'twas not likely she
would long bury herself in an old country house, hiding her beauty in
weeds and sad-coloured draperies. She would make her period of
seclusion as brief as decency would permit, and after it reappear in a
blaze of brilliancy.

But she remained at Wildairs with her sister, Mistress Anne, only being
seen on occasions at church, in her long and heavy draperies of black.

"But she is a strange mixture," said my Lord Twemlow's Chaplain, in
speaking of her, "and though she hath so changed, hath scarce changed
at all. Her black eye can flame as bright as ever under her long
widow's veil. She visits the poor with her sister, and gives charities,
but she will have no beggarly tricks, and can pick out a hypocrite at
his first whining, howsoever clever he may be. One came to her last
week with a lying tale of having loved the old Earl Dunstanwolde, and
been his pensioner for years. And to see her mark the weak points of
his story, and to hear the wit with which she questioned him until he
broke down affrighted, was a thing to marvel at.

"'Think you,' she said, 'that I will let knaves trade on my lord's
goodness, and play tricks in his name? You shall all see. In the
stocks you shall sit and repent it--a warning to other rascals.'"

But in the miserable, long-neglected village of Wildairs she did such
deeds as made her remembered to the end of many lives. No village was
in worse case than this had been for years, as might well be expected.
Falling walls, rotting thatches, dirt and wretchedness were to be seen
on all sides; cottages were broken-paned and noisome, men and women who
should have been hale were drawn with rheumatism from mouldering
dampness, or sodden with drink and idleness; children who should have
been rosy and clean and studying their horn books, at the dame school,
were little, dirty, evil, brutal things.

"And no blame of theirs, but yours," said my lady to her father.

"Thou didst not complain in days gone by, Clo," said Sir Jeoffry, "but
swore at them roundly when they ran in thy horse's way as thou went at
gallop through the village, and called the men and women lousy pigs who
should be whipt."

"Did I?" said her ladyship, looking at him with large eyes. "Ay, that I
did. In those days surely I was mad and blind."

"Wildairs village is no credit to its owner," grumbled Sir Jeoffry.
"Wherefore should it be? I am a poor man--I can do naught for it."

"I can," said my Lady Dunstanwolde.

And so she did, but at first when she entered the tumbledown cottages,
looking so tall, a black figure in her sweeping draperies and widow's
veil, the people were more than half affrighted. But soon she won them
from their terror with her own strange power, and they found that she
was no longer the wild young lady who had dashed through their hamlet
in hunting garb, her dogs following her, and the glance of her black
eyes and the sound of her mocking laugh things to flee before. Her eyes
had grown kind, and she had a way none could resist, and showed a
singular knowledge of poor folks' wants and likings. Her goodness to
them was not that of the ordinary lady who felt that flannel petticoats
and soup and scriptural readings made up the sum of all requirements.
There were other things she knew and talked to them of, as if they were
human creatures like herself.

"I can carry to them food and raiment," said Mistress Anne, wondering
at her, "but when I try to talk with them I am afraid and have no
words. But you, sister--when you sate by that poor distraught young
woman yesterday and talked to her of her husband who had met such
sudden death--you knew what to say, and in the midst of her agony she
turned in her bed and lay and stared at you and listened."

"Yes, I knew," said my lady--her eyes shining. "She is passing through
what I might pass through if----! Those two poor souls--rustics, and
ignorant, who to greater people seem like cattle--they were man and
woman who had loved and mated. They could not have told their joy or
the meaning of it. I could--I could! And now her mate is gone--and the
world is empty, and she is driven mad. I know, I know! Only another
woman who _knew_ could have uttered words she would have listened to."

"What--what did you say?" said Mistress Anne--and almost gasped, for my
lady looked so full of tragic truth and passion, and how could she
know? being only the widow of an old man whom she had but loved with
kindness, as if she had been his daughter? 'Twas not through her loss
of my Lord Dunstanwolde she knew. And yet, know she did, 'twas plain.

And her answer was the strangest, daring proof.

"I said to her--almost fiercely, though I spoke beneath my breath, 'He
hath not left thee: Thou wouldst not have left him. Thou couldst not.
Remember! Think! Thou canst not see him, but thee he sees, and
loves--_loves_, I tell thee, as he did two weeks since. Perhaps he
holds thee in his arms and cries to thee to hear him. Perhaps 'tis he
who speaks in these words of mine. When we have loved them and they us,
death is not strong enough to part us. Love holds too close. Listen?
He is here!'"

"Heaven's mercy!" cried gentle Mistress Anne, the tears running down
her cheeks. "There seems no Death, when you talk thus, sister--no
Death."

"There is none," said my lady, "when Love comes. When Love has come,
there is naught else in Nature's universe, for it is stronger than
all."

And 'twas as if she were some prophetess who spoke, her face and eyes
glowed with such fire and solemness. But Mistress Anne, gazing at her,
thrilled to her heart's core, had a strange sense of fear, wondering
whence this mood had come, how it had grown, and what it might bring
forth in the unknown future.

The custom of the time held that a widowed lady should mourn retired a
year, but 'twas near two before her ladyship of Dunstanwolde came forth
from her seclusion, and casting her weeds returned to town. And my Lord
Duke of Osmonde had come again to Camylott when the news was spread.

