My spirit never can
be contented with him, ne pardon!"

For several days she maintained a language which betrayed the chief
cause of her own impolitic passions, that had lost her crown.  Showing
to Louis the letter despatched to her, proffering the hand of the Lady
Elizabeth to her son, she asked if that were not a more profitable
party [See, for this curious passage of secret history, Sir H. Ellis's
"Original Letters from the Harleian Manuscripts," second series, vol.
i., letter 42.], and if it were necessary that she should forgive,--
whether it were not more queenly to treat with Edward than with a
twofold rebel?

In fact, the queen would perhaps have fallen into Gloucester's artful
snare, despite all the arguments and even the half-menaces [Louis
would have thrown over Margaret's cause if Warwick had demanded it; he
instructed MM. de Concressault and du Plessis to assure the earl that
he would aid him to the utmost to reconquer England either for the
Queen Margaret or for any one else he chose (on pour qui il voudra):
for that he loved the earl better than Margaret or her son.--BRANTE,
t. ix. 276.] of the more penetrating Louis, but for a counteracting
influence which Richard had not reckoned upon.  Prince Edward, who had
lingered behind Louis, arrived from Amboise, and his persuasions did
more than all the representations of the crafty king.  The queen loved
her son with that intenseness which characterizes the one soft
affection of violent natures.  Never had she yet opposed his most
childish whim, and now he spoke with the eloquence of one who put his
heart and his life's life into his words.  At last, reluctantly, she
consented to an interview with Warwick.  The earl, accompanied by
Oxford, arrived at Tours, and the two nobles were led into the
presence of Margaret by King Louis.

The reader will picture to himself a room darkened by thick curtains
drawn across the casement, for the proud woman wished not the earl to
detect on her face either the ravages of years or the emotions of
offended pride.  In a throne chair, placed on the dais, sat the
motionless queen, her hands clasping, convulsively, the arms of the
fauteuil, her features pale and rigid; and behind the chair leaned the
graceful figure of her son.  The person of the Lancastrian prince was
little less remarkable than that of his hostile namesake, but its
character was distinctly different.  ["According to some of the French
chroniclers, the Prince of Wales, who was one of the handsomest and
most accomplished princes in Europe, was very desirous of becoming the
husband of Anne Nevile," etc.--Miss STRICKLAND: Life of Margaret of
Anjou.]  Spare, like Henry V., almost to the manly defect of leanness,
his proportions were slight to those which gave such portly majesty to
the vast-chested Edward, but they evinced the promise of almost equal
strength,--the muscles hardened to iron by early exercise in arms, the
sap of youth never wasted by riot and debauch.  His short purple
manteline, trimmed with ermine, was embroidered with his grandfather's
favourite device, "the silver swan;" he wore on his breast the badge
of St. George; and the single ostrich plume, which made his cognizance
as Prince of Wales, waved over a fair and ample forehead, on which
were even then traced the lines of musing thought and high design; his
chestnut hair curled close to his noble head; his eye shone dark and
brilliant beneath the deep-set brow, which gives to the human
countenance such expression of energy and intellect,--all about him,
in aspect and mien, seemed to betoken a mind riper than his years, a
masculine simplicity of taste and bearing, the earnest and grave
temperament mostly allied in youth to pure and elevated desires, to an
honourable and chivalric soul.

Below the dais stood some of the tried and gallant gentlemen who had
braved exile, and tasted penury in their devotion to the House of
Lancaster, and who had now flocked once more round their queen, in the
hope of better days.  There were the Dukes of Exeter and Somerset,
their very garments soiled and threadbare,--many a day had those great
lords hungered for the beggar's crust!  [Philip de Comines says he
himself had seen the Dukes of Exeter and Somerset in the Low Countries
in as wretched a plight as common beggars.]  There stood Sir John
Fortescue, the patriarch authority of our laws, who had composed his
famous treatise for the benefit of the young prince, overfond of
exercise with lance and brand, and the recreation of knightly song.
There were Jasper of Pembroke, and Sir Henry Rous, and the Earl of
Devon, and the Knight of Lytton, whose House had followed, from sire
to son, the fortunes of the Lancastrian Rose; [Sir Robert de Lytton
(whose grandfather had been Comptroller to the Household of Henry IV.,
and Agister of the Forests allotted to Queen Joan), was one of the
most powerful knights of the time; and afterwards, according to Perkin
Warbeck, one of the ministers most trusted by Henry VII.  He was lord
of Lytton, in Derbyshire (where his ancestors had been settled since
the Conquest), of Knebworth in Herts (the ancient seat and manor of
Plantagenet de Brotherton, Earl of Norfolk and Earl Marshal), of
Myndelesden and Langley, of Standyarn, Dene, and Brekesborne, in
Northamptonshire, and became in the reign of Henry VII. Privy
Councillor, Uuder-Treasurer, and Keeper of the great Wardrobe.] and,
contrasting the sober garments of the exiles, shone the jewels and
cloth-of-gold that decked the persons of the more prosperous
foreigners, Ferri, Count of Vaudemonte, Margaret's brother, the Duke
of Calabria, and the powerful form of Sir Pierre de Breze, who had
accompanied Margaret in her last disastrous campaigns, with all the
devotion of a chevalier for the lofty lady adored in secret.  [See,
for the chivalrous devotion of this knight (Seneschal of Normandy) to
Margaret, Miss Strickland's Life of that queen.]

