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+The Project Gutenberg EBook Last Of The Barons, by Lytton, Volume 9.
+#150 in our series by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
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+
+Title: The Last Of The Barons, Volume 9.
+
+Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
+Release Date: March 2005  [EBook #7723]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on May 6, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LAST OF THE BARONS, V9 ***
+
+
+This eBook was produced by Tapio Riikonen
+and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+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!"
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LAST OF THE BARONS, V9 ***
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