A Lady of Quality<br />Being a Most Curious, Hitherto Unknown History, as Related by Mr. Isaac Bicke, Frances Hodgson Burnett [paper ebook reader .txt] 📗

still you shielded me, and gave me chance to live, and to repent, and know love’s highest sweetness.  You thought I murdered him, and yet your soul had mercy.  Now do I believe in God, for only a God could make a heart so noble.”

“And you—did not—” cried out Anne, and raised upon her elbow, her breast panting, but her eyes growing wide with light as from stars from heaven.  “Oh, sister love—thanks be to Christ who died!”

The duchess rose, and stood up tall and great, her arms out-thrown.

“I think ’twas God Himself who did it,” she said, “though ’twas I who struck the blow.  He drove me mad and blind, he tortured me, and thrust to my heart’s core.  He taunted me with that vile thing Nature will not let women bear, and did it in my Gerald’s name, calling on him.  And then I struck with my whip, knowing nothing, not seeing, only striking, like a goaded dying thing.  He fell—he fell and lay there—and all was done!”

“But not with murderous thought—only through frenzy and a cruel chance—a cruel, cruel chance.  And of your own will blood is not upon your hand,” Anne panted, and sank back upon her pillow.

“With deepest oaths I swear,” Clorinda said, and she spoke through her clenched teeth, “if I had not loved, if Gerald had not been my soul’s life and I his, I would have stood upright and laughed in his face at the devil’s threats.  Should I have feared?  You know me.  Was there a thing on earth or in heaven or hell I feared until love rent me.  ’Twould but have fired my blood, and made me mad with fury that dares all.  ‘Spread it abroad!’ I would have cried to him.  ‘Tell it to all the world, craven and outcast, whose vileness all men know, and see how I shall bear myself, and how I shall drive through the town with head erect.  As I bore myself when I set the rose crown on my head, so shall I bear myself then.  And you shall see what comes!’  This would I have said, and held to it, and gloried.  But I knew love, and there was an anguish that I could not endure—that my Gerald should look at me with changed eyes, feeling that somewhat of his rightful meed was gone.  And I was all distraught and conquered.  Of ending his base life I never thought, never at my wildest, though I had thought to end my own; but when Fate struck the blow for me, then I swore that carrion should not taint my whole life through.  It should not—should not—for ’twas Fate’s self had doomed me to my ruin.  And there it lay until the night; for this I planned, that being of such great strength for a woman, I could bear his body in my arms to the farthest of that labyrinth of cellars I had commanded to be cut off from the rest and closed; and so I did when all were sleeping—but you, poor Anne—but you!  And there I laid him, and there he lies to-day—an evil thing turned to a handful of dust.”

“It was not murder,” whispered Anne—“no, it was not.”  She lifted to her sister’s gaze a quivering lip.  “And yet once I had loved him—years I had loved him,” she said, whispering still.  “And in a woman there is ever somewhat that the mother creature feels”—the hand which held her sister’s shook as with an ague, and her poor lip quivered—“Sister, I—saw him again!”

The duchess drew closer as she gasped, “Again!”

“I could not rest,” the poor voice said.  “He had been so base, he was so beautiful, and so unworthy love—and he was dead,—none knowing, untouched by any hand that even pitied him that he was so base a thing, for that indeed is piteous when death comes and none can be repentant.  And he lay so hard, so hard upon the stones.”

Her teeth were chattering, and with a breath drawn like a wild sob of terror, the duchess threw her arm about her and drew her nearer.

“Sweet Anne,” she shuddered—“sweet Anne—come back—you wander!”

“Nay, ’tis not wandering,” Anne said.  “’Tis true, sister.  There is no night these years gone by I have not remembered it again—and seen.  In the night after that you bore him there—I prayed until the mid-hours, when all were sleeping fast—and then I stole down—in my bare feet, that none could hear me—and at last I found my way in the black dark—feeling the walls until I reached that farthest door in the stone—and then I lighted my taper and oped it.”

“Anne!” cried the duchess—“Anne, look through the tower window at the blueness of the sky—at the blueness, Anne!”  But drops of cold water had started out and stood upon her brow.

“He lay there in his grave—it was a little black place with its stone walls—his fair locks were tumbled,” Anne went on, whispering.  “The spot was black upon his brow—and methought he had stopped mocking, and surely looked upon some great and awful thing which asked of him a question.  I knelt, and laid his curls straight, and his hands, and tried to shut his eyes, but close they would not, but stared at that which questioned.  And having loved him so, I kissed his poor cheek as his mother might have done, that he might not stand outside, having carried not one tender human thought with him.  And, oh, I prayed, sister—I prayed for his poor soul with all my own.  ‘If there is one noble or gentle thing he has ever done through all his life,’ I prayed, ‘Jesus remember it—Christ do not forget.’  We who are human do so few things that are noble—oh, surely one must count.”

The duchess’s head lay near her sister’s breast, and she had fallen a-sobbing—a-sobbing and weeping like a young broken child.

