Earl Hubert's Daughter / The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century

Emily Sarah Holt

"Earl Hubert's Daughter"

Preface.

The thirteenth century was one of rapid and terrible incidents, tumultuous politics, and in religious matters of low and degrading superstition. Transubstantiation had just been formally adopted as a dogma of the Church, accompanied as it always is by sacramental confession, and quickly followed by the elevation of the host and the invention of the pix. Various Orders of monks were flocking into England. The Pope was doing his best, aided by the Roman clergy, and to their shame be it said, by some of the English, to fix his iron yoke on the neck of the Church of England. The doctrine of human merit was at its highest pitch; the doctrine of justification by faith was absolutely unknown.

Amid this thick darkness, a very small number of true-hearted, Heaven-taught men bore aloft the torch of truth—that is, of so much truth as they knew. One of such men as these I have sketched in Father Bruno. And if, possibly, the portrait is slightly over-charged for the date,—if he be represented as a shade more enlightened than at that time he could well be—I trust that the anachronism will be pardoned for the sake of those eternal verities which would otherwise have been left wanting.

There is one fact in ecclesiastical history which should never be forgotten, and this is, that in all ages, within the visible corporate body which men call the Church, God has had a Church of His own, true, living, and faithful. He has ever reserved to Himself that typical seven thousand in Israel, of whom all the knees have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth hath not kissed him.

Such men as these have been termed “Protestants before the Reformation.” The only reason why they were not Protestants, was because there was as yet no Protestantism. The heavenly call to “come out of her” had not yet been heard. These men were to be found in all stations and callings; on the throne—as in Alfred the Great, Saint Louis, and Henry the Sixth; in the hierarchy—as in Anselm, Bradwardine, and Grosteste; in the cloister—as in Bernard de Morlaix; but perhaps most frequently in that rank and file of whom the world never hears, and of some of whom, however low their place in it, the world is not worthy.

These men often made terrible blunders—as Saint Louis did when he persecuted the Jews, under the delusion that he was thus doing honour to the Lord whom they had rejected: and Bernard de Morlaix, when he led a crusade against the Albigenses, of whom he had heard only slanderous reports. Do we make no blunders, that we should be in haste to judge them? How much more has been given to us than to them! How much more, then, will be required?

Chapter One.

Father and Mother.

“He was a true man, this—who lived for England,
And he knew how to die.”
“Sweet? There are many sweet things. Clover’s sweet,
And so is liquorice, though ’tis hard to chew;
And sweetbriar—till it scratches.”

“Look, Margaret! Thine aunt, Dame Marjory, is come to spend thy birthday with thee.”

“And see my new bower? (Boudoir). O Aunt Marjory, I am so glad!”

The new bower was a very pretty room—for the thirteenth century—but its girl-owner was the prettiest thing in it. Her age was thirteen that day, but she was so tall that she might easily have been supposed two or three years older. She had a very fair complexion, violet-blue eyes, and hair exactly the colour of a cedar pencil. If physiognomy may be trusted, the face indicated a loving and amiable disposition.

The two ladies who had just entered from the ante-room—the mother and aunt of Margaret were both tall, finely-developed women, with shining fair hair. They spoke French, evidently as the mother-tongue: but in 1234 that was the custom of all English nobles. These ladies had been brought up in England from early maidenhood, but they were Scottish Princesses—the eldest and youngest daughters of King William the Lion, by his Norman Queen, Ermengarde de Beaumont. Both sisters were very handsome, but the younger bore the palm of beauty in the artist’s sense, though she was not endowed with the singular charm of manner which characterised her sister. Chroniclers tell us that the younger Princess, Marjory, was a woman of marvellous beauty. Yet something more attractive than mere beauty must have distinguished the Princess Margaret, for two men of the most opposite dispositions to have borne her image on their hearts till death, and for her husband—a man capable of abject superstition, and with his hot-headed youth far behind him—to have braved all the thunders of Rome, rather than put her away.

These royal sisters had a singular history. Their father, King William, had put them for education into the hands of King John of England and his Queen, Isabelle of Angoulème, when they were little more than infants, in other words, he had committed his tender doves to the charge of almost the worst man and woman whom he could have selected. There were just two vices of which His English Majesty was not guilty, and those were cowardice and hypocrisy. He was a plain, unvarnished villain, and he never hesitated for a moment to let people see it. Queen Isabelle had been termed “the Helen of the Middle Ages,” alike from her great beauty, and from the fact that her husband abducted her when betrothed elsewhere. She can hardly be blamed for this, since she was a mere child at the time: but as she grew up, she developed a character quite worthy of the scoundrel to whom she was linked. To personal profligacy she added sordid avarice, and a positive incapacity for telling the truth. To these delightful persons the poor little Scottish maidens, Margaret and Isabel, were consigned. At what age Marjory joined them in England is doubtful: but it does not appear that she was ever, as they were, an official ward of the Crown.

The exact terms on which these royal children were sent into England were for many years the subject of sharp contention between their brother Alexander and King Henry the Third. The memorandum drawn up between the Kings William and John, does not appear to be extant: but that by which, in 1220, they were afresh consigned to the care of Henry the Third, is still in existence. Alexander strenuously maintained that John had undertaken to marry the sisters to his own two sons. The agreement with Henry the Third simply provides that “We will also marry (This meant at the time, ‘cause to be married’) Margaret and Isabel, sisters of the said Alexander, King of Scotland, during the space of one full year from the feast of Saint Denis (October 8), 1220, as shall be to our honour: and if we do not marry them within that period, we will return them to the said Alexander, King of Scotland, safe and free, in his own territories, within two years from the time specified.” (Note 1.)

This article of the convention was honestly carried out according to the later memorandum, so far as concerned Margaret, who was married to Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, at York, on the twenty-fifth of June, 1221. Isabel, however, was not married (to Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk) until May, 1225. (Note 2.) Still, after the latter date, the convention having been carried out, it might have been supposed that the Kings would have given over quarrelling about it. The Princesses were honourably married in England, which was all that Henry the Third at least had undertaken to do.

But neither party was satisfied. Alexander never ceased to reproach Henry for not having himself married Margaret, and united Isabel to his brother. Henry, while he testily maintained to Alexander that he had done all he promised, and no further claim could be established against him, yet, as history shows, never to the last hour pardoned Hubert de Burgh for his marriage with the Scottish Princess, and most bitterly reproached him for depriving him of her whom he had intended to make his Queen.

The truth seems to be that Henry the Third, who at the time of Margaret’s marriage was only a lad of thirteen years, had cherished for her a fervent boyish passion, and that she was the only woman whom he ever really loved. Hubert, at that time Regent, probably never imagined any thing of the kind: while to Margaret, a stately maiden of some twenty years, if not more, the sentimental courtship of a schoolboy of thirteen would probably be a source of amusement rather than sympathy. But at every turn in his after life, Henry showed that he had never forgiven this slight put on his affections. It is true that his affection was of a somewhat odd type, presenting no obstacle to his aspersing the character of his lady-love, when he found it convenient to point a moral by so doing. But of all men who ever lived, surely one of the most consistently inconsistent was Henry the Third. In most instances he was “constant to one thing—his inconstancy.” Like his father, he possessed two virtues: but they were not the same. Henry was not a lover of cruelty for its own sake—which John was: and he was not personally a libertine. Of his father’s virtues, bravery and honesty, there was not a trace in him. He covered his sins with an embroidered cloak of exquisite piety. The bad qualities of both parents were inherited by him. To his mother’s covetous acquisitiveness and ingrained falsehood, he joined his father’s unscrupulous exactions and wild extravagance.

I have said that Henry was not a lover of cruelty in itself: but he could be fearfully and recklessly cruel when he had a point to gain, as we shall see too well before the story is ended. It may be true that John murdered his nephew Arthur with his own hands; but it was reserved for Henry, out of the public sight and away from his own eyes, to perpetrate a more cruel murder upon Arthur’s hapless sister, “the Pearl of Bretagne,” by one of the slowest and most dreadful deaths possible to humanity, and without any offence on her part beyond her very existence. Stow tells us that poor Alianora was slowly starved to death; and that she died by royal order the Issue Roll gives evidence, since one hundred pounds were delivered to John Fitz Geoffrey as his fee for the execution of Alianora the King’s kinswoman. (Note 3.)

It is not easy to say whether John or Henry would have made the more clever vivisector. But assuredly, while John would have kept his laboratory door open, and have sneered at anaesthetics, Henry would have softly administered curare (Note 4), and afterwards made a charming speech on the platform concerning the sacrifices of their own feelings, which physiologists are sorrowfully compelled to make for the benefit of humanity and the exigencies of science.

Thirteen years after the marriage of Margaret of Scotland, when he was a young man of six-and-twenty, Henry the Third made a second attempt to win a Scottish queen. The fair Princess Marjory had now joined her sisters in England; and in point of age she was more suitable than Margaret. The English nobles, however, were very indignant that their King should think of espousing a younger sister of the wife of so mere an upstart as Hubert de Burgh. They grumbled bitterly, and the Count of Bretagne, brother-in-law of the murdered Arthur and the disinherited Alianora, took upon himself to dissuade the King from his purpose.

This Count of Bretagne is known as Pierre Mauclerc, or Bad-Clerk: not a flattering epithet, but historians assure us that Pierre only too thoroughly deserved the adjective, whatever his writing may have done. He had, four years before, refused his own daughter to King Henry, preferring to marry her to a son of the King of France. The Count had undertaken no difficult task, for an easier could not be than to persuade or dissuade Henry the Third in respect of any mortal thing. He passed his life in acting on the advice in turn of every person who had last spoken to him. So he gave up Marjory of Scotland.

Three years more had elapsed since that time, during which Marjory, very sore at her rejection, had withdrawn to the Court of King Alexander her brother. In the spring of 1234 she returned to her eldest sister, who generally resided either in her husband’s Town-house at Whitehall,—it was probably near Scotland Yard—or at the Castle of Bury Saint Edmund’s. She was just then at the latter. Earl Hubert himself was but rarely at home in either place, being constantly occupied elsewhere by official duties, and not unfrequently, through some adverse turn of King Henry’s capricious favour, detained somewhere in prison.

“And how long hast thou nestled in this sweet new bower, my bird?” said Marjory caressingly to her niece.

“To-day, Aunt Marjory! It is a birthday present from my Lord and father. Is it not pretty? Only look at the walls, and the windows, and my beautiful velvet settle. Now, did you ever see any thing so charming?”

Marjory glanced at her sister, and they exchanged smiles.

“Well, I cannot quite say No to that question, Magot. (Note 5.) But lead me round this wonderful chamber, and show me all its beauties.”

The wonderful chamber in question was not very spacious, being about sixteen feet in length by twelve in width. It had a wide fireplace at one end—there was no fire, for the spring was just passing into summer—and two arched windows on one of its longer sides. The fireplace was filled with a grotto-like erection of fir-cones, moss, and rosemary: the windows, as Margaret triumphantly pointed out, were of that rare and precious material, glass. Three doors led into other rooms. One, opposite the fireplace, gave access to a small private oratory; two others, opposite the windows, communicated respectively with the wardrobe and the ante-chamber. These four rooms together, with the narrow spiral staircase which led to them, occupied the whole floor of one of the square towers of the Castle. The walls of the bower were painted green, relieved by golden stars; and on every wall-space between the doors and windows was a painted “history”—namely, a medallion of some Biblical, historical, or legendary subject. The subjects in this room had evidently been chosen with reference to the tastes of a girl. They were,—the Virgin and Child; the legend of Saint Margaret; the Wheel of Fortune; Saint Agnes, with her lamb; a fountain with doves perched upon the edge; and Saint Martin dividing his cloak with the beggar. The window-shutters were of fir-wood, bound with iron. Meagre indeed we should think the furniture, but it was sumptuous for the date. A tent-bed, hung with green curtains, stood between the two doors. A green velvet settle stretched across the window side of the room. By the fireplace was a leaf-table; round the walls were wooden brackets, with iron sockets for the reception of torches; and at the foot of the bed, which stood with its side to the wall, was a fine chest of carved ebony. There were only three pieces of movable furniture, two footstools, and a curule chair, also of ebony, with a green velvet cushion. As nobody could sit in the last who had not had a king and queen for his or her parents, it may be supposed that more than one was not likely to be often wanted.

The Countess of Kent, as the elder sister, took the curule chair, while her sister Marjory, when the inspection was finished, sat down on the velvet settle. Margaret drew a footstool to her aunt’s side, and took up her position there, resting her head caressingly on Marjory’s knee.

“Three whole years, Aunt Marjory, that you have not been near us! What could make you stay away so long?”

“There were reasons, Magot.”

The two Princesses exchanged smiles again, but there was some amusement in that of the Countess, while the expression of her sister was rather sad.

Margaret looked from one to the other, as if she would have liked to understand what they meant.