When the door opened, and gave to the eyes of those proud exiles the
form of their puissant enemy, they with difficulty suppressed the
murmur of their resentment, and their looks turned with sympathy and
grief to the hueless face of their queen.

The earl himself was troubled; his step was less firm, his crest less
haughty, his eye less serenely steadfast.

But beside him, in a dress more homely than that of the poorest exile
there, and in garb and in aspect, as he lives forever in the
portraiture of Victor Hugo and our own yet greater Scott, moved Louis,
popularly called "The Fell."

"Madame and cousin," said the king, "we present to you the man for
whose haute courage and dread fame we have such love and respect, that
we value him as much as any king, and would do as much for him as for
man living [Ellis: Original Letters, vol. i., letter 42, second
series]; and with my lord of Warwick, see also this noble earl of
Oxford, who, though he may have sided awhile with the enemies of your
Highness, comes now to pray your pardon, and to lay at your feet his
sword."

Lord Oxford (who had ever unwillingly acquiesced in the Yorkist
dynasty), more prompt than Warwick, here threw himself on his knees
before Margaret, and his tears fell on her hand, as he murmured
"Pardon."

"Rise, Sir John de Vere," said the queen, glancing with a flashing eye
from Oxford to Lord Warwick.  "Your pardon is right easy to purchase,
for well I know that you yielded but to the time,--you did not turn
the time against us; you and yours have suffered much for King Henry's
cause.  Rise, Sir Earl."

"And," said a voice, so deep and so solemn, that it hushed the very
breath of those who heard it,--"and has Margaret a pardon also for the
man who did more than all others to dethrone King Henry, and can do
more than all to restore his crown?"

"Ha!" cried' Margaret, rising in her passion, and casting from her the
hand her son had placed upon her shoulder, "ha!  Ownest thou thy
wrongs, proud lord?  Comest thou at last to kneel at Queen Margaret's
feet?  Look round and behold her court,--some half-score brave and
unhappy gentlemen, driven from their hearths and homes, their heritage
the prey of knaves and varlets, their sovereign in a prison, their
sovereign's wife, their sovereign's son, persecuted and hunted from
the soil!  And comest thou now to the forlorn majesty of sorrow to
boast, 'Such deeds were mine?'"

"Mother and lady," began the prince

"Madden me not, my son.  Forgiveness is for the prosperous, not for
adversity and woe."

"Hear me," said the earl,--who, having once bowed his pride to the
interview, had steeled himself against the passion which, in his
heart, he somewhat despised as a mere woman's burst of inconsiderate
fury,--"for I have this right to be heard,--that not one of these
knights, your lealest and noblest friends, can say of me that I ever
stooped to gloss mine acts, or palliate bold deeds with wily words.
Dear to me as comrade in arms, sacred to me as a father's head, was
Richard of York, mine uncle by marriage with Lord Salisbury's sister.
I speak not now of his claims by descent (for those even King Henry
could not deny), but I maintain them, even in your Grace's presence,
to be such as vindicate, from disloyalty and treason, me and the many
true and gallant men who upheld them through danger, by field and
scaffold.  Error, it might be,--but the error of men who believed
themselves the defenders of a just cause.  Nor did I, Queen Margaret,
lend myself wholly to my kinsman's quarrel, nor share one scheme that
went to the dethronement of King Henry, until--pardon, if I speak
bluntly; it is my wont, and would be more so now, but for thy fair
face and woman's form, which awe me more than if confronting the frown
of Coeur de Lion, or the First Great Edward--pardon me, I say, if I
speak bluntly, and aver that I was not King Henry's foe until false
counsellors had planned my destruction, in body and goods, land and
life.  In the midst of peace, at Coventry, my father and myself
scarcely escaped the knife of the murderer.  [See Hall (236), who says
that Margaret had laid a snare for Salisbury and Warwick at Warwick,
and "if they had not suddenly departed, their life's thread had been
broken."]  In the streets of London the very menials and hangmen
employed in the service of your Highness beset me unarmed [Hall,
Fabyan]; a little time after and my name was attainted by an illegal
Parliament.  [Parl. Rolls, 370; W. Wyr. 478.]  And not till after
these things did Richard Duke of York ride to the hall of Westminster,
and lay his hand upon the throne; nor till after these things did I
and my father Salisbury say to each other, 'The time has come when
neither peace nor honour can be found for us under King Henry's
reign.'  Blame me if you will, Queen Margaret; reject me if you need
not my sword; but that which I did in the gone days was such as no
nobleman so outraged and despaired [Warwick's phrase.  See Sir H.
Ellis's "Original Letters," vol. i., second series.] would have
forborne to do,--remembering that England is not the heritage of the
king alone, but that safety and honour, and freedom and justice, are
the rights of his Norman gentlemen and his Saxon people.  And rights
are a mockery and a laughter if they do not justify resistance,
whensoever, and by whomsoever, they are invaded and assailed."