“Oh, brave and noble, pitiful, strong, fair soul!” she cried.  “As Christ loved you have loved, and He would hear your praying.  Since you so pleaded, He would find one thing to hang His mercy on.”

She lifted her fair, tear-streaming face, clasping her hands as one praying.

“And I—and I,” she cried—“have I not built a temple on his grave?  Have I not tried to live a fair life, and be as Christ bade me?  Have I not loved, and pitied, and succoured those in pain?  Have I not filled a great man’s days with bliss, and love, and wifely worship?  Have I not given him noble children, bred in high lovingness, and taught to love all things God made, even the very beasts that perish, since they, too, suffer as all do?  Have I left aught undone?  Oh, sister, I have so prayed that I left naught.  Even though I could not believe that there was One who, ruling all, could yet be pitiless as He is to some, I have prayed That—which sure it seems must be, though we comprehend it not—to teach me faith in something greater than my poor self, and not of earth.  Say this to Christ’s self when you are face to face—say this to Him, I pray you!  Anne, Anne, look not so strangely through the window at the blueness of the sky, sweet soul, but look at me.”

For Anne lay upon her pillow so smiling that ’twas a strange thing to behold.  It seemed as she were smiling at the whiteness of the doves against the blue.  A moment her sister stood up watching her, and then she stirred, meaning to go to call one of the servants waiting outside; but though she moved not her gaze from the tower window, Mistress Anne faintly spoke.

“Nay—stay,” she breathed.  “I go—softly—stay.”

Clorinda fell upon her knees again and bent her lips close to her ear.  This was death, and yet she feared it not—this was the passing of a soul, and while it went it seemed so fair and loving a thing that she could ask it her last question—her greatest—knowing it was so near to God that its answer must be rest.

“Anne, Anne,” she whispered, “must he know—my Gerald?  Must I—must I tell him all?  If so I must, I will—upon my knees.”

The doves came flying downward from the blue, and lighted on the window stone and cooed—Anne’s answer was as low as her soft breath and her still eyes were filled with joy at that she saw but which another could not.

“Nay,” she breathed.  “Tell him not.  What need?  Wait, and let God tell him—who understands.”

Then did her soft breath stop, and she lay still, her eyes yet open and smiling at the blossoms, and the doves who sate upon the window-ledge and lowly cooed and cooed.

* * * * *

’Twas her duchess sister who clad her for her last sleeping, and made her chamber fair—the hand of no other touched her; and while ’twas done the tower chamber was full of the golden sunshine, and the doves ceased not to flutter about the window, and coo as if they spoke lovingly to each other of what lay within the room.

Then the children came to look, their arms full of blossoms and flowering sprays.  They had been told only fair things of death, and knowing but these fair things, thought of it but as the opening of a golden door.  They entered softly, as entering the chamber of a queen, and moving tenderly, with low and gentle speech, spread all their flowers about the bed—laying them round her head, on her breast, and in her hands, and strewing them thick everywhere.

“She lies in a bower and smiles at us,” one said.  “She hath grown beautiful like you, mother, and her face seems like a white star in the morning.”

“She loves us as she ever did,” the fair child Daphne said; “she will never cease to love us, and will be our angel.  Now have we an angel of our own.”

When the duke returned, who had been absent since the day before, the duchess led him to the tower chamber, and they stood together hand in hand and gazed at her peace.

“Gerald,” the duchess said, in her tender voice, “she smiles, does not she?”

“Yes,” was Osmonde’s answer—“yes, love, as if at God, who has smiled at herself—faithful, tender woman heart!”

The hand which he held in his clasp clung closer.  The other crept to his shoulder and lay there tremblingly.

“How faithful and how tender, my Gerald,” Clorinda said, “I only know.  She is my saint—sweet Anne, whom I dared treat so lightly in my poor wayward days.  Gerald, she knows all my sins, and to-day she has carried them in her pure hands to God and asked His mercy on them.  She had none of her own.”

“And so having done, dear heart, she lies amid her flowers, and smiles,” he said, and he drew her white hand to press it against his breast.

* * * * *

While her body slept beneath soft turf and flowers, and that which was her self was given in God’s heaven, all joys for which her earthly being had yearned, even when unknowing how to name its longing, each year that passed made more complete and splendid the lives of those she so had loved.  Never, ’twas said, had woman done such deeds of gentleness and shown so sweet and generous a wisdom as the great duchess.  None who were weak were in danger if she used her strength to aid them; no man or woman was a lost thing whom she tried to save: such tasks she set herself as no lady had ever given herself before; but ’twas not her way to fail—her will being so powerful, her brain so clear, her heart so purely noble.  Pauper and prince, noble and hind honoured her and her lord alike, and all felt wonder at their happiness.  It seemed that they had learned life’s meaning and the honouring of love, and this they taught to their children, to the enriching of a long and noble line.  In the ripeness of years they passed from earth in as beauteous peace as the sun sets, and upon a tablet above the resting-place of their ancestors there are inscribed lines like these:—

“Here sleeps by her husband the purest and noblest lady God e’er loved, yet the high and gentle deeds of her chaste sweet life sleep not, but live and grow, and so will do so long as earth is earth.”