“Don’t trouble that little head,” said her mother, with a laugh. “Thy time will come soon enough. Thou art too short to be told state secrets.”

“I shall be as tall as you some day, Lady,” responded Margaret archly.

“And then,” said Marjory, stroking the girl’s hair, “thou wilt wish thyself back again, little Magot.”

“Nay!—under your good leave, fair Aunt, never!”

“Ah, we know better, don’t we, Madge?” asked the Countess, laughing. “Well, I will leave you two maidens together. There is the month’s wash to be seen to, and if I am not there, that Alditha is as likely to put the linen in the chests without a sprig of rosemary, as she is to look in the mirror every time she passes it. We shall meet at supper. Adieu!”

And the Countess departed, on housekeeping thoughts intent. For a few minutes the two girls—for the aunt was only about twelve years the senior—sat silent, Margaret having drawn her aunt’s hand down and rested her cheek upon it. They were very fond of one another: and being so near in age, they had been brought up so much like sisters, that except in one or two items they treated each other as such, and did not assume the respective authority and reverence usual between such relations at that time. Beyond the employment of the deferential you by Margaret, and the familiar thou by Marjory, they chatted to each other as any other girls might have done. But just then, for a few minutes, neither spoke.

“Well, Magot!” said Marjory, breaking the silence at last, “have we nought to say to each other? Thou art forgetting, I think, that I want a full account of all these three years since I came to see thee before. They have not been empty of events, I know.”

Margaret’s answer was a groan.

“Empty!” she said. “Fair Aunt, I would they had been, rather than full of such events as they were. Father Nicholas saith that the old Romans—or Greeks, I don’t know which—used to say the man was happy who had no history. I am sure we should have been happier, lately, if we had not had any.”

“‘Don’t know which!’ What a heedless Magot!”

“Why, fair Aunt, surely you don’t expect people to recollect lessons. Did you ever remember yours?”

Marjory laughed. “Sufficiently so, I hope, to know the difference between Greeks and Romans. But, however,—for the last three years. Tell me all about them.”

“Am I to begin with the Flood, like a professional chronicler?”

“Well, no. I think the Conquest would be soon enough.”

“Delicious Aunt Marjory! How many weary centuries you excuse me!”

“How many, Magot?”

“Oh, please don’t! How can I possibly tell? If you really want to know, I will send for Father Nicholas.”

Marjory laughed, and kissed the lively face turned up to her.

“Idle Magot! Well, go on.”

“I don’t think I am idle, fair Aunt. But I do detest learning dates.—Well, now,—was it in April you left us? I know it was very soon after my Lady of Cornwall was married, but I do not remember exactly what month.”

“It was in May,” said Marjory, shortly.

“May, was it? Oh, I know! It was the eve of Saint Helen’s Day. Well, things went on right enough, till my Lord of Canterbury took it into his head that my Lord and father had no business to detain Tunbridge Castle,—it all began with that. It was about July, I think.”

“I thought Tunbridge Castle belonged to my Lord of Gloucester. What had either to do with it?”

“O Aunt Marjory! Have you forgotten that my young Lord of Gloucester is in ward to my Lord and father? The Lord King gave him first to my Lord the Bishop of Winchester, when his father died; and then, about a year after, he took him away from the Bishop, and gave him to my fair father. Don’t you remember him?—such a pretty boy! I think you knew all about it at the time.”

“Very likely I did, Magot. One forgets things, sometimes.”

And Margaret, looking up into the fair face, saw, and did not understand, the hidden pain behind the smile.

“So my Lord of Canterbury complained of my fair father to the Lord King. (I wonder he could not attend to his own business.) But the Lord King said that as my Lord of Gloucester held in chief of the Crown, all vacant trusts were his, to give as it pleased him. And then—Aunt Marjory, do you like priests?”

“Magot, what a question!”

“But do you?”

“All priests are not alike, my dear child. They are like other people—some good, and some bad.”

“But surely all priests ought to be good.”

“Art thou always what thou oughtest to be, Magot?”

Margaret’s answer was a sudden spring from the stool and a fervent hug of Marjory.

“Aunt Marjory,” she said, when she had sat down again, “I just hate that Bishop of Winchester.” (Peter de Rievaulx, always one of the two chief enemies of Margaret’s father.)

“Shocking, Magot!”

“Oh yes, of course it is extremely wicked. But I do.”

“I wish he were here, to set thee a penance for such a naughty speech. However, go on with thy story.”

“Well, what do you think, fair Aunt, that my Lord’s Grace of Canterbury (Richard Grant, consecrated in 1229) did? He actually excommunicated all intruders on the lands of his jurisdiction, and all who should hold communication with them, the King only excepted; and away he went to Rome, to lay the matter before the holy Father. Of course he would tell his tale from his own point of view.”

“The Archbishop went to Rome!”

“Indeed he did, Aunt Marjory. My fair father was very indignant. ‘That the head of the English Church could not stand by himself, but must seek the approbation of a foreign Bishop!’ That was what he said, and I think my fair mother agreed with him.”

Perhaps in this nineteenth century we scarcely realise the gallant fight made by the Church of England to retain her independence of Rome. It did not begin at the Reformation, as people are apt to suppose. It was as old as the Church herself, and she was as old as the Apostles. Some of her clergy were perpetually trying to force and to rivet the chains of Rome upon her: but the body of the laity, who are really the Church, resisted this attempt almost to the death. There was a perpetual struggle, greater or smaller according to circumstances, between the King of England and the Papacy, Pope after Pope endeavoured to fill English sees and benefices with Italian priests: King after King braved his wrath by refusing to confirm his appointments. Apostle, they were ready to allow the Pope to be: sovereign or legislator, never. Doctrine they would accept at his hands; but he should not rule over their secular or ecclesiastical liberties. The quarrel between Henry the Second and Becket was entirely on this point. No wonder that Rome canonised the man who thus exalted her. The Kings who stood out most firmly for the liberties of England were Henry the Second, John, Edward the First and Second, and Richard the Second. This partly explains the reason why history (of which monks were mainly the authors) has so little good to say of any of them, Edward the First only excepted. It is not easy to say why the exception was made, unless it were because he was too firmly rooted in popular admiration, and perhaps a little too munificent to the monastic Orders, for much evil to be discreetly said of him. Coeur-de-Lion was a Gallio who cared for none of those things: Henry the Third played into the hands of the Pope to-day, and of the Anglican Church to-morrow. Edward the Third held the balance as nearly even as possible. The struggle revived faintly during the reign of Henry the Sixth, but the Wars of the Roses turned men’s minds to home affairs, and Henry the Seventh was the obedient servant of His Holiness. So the battle went on, till it culminated in the Reformation. Those who have never entered into this question, and who assume that all Englishmen were “Papists” until 1530, have no idea how gallantly the Church fought for her independent life, and how often she flung from off her the iron grasp of the oppressor. It was not probable that a Princess whose fathers had followed the rule of Columba, and lay buried in Protestant Iona, should have any Roman tendencies on this question. Marjory was as warm as any one could have wished her.

“Well, then,” Margaret went on, “that horrid Bishop of Winchester—”

“Oh, fie!” said her aunt.

”—Came back to England in August. Aunt Marjory, it is no use,—he is horrid, and I hate him! He hates my fair father. Do you expect me to love him?”

“Well done, Magot!” said another voice. “When I want a lawyer to plead my cause, I will send for thee.—Christ save you, fair Sister! I heard you were here, with this piece of enthusiasm.”

Both the girls rose to greet the Earl, Margaret courtesying low as beseemed a daughter.

It was very evident that, so far as outside appearance went, Margaret was “only the child of her mother.” Earl Hubert was scarcely so tall as his wife, and he had a bronzed, swarthy complexion, with dark hair. Though short, he was strongly-built and well-proportioned. His eyes were dark, small, but quick and exceedingly bright. He had, when needful, a ready, eloquent tongue and a very pleasant smile. Yet eloquent as undoubtedly he could be, he was not usually a man of many words; and capable as he was of very deep and lasting affection, he was not demonstrative.

The soft, caressing manners of the Princess Margaret were not in her husband’s line at all. He was given to calling a spade a spade whenever he had occasion to mention the article: and if she preferred to allude to it as “an agricultural implement for the trituration of the soil,” he was disposed to laugh good-humouredly at the epithet, though he dearly loved the silver voice which used it.

A thoroughly representative man of his time was Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent; and he was one of those persons who leave a deep mark upon their age. He was a purely self-made man. He had no pedigree: indeed, we do not know with absolute certainty who was his father, though modern genealogists have amused themselves by making a pedigree for him, to which there is no real evidence that he had the least claim. Yet of his wives—for he was four times married—the first was an heiress, the second a baron’s widow, the third a countess in her own right and a divorced queen, and the last a princess. His public life had begun by his conducting a negotiation to the satisfaction of Coeur-de-Lion, in the first year of his reign, 1189, when in all probability Hubert was little over twenty years of age. From that moment he rose rapidly. Merely to enumerate all the titles he bore would almost take a page. He was by turns a very rich man and a very poor one, according as his royal and capricious master made or revoked his grants.

The religious character of Hubert is not a matter of speculation, but of certainty. It was—what his contemporaries considered elevated piety—a most singular mixture of the barest and basest superstition with some very strong plain common-sense. The superstition was of the style set forth in the famous Spanish drama entitled “The Devotion of the Cross”—the true Roman type of piety, though to Protestant minds of the nineteenth century it seems almost inconceivable. The hero of this play, who is represented as tinctured with nearly every crime which humanity can commit, has a miracle performed in his favour, and goes comfortably to Heaven after it, on account of his devotion to the cross. The innocent reader must not suspect the least connection between this devotion and the atonement wrought upon the cross. It simply means, that whenever Eusebio sees the shape of a cross—in the hilt of his sword, the pattern of a woman’s dress, two sticks thrown upon one another,—he stops in the midst of whatever sin he may be committing, and in some form, by word or gesture, expresses his “devotion.”

Of this type was Hubert’s religion. His notion of spirituality was to grasp the pix with one hand, and to hold the crucifix in the other. He kept a nicely-balanced account at the Bank of Heaven, in which—this is historical—the heaviest deposit was the fact that he had many years before saved a large crucifix from the flames. The idea that this action was not most pious and meritorious would have been in Hubert’s eyes rank heresy. Yet he might have known better. The Psalter lay open to him, which, had he been acquainted with no other syllable of revelation, should alone have given him a very different conception of spiritual religion.

Athwart these singular notions of excellence, Hubert’s good common-sense was perpetually gleaming, like the lightning across a dark moor. Whatever else this man was, he was no slave of Rome. It was supported by him, and probably at his instigation, that King John had sent his lofty message to the Pope, that—

“No Italian priest
Should tithe or toll in his dominions.”

It was when the administration lay in his hands that Parliament refused to comply with the demands of the Pope till it was seen what other kingdoms would do: and no Papal aggressions were successful in England so long as Hubert was in power. To reverse the famous phrase of Lord Denbigh, Hubert was “a Catholic, if you please; but an Englishman first.”

Truer Englishman, at once loyalist and patriot, never man was than he—well described by one of the English people as “that most faithful and noble Hubert, who so often saved England from the ravages of the foreigner, and restored England to herself.” He stood by the Throne, bearing aloft the banner of England, in three especially dark and perilous days, when no man stood there but himself. To him alone, under Providence, we owe it that England did not become a vassal province of France. Most amply was his fidelity put to the test; most unspotted it emerged from the ordeal: most heavy was the debt of gratitude owed alike by England and her King.

That debt was paid, in a sense, to the uttermost farthing. In what manner of coin it was discharged, we are about to see.

Note 1. Patent Roll, 4 Henry Third; dated York, June 15 1220.

Note 2. “In the octave of Holy Trinity” (May 25—June 1), at Alnwick.—Roberts’ Extracts from Fines Rolls, 1225.

Note 3. This terrible fact has been strangely ignored by many modern historians.—Rot. Exit., Michs., 25-6 Henry Third.

Note 4. A drug which deadens the sensibilities—of the vivisector—by rendering the victim incapable of sound or motion, but not affecting the nerves of sensation in the least.

Note 5. This was in 1234, when our story begins, the English diminutive of Margaret, and was doubtless derived from the French Margot.

Note 6. Any reader who is inclined to doubt this is requested to consult Acts fifteen, 4, 22. It is unquestionably the teaching of the New Testament. The clergy form part of the Church merely as individual Christians.

Chapter Two.

“What do you lack?”

“If pestilence stalk through the land, ye say, This is God’s doing. Is it not also His doing, when an aphis creepeth on a rosebud?”

Martin F. Tupper.

Earl Hubert was far too busy a man to waste his time in lounging on velvet settles and exchanging sallies of wit with the ladies of his household. He had done little more than give a cordial welcome to Marjory, and pat Margaret on the head, when he again disappeared, to be seen no more until supper-time.