It had been with a violent effort that Margaret had refrained from
interrupting this address, which had, however, produced no
inconsiderable effect upon the knightly listeners around the dais.
And now, as the earl ceased, her indignation was arrested by dismay on
seeing the young prince suddenly leave his post and advance to the
side of Warwick.

"Right well hast thou spoken, noble earl and cousin,--right well,
though right plainly.  And I," added the prince, "saving the presence
of my queen and mother,--I, the representative of my sovereign father,
in his name will pledge thee a king's oblivion and pardon for the
past, if thou on thy side acquit my princely mother of all privity to
the snares against thy life and honour of which thou hast spoken, and
give thy knightly word to be henceforth leal to Lancaster.  Perish all
memories of the past that can make walls between the souls of brave
men."

Till this moment, his arms folded in his gown, his thin, fox-like face
bent to the ground, Louis had listened, silent and undisturbed.  He
now deemed it the moment to second the appeal of the prince.  Passing
his hand hypocritically over his tearless eyes, the king turned to
Margaret and said,--

"Joyful hour! happy union!  May Madame La Vierge and Monseigneur Saint
Martin sanctify and hallow the bond by which alone my beloved
kinswoman can regain her rights and roiaulme.  Amen."

Unheeding this pious ejaculation, her bosom heaving, her eyes
wandering from the earl to Edward, Margaret at last gave vent to her
passion.

"And is it come to this, Prince Edward of Wales, that thy mother's
wrongs are not thine?  Standest thou side by side with my mortal foe,
who, instead of repenting treason, dares but to complain of injury?
Am I fallen so low that my voice to pardon or disdain is counted but
as a sough of idle air!  God of my fathers, hear me!  Willingly from
my heart I tear the last thought and care for the pomps of earth.
Hateful to me a crown for which the wearer must cringe to enemy and
rebel!  Away, Earl Warwick!  Monstrous and unnatural seems it to the
wife of captive Henry to see thee by the side of Henry's son!"

Every eye turned in fear to the aspect of the earl, every ear listened
for the answer which might be expected from his well-known heat and
pride,--an answer to destroy forever the last hope of the Lancastrian
line.  But whether it was the very consciousness of his power to raise
or to crush that fiery speaker, or those feelings natural to brave
men, half of chivalry, half contempt, which kept down the natural
anger by thoughts of the sex and sorrows of the Anjouite, or that the
wonted irascibility of his temper had melted into one steady and
profound passion of revenge against Edward of York, which absorbed all
lesser and more trivial causes of resentment,--the earl's face, though
pale as the dead, was unmoved and calm, and, with a grave and
melancholy smile, he answered,--

"More do I respect thee, O queen, for the hot words which show a truth
rarely heard from royal lips than hadst thou deigned to dissimulate
the forgiveness and kindly charity which sharp remembrance permits
thee not to feel!  No, princely Margaret, not yet can there be frank
amity between thee and me!  Nor do I boast the affection yon gallant
gentlemen have displayed.  Frankly, as thou hast spoken, do I say,
that the wrongs I have suffered from another alone move me to
allegiance to thyself!  Let others serve thee for love of Henry;
reject not my service, given but for revenge on Edward,--as much,
henceforth, am I his foe as formerly his friend and maker!  [Sir H.
Ellis: Original Letters, vol. i., second series.]  And if, hereafter,
on the throne, thou shouldst remember and resent the former wars, at
least thou hast owed me no gratitude, and thou canst not grieve my
heart and seethe my brain, as the man whom I once loved better than a
son!  Thus, from thy presence I depart, chafing not at thy scornful
wrath; mindful, young prince, but of thy just and gentle heart, and
sure, in the calm of my own soul (on which this much, at least, of our
destiny is reflected as on a glass), that when, high lady, thy colder
sense returns to thee, thou wilt see that the league between us must
be made!--that thine ire as woman must fade before thy duties as a
another, thy affection as a wife, and thy paramount and solemn
obligations to the people thou hast ruled as queen!  In the dead of
night thou shalt hear the voice of Henry in his prison asking Margaret
to set him free; the vision of thy son shall rise before thee in his
bloom and promise, to demand why his mother deprives him of a crown;
and crowds of pale peasants, grinded beneath tyrannous exaction, and
despairing fathers mourning for dishonoured children, shall ask the
Christian queen if God will sanction the unreasoning wrath which
rejects the only instrument that can redress her people."