He had been engaged in grave business, and having been abroad upon it
had, on his return, travelled at once to the country. To Camylott he
came because it was his refuge in all unrestful hours or deeply grave
ones--the broad, heavenly scene spread out before it soothed him when
he gazed through its windows, the waving and rustle of the many huge
trees on every side never ceased to bring back to him something of the
feeling he had had in his childhood, that they were mighty and
mysterious friends who hushed him as a child is hushed to sleep; and so
he came to Camylott for a few days' repose before re-entering Court
life with its tumults and broils and scheming.

In a certain comfortable suite of rooms which had once been a part of
the nurseries there lived at peaceful ease an aged woman who loved his
Grace well and faithfully, and had so loved him from his childhood,
knowing indeed more of the intimate details of his life and career than
he himself imagined. This old gentlewoman was Mistress Rebecca Halsell,
the whilom chieftainess of the nursery department, and having failed in
health as age drew near her, she had been generously installed a quiet
pensioner in her old domain. When the Marquess of Roxholm had returned
from his first campaign he had found her living in these apartments--a
woman nearing seventy, somewhat bent with rheumatism, and white-haired,
but with the grave, clear eyes he remembered, still undimmed.

"I hope to be here still, my lord Marquess," she had said, "when you
bring your lady home to us--even perhaps when the nurseries are thrown
open again. I have been a happy woman in these rooms since the first
hour I entered them and took your lordship from Nurse Alison's arms."

She had led a happy life, being surrounded by every comfort, all the
servants being her friends, and she spending her days with books and
simple work, sitting chiefly at the large window from whence she could
see the park, and the avenue where the company came and went, and on
days when there was naught else stirring, watch the rookery with its
colony of rooks flying to and fro quarrelling or sitting in judgment on
affairs of state, settling their big nests, and marrying and giving in
marriage.

When his Grace was at the tower he paid her often a friendly visit, and
entertained her bravely with stories of camp and Court until, indeed,
she had become a wondrous stateswoman, and knew quite well the merits
of Marlborough and Prince Eugene, and had her own views of the changing
favourites and their bitter struggles to attain their ends. On this
occasion of his return, my lord Duke going to give her greeting, found
her parting with a friend, a comely country woman who left them
courtesying, and Mistress Halsell sate in her armchair with somewhat of
a glow in her grave eyes. And after their first exchange of words the
room was for a few moments very quiet.

"Your Grace," she said, "before she, who has just left us, came, I
sate here and thought of a day many a year ago when you and I sate
together, and your Grace climbed on my knee."

"I have climbed there many a time, Nurse Halsell," he said, his brown
eye opening, laughing, as it had a trick of doing.

"But this time was a grave one," Mistress Halsell answered. "We talked
of grave things, and in my humble way I strove to play Chaplain and
preach a sermon. You had heard Grace and Alison gossip of King Charles
and Madam Carwell and Nell Gwynne--and would ask questions it was hard
to answer."

"I remember well," said my lord Duke, the light of memory in his eye,
and he added, as one who reflects, "He is the King--he is the King!"

"You remember!" said Nurse Halsell, her old eyes glowing. "I have never
forgot, and your Grace's little face so lost in thought, as you looked
out at the sky."

"I have remembered it," said his Grace, "in many a hard hour such as
comes in all men's lives."

"You have known some such?" said the old woman, and of a sudden, as she
gazed at him, it seemed as if such feeling overswept her as made her
forget he was a great Duke and remember only her beauteous nurseling.
"Yes, you have known them, for I have sate here at the window and
watched, and there have been days when my heart was like to break."

He started and turned towards her. Her deep eyes were full of tears
which brimmed over and ran down her furrowed cheeks, and in them he saw
a tender and wise knowledge of his nature's self and all its pains--a
thing of which, before, he had never dreamed, for how could he have
imagined that an old woman living alone could have so followed him with
her heart that she had guessed his deepest secret; but this indeed she
had, and her next words most touchingly revealed it.

"Being widowed and childless when I came to you," she said, her emotion
rising to a passion, "'twas as if you grew to be my own--and in those
summer days three years gone, life and love were strong in you--life
and love and youth. And _her_ eyes dared not turn to you, nor yours to
her--and I am a woman and was afraid--for my man who died and left me
widowed was my lover as well as my husband, and soul and body we had
been one--so I _knew!_ But as I sate here and saw you as you passed
below with your company, I said it to myself again and again, 'He is
the King--he is the King!'" And as his Grace rose from his seat, not
angered, indeed, gazing at her tenderly, though growing pale, she
seized his hand and kissed it, her tears falling.

"If 'tis unseemly," she said, "forgive me, your Grace, forgive me; but
I had sate here so long this very morning, and thought but of this
thing--and in the midst of my thinking came this woman, and she is from
Gloucestershire, and told me of her ladyship of Dunstanwolde--whose
chariot passed her on the road, and she goes up to town, and rode
radiant and blooming in rich colours, having cast her weeds aside and
looking, so the woman said, like a beauteous creature new born, with
all of life to come."




_CHAPTER XXIV_

_Sir John Oxon Returns Also_


When his Grace of Osmonde returned to town he found but one topic of
conversation, and this was of such interest and gave such a fillip to
gossip and chatter that fierce Sarah of Marlborough's encounters with
Mrs. Masham, and her quarrels with Majesty itself, were for the time
actually neglected. Her Grace had engaged in battles royal for so long
a time and with such activity that the Court and the world were a
little wearied and glad of something new. And here was a most promising
event which might be discussed from a thousand points and bring forth
pretty stories of past and present, as well as prophecies for the
future.

The incomparable and amazing Clorinda, Countess of Dunstanwolde, having
mourned in stately retirement for near upon two years