“Well, Magot,” said Marjory, sitting down in the chair, while Margaret as before accommodated herself with a footstool at her feet, “let us get on with thy story. I want to know all about that affair two years ago. Thy fair father looks wonderfully well, methinks, considering all that he has gone through.”

“Does he not? O Aunt Marjory, I scarcely know how I am to tell you about that. It was dreadful,—dreadful!”

And the tears stood in big drops on Margaret’s eyelashes.

“Well, I will try,” she said, with a deep sigh, as Marjory stroked her hair. “In the first place, the year ended all very well. My fair father had been created Justiciary of Ireland for life, and Constable of the Tower, and various favours had been granted to him. That he should be on the brink of trouble—and such trouble!—was the very last thing thought of by any one of us. And then that Bishop of Winchester came back, and before a soul knew anything about it, he was high in the Lord King’s favour, and on the twenty-ninth of July—(I am not likely to forget that date!)—the blow fell.”

“He was dismissed, then, was he not, from all his offices, without a word of warning?”

“Dismissed and degraded, without a shadow of it!—and a string of the most cruel, wicked accusations brought against him—things that he never did nor dreamed of doing—Aunt Marjory, it makes my blood boil, only to remember them! I am not going to tell you all: there was one too horrid to mention.”

“I know, my maiden.” Marjory interposed rather hastily. She had heard already of King Henry’s delicate and affectionate assault upon the fair name of Margaret’s mother, and she did not wish for a repetition of it.

“But beyond that, of what do you think he was accused?”

“I have not heard the other articles, Magot.”

“Then I will tell you. First, of preventing the Lord King’s marriage with the Duke of Austria’s daughter, by telling the Duke that the King was lame, and blind, and deaf, and a leper, and—”

“Gently, Magot, gently!” said Marjory, laughing.

“I am not making a syllable of it, fair Aunt!—And that he was a wicked, treacherous man, not worthy of the love or alliance of any noble lady. Pure foy!—but I know what I should say, if I said just what I think.”

“It is sometimes quite as well not to do that, Magot.”

“Ha! Perhaps it is, when one may get into prison by it. It is a comfort one can always think. Neither Pope nor King can stop that.”

“Magot, my dear child!”

“Oh yes, I know! You think I am horribly imprudent, Aunt Marjory. But nobody hears me except you and Eva de Braose—she is the only person in the wardrobe, and there is no one in the ante-chamber. And as I have heard her say more than I did just now, I don’t suppose there is much harm done.—Then, secondly,—they charged my fair father with stealing—only think, stealing!—a magical gem from the royal treasury which made the wearer victorious in battle, and sending it to the Prince of Wales.” (Llywelyn the Great, with whom King Henry was at war.)

“Why should they suppose he would do that?”

“Pure foy, Aunt Marjory, don’t ask me! Then, thirdly, they said it was—”

Margaret sprang from her footstool suddenly, and disappeared for a second through the door of the wardrobe. Marjory heard her say—

“Eva! I had completely forgotten, till this minute, to tell Marie that my Lady and mother desired her to finish that piece of tapestry to-night, if she can. Do go and look for her, and let her know, or she will not have time.”

A slight rustle as of some one leaving the room was audible, and then Margaret dashed back to her footstool, as if she too had not a minute to lose.

“You know, Aunt Marjory, I could not tell you the next thing with Eva listening. They said that it was by traitorous letters from my fair father that the Prince of Wales had caused Sir William de Braose to be hung.”

“Eva’s father, thou meanest?”

“Yes. Then they accused him of administering poison to my Lord of Salisbury, of sending my cousin Sir Raymond to try and force the Lady of Salisbury into marrying him while her lord was beyond seas, of poisoning my Lord of Pembroke, Sir Fulk de Breaut, and my sometime Lord of Canterbury’s Grace. He might have spent his life in poisoning every body! Then, lastly, they said he had obtained favour of the Lord King by help of the black art.”

Marjory smiled contemptuously. It was not because she was more free from superstition than other people, but simply because she knew full well that the only sorcery necessary to be used towards Henry the Third was “the sorcery of a strong mind over a weak one.” (Note 1.)

“It was rather unfortunate,” she said, “that my good Lord of Salisbury (whom God rest!) was seized with his last illness the very day after he had supped at my fair brother’s table.”

“Aunt Marjory!” cried her indignant niece. “Why, it is not a month since I was taken ill in the night, after I had supped likewise. Do you suppose he poisoned me?”

“It is quite possible that walnuts might have something to do with it, Magot. But did I say he poisoned any one?”

“Now, Aunt Marjory, you are laughing at me, because you know I like them. But don’t you think it is absurd—the way in which people insist on fancying themselves poisoned whenever they are ill? It looks as if every human being were a monster of wickedness!”

“What would Father Warner say they are, Magot?”

“Oh, he would say it was perfectly true: and he would be right—so far as my Lord of Winchester and a few more are concerned.—Well, Eva, hast thou found Marie?”

“Yes, my dear. She is with the Lady, and she is busy with the tapestry.”

“Oh, that is right! I am sorry I forgot.”

“And the Lady bade me tell thee, mignonne, that she is coming to thy bower shortly, with a pedlar who is waiting in the court, to choose stuffs for thy Whitsuntide robes.”

“A pedlar! Delightful! Aunt Marjory, I am sure you want something?”

Marjory laughed. “I want thy tale finished, Magot, before the pedlar comes.”

“Too long, my dear Aunt Marjory, unless the pedlar takes all summer to mount the stairs. But you know my Lord and father fled into sanctuary at Merton Abbey, and refused to leave it unless the Lord King would pledge his royal word for his safety. I don’t think I should have thought it made much difference. (I wonder if that pedlar has any silversmiths’ work.) The Lord King did not pledge his word, but he ordered the Lord Mayor and the citizens to fetch my fair father—only think of that, Aunt Marjory!—dead or alive. Some of the nobler citizens appealed to the Bishop, who was everything with the King just then: but instead of interceding for my fair father, as they asked, he merely confirmed the order. So twenty thousand citizens marched on the Abbey; and when my fair father knew that, he fled to the high altar, and embraced the holy cross with one hand, holding the blessed pix in the other.”

“Was our Lord in the pix?” inquired Marjory—meaning, of course, to refer to the consecrated wafer.

“I am not sure, fair Aunt. But however, things turned out better than seemed likely: for not only the Bishop of Chichester, but even my Lord of Chester—my fair father’s great enemy—interceded with the Lord King in his behalf. We heard that my Lord of Chester spoke very plainly to him, and told him not only that he would find it easier to draw a crowd together than to get rid of it again, but also that his fickleness would scandalise the world.”

“And the Lord King allowed him to say that?”

“Yes, and it had a great effect upon him. I think people who are fickle don’t like others to see it—don’t you? Do you think that pedlar will have any sendal (a silk stuff of extremely fine quality) of India?”

“Thine eyes and half thy tongue are in the pedlar’s pack, Magot. I cannot tell thee. But just let me know how it ended, and thy fair father was set free.”

“Oh, it did not end for ever so long! My Lord’s Grace of Dublin got leave for him to come home and see my fair mother and me; and after that, when he had gone into Essex, the King sent after him again, and Sir Godfrey de Craucumbe took him away to the Tower. They sent for a smith to put him in fetters, but the man would not do it when he heard who was to wear the fetters. He said he would rather die than be the man to put chains on ‘that most faithful and noble Hubert, who so often saved England from the ravages of foreigners, and restored England to herself.’ Aunt Marjory, I think he was a grand fellow! I would have kissed him if I had been there.”

As the kiss was at that time the common form of greeting between men and women, for a lady to offer a kiss to a man as a token that she approved his words or actions, was not then considered more demonstrative than it would be to shake hands now. It was, in fact, not an unusual occurrence.

“And my fair father told us,” pursued Margaret, “when he heard what the smith said, he could not help thinking of those words of our Lord, when He thanked God that His mission had been hidden from the wise, but revealed to the ignorant. ‘For,’ our Lord said, ‘to Thee, my God, do I commit my cause; for mine enemies have risen against me.’” (Note 2.)

“And they took him to the Tower of London?”

“Yes, but the Bishop of London was very angry at the violation of sanctuary, and insisted that my fair father should be sent back. He threatened the King with excommunication, and of course that frightened him. He sent him back to the church whence he was taken, but commanded the Sheriff of Essex to surround the church, so that he should neither escape nor obtain food. But my fair father’s true friend, my good old Lord of Dublin—(you were right, Aunt Marjory; all priests are not alike)—interposed, and begged the Lord King to do to him what he had thought to do to my Lord and father. The Lord King then offered the choice of three things:—my Lord and father must either abjure the kingdom for ever, or he must be perpetually imprisoned, or he must openly confess himself a traitor.”

“A fair choice, surely!”

“Horrid, wasn’t it?”

“He chose banishment, did he not?”

“He said, if the King willed it, he was content to go out of England for a time,—not for ever: but a traitor he would never confess himself, for he had never been one.”

“The words of a true man!” said Marjory.

“Splendid!—and then (Eva!—is that pedlar never coming up?) the Lord King found out that my fair father had laid up treasure in the Temple, and he actually accused him of taking it fraudulently from the royal treasury, and summoned him to resign it. My fair father replied (I shouldn’t have done!) that he and all he had were at the King’s pleasure, and sent an order to the Master of the Temple accordingly. Then—O Aunt Marjory, it is too long a tale to tell!—and I want that pedlar. But I do think it was a shame, after all that, for the Lord King to profess to compassionate my Lord and father, and to say that he had been faithful to our Lord King John of happy memory, (Note 3) and also to our Lord King Richard (whom God pardon!); therefore, notwithstanding the ill-usage of himself, and the harm he had done the kingdom, he would rather pardon my fair father than execute him. ‘For,’ he said, ‘I would rather be accounted a remiss king than a man of blood.’”

“Well, that does not sound bad, Magot.”

“Oh no! Words are very nice things, Aunt Marjory. And our Lord King Henry can string them very prettily together. I have no patience—I say, Eva! Do go and peep into the court and see what is becoming of that snail of a pedlar!”

“He is in the hall, eating and drinking, Margaret.”

“Well, I am sure he has had as much as is good for him!—So then, Aunt Marjory, my fair father was sent to Devizes: and many nobles became sureties for him,—my Lord of Cornwall, the King’s brother, among others. And while he was there, he heard of the death of his great enemy, my Lord of Chester. Then he said, ‘The Lord be merciful to him: he was my man by his own doing, and yet he never did me good where he could work me harm.’ And he set himself before the holy cross, and sang over the whole Psalter for my Lord of Chester. Well, after that,—I cannot go into all the ups and downs of the matter,—but after a while, by the help of some of the garrison, my fair father contrived to escape from Devizes, and joined the Prince of Wales. That was last November; and he stayed in Wales until the King’s journey to Gloucester. Last March the Lord King came here to the Abbey, and he granted several manors to my fair mother: and she took the opportunity to plead for my Lord and father. So when the Lord King went to Gloucester, he was met by my Lord’s Grace of Canterbury, who had been to treat with the Prince of Wales, and by his advice all those who had been outlawed, and had sought refuge in Wales, were to be pardoned and received to favour. One of them, of course, was my fair father. So they met the Lord King at Gloucester, and he took them to his mercy. My Lord and father said the Lord King looked calmly on them, and gave them the kiss of peace. But my fair father himself was so much struck by the manner in which our Lord had repaid him his good deeds, that, as his varlet Adam told us, he clasped his hands, and looked up to Heaven, and he said,—‘O Jesus, crucified Saviour, I once when sleeping saw Thee on the cross, pierced with bloody wounds, and on the following day, according to Thy warning, I spared Thy image and worshipped it: and now Thou hast, in Thy favour, repaid me for so doing, in a lucky moment.’”

It did not strike either Marjory or Margaret, as perhaps it may the reader, that this speech presented a very curious medley of devotion, thankfulness, barefaced idolatry, and belief in dreams and lucky moments. To their minds the mixture was perfectly natural. So much so, that Marjory’s response was—

“Doubtless it was so, Magot. It is always very unlucky to neglect a dream.”

At this juncture Eva de Braose presented herself. She was one of three maidens who were alike—as was then customary—wards of the Earl, and waiting-maids of the Countess. They were all young ladies of high birth and good fortune, orphan heirs or co-heirs, whose usual lot it was, throughout the Middle Ages, to be given in wardship to some nobleman, and educated with his daughters. Eva de Braose, Marie de Lusignan, and Doucebelle de Vaux, (Eva and Marie (but not Doucebelle) are historical persons,) were therefore the social equals and constant companions of Margaret. Eva was a rather pretty, fair-haired girl, about two years older than our heroine.

“The pedlar is coming now, Margaret.”

“Ha, jolife!” cried Margaret. (Note 4.) “Is my Lady and mother coming?”

“Yes, and both Hawise and Marie.”