This said, the earl bowed his head and turned; but, at the first sign
of his departure, there was a general movement among the noble
bystanders.  Impressed by the dignity of his bearing, by the greatness
of his power, and by the unquestionable truth that in rejecting him
Margaret cast away the heritage of her son, the exiles, with a common
impulse, threw themselves at the queen's feet, and exclaimed, almost
in the same words,--

"Grace! noble queen!--Grace for the great Lord Warwick!"

"My sister," whispered John of Calabria, "thou art thy son's ruin if
the earl depart!"

"Pasque Dieu!  Vex not my kinswoman,--if she prefer a convent to a
throne, cross not the holy choice!" said the wily Louis, with a
mocking irony on his pinched lips.

The prince alone spoke not, but stood proudly on the same spot, gazing
on the earl, as he slowly moved to the door.

"Oh, Edward! Edward, my son!" exclaimed the unhappy Margaret, "if for
thy sake--for thine--I must make the past a blank, speak thou for me!"

"I have spoken," said the prince, gently, "and thou didst chide me,
noble mother; yet I spoke, methinks, as Henry V. had done, if of a
mighty enemy he had had the power to make a noble friend."

A short, convulsive sob was heard from the throne chair; and as
suddenly as it burst, it ceased.  Queen Margaret rose, not a trace of
that stormy emotion upon the grand and marble beauty of her face.  Her
voice, unnaturally calm, arrested the steps of the departing earl.

"Lord Warwick, defend this boy, restore his rights, release his
sainted father, and for years of anguish and of exile, Margaret of
Anjou forgives the champion of her son!"

In an instant Prince Edward was again by the earl's side; a moment
more, and the earl's proud knee bent in homage to the queen, joyful
tears were in the eyes of her friends and kindred, a triumphant smile
on the lips of Louis, and Margaret's face, terrible in its stony and
locked repose, was raised above, as if asking the All-Merciful pardon
--for the pardon which the human sinner had bestowed!  [Ellis: Original
Letters from the Harleian Manuscripts, letter 42.]




CHAPTER X.

LOVE AND MARRIAGE--DOUBTS OF CONSCIENCE--DOMESTIC JEALOUSY--AND
HOUSEHOLD TREASON.

The events that followed this tempestuous interview were such as the
position of the parties necessarily compelled.  The craft of Louis,
the energy and love of Prince Edward, the representations of all her
kindred and friends, conquered, though not without repeated struggles,
Margaret's repugnance to a nearer union between Warwick and her son.
The earl did not deign to appear personally in this matter.  He left
it, as became him, to Louis and the prince, and finally received from
them the proposals, which ratified the league, and consummated the
schemes of his revenge.

Upon the Very Cross [Miss Strickland observes upon this interview: "It
does not appear that Warwick mentioned the execution of his father,
the Earl of Salisbury, which is almost a confirmation of the
statements of those historians who deny that he was beheaded by
Margaret."] in St. Mary's Church of Angers, Lord Warwick swore without
change to hold the party of King Henry.  Before the same sacred
symbol, King Louis and his brother, Duke of Guienne, robed in canvas,
swore to sustain to their utmost the Earl of Warwick in behalf of King
Henry; and Margaret recorded her oath "to treat the earl as true and
faithful, and never for deeds past to make him any reproach."

Then were signed the articles of marriage between Prince Edward and
the Lady Anne,--the latter to remain with Margaret, but the marriage
not to be consummated "till Lord Warwick had entered England and
regained the realm, or most part, for King Henry,"--a condition which
pleased the earl, who desired to award his beloved daughter no less a
dowry than a crown.

An article far more important than all to the safety of the earl and
to the permanent success of the enterprise, was one that virtually
took from the fierce and unpopular Margaret the reins of government,
by constituting Prince Edward (whose qualities endeared him more and
more to Warwick, and were such as promised to command the respect and
love of the people) sole regent of all the realm, upon attaining his
majority.  For the Duke of Clarence were reserved all the lands and
dignities of the duchy of York, the right to the succession of the
throne to him and his posterity,--failing male heirs to the Prince of
Wales,--with a private pledge of the viceroyalty of Ireland.

Margaret had attached to her consent one condition highly obnoxious to
her high-spirited son, and to which he was only reconciled by the
arguments of Warwick: she stipulated that he should not accompany the
earl to England, nor appear there till his father was proclaimed king.
In this, no doubt, she was guided by maternal fears, and by some
undeclared suspicion, either of the good faith of Warwick, or of his
means to raise a sufficient army to fulfil his promise.  The brave
prince wished to be himself foremost in the battles fought in his
right and for his cause.  But the earl contended, to the surprise and
joy of Margaret, that it best behooved the prince's interests to enter
England without one enemy in the field, leaving others to clear his
path, free himself from all the personal hate of hostile factions, and
without a drop of blood upon the sword of one heralded and announced
as the peace-maker and impartial reconciles of all feuds.  So then
(these high conditions settled), in the presence of the Kings Rene and
Louis, of the Earl and Countess of Warwick, and in solemn state, at
Amboise, Edward of Lancaster plighted his marriage-troth to his
beloved and loving Anne.

It was deep night, and high revel in the Palace of Amboise crowned the
ceremonies of that memorable day.  The Earl of Warwick stood alone in
the same chamber in which he had first discovered the secret of the
young Lancastrian.  From the brilliant company, assembled in the halls
of state, he had stolen unperceived away, for his great heart was full
to overflowing.  The part he had played for many days was over, and
with it the excitement and the fever.  His schemes were crowned,--the
Lancastrians were won to his revenge; the king's heir was the
betrothed of his favourite child; and the hour was visible in the
distance, when, by the retribution most to be desired, the father's
hand should lead that child to the throne of him who would have
degraded her to the dust. If victory awaited his sanguine hopes, as
father to his future queen, the dignity and power of the earl became
greater in the court of Lancaster than, even in his palmiest day,
amidst the minions of ungrateful York; the sire of two lines,--if
Anne's posterity should fail, the crown would pass to the sons of
Isabel,--in either case from him (if successful in his invasion) would
descend the royalty of England.  Ambition, pride, revenge, might well
exult in viewing the future, as mortal wisdom could discern it.  The
House of Nevile never seemed brightened by a more glorious star: and
yet the earl was heavy and sad at heart.  However he had concealed it
from the eyes of others, the haughty ire of Margaret must have galled
him in his deepest soul.  And even as he had that day contemplated the
holy happiness in the face of Anne, a sharp pang had shot through his
breast. Were those the witnesses of fair-omened spousailles?  How
different from the hearty greeting of his warrior-friends was the
measured courtesy of foes who had felt and fled before his sword!  If
aught chanced to him in the hazard of the field, what thought for his
child ever could speak in pity from the hard and scornful eyes of the
imperious Anjouite?

The mist which till then had clouded his mind, or left visible to his
gaze but one stern idea of retribution, melted into air.  He beheld
the fearful crisis to which his life had passed,--he had reached the
eminence to mourn the happy gardens left behind.  Gone, forever gone,
the old endearing friendships, the sweet and manly remembrances of
brave companionship and early love!  Who among those who had
confronted war by his side for the House of York would hasten to clasp
his hand and hail his coming as the captain of hated Lancaster?  True,
could he bow his honour to proclaim the true cause of his desertion,
the heart of every father would beat in sympathy with his; but less
than ever could the tale that vindicated his name be told.  How stoop
to invoke malignant pity to the insult offered to a future queen?
Dark in his grave must rest the secret no words could syllable, save
by such vague and mysterious hint and comment as pass from baseless
gossip into dubious history.  [Hall well explains the mystery which
wrapped the king's insult to a female of the House of Warwick by the
simple sentence, "The certainty was not, for both their honours,
openly known!"]  True, that in his change of party he was not, like
Julian of Spain, an apostate to his native land.  He did not meditate
the subversion of his country by the foreign foe; it was but the
substitution of one English monarch for another,--a virtuous prince
for a false and a sanguinary king.  True, that the change from rose to
rose had been so common amongst the greatest and the bravest, that
even the most rigid could scarcely censure what the age itself had
sanctioned.  But what other man of his stormy day had been so
conspicuous in the downfall of those he was now as conspicuously to
raise?  What other man had Richard of York taken so dearly to his
heart, to what other man had the august father said, "Protect my
sons"?  Before him seemed literally to rise the phantom of that
honoured prince, and with clay-cold lips to ask, "Art thou, of all the
world, the doomsman of my first-born?"  A groan escaped the breast of
the self-tormentor; he fell on his knees and prayed: "Oh, pardon, thou
All-seeing!--plead for me, Divine Mother! if in this I have darkly
erred, taking my heart for my conscience, and mindful only of a
selfish wrong!  Oh, surely, no!  Had Richard of York himself lived to
know what I have suffered from his unworthy son,--causeless insult,
broken faith, public and unabashed dishonour; yea, pardoning, serving,
loving on through all, till, at the last, nothing less than the
foulest taint that can light upon 'scutcheon and name was the cold,
premeditated reward for untired devotion,--surely, surely, Richard
himself had said, 'Thy honour at last forbids all pardon!'"

Then, in that rapidity with which the human heart, once seizing upon
self-excuse, reviews, one after one, the fair apologies, the earl
passed from the injury to himself to the mal-government of his land,
and muttered over the thousand instances of cruelty and misrule which
rose to his remembrance,--forgetting, alas, or steeling himself to the
memory, that till Edward's vices had assailed his own hearth and
honour, he had been contented with lamenting them, he had not ventured
to chastise.  At length, calm and self-acquitted, he rose from his
self-confession, and leaning by the open casement, drank in the
reviving and gentle balm of the summer air.  The state apartments he
had left, formed as we have before observed, an angle to the wing in
which the chamber he had now retired to was placed.  They were
brilliantly illumined, their windows opened to admit the fresh, soft
breeze of night; and he saw, as if by daylight, distinct and gorgeous,
in their gay dresses, the many revellers within.  But one group caught
and riveted his eye.  Close by the centre window he recognized his
gentle Anne, with downcast looks; he almost fancied he saw her blush,
as her young bridegroom, young and beautiful as herself, whispered
love's flatteries in her ear.  He saw farther on, but yet near, his
own sweet countess, and muttered, "After twenty years of marriage, may
Anne be as dear to him as thou art now to me!"  And still he saw, or
deemed he saw, his lady's eye, after resting with tender happiness on
the young pair, rove wistfully around, as if missing and searching for
her partner in her mother's joy.  But what form sweeps by with so
haughty a majesty, then pauses by the betrothed, addresses them not,
but seems to regard them with so fixed a watch?  He knew by her ducal
diadem, by the baudekin colours of her robe, by her unmistakable air
of pride, his daughter Isabel.  He did not distinguish the expression
of her countenance, but an ominous thrill passed through his heart;
for the attitude itself had an expression, and not that of a sister's
sympathy and love.  He turned away his face with an unquiet
recollection of the altered mood of his discontented daughter.  He
looked again: the duchess had passed on, lost amidst the confused
splendour of the revel.  And high and rich swelled the merry music
that invited to the stately pavon.  He gazed still; his lady had left
her place, the lovers too had vanished, and where they stood, stood
now in close conference his ancient enemies, Exeter and Somerset.  The
sudden change from objects of love to those associated with hate had
something which touched one of those superstitions to which, in all
ages, the heart, when deeply stirred, is weakly sensitive.  And again,
forgetful of the revel, the earl turned to the serener landscape of
the grove and the moonlit green sward, and mused and mused, till a
soft arm thrown round him woke his revery.  For this had his lady left
the revel.  Divining, by the instinct born of love, the gloom of her
husband, she had stolen from pomp and pleasure to his side.

"Ah, wherefore wouldst thou rob me," said the countess, "of one hour
of thy presence, since so few hours remain; since, when the sun that
succeeds the morrow's shines upon these walls, the night of thine
absence will have closed upon me?"

"And if that thought of parting, sad to me as thee, suffice not, belle
amie, to dim the revel," answered the earl, "weetest thou not how ill
the grave and solemn thoughts of one who sees before him the emprise
that would change the dynasty of a realm can suit with the careless
dance and the wanton music?  But not at that moment did I think of
those mightier cares; my thoughts were nearer home.  Hast thou noted,
sweet wife, the silent gloom, the clouded brow of Isabel, since she
learned that Anne was to be the bride of the heir of Lancaster?"

The mother suppressed a sigh.  "We must pardon, or glance lightly
over, the mood of one who loves her lord, and mourns for his baffled
hopes!  Well-a-day!  I grieve that she admits not even me to her
confidence.  Ever with the favourite lady who lately joined her
train,--methinks that new friend gives less holy counsel than a
mother!"

"Ha! and yet what counsels can Isabel listen to from a comparative
stranger?  Even if Edward, or rather his cunning Elizabeth, had
suborned this waiting-woman, our daughter never could hearken, even in
an hour of anger, to the message from our dishonourer and our foe."

"Nay, but a flatterer often fosters by praising the erring thought.
Isabel hath something, dear lord, of thy high heart and courage; and
ever from childhood, her vaulting spirit, her very character of
stately beauty, hath given her a conviction of destiny and power
loftier than those reserved for our gentle Anne.  Let us trust to time
and forbearance, and hope that the affection of the generous sister
will subdue the jealousy of the disappointed princess."

"Pray Heaven, indeed, that it so prove!  Isabel's ascendancy over
Clarence is great, and might be dangerous.  Would that she consented
to remain in France with thee and Anne!  Her lord, at least, it seems
I have convinced and satisfied.  Pleased at the vast fortunes before
him, the toys of viceregal power, his lighter nature reconciles itself
to the loss of a crown, which, I fear, it could never have upheld.
For the more I have read his qualities in our household intimacy, the
more it seems that I could scarcely have justified the imposing on
England a king not worthy of so great a people.  He is young yet, but
how different the youth of Lancastrian Edward!  In him what earnest
and manly spirit!  What heaven-born views of the duties of a king!
Oh, if there be a sin in the passion that hath urged me on, let me,
and me alone, atone! and may I be at least the instrument to give to
England a prince whose virtues shall compensate for all!"

While yet the last word trembled upon the earl's lips, a light flashed
along the floors, hitherto illumined but by the stars and the full
moon.  And presently Isabel, in conference with the lady whom her
mother had referred to, passed into the room, on her way to her
private chamber.  The countenance of this female diplomatist, whose
talent for intrigue Philip de Comines [Comines, iii. 5; Hall, Lingard,
Hume, etc.] has commemorated, but whose name, happily for her memory,
history has concealed, was soft and winning in its expression to the
ordinary glance, though the sharpness of the features, the thin
compression of the lips, and the harsh dry redness of the hair
corresponded with the attributes which modern physiognomical science
truly or erringly assigns to a wily and treacherous character.  She
bore a light in her hand, and its rays shone full on the disturbed and
agitated face of the duchess.  Isabel perceived at once the forms of
her parents, and stopped short in some whispered conversation, and
uttered a cry almost of dismay.

"Thou leavest the revel betimes, fair daughter," said the earl,
examining her countenance with an eye somewhat stern.

"My lady," said the confidant, with a lowly reverence, "was anxious
for her babe."

"Thy lady, good waiting-wench," said Warwick, "needs not thy tongue to
address her father.  Pass on."

The gentlewoman bit her lips, but obeyed, and quitted the room.  The
earl approached, and took Isabel's hand,--it was cold as stone.

"My child," said he, tenderly, "thou dost well to retire to rest; of
late thy cheek hath lost its bloom.  But just now, for many causes, I
was wishing thee not to brave our perilous return to England; and now,
I know not whether it would make me the more uneasy, to fear for thy
health if absent or thy safety if with me!"

"My lord," replied Isabel, coldly, "my duty calls me to my husband's
side, and the more, since now it seems he dares the battle but reaps
not its rewards!  Let Edward and Anne rest in safety, Clarence and
Isabel go to achieve the diadem and orb for others!"

"Be not bitter with thy father, girl; be not envious of thy sister!"
said the earl, in grave rebuke; then, softening his tone, he added,
"The women of a noble House should have no ambition of their own,--
their glory and their honour they should leave, unmurmuring, in the
hands of men!  Mourn not if thy sister mounts the throne of him who
would have branded the very name to which thou and she were born!"

"I have made no reproach, my lord.  Forgive me, I pray you, if I now
retire; I am so weary, and would fain have strength and health not to
be a burden to you when you depart."

The duchess bowed with proud submission, and moved on.  "Beware!" said
the earl, in a low voice.

"Beware!--and of what?" said Isabel, startled.

"Of thine own heart, Isabel.  Ay, go to thine infant's couch ere thou
seek thine own, and, before the sleep of innocence, calm thyself back
to womanhood."

The duchess raised her head quickly, but habitual awe of her father
checked the angry answer; and kissing, with formal reverence, the hand
the countess extended to her, she left the room.  She gained the
chamber in which was the cradle of her son, gorgeously canopied with
silks, inwrought with the blazoned arms of royal Clarence;--and beside
the cradle sat the confidant.

The duchess drew aside the drapery, and contemplated the rosy face of
the infant slumberer.

Then, turning to her confidant, she said,--

"Three months since, and I hoped my first-born would be a king!  Away
with those vain mockeries of royal birth!  How suit they the destined
vassal of the abhorred Lancastrian?"

"Sweet lady," said the confidant, "did I not warn thee from the first
that this alliance, to the injury of my lord duke and this dear boy,
was already imminent?  I had hoped thou mightst have prevailed with
the earl!"

"He heeds me not, he cares not for me!" exclaimed Isabel; "his whole
love is for Anne,--Anne, who, without energy and pride, I scarcely
have looked on as my equal!  And now to my younger sister I must bow
my knee, pleased if she deign to bid me hold the skirt of her queenly
robe!  Never,--no, never!"

"Calm thyself; the courier must part this night.  My Lord of Clarence
is already in his chamber; he waits but thine assent to write to
Edward, that he rejects not his loving messages."

The duchess walked to and fro, in great disorder.  "But to be thus
secret and false to my father?"

"Doth be merit that thou shouldst sacrifice thy child to him?
Reflect! the king has no son!  The English barons acknowledge not in
girls a sovereign; [Miss Strickland ("Life of Elizabeth of York")
remarks, "How much Norman prejudice in favour of Salic law had
corrupted the common or constitutional law of England regarding the
succession!"  The remark involves a controversy.] and, with Edward on
the throne, thy son is heir-presumptive.  Little chance that a male
heir shall now be born to Queen Elizabeth, while from Anne and her
bridegroom a long line may spring.  Besides, no matter what parchment
treaties may ordain, how can Clarence and his offspring ever be
regarded by a Lancastrian king but as enemies to feed the prison or
the block, when some false invention gives the seemly pretext for
extirpating the lawful race?"

"Cease, cease, cease!" cried Isabel, in terrible struggles with
herself.

"Lady, the hour presses!  And, reflect, a few lines are but words, to
be confirmed or retracted as occasion suits!  If Lord Warwick succeed,
and King Edward lose his crown, ye can shape as ye best may your
conduct to the time.  But if the earl lose the day, if again he be
driven into exile, a few words now release you and yours from
everlasting banishment; restore your boy to his natural heritage;
deliver you from the insolence of the Anjouite, who, methinks, even
dared this very day to taunt your highness--"

"She did--she did!  Oh that my father had been by to hear!  She bade
me stand aside that Anne might pass,--'not for the younger daughter of
Lord Warwick, but for the lady admitted into the royalty of
Lancaster!'  Elizabeth Woodville, at least, never dared this
insolence!"

"And this Margaret the Duke of Clarence is to place on the throne
which your child yonder might otherwise aspire to mount!"

Isabel clasped her hands in mute passion.

"Hark!" said the confidant, throwing open the door--

And along the corridor came, in measured pomp, a stately procession,
the chamberlain in front, announcing "Her Highness the Princess of
Wales;" and Louis XI., leading the virgin bride (wife but in name and
honour, till her dowry of a kingdom was made secure) to her gentle
rest. The ceremonial pomp, the regal homage that attended the younger
sister thus raised above herself, completed in Isabel's jealous heart
the triumph of the Tempter.  Her face settled into hard resolve, and
she passed at once from the chamber into one near at hand, where the
Duke of Clarence sat alone, the rich wines of the livery, not
untasted, before him, and the ink yet wet upon a scroll he had just
indited.

He turned his irresolute countenance to Isabel as she bent over him
and read the letter.  It was to Edward; and after briefly warning him
of the meditated invasion, significantly added, "and if I may seem to
share this emprise, which, here and alone, I cannot resist, thou shalt
find me still, when the moment comes, thy affectionate brother and
loyal subject."

"Well, Isabel," said the duke, "thou knowest I have delayed this till
the last hour to please thee; for verily, lady mine, thy will is my
sweetest law.  But now, if thy heart misgives thee--"

"It does, it does!" exclaimed the duchess, bursting into tears.

"If thy heart misgives thee," continued Clarence, who with all his
weakness had much of the duplicity of his brothers, "why, let it pass.
Slavery to scornful Margaret, vassalage to thy sister's spouse,
triumph to the House which both thou and I were taught from childhood
to deem accursed,--why, welcome all! so that Isabel does not weep, and
our boy reproach us not in the days to come!"

For all answer, Isabel, who had seized the letter, let it drop on the
table, pushed it, with averted face, towards the duke, and turned back
to the cradle of her child, whom she woke with her sobs, and who
wailed its shrill reply in infant petulance and terror, snatched from
its slumber to the arms of the remorseful mother.

A smile of half contemptuous joy passed over the thin lips of the she-
Judas, and, without speaking, she took her way to Clarence.  He had
sealed and bound his letter, first adding these words, "My lady and
duchess, whatever her kin, has seen this letter, and approves it, for
she is more a friend to York than to the earl, now he has turned
Lancastrian;" and placed it in a small iron coffer.

He gave the coffer, curiously clasped and locked, to the gentlewoman,
with a significant glance--"Be quick, or she repents!  The courier
waits, his steed saddled!  The instant you give it, he departs,--he
hath his permit to pass the gates."

"All is prepared; ere the clock strike, he is on his way."  The
confidant vanished; the duke sank in his chair, and rubbed his hands.

"Oho, father-in-law, thou deemest me too dull for a crown!  I am not
dull enough for thy tool.  I have had the wit, at least, to deceive
thee, and to hide resentment beneath a smiling brow!  Dullard, thou to
believe aught less than the sovereignty of England could have bribed
Clarence to thy cause!"  He turned to the table and complacently
drained his goblet.

Suddenly, haggard and pale as a spectre, Isabel stood before him.

"I was mad--mad, George!  The letter! the letter--it must not go!"

At that moment the clock struck.

"Bel enfant," said the duke, "it is too late!"





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