Hawise de Lanvalay was the young wife of Margaret’s eldest brother. Earl Hubert’s family consisted, beside his daughter, of two sons of his first marriage, John and Hubert, who were respectively about eighteen and fifteen years older than their sister.

The Countess entered in a moment, bringing with her the young Lady Hawise,—a quiet-looking, dark-eyed girl of some eighteen years; and Marie, the little Countess of Eu, who was only a child of eleven. After them came Levina, one of the Countess’s dressers, and two sturdy varlets, carrying the pedlar’s heavy pack between them. The pedlar himself followed in the rear. He was a very respectable-looking old man, with strongly-marked aquiline features and long white beard; and he brought with him a lithe, olive-complexioned youth of about eighteen years of age.

The varlets set down the pack on the floor, and departed. The old man unstrapped it, and opening it out with the youth’s help, proceeded to display his goods. Very rich, costly, and beautiful they were. The finest lawn of Cambray (whence comes “cambric”), and the purest sheeting of Rennes, formed a background on which were exhibited rich diapered stuffs from Damascus, crape of all colours from Cyprus, golden baudekyns from Constantinople, fine sendal from India, with satins, velvets, silks, taffetas, linen and woollen stuffs, in bewildering profusion. Over these again were laid rich furs,—sable, ermine, miniver, black fox, squirrel, marten, and lamb; and trimmings of gold and silver, gimp and beads, delicate embroidery, and heavy tinsel.

“Here, Lady, is a lovely thing in changeable sendal,” said the old man, hunting for it among his silks: “it would be charming for the fair-haired damsel—(lift off that fox fur, Cress),—blue and gold. Or here,—a striped tartaryn, which would suit the dark young lady,—orange and green. Then—(Cress, give me the silver frieze),—this, Lady, would be well for the little maid, for somewhat cooler weather. And will my Lady see the Cyprus? (Hand the pink one, Cress.) This would make up enchantingly for the damsel that was in my Lady’s chamber.”

“Where is Doucebelle?” asked the Countess, looking round. “I thought she had come. Marie, run and fetch her.—Hast thou any broidery-work of the East Country, good man?”

“One or two small things, Lady.—Cress, give me thy sister’s scarves.”

The young man unfolded a woollen wrapper, and then a lawn one inside it, and handed to his father three silken scarves, of superlatively fine texture, and covered with most exquisite embroidery. Even the Countess, accustomed as her eyes were to beautiful things, was not able to suppress an admiring ejaculation.

“This is lovely!” she said.

“Those are samples,” remarked the pedlar, with a gleam of pleasure in his eyes. “I have more, of various patterns, if my Lady would wish to see them. She has only to speak her commands.”

“Yes. But—these are all imported, I suppose?”

“All imported, such as I have shown to my Lady.”

“I presume no broideress is to be found in England, who can do such work as this?” said the Countess in a regretful tone.

“Did my Lady wish to find one?”

“I wished to have a scarf in my possession copied, with a few variations which I would order. But I fear it cannot be done—it would be almost necessary that I should see the broideress myself, to avoid mistakes; and I would fain, if it were possible, have had the work done under my own eye.”

“That might be done, perhaps. It would be costly.”

“Oh, I should not care for the cost. I want the scarf for a gift; and it is nothing to me whether I pay ten silver pennies or a hundred.”

“Would my Lady suffer her servant to see the scarf she wishes to have imitated?”

“Fetch it, Levina,” said the Countess; “thou knowest which I mean.”

Levina brought it, and the pedlar gave it very careful inspection.

“And the alterations?” he asked.

“I would have a row of silver harebells and green ferns, touched with gold, as an outer border,” explained the Countess: “and instead of those ornaments in the inner part, I would have golden scrolls, worked with the words ‘Dieu et mon droit’ in scarlet.”

The pedlar shook his head. “The golden scrolls with the words can be done, without difficulty. But I must in all humility represent to my Lady that the flowers and leaves she desires cannot.”

“Why?” asked the Countess in a surprised tone.

“Not in this work,” answered the pedlar. “In this style of embroidery”—and he took another scarf from his pack—“it could be wrought: but not in the other.”

“But that is not to be compared with the other!”

“My Lady has well said,” returned the pedlar with a smile.

“But I do not understand where the difficulty lies?” said the Countess, evidently disappointed.

“Let my Lady pardon her servant. We have in our company—nay, there is in all England—one broideress only, who can work in this style. And I dare not make such an engagement on her behalf.”

“Still I cannot understand for what reason?”

“Lady, these flowers, leaves, heads, and such representations of created things, are the work of Christian hands. That broidery which my Lady desires is not so.”

“But why cannot Christians work this broidery?”

“Ha! They do not. My Lady’s servant cannot speak further.”

“Then what is she who alone can do this work? What eyes and fingers she must have!”

“She is my daughter,” answered the pedlar, rather proudly.

“But I am sure the woman who can broider like this, is clever enough to make a row of harebells and ferns!”

“Clever enough,—oh yes! But—she could not do it.”

“‘Clever enough,’ but ‘could not do it’—old man, I cannot understand thee.”

“Lady, she would account it sin to imitate created things.”

The Countess looked up with undisguised amazement.

“Why?”

“Because the Holy One has forbidden us to make to ourselves any likeness of that which is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath.”

“But I would pay her any sum she asked.”

“If my Lady can buy Christian consciences with gold, not so a daughter of Israel.”

The old man spoke proudly now, and his head was uplifted in a very different style from his previous subservient manner. His son’s lip was curled, and his black eyes were flashing fire.

“Well! I do not understand it,” answered the Countess, looking as much annoyed as the sweet Princess Margaret knew how to look. “I should have thought thy daughter might have put her fancies aside; for what harm can there be in broidering flowers? However, if she will not, she will not. She must work me a border of some other pattern, for I want the scarf wider.”

“That she can do, as my Lady may command.” The old Jew was once more the obsequious tradesman, laying himself out to please a profitable customer.

“What will be the cost, if the scarf be three ells in length, and—let me see—about half an ell broad?”

“It could not be done under fifteen gold pennies, my Lady.”

“That is costly! Well, never mind. If people want to make rich gifts, they must pay for them. But could I have it by Whitsuntide?—that is, a few days earlier, so as to make the gift then.”

The pedlar reflected for a moment.

“Let my Lady pardon her servant if he cannot give that answer at this moment. If my daughter have no work promised, so that she can give her time entirely to this, it can be done without fail. But it is some days since my Lady’s servant saw her, and she may have made some engagement since.”

“I am the better pleased thou art not too ready to promise,” said the Countess, smiling. “But what about the work being done under my eye? I will lodge thy daughter, and feed her, and give her a gold penny extra for it.”

The old Jew looked very grave.

“Let my Lady not be angered with the lowest of her servants! But—we are of another religion.”

“Art thou afraid of my converting her?” asked the Countess, in an amused tone.

“Under my Lady’s pardon—no!” said the old man, proudly. “I can trust my daughter. And if my noble Lady will make three promises on whatsoever she holds most holy, the girl shall come.”

“She should be worth having, when she is so hard to get at!” responded the Countess, laughing, as she took from her bosom a beautiful little silver crucifix, suspended by a chain of the same material from her neck, “Now then, old man, what am I to swear?”

“First, that my daughter shall not be required to work in any manner on the holy Sabbath,—namely, as my Lady will understand it, from sunset on Friday until the same hour on Saturday.”

“That I expected. I know Jews are very precise about their Sabbaths. Very well,—so that the scarf be finished by Wednesday before Whitsuntide, that I swear.”

“Secondly, by my Lady’s leave, that she shall not be compelled to eat any thing contrary to our law.”

“I have no desire to compel her. But what will she eat? I must know that I can give her something.”

“Any kind of vegetables, bread, milk, and eggs.”

“Lenten fare. Very well. I swear it.”

“Lastly, that my Lady will appoint her a place in her own apartments, or in those of the damsel her daughter, and that she may never stir out of that tower while she remains in the Castle.”

“Poor young prisoner! Good. If thou art so anxious to consign thy child to hard durance, I will swear to keep her in it.”

“May my Lady’s servant ask where she will be?”

The Countess laughed merrily. “This priceless treasure of thine! She might be a king’s daughter. I will put her in my daughter’s ante-chamber, just behind thee.”

The pedlar walked into the ante-chamber, and inspected it carefully, to the great amusement of the ladies.

“It is enough,” he said, returning. “Lady, my child is not a king’s daughter, but she is the dearest treasure of her old father’s heart.”

The old man had well spoken, for his words, Jew as he was—a creature, according to the views of that day, born to be despised and ill-treated—went straight to the tender heart of the Princess Margaret.

“’Tis but nature,” she said softly. “Have no fear, old man: I will take care of thy treasure. What is her name?”

“Will my Lady suffer her grateful servant to kiss her robe? I am Abraham of Norwich, and my daughter’s name is Belasez.”

Singular indeed were the Jewish names common at this time, beyond a very few Biblical ones, of which the chief were Abraham, Aaron, and Moses—the last usually corrupted to Moss or Mossy. They were, for men,—Delecresse (“Dieu le croisse”), Ursel, Leo, Hamon, Kokorell, Emendant, and Bonamy:—for women,—Belasez (“Belle assez”), Floria, Licorice (these three were the most frequent), Esterote, Cuntessa, Belia, Anegay, Rosia, Genta, and Pucella. They used no surnames beyond the name of the town in which they lived.

“And what years has she?” asked the Countess.

“Seventeen, if it please my Lady.”

“Good. I hope she will be clever and tractable.—Now, Madge, what do you want?”

The Princess Marjory wanted a silver necklace, a piece of green silk for a state robe, and some unshorn wool for an every-day dress, beside lamb’s fur and buttons for trimming. Buttons were fashionable ornaments in those days, and it was not unusual to spend six or eight dozen upon one dress.

“Now, Magot, let me see for thee,” said her mother. “Thy two woollen gowns must be shorn for winter, and thou wilt want a velvet one for gala days: but there is time for that by and bye. What thou needest now is a blue Cyprus (crape) robe for thy best summer one, two garments of coloured thread for common, a silk hood, one or two lawn wimples (Note 5), and a pair of corsets. (Note 6.) Thou mayest have a new armilaus (Note 7) if thou wilt.”

“And may I not have a new mantle?” was Margaret’s answer, in a coaxing tone.

“A new mantle? Thou unconscionable Magot! Somebody will be ruined before thy wants are supplied.”

“And a red velvet gipcière, Lady? And I did so want a veil of sendal of Inde!”

“Worse and worse! Come, old man, prithee, measure off the Cyprus, and look out the wimples quickly, or this damsel of mine will leave me never a farthing in my pocket.”

“And Eva wants a new gown,” suggested Margaret.

“Oh yes!” said the Countess, laughing. “And so does Marie, and so does Doucebelle, I suppose,—and Hawise, I have no doubt. I shall be completely ruined among you!”

“But my Lady will give me the sendal of Inde? I will try to do without the gipcière.”

A gipcière was a velvet bag dependent from the waist, which served as a purse or pocket, as occasion required.

“Magot, hast thou no conscience? Come, then, old man, let this unreasonable damsel see thy gipcières. And if she must have some sendal of Inde, well,—fate is inevitable. What was the other thing, Magot? A new mantle? Oh, shocking! I can’t afford that. What is the price of thy black cloth, old man?”

It was easy to see that Margaret would have all she chose to ask, without much pressure. Some linen dresses were also purchased for the young wards of the Earl,—a blue fillet for Eva, and a new barm-cloth (apron) for Marie; and the Countess having chosen some sendal and lawn for her own use, the purchases were at last completed.

The old Jew, helped by Delecresse, repacked his wares with such care as their delicacy and costliness required, and the Countess desired Levina to summon the varlets to bear the heavy burden down to the gate.

“Peace wait on my Lady!” said the pedlar, bowing low as he took leave. “If it please the Holy One, my Belasez shall be here at my Lady’s command before a week is over.”

Note 1. This was the answer given to her judges, four hundred years later, by Leonora Galigai, when she was asked to confess what kind of magic she had employed to obtain the favour of Queen Maria de’ Medici.

Note 2. The Earl’s quotation from Scripture was extremely free, combining Matthew eleven verse 25 with the substance, but not the exact words, of several passages in the Psalms. Nor did Friar Matthew Paris know much better, since he refers to it all as “that passage in the Gospels.”

Note 3. King Henry was given to allusions of this class, to the revered memory of his excellent father.

Note 4. “Oh, delightful!” The modern schoolboy’s “How jolly” is really a corruption of this. The companion regret was “Ha, chétife!”—(“Oh, miserable!”)

Note 5. The wimple covered the neck, and was worn chiefly out of doors. Ladies from a queen to a countess wore it coming over the chin; women of less rank, beneath.

Note 6. Tight-lacing dates from about the twelfth century.

Note 7. A short cloak, worn by both sexes, ornamented with buttons.

Chapter Three.

Belasez.

“And, born of Thee, she may not always take
Earth’s accents for the oracles of God.”
Felicia Hemans.

The last word had scarcely left the pedlar’s lips, when the door of the ante-chamber was flung open, and a boy of Margaret’s age burst into the room.

He was fair-haired and bright-faced, with a slender, elegant figure, and all his motions were very agile. Beginning with—“I say, Magot!”—he stopped suddenly both tongue and feet as he caught sight of the Countess.

“Well, Sir Richard?” suggested that lady.

“I cry you mercy, Lady. I did not know you were here.”

“And if you had done—what then?”

“Why, then,” answered Richard, laughing but colouring, “I suppose I ought to have come in more quietly.”

“Ah! Did you ever read with Father Nicholas about an old man who said that the Athenians knew what was right, but the Lacedemonians did it?”

“Your pardon, Lady! I always forget what I read with Father Nicholas.”

“I should suppose so. I am afraid there is Athenian blood in your veins, Sir Richard!”

“Lady, if it stand with your pleasure, there is none but true Christian blood in my veins!” was the proud reply.

“Pure foy! If you are so proud of your blood, I fear you will disdain to do what I was about to bid you.”

“I shall never disdain to execute the commands of a fair lady.”

“My word, Sir Richard, but you are growing a courtly knight! You see that Jew boy has left his cap behind. As there are none here but damsels, I was thinking I would ask you to call him back to fetch it.”

“He shall have it—a Jew boy! I’ll take the tongs, then!”

The next minute Delecresse, who was just turning back to fetch the forgotten cap, heard a boyish voice calling to him out of a window, and looking up, saw his cap held out in the tongs.

“Here, thou cur of a Jew! What dost thou mean, to leave thy heathen stuff in the chamber of a noble damsel?”

And the cap was dropped into the courtyard, with such good aim that it first hit Delecresse on the head, and then lodged itself in the midst of a puddle.

Delecresse, without uttering a word, yet flushing red even through his dark complexion, deliberately stooped, recovered his wet cap, and placed it on his head, pressing it firmly down as if he wished to impart the moisture to his hair. Then he turned and looked fixedly at Richard, who was watching him with an amused face.

“That wasn’t a bad shot, was it?” cried the younger lad.

“Thank you,” was the answer of Delecresse. “I shall know you again!”

The affront was a boyish freak, perpetrated rather in thoughtlessness than malice: but the tone of the answer, however simple the words, manifestly breathed revenge. Richard de Clare was not an ill-natured boy. But he had been taught from his babyhood that a Jew was the scum of the earth, and that to speak contumeliously to such was so far from being wrong, that it absolutely savoured of piety. Jews had crucified Christ. To have aided one of them, or to have been over civil to him, would in a Christian have been considered as putting a slight upon his Lord. There was, therefore, some excuse for Richard, educated as he had been in this belief.

Delecresse, on the contrary, had been as carefully brought up in the opposite conviction. To him it was the Gentile who was the refuse of humanity, and it was a perpetual humiliation to be forced to cringe to, and wait upon, such contemptible creatures. Moreover, the day was coming when their positions should be reversed; and who could say how near it was at hand? Then the proud Christian noble would be the slave of the despised Jew pedlar, and—thought Delecresse, grinding his teeth—he at least would take care that the Christian slave should indulge no mistakes on that point.

To both the youths Satan was whispering, and by both he was obeyed. And each of them was positively convinced that he was serving God.

The vengeful words of Delecresse made no impression whatever on the young Earl of Gloucester. He would have laughed with scorn at the mere idea that such an insect as that could have any power to hurt him. He danced back to Margaret’s bower, where, in a few minutes, he, she, Marie, and Eva were engaged in a merry round game.

Beside the three girls who were in the care of the Countess, Earl Hubert had also three boy-wards—Richard de Clare, heir of the earldom of Gloucester; Roger de Mowbray, heir of the barony of Mowbray, now about fifteen years old; and John de Averenches (or Avranches), the son of a knight. With these six, the Earl’s two sons, his daughter, and his daughter-in-law, there was no lack of young people in the Castle, of whom Sir John de Burgh, the eldest, was only twenty-nine.

The promise made by Abraham of Norwich was faithfully kept. A week had not quite elapsed when Levina announced to the Countess that the Jew pedlar and the maiden his daughter awaited her pleasure in the court. The Countess desired her to bring them up immediately to Margaret’s bower, whither she would go herself to meet them.

Margaret and Doucebelle had just come in from a walk upon the leads—the usual way in which ladies took airings in the thirteenth century. Indeed, the

leads were the only safe and proper place for a young girl’s out-door recreation. The courtyard was always filled by the household servants and soldiers of the garrison: and the idea of taking a walk outside the precincts of the Castle, would never have occurred to anybody, unless it were to a very ignorant child indeed. There were no safe highroads, nor quiet lanes, in those days, where a maiden might wander without fear of molestation. Old ballads are full of accounts of the perils incurred by rash and self-sufficient girls who ventured alone out of doors in their innocent ignorance or imprudent bravado. The roadless wastes gave harbour to abundance of fierce small animals and deadly vipers, and to men worse than any of them.

Old Abraham, cap in hand, bowed low before the Princess, and presented a closely-veiled, graceful figure, as the young broideress whom he had promised.

“Lay thy veil aside, my maid,” said the Countess, with most unusual kindness, considering that it was a Jewess to whom she spoke.

The maiden obeyed, and revealed to the eyes of the Princess and her damsels a face and figure of such extreme loveliness that she no longer wondered at the anxiety of her father to provide for her concealment. But the beauty of Belasez was of an entirely different type from that of the Christians around her. Her complexion was olive, her hair raven black, her eyes large and dark, now melting as if in liquid light, now brilliant and full of fire. And if Margaret looked two years beyond her real age, Belasez looked more like seven.

“Thou knowest wherefore thou art come hither?” asked the Countess, smiling complacently on the vision before her.

“To broider for my Lady,” said Belasez, in a low, clear, musical voice.

“And wilt thou obey my orders?”

“I will obey my Lady in every thing not forbidden by the holy law.”

“Well, I think we shall agree, my maid,” returned the Countess, whose private views respecting religious tolerance were something quite extraordinary for the time at which she lived. “I would not willingly coerce any person’s conscience. But as I do not know thy law, thou wilt have to tell me if I should desire thee to do some forbidden thing.”

“My Lady is very good to her handmaiden,” said Belasez.

“Margaret, take the maid into thy wardrobe for a little while, until she has dined; and after that I will show her what I require. She will be glad of rest after her journey.”

Margaret obeyed, and a motion of her mother’s hand sent Doucebelle after her. The daughter of the house sat down on the settle which stretched below the window, and Doucebelle followed her example: but Belasez remained standing.

“Come and sit here by me,” said Margaret to the young Jewess. “I want to talk to thee.”

Belasez obeyed in silence.

“Art thou very tired with thy journey?”

“Not now, damsel, I thank you. We have come but a short stage this morning.”

“Art thou fond of broidery?”

“I love everything beautiful.”

“And nothing that is not beautiful?”

“I did not say that, damsel.” Belasez’s smile showed a perfect row of snow-white teeth.

“Am I fair enough to love?” asked Margaret laughingly. She had a good deal of her mother’s easy tolerance of differences, and all her sweet affability to those beneath her.

“Ah, my damsel, true love regards the heart rather than the face, methinks. I cannot see into my damsel’s heart in one minute, but I should think it was not at all difficult to love her.”

“I want every body to love me,” said Margaret. “And I love every body.”

“If my damsel would permit me to counsel her,—love every body by all means: but do not let her want every body to love her.”

“Why not?”

“Because I fear my damsel will meet with disappointment.”

“Oh, I hate to be disappointed. Hast thou brought thine image with thee?”

To Margaret this question sounded most natural. In the first place, she could not conceive the idea of prayer without something visible to pray to: and in the second, she had been taught that all Jews and Saracens were idolaters. She was surprised to see the blood rush to Belasez’s dark cheek, and the fire flash from her eyes.

“Will my damsel allow me to ask what she means? I do not understand.”

“Wilt thou not want to say thy prayers whilst thou art here?” responded Margaret, who was at least as much puzzled as Belasez.

“Most certainly! but not to an image!”

“Oh, do you Jews sometimes pray without images?”

“Does my damsel take us for idolaters?”

“Yes, I was always told so,” said Margaret, looking astonished.

The fire died out of Belasez’s eyes. She saw that Margaret had simply made an innocent mistake from sheer ignorance of the question.

“My damsel has been misinformed. We Israelites hold all images to be wicked, and abhorrent to the holy law.”

“Then thou wilt not want to set up an idol for thyself anywhere?”

“Most assuredly not.”

“I hope I have not vexed thee,” said Margaret, ingenuously. “I did not know.”

“My damsel did not vex me, as soon as I saw that she did not know.”

“And wouldst thou not like better to be a Christian than a Jew?” demanded Margaret, who could not imagine the possibility of any feeling on Belasez’s part regarding her nationality except those of regret and humiliation.

But the answer, though it came in a single syllable, was unmistakable. Intense pride, passionate devotion to her own creed and people, the deepest scorn and loathing for all others, combined to make up the tone of Belasez’s “No!”

“How very odd!” exclaimed Margaret, looking at her, with an expression of great astonishment upon her own fair, open features.

“Is it odd to my damsel? Does she know what her question sounded like, to me?”

“Tell me.”

“‘Would she not like better to be a villein scullion-maid, than to be the daughter of my noble Lord of Kent?’”

“But Jews are not noble!” cried Margaret, gazing in bewilderment from Belasez to Doucebelle, as if she expected one of them to help her out of the puzzle.

“Not in the world’s estimate,” answered Belasez. “There is One above the world.”

Before Margaret could reply, the deep bass “Ding-dong!” of the great dinner-bell rang through the Castle, and Levina made her appearance at the door.

“My Lady has given me charge concerning thee, Belasez,” she said, rather coldly addressing the Jewess. “Thou wilt come with me.”

With a graceful reverence to Margaret, Belasez turned, and followed Levina.

At that date, no titles except those of nobility or office were usual in England. Any woman below a peer’s daughter, was addressed by her Christian name or by that of her husband. That is to say, the unmarried woman was simply “Joan;” the married one was “John’s Wife.”

Belasez was gifted by nature with a large amount of that kind of intuition which has been defined as feeling the pressure of other people’s atmosphere. It may be a gift which augurs delicacy and refinement, but it always brings discomfort to its possessor. She knew instinctively, and in a moment, that Levina was likely to be her enemy.

It was true. Levina was a prey to that green-eyed monster which sports itself with the miseries of humanity. She had been the best broideress in the Castle until that day. And now she felt herself suddenly supplanted by a young thing of barely more than half her age and experience, who was called in, forsooth, to do something which it was imagined that Levina could not do. What business had the Countess to suppose there was any thing she could not do?—or, to want something out of her power to provide? Was there the slightest likelihood, thought Levina, flaring up, that this scrap of a creature could work better than herself?—a mere chit of a child (Levina was past thirty), with a complexion like the fire-bricks (Levina’s resembled putty), and hair the colour of nasty sloes (Levina’s was nearer that of a tiger-lily), and great staring eyes like horn lanterns! The Countess was the most unreasonable, and Levina the most cruelly-outraged, of all the women that had ever held a needle since those useful instruments were originally invented.

Levina did not put her unparalleled wrongs into words. It would have been easier for Belasez to get on with her if she had done so. She held her head up, and snorted like an impatient horse, as she stalked through the door into the ante-chamber.

“This is where thou art to be,” she snapped in a staccato tone.

Any amount of personal slight and scorn was merely what Belasez had been accustomed to receive from Christians ever since she had left her cradle. The disdain of Levina, therefore, though she could hardly enjoy it, made far less impression on her than the unaccountable kindliness of the royal ladies.

“The Lady bade me ask what thou wouldst eat?” demanded Levina in the same tone as before.

“I thank thee. Any thing that has not had life.”

“What’s that for?” came in shorter snaps than ever.

“It would not be kosher.”

“Speak sense! What does the vermin mean?”

“I mean, it would not be killed according to our law.”

“Suppose it wasn’t I—what then?”

“Then I must not eat it.”

“Stupid, silly, ridiculous stuff! May I be put in a pie, if I know what the Lady was thinking about, when she brought in such road-dirt as this! And my damsel sets herself above us all, forsooth! She must have her meat served according to some law that nobody ever heard of, least of all the Lord King’s noble Council: and she must have a table set for her all by herself, as though she were a sick queen. Pray you, my noble Countess, would you eat in gold or silver?—and how many varlets shall serve to carry your dainty meat?—and is your sweet Grace served upon the knee, or no? I would fain have things done as may pleasure my right noble Lady.”

Belasez answered as she usually disposed of similar affronts,—by treating them as if they were offered in genuine courtesy, but with a faint ring of satire beneath her tone.

“I thank you. I should prefer wood, or pewter if it please you: and I should think one varlet might answer. I was never served upon the knee yet, and it will scarcely be necessary now.”

Levina gave a second and stronger snort, and disappeared down the stairs. In a few minutes she made her reappearance, carrying in one hand a plate of broiled ham, and in the other a piece of extremely dry and rather mouldy bread.

“Here is my gracious damsel’s first course! Fulk le Especer was so good as to tell me that folks of her sort are mighty fond of ham; so I took great care to bring her some. There’ll be sauce with the next.”

That there would be sauce—of one species—with every course served to her in that house, Belasez was beginning to feel no doubt. Yet however Levina chose to behave to her, the young Jewess maintained her own dignity. She quietly put aside the plate of ham, and, cutting off the mouldy pieces, ate the dry bread without complaint Belasez’s kindly and generous nature was determined that the Countess, who had been so much kinder to her than at that time Christians usually were to Jews, should hear no murmuring word from her unless it came to actual starvation.

Levina’s sauce presented itself unmistakably with the second course, which proved to be a piece of apple-pie, swimming in the strongest vinegar. Though it must have set her teeth on edge, Belasez consumed the pie in silence, avoiding the vinegar so far as she could, and entertained while she did so by Levina’s assurances that it delighted her to see how completely Belasez enjoyed it.

The third article, according to Levina, was cheese: but the first mouthful was enough to convince the persecuted Jewess that soft soap would have been a more correct epithet. She quietly let it alone.

“Ha, chétife! I am sadly in fear that my sweetest damsel does not like our Suffolk cheese?” said Levina in a most doleful tone.

“Is it manufactured in this county?” asked Belasez very coolly; for, in 1234, all soaps were of foreign importation. “I thought it tasted more like the French make.”

Levina vanished down the stairs, but her suppressed laughter was quite audible. She came up again with two more plates, and informed Belasez that they constituted the last course. One of them was filled with chicken-bones, picked exceedingly clean: the other with a piece of sweet cake, over which had been poured some very hot saline compound which by no means harmonised with the cake, but set Belasez’s throat on fire. She managed, however, to eat it, thinking that she would get little food of any kind if she did not: and Levina departed with the plates, remarking that it had done her good to see the excellent meal which Belasez had made. It was a relief to the girl to be left alone: for solitude had no terrors for her, and Levina was certainly not an enjoyable companion. After half-an-hour’s quiet, Margaret and Eva entered the ante-chamber.

“Hast thou dined, Belasez?” asked Margaret, kindly.

“I thank my damsel, yes.”

“Did Levina bring thee such dishes as thou mightest eat?”

“According to our law? Oh yes.”

It was rather a relief to Belasez that the question took that form.

“Then that is all right,” said Margaret, innocently, and passed on into her own room.

The Countess’s step was heard approaching, but just before entering she stopped at the head of the stairs.

“Thou hast given the girl her dinner, Levina?”

“Oh yes, my Lady!”

“What had she?”

“I brought her apple-pie, if it please my Lady, and cheese, and gateau de Dijon, and ham, and—a few other little things: but she would not touch the ham, and scarcely the cheese.”

“Thou hast forgotten, Levina: I told thee no meat of any kind, nor fish; and I believe no Jew will touch ham. I did not know they objected to cheese. But had she enough? Apple-pie and gateau de Dijon make but a poor dinner.”

And without questioning Levina further, the Countess went on and addressed Belasez direct.

“My maid, hast thou fared well? I fear Levina did not bring thee proper things.”

Belasez hesitated. She was very unwilling to say no: and how could she in conscience say yes?

“They were according to our law, I thank my Lady,—all but the ham. That, under her gracious leave, I must decline.”

“But thou didst not take the cheese?”

“No,—with my Lady’s leave.”

“Was it not in accordance with thy law, or didst thou not like it?”

“If my Lady will pardon me,” said poor Belasez, driven into a corner, “I did not like it.”

“What kind was it?”

“Levina said it was Suffolk cheese.” Belasez’s conscience rather smote her in giving this answer.

“Ah!” responded the unconscious Countess, “it is often hard, and everybody does not like it, I know.”

Belasez was silent beyond a slight reverence to show that she heard the observation.

“But hast thou had enough?” pursued the Countess, still unsatisfied.

“I am greatly obliged to my Lady, and quite ready to serve her,” was the evasive reply.

The Countess looked hard at Belasez, but she said no more. She despatched Levina for the scarf which was to be copied, and gave the young Jewess her instructions. The exquisite work which grew in Belasez’s skilful hands evidently delighted the Countess. She was extremely kind, and the reserved but sensitive nature of Belasez went out towards her in fervent love.

To Margaret, the Jewish broideress was an object of equal mystery and interest. She would sit watching her work for long periods. She noticed that Belasez ignored the existence of her private oratory, made no reverence to the gilded Virgin which stood on a bracket in her wardrobe, and passed the bénitier without vouchsafing the least attention to the holy water. Manifestly, Jews did not believe in gilded images and holy water. But then, in what did they believe? Had they any faith in any thing? Belasez had owned to saying her prayers, and she acknowledged the existence of some law which she felt herself bound to obey. But whose law was it?—and to whom did she pray? These thoughts seethed in Margaret’s brain till at last, one afternoon when she sat watching the embroidery, they burst forth into speech, “Belasez!”

“What would my damsel?”

“Belasez, what dost thou believe?”

The Jewess looked up in surprise.

“I am not sure that I understand my damsel’s question. Will she condescend to explain?”

“I mean, what god dost thou worship?”

“There is but one God,” answered Belasez, solemnly.

“That I believe, too: but we do not worship the same God, do we?”

“I think we do—to a certain extent.”

“But there is a difference between us. What is the difference?”

Belasez seemed to hesitate.

“Don’t be afraid, but speak out!” said Margaret, eagerly.

“If I say what my Lady would not approve, would it be right in me?”

“My Lady and mother will not mind. Go on!”

“Damsel, I think the difference touches Him who is the Sent of God, and the Son of the Blessed. We believe in Him, as well as you. But we believe that He is yet to come, and is to be the salvation of Israel. You believe,”—Belasez’s words came slowly, as if dragged from her—“that He is come, long ago; and you think He will save all men.”

“But that is our Lord Christ, surely?” said Margaret.

“You call Him so,” was Belasez’s reply. “But He did come!” said Margaret, in a puzzled tone.

“A man came, undoubtedly, who claimed to be the Man who was to come. But was the claim a true one?”

“I have always been told that it was!”

“And I have always been told that it was not.”

“Then how are we to find out which is true?” Belasez spread her hands out with a semi-Eastern gesture, which indicated hopeless incapacity, of some sort.

“Damsel, do not ask me. The holy prophets told our fathers of old time that so long as Israel walked contrary to the Holy One, so long should they wander over the earth, forsaken exiles, and be punished seven times for their sins. Are we not exiles? Is He not punishing us? Our holy and beautiful house is a desolation; our land is overthrown by strangers. Yet we are no idolaters; we are no Sabbath-breakers; we do not profane the name of the Blessed. Do you think I never ask myself for what sin it is that we are thus cast away from the presence of our King? In old days it was always for such sins as I have named: it cannot be that now. Is it—O Abraham our father! can it be?—that He has come, the King of Israel, and we have not known Him? Damsel, there are thousands of the sons of Israel that have asked that question! And then—”

Belasez stopped suddenly.

“Go on!” urged Margaret. “What then?”

“I shall say what my damsel will not wish to hear, if I do go on.”

“But I wish very much to hear it.”

“And then we look around on you, who call yourselves servants of Him whom ye say is come. We ask you to tell us what you have learned of Him. And ye answer us with the very things which the King of Israel solemnly forbade. Ye point us to images of dead men, and ye hold up before us a goddess, a fair dead woman, and ye say, These are they whom ye shall serve! And we answer, If these things be what ye have learned from him that is come, then he never can be the Sent of God. God forbade all idolatry, and all image-making: if he taught it, can he be Messiah? This is why in all the ages we have stood aloof. We might have received him, we might have believed him,—but for this.”

“But I do not know,” said Margaret, thoughtfully, “that holy Church lays much stress on images. I should think, if ye prefer to pray without them, she would allow you to do so. I cannot understand how ye can pray without them; for what is there to pray to? It is your infirmity, I suppose.”

“Ah, Damsel,” said Belasez with a sad smile, “this seems to you a very, very little matter! How shall a Jew and a Christian ever understand each other? For it is life or death to us. It is a question of obeying, or of disobeying—not of doing something we fancy, or do not fancy.”

“Yes, but holy Church would decide it for you,” urged Margaret, earnestly.

“Damsel, your words are strange to my ears. The Holy One (to whom be praise!) has decided it long ago. ‘Ye shall not make unto you any graven image: ye shall not bow down to them, nor worship them.’ The command is given. What difference can it make to us, that the thing you call the Church dares to disregard it? I scarcely understand what ‘the Church’ is. If I rightly know what my damsel means, it signifies all the Christians. And Christians are Gentiles. How can the sons of Israel take laws from them? And to speak as if they could abrogate the law of Him that sitteth in the heavens, before whom they are all less than nothing and vanity! It is a strange tongue in which my damsel speaks. I do not understand it.”

Neither did Margaret understand Belasez. She sat and looked at her, with her mind in bewildered confusion. To her, the authority of the Church was paramount,—was the only irrefragable thing. And here was something which looked like another Church, setting itself up with some unaccountable and unheard-of claim to be older, truer, better!—something which denied that the Church—with horror be it whispered!—had any right to make laws!—which referred to a law, and a Legislator, so high above the Church that it scarcely regarded the Church as worth mention in the matter at all! Margaret felt stunned.

“But God speaks through the Church!” she gasped.

“If that were so, they would speak the same thing,” was Belasez’s unanswerable response.

Margaret felt pushed into a corner, and did not know what to say next. The difference between her point of view and that of Belasez was so vast, that considerations which would have silenced any one else at once passed as the idle wind by her. And Margaret could not see how to alter it.

“I must ask Father Nicholas to show thee how it is,” she said at last in a kindly manner. “I am only an ignorant girl. But he can explain to thee.”

“Can he?” said Belasez. “What explanations of his, or any one’s, can prove that man may please himself about obeying his Maker? He will tell me—does my damsel think I have never listened to a Christian priest?—he will tell me to offer incense to yonder gilded image. Had I not better offer it to myself? I am a living daughter of Israel: is that not better than the stone image of a dead one?”

“Better than our blessed Lady!” cried the horrified Margaret.

“Perhaps, if she were here, a living woman, she might be the better woman of the two,” said Belasez, coolly. “But a living woman, I am sure, is better than a stone image, which can neither see, nor hear, nor feel.”

“Oh, but don’t you know,” said Margaret eagerly, as a bright idea occurred to her, “that we have the holy Father,—the Pope? He keeps the Church right; and our Lord commissioned Saint Peter, who was the first Pope, to teach every body and promised to guard him from all error.”

Margaret was mentally congratulating herself on this brilliant solution of all difficulties. Belasez looked up thoughtfully. “But did He promise to guard all the successors?”

“Oh, of course!”

“I wonder—supposing He were the Messiah—if He did,” said Belasez. “Because I have sometimes thought that might explain it.”

“What might explain it?”

“My damsel knows that the disciples of great teachers often corrupt their master’s teaching, and in course of time they may come to teach doctrines quite different from his. It has struck me sometimes whether it might be so with you: that your Master was truly the Sent of God, and that you have so corrupted His doctrines that there is very little likeness left now. There must be very little, if He spoke according to the will of the Holy One.”

“But the Church never changes,” said Margaret. “Then He could not be true,” said Belasez. “Oh, but Father Nicholas says the Church develops! She always teaches the truth, but she unfolds it more and more as time goes on.”

“The truth is one, my damsel. It maybe more. But it can never be different and contrary.”

“But we change,” urged Margaret, taking the last weapon out of her quiver. “We may need one thing to-day, and another to-morrow.”

“We may. And if the original command had been even, ‘Ye shall make no image but one,’ I should think it might then, as need were, have been altered to, ‘Ye may now make a thousand images.’ But being, ‘Ye shall make none’ it cannot be altered. That would be to alter His character who is in all His universe the only unchangeable One.”

Margaret sat and watched the progress of the embroidery, but she said no more.

Chapter Four.

The Time of Jacob’s Trouble.

“I know that the thorny path I tread
Is ruled with a golden line;
And I know that the darker life’s tangled thread,
The brighter the rich design.
“For I see, though veiled from my mortal sight,
God’s plan is all complete;
Though the darkness at present be not light,
And the bitter be not sweet.”

The course of public events at that time was of decidedly a stirring character. The public considered that four mock suns which had been seen during the previous winter, two snakes fighting in the sea off the south coast, and fifteen days’ continuous thunder in the following March, were portents sufficiently formidable to account for any succeeding political events whatever. The Church was busy introducing the Order of Saint Francis into England. The populace were discovering how to manufacture cider, hitherto imported: and were, quite unknown to themselves, laying the foundation of their country’s commercial greatness by breaking into the first vein of coal at Newcastle. In fact, the importance of this last discovery was so little perceived, that a hundred and fifty years were suffered to elapse before any advantage was taken of it.

Belasez’s work was done, and entirely to the satisfaction of the Countess. So much, also, did the Princess Marjory admire it, that she requested another scarf might be worked for her, to be finished in time for her approaching marriage. She was now affianced to Gilbert de Clare, the new Earl of Pembroke. It was not without a bitter pang that Marjory had resigned her proud hope of wearing the crown of England, and had consented to become merely the wife of an English noble. But the crown was gone from her beyond recall. The fickle-hearted King, who had been merely attracted for a season by her great beauty, was now as eagerly pursuing a foreign Countess, Jeanne of Ponthieu, whom report affirmed to be equally beautiful: and perhaps Marjory was a little consoled, though she might not even admit it to herself, by the fact that Earl Gilbert was at once a much richer man than the King, and very much better-looking. She made him a good wife when the time came, and she grieved bitterly over his loss, when six years afterwards he was killed in a tournament at Hereford.

Marjory was not so particular as her sister about the work being done under her own eyes. She left pattern and colours to Belasez’s taste, only expressing her wish that red and gold should predominate, as they were the tints alike of the arms of Scotland and of Clare. The Princess was to be married on the first of August, and Belasez promised that her father should deliver the scarf during his customary hawker’s round in July.

The young Jewess had suffered less than might have been supposed from Levina. The Countess, without condescending to assign any reason, had quietly issued orders that Belasez’s meals should be served in the ante-chamber, half an hour before the general repast was ready in the hall. In the presence of the young ladies, and not unfrequently of the Countess herself, Levina deemed it prudent to bring up apple-pie without sauce piquante, and to serve gateaux unmixed with pepper or anchovies.

Abraham became eloquent in his thanks for the kindness shown to his daughter, and the tears were in Belasez’s eyes when she took leave.

“Farewell, my maid,” said the Countess, addressing the latter. “Thou art a fair girl, and thou hast been a good girl. I shall miss thy pretty face in Magot’s ante-chamber. We shall meet again, I doubt not. Such work as thine is not to be lightly esteemed.—Wilt thou grudge thy treasure to me, if I ask for her again?” she added, turning to Abraham with a smile.

“Surely not, my Lady! My Lady has been as an angel of God to my darling.”

“And remember, both of you, that if ye come into any trouble—as may be—and thou seekest safe shelter for thy bird, I will give it her at any time, in return for her lovely work.”

This was a greater boon than it may appear. Troubles were only too likely to assail a Jewish household, and to know a place where Belasez could seek shelter and be certain of finding it, was a comfort indeed, and might at any hour be a most terrible necessity.

Abraham kissed the robe of the Countess, and poured out eloquent blessings on her. Belasez kissed her hand and that of Margaret: but the tears choked the girl’s voice as she turned to follow her father.

The arguments against idolatry which Margaret had heard from Belasez were ghosts easily laid by Father Nicholas. A few vague platitudes concerning the supreme authority committed to the Apostle Peter, and through him to the Papacy (Father Nicholas discreetly left both points unencumbered by evidence),—the wickedness of listening to sceptical reasonings, and the happiness of implicit obedience to holy Church,—were quite enough to reduce Belasez’s arguments, as they remained in Margaret’s mind, to the condition of uncomfortable reminiscences, which, being also wicked, it was best to forget as soon as possible.

But there had been one listener to that conversation, of whom neither party took account, and who could not forget it. This was Doucebelle de Vaux. In her brain the words of the young Jewess took root and germinated, but so silently, that no one suspected it but herself. Father Nicholas had not the faintest idea of the importance of the question, when one morning, during the Latin lesson which he administered twice a week to the young ladies of the Castle, Doucebelle asked him the precise meaning of adoro.

“It means, in its original, to speak to or accost any one,” said the priest; “but being now taken into the holy service of religion, it signifies to pray, to supplicate; and, thence derived—to worship, to bow one’s self down.”

“And,—if I do not trouble you too much, Father,—would you please to tell me the difference between adoro and colo?”

Father Nicholas was a born philologist, though in his day there was no appellation for the science. To be asked any question involving a derivation or comparison of words, was to him as a trumpet to a war-horse.

“My daughter, it is pleasure, not trouble, to me, to answer such questions as these. Colo is a word which comes from the Greek, but is now obsolete in that tongue, wherein it seems to have had the meaning of feed or tend. Transferred to the Latin, it signifies to cultivate, exercise, practise, or cherish,—say rather, in any sense, to take pains about a thing: hence, used in the blessed service of religion, it is to regard, venerate, respect, or worship. Therefore cultus, which is the noun of this verb, signifies, when referred to things inanimate, tending or cultivation to things animate, education, culture; to God and the holy saints, reverence and worship. Dost thou now understand, my daughter?”

“I thank you very much, Father,” said Doucebelle, quietly; “I understand now.”

When she was alone, she put her information together, and thought it carefully over.

“Non adorabis ea, neque coles.”

Images, then, were not to be reverenced, either in heart or by bodily gesture. So said the version of Scripture made by Saint Jerome, and used and authorised by the Church. But how was it that the Church allowed these things to be done? Did she not know that Scripture forbade them? Or was she above all Scripture? Practically, it looked like it.

Yet how was it, if the Church were the mouthpiece of God, that the commands issued by the One were diametrically at variance with the recommendations given by the other? If God did not change,—if the Church did not change,—when had they been in accord, and how came they to differ?

Doucebelle had now reached a point where she could neither turn round nor go further. The more she cogitated on her problem, the more insoluble it appeared to her. Yet her instinctive feeling told her that to refer it to Father Nicholas would be of no service. He was one of the better class of priests,—a man of respectable character, with literary proclivities, which had in his case the effect of keeping him from vice on the one hand, and of deadening his spiritual sensibilities on the other. To him, the religion he taught, and had himself been taught, was sufficient for all necessities, and he could not understand any one wanting more. When a man’s mind has never been disturbed by the question, it is no cause for wonder that he has never sought for the answer.

That Father Nicholas would have listened to her, Doucebelle knew; for he was by no means an unkind or disobliging man. But she had sense to perceive that he was incapable of understanding her, and that his only idea of dealing with such queries would be not to solve, but to suppress them.

Doucebelle passed in mental review every person in the Castle: and every one, in turn, she dismissed as unsuitable for her purpose. The other chaplain of the Earl, Father Warner, was a stern, harsh man, of whom she, in common with all the young people, was very much afraid; she could not think of putting such queries to him. The chaplain of the Countess, Father Elias, had just resigned his post, and his successor had not yet been appointed. Master Aristoteles, the household physician, was an excellent authority on the virtues of comfrey or frogs’ brains, but a very poor resource on a theological question. The Earl was not at home. The Countess would be likely to enter into Doucebelle’s perplexities little better than Father Nicholas, and would playfully chide her for entertaining them. All the young people were too young except Sir John de Burgh and Hawise. Sir John had not an idea beyond war, politics, and falconry; and Hawise was accustomed to decline mental investigations altogether. So Doucebelle was shut up to her thoughts and her Psalter. Perhaps she might have been worse situated.

On the 7th of February 1235, died Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, “the enemy of all monks.” He had not, however, by any means been the enemy of all superstition. He was remarkably easy to take in by young women who had sustained personal encounters with Satan, nuns who had been favoured with apparitions of the Virgin, and monks to whom Saint Peter or Saint Lawrence had made revelations. It is little wonder that he was canonised, and perhaps not much that a touch of his bones, or a shred of his chasuble, were asserted to be possessed of miraculous power. A very different man filled the see of Lincoln in his stead. On the 3rd of June following, Robert Grosteste was appointed to the vacant episcopal throne.

Grosteste was a man who had learned his life-lessons, not from priest or monk, from Fathers or Decretals, but direct from God. I do not presume to say that he held no false doctrine, or that he made no mistakes: but considering the time at which he lived, and the corruption all around him, his teaching was singularly free from “wood, hay, stubble”—singularly clear, evangelical, and true to the one Foundation. Especially he set himself in opposition to the most popular doctrine of the day—that which was termed grace of congruity. And for a man in such a position to set himself in entire and active opposition to popular taste and belief, and to persevere in it, requires supplies either of vast pride from Satan, or of great grace from God. Grace of congruity is simply a variety of the old heresy of human merit. It clad its proud self in the silver robe of humility, by professing to possess only an imperfect degree of qualification for the reception of God’s grace. Grace of condignity, on the other hand, put itself on an equality with the Divine gift, by its pretension to possess that qualification to the uttermost.

The summer was chiefly occupied by pageants and feasts, for there were two royal marriages, that of the Princess Marjory of Scotland with Gilbert de Clare, and that of the Princess Isabel of England with the Emperor Frederic the Second of Germany. The latter ceremony did not take place in England, but the gorgeous preparations did: for Henry the Third, who delighted in spending money even more than in acquiring it, provided his sister with the most splendid trousseau ever known even for a royal bride. Her very cooking-vessels were all of silver, and her reins and bridles were worked in gold. She was married at Worms, in June: the wedding of the Princess Marjory took place on the first of August. Abraham and Belasez were faithful to their promises, and the beautiful scarf, wrought in scarlet and gold, was delivered into Marjory’s hands in time to be worn at the wedding. The young people of the Castle were naturally interested in the stereotyped rough and silly gambols which were then the invariable concomitants of a marriage: and the stocking, skilfully flung by Marie, hit Margaret on the head, to the intense delight of the merry group around her. The equally amusing work of cutting up the bride-cake revealed Richard de Clare in possession of the ring, supposed to indicate approaching matrimony, Marie of the silver penny which denoted riches, and Doucebelle of the thimble which doomed her to celibacy.

“There, now! ’Tis as plain to be seen as the church spire!” said Eva, clapping her hands. “Margaret is destined by fate to wed with my cousin Sir Richard.”

“Well, if ‘fate’ mean my wish and intention, so she is,” whispered the Countess to her sister the bride.

“Doth thy Lord so purpose it?” asked Marjory.

“Oh, hush!” responded the Countess, laughing. “He knows nothing about it, and I don’t intend that he shall, just yet. Trust me to bring things about.”

“But suppose he should be angry?”

“Pure foy! He is never angry with me. Oh, thou dost not understand, my dear Madge,—at present. Men always want managing. When thou hast been wed a year, thou wilt know more about it.”

“But can all women manage men?” asked Marjory in an amused tone.

“Ha, chétife! No, indeed. And there are some men who can’t be managed,—worse luck! But my Lord is not one of the latter, the holy saints be thanked.”

“And thou art one of the women who can manage men,” answered Marjory, laughing. “I wonder at thee, Magot, and have done so many times,—thou hast such a strange power of winning folks to thy will.”

“Well, that some have, and some have not. I have it, I know,” said the Countess, complacently. “But I will give thee a bit of counsel, Madge, which thou mayest find useful. First, have a will: let it be clear and distinct in thine own mind, what thou wouldst have done. And, secondly, let people see that thou takest quietly for granted that of course they will do it. There is a great deal in that, with some people. A weak will always bends to a strong.”

“But when two strong ones come in collision, how then?”

“Why, like wild animals,—fight it out, and discover which is the stronger.”

“A tournament of wills!” said Marjory. “I should hardly care to enter those lists, I think.”

The Countess laughed, and shook her head. She knew that among the strong-willed women Marjory was not to be reckoned.

A tournament of that class was being held all that summer between the regular priests and the newly-instituted Predicant Friars. The priests complained that the friars presumed to hear confessions in the churches, which it was the prerogative of the regularly appointed priests to do: and wrathfully alleged that the public were more ready to confess to these travelling mendicants than to the proper authorities. It is possible that the cause may be traced to that human proclivity which inclines a man to confide rather in a stranger whom he may never meet again, than in one who can remind him of uncomfortable facts at inconvenient times: but also it is possible that the people recognised in the teaching of the Minorite Friars, largely recruited as they were from the ranks of the Waldenses, somewhat more of that good news which Christ came to bring to men, than of the endless, unmeaning ceremonies which encumbered the doctrine of the regular priests.

The summer had given place to autumn. The courtyard of Bury Castle was strewn with golden and russet leaves; the Countess was preparing a new dress for the feast of Saint Luke. A foggy day had ended in a dark night, and Eva threw down her work and rethreaded her needle with a long-drawn sigh. “Tired of sewing, Eva?”

“Very tired, Lady. I almost wish buttons grew on robes, and required no sewing.”

“Lazy maiden!” said the Countess playfully. “Then I am lazy too,” interposed Margaret; “for I do hate sewing.”

“If it please the Lady,” said Levina’s voice at the door, “an old man and woman entreat the honour of laying a petition before her.”

“An old man and woman?—such a night as this! Do they come from the town?”

“If it please the Lady, I do not know.”

“Very well. If the warder thinks them not suspicious persons, they can come into the hall. I shall be down shortly.”

When the Countess descended, followed by Margaret and Doucebelle, she found her petitioners awaiting her. Most unsuspicious, harmless, feeble creatures they looked. The old man had tottered in as if barely able to stand; the old woman walked with a stout oaken staff, and was bent nearly double.

“Well, good people!—what would ye have?” asked the Countess.

In answer, the old man lifted his head, pulled away a mass of false grey hair and a wax mask from, his face, and the old Jew pedlar, Abraham of Norwich, stood before the astonished ladies.

“I am come,” he said in a voice broken by emotion, “to claim my Lady’s promise.”

“What promise, old man?”

“My Lady was pleased to say, that if the robbers broke into the nest, or the hawk hovered over it, the young bird should be safe in her care.”

“Thy daughter? I remember, I did say so. Where is she?”

At a signal from Abraham, the aged woman at his side suddenly straightened herself, and the removal of another wax mask and some false white hair revealed the beautiful face of Belasez.

“Welcome, my maiden,” said the Countess kindly. “And what troubles have assailed thee, old Abraham, which made this disguise and flight necessary?”

“My Lady is good to her poor servants,—may the Blessed One bind her in the bundle of life! But not all Christians are like her. Lady, there is this day sore trouble, and great rebuke and blasphemy, against the sons of Israel that dwell in Norwich. They accuse us of having kidnapped and crucified a Christian child. They lay too much to us, Lady,—too much! We have never done such a thing, nor thought of it. But the house of my Lady’s servant is despoiled, and his son ill-treated, and his brother in the gaol at Norwich for this cause: and to save his beautiful Belasez he has brought her to his gracious Lady. Will she give his bird shelter in her nest, according to her word?”

“Indeed I will,” answered the Countess. “Margaret, take the maid up to thine ante-chamber, and bid Levina bring her food. She must stay here a while. And thou, sit thou down, old Abraham, and rest and refresh thee.”

“Truly, my Lady is as one of the angels of the Holy One to her tried servants!” said Abraham thankfully.

Belasez kissed the hand of the Countess, and then turned and followed Margaret to the ante-chamber.

“Art thou very tired, Belasez?”

“Very, very weary, my Damsel. We have come fourteen miles on foot since yesterday.”

Very weary Belasez looked. Now that the momentary excitement of her arrival and reception was over, the light had died out of the languid eyes, and her head drooped as if she could scarcely hold it up.

“Go to bed,” said Margaret; “that is the best place for over-tired people.—Levina! My Lady and mother wills thee to bring the maid some food.”

Levina appeared at the door, with an expression of undisguised annoyance.

“Ha, chétife!—if here is not my Lady Countess Jew come again! What would it please her sweetest Grace to take?”

But Levina had forgotten, as older people sometimes do, that Margaret was no longer a child to be kept in silent subjection. Girls of fifteen—and she was nearly that now—were virtually women in the thirteenth century. Margaret turned to the scoffing Levina, with an air of dignified displeasure which rather startled the latter.

“Levina! thou hast forgotten thyself. Do as thou art bid.”

And Levina disappeared without venturing a reply.

“What have they done to thy brother, Belasez?” asked Margaret.

“They beat him sorely. Damsel, and turned him forth into the street.”

“Where did he go?”

“That is known to the Blessed One. Out in the fields somewhere. It is not the first time that a Jew hath lain hidden for a night or more, until the fury of the Christians should pass away.”

Doucebelle de Vaux was a grave and thoughtful girl, beyond her years. She sat silent now, trying to recall, from the stores of a memory not too well furnished, whether Christ, whom these Christians professed to follow, had ever treated people in such a manner as this. At length she remembered that she had seen a picture at Thetford of His driving sundry people out of the Temple with a scourge. But was that because they were Jews? Doucebelle thought not. She was too ignorant to be sure, but she fancied they had been doing something wrong.

“I should think,” said Margaret warmly, “that you Jews must hate us Christians.”

“Christians are not all alike,” said Belasez with a faint smile.

“But do you not hate us?” persisted Margaret.

“Delecresse does, I am afraid,” replied Belasez, colouring.

“But thyself?”

“No. O my Damsel, no!” She warmed into vivid life for an instant, to make this reply; then she sank back against the wall, apparently overpowered by utter weariness.

“I am glad of that,” said Margaret, with her usual outspoken earnestness.—“What can Levina be doing? Doucebelle, do go and see.—And hast thou been hard at work at Norwich all the summer, Belasez?”

“No, if it please my Damsel. I have dwelt all this summer at Lincoln, with my mother’s father.”

“‘The Devil overlooks Lincoln,’ they say,” remarked Margaret, laughingly. “I hope he did thee no mischief, Belasez. But, perhaps Jews do not believe in the Devil?”

“Ah! We have good cause to believe in the Devil,” answered Belasez gravely. “Nay, Damsel, he did me no mischief. Yet—what know I? The Holy One knoweth all things.”

Belasez’s tone struck Margaret as hinting at some one thing in particular. But she did not explain further. Perhaps she was too tired.

Doucebelle returned at this point, followed by Levina, who carried a plate of manchet-bread and a bowl of milk. And though Belasez did not know it, she owed thanks to Doucebelle that it was not skim milk. The young Jewess ate as if she were very faint as well as weary.

“Then hast thou come here all the way from Lincoln?” inquired Margaret when the bowl was emptied.

“If it please my Damsel, no. I had returned home only two days before the riot.”

“Is thy mother living?” asked Margaret abruptly.

“Yes. She abode at Lincoln with my grandfather. He is very old, and will not in likelihood live long. When he dies, my mother will come back to us.”

“Do go to bed, Belasez. Thou canst scarcely hold thine head up, nor thine eyes open,” said Margaret compassionately: and Belasez accepted the invitation with thanks. Doucebelle went with her, and silently noticed two facts: that Belasez stood for a few minutes in silent prayer, with her face turned to the wall, before she offered to undress; and that she was fast asleep almost as soon as her head had touched the pillow.

Doucebelle stood still and looked at the sleeping girl. Why was it so wicked to be a Jew? Had Belasez been a Christian of noble birth, or even of mean extraction, she would have been regarded as an ornament of any Court in Christendom. Some nobleman or knight would very soon have found that lovely face, and her refined and dignified manners were fit for any lady in the land. Why must she be regarded as despicable, and treated with abuse and loathing, merely because she had been born a Jewess? Of course Doucebelle knew the traditionary reason—because the Jews had crucified Christ. But Belasez had not been one of them. Why must she bear the shame of others’ sins? Did none of my ancestors, thought Doucebelle, ever do some wicked deed? Yet people do not despise me on that account. Why do they scorn her?

Belasez stirred in her sleep, and one or two broken words dropped from her unconscious lips. Greatly interested, and a little startled, Doucebelle bent over her. But she could make out nothing connected from the indistinct utterances. It sounded as if Belasez were dreaming about somebody whose face she could not see. “Hid faces,” Doucebelle heard her murmur. It was probably, she thought, some reminiscence connected with the tumults which had brought her to seek shelter at the Castle. Doucebelle drew the coverlet higher over the weary sleeper, and went to seek rest in her own bed.

Chapter Five.

Not Wisely.

“I love but one, and only one,—
O Damon, thou art he;
Love thou but one, and only one,
And let that one be me.”
(Note 1.)

The pedlar, Abraham, declined to remain at the Castle. There were plenty of places, he said, where an old man could be safe: it was quite another thing for a young girl. If his gracious Lady would of her bounty give his bird shelter until the riot and its consequences were over, and every thing peaceable again, Abraham would come and fetch her as soon as he deemed it thoroughly prudent. Meanwhile, Belasez could work for the Lady. The Countess was only too pleased to procure such incomparable embroidery on such easy terms. She set Belasez to work on the border of an armilaus, intended as a present for the new Queen: for the hitherto unmarriageable King had at last found a Princess to accept him. She was the second daughter of a penniless Provençal Count; but she was a great beauty, though an extremely young girl; and her eldest sister was Queen of France. She proved a costly bargain. Free from all visible vices except two, which, unfortunately, were two cultivated by Henry himself—unscrupulous acquisition and reckless extravagance—she nevertheless contrived to do terrible mischief, by giving her husband no advice in general, and bad advice whenever she gave it in particular. His ivy-like nature wanted a strong buttress upon which to lean; and Eleonore of Provence was neither stronger nor more stable than himself. Her one idea of life was to enjoy herself to the utmost. When she wanted a new dress, she had not the slightest notion of waiting till she had money to pay for it. What were the people of England in her eyes, but machines for making it—things to be taxed—a vast and inexhaustible treasury, of which you did but turn the handle, and coins came showering out?

So the tax-gatherers went grinding on, and the land cried to God, and the Court heard no sound. The man who was to be God’s avenger upon them was an obscure foreigner as yet. And the English noble who above all others was to aid him in that vengeance, was still only a fair-haired youth of fifteen, whose thoughts were busy with a very different subject. But out of the one, the other was to grow, watered by tears and blood.

He was standing—young Richard de Clare—in one of the recessed windows of the great hall, with Margaret beside him. They were talking in very low tones. Richard’s manner was pleading and earnest, while Margaret’s eyes were cast down, and she was diligently winding round her finger a shred of green sewing-silk, as though her most important concern were to make it go round a certain number of times.

It was the old story, so many times repeated in this world, sometimes to flow smoothly on like waters to their haven, sometimes to end in stormy wreckage and bitter disappointment.

They were very young lovers. We should term them mere boy and girl, and count them unfit to consider the matter at all. But in the thirteenth century, when circumstances forced men and women early to the front, and sixty years was considered ripe old age, fifteen was equivalent at least to twenty now.

In this instance, the course of true love—for it was on both sides very true—seemed likely to be smooth enough. The King had granted the marriage of Richard to Earl Hubert; and, as was then well understood, the person to whom he would most probably marry his ward was his own daughter. The only irregular item of the matter was that the pair should fall in love, or should broach the subject at all to each other. But human hearts are unaccountable articles; and even in those days, when matrimony was an affair of rule and compasses, those irregular things did occasionally conduct themselves in a very irregular manner, leading young people to fall in love (and sometimes to run away) with the wrong person, but happily and occasionally, as in this instance, with the right one.

Half an hour later, Margaret was kneeling on a velvet cushion at the feet of the Countess, who was (with secret delight) receiving auricular confession concerning the very point on which she had set her heart.

This mother and daughter were great friends,—a state of things too infrequent at any time, and particularly so in the Middle Ages. Margaret, the only one of her mother, was an unusually cherished and petted child. The result was that she had no fear of the Countess, and looked upon her as her natural confidante. Perhaps, if more daughters would do so, there might be fewer unhappy marriages. At the same time it must be admitted, that some mothers by no means invite confidence.

The Countess of Kent, sweet as she was, had one great failing,—a fault often to be found in very gentle and amiable natures. She was not sufficiently straightforward. Instead of honestly telling people what she wanted them to do, she liked to manage them into it; and this managing involved at most times more or less dissimulation. She dearly loved to conduct her affairs by a series of little secrets. This is a temperament which usually rests on a mixture of affection and want of courage. We cannot bear to grieve those whom we love, and we shrink from calling down their anger on ourselves, or even from risking their disapprobation of our conduct, past or proposed. Now, it had been for some years the dearest wish of the Countess’s heart that her Margaret should marry Richard de Clare. But she never whispered her desire to any one,—least of all to her husband, with whom, humanly speaking, it lay mainly to promote or defeat it. And now, when Margaret’s blushing confession was whispered to her, the Countess privately congratulated herself on her excellent management, and thought how much better it was to pull unseen strings than to blaze one’s wishes abroad.

“And, Lady, will you of your grace plead for us with my Lord and father?” said Margaret in a coaxing tone at last.

“Oh, leave it all to me,” replied her mother. “I will manage him into it. Never tell a man anything, my dove, if thou wouldst have him do it. Men are such obstinate, perverse creatures, that as often as not they will just go the other way out of sheer wilfulness. Thou must always contrive to manage them into it.”

Margaret, who had inherited her father’s honesty with her mother’s amiability, was rather puzzled by this counsel.

“But how do you manage them?” said she.

“There is an art in that, my dear. It takes brains. Different men require very different kinds of management. Now thy father is one who will generally consent to a thing when it is done, though he would not if it were suggested to him at first. He rather likes his own way; still, he is very good when he is well managed,”—for instance after instance came floating back to the wife’s mind, in which he had against his own judgment given way to her. “So that is the way to manage him. Now our Lord King Henry requires entirely different handling.”

That was true enough. While Earl Hubert always had a will of his own, and knew what it was (though he did not always get it), King Henry had no will, and never knew what it was until somebody else told him.

“I am afraid, Lady, I don’t understand the management of men,” said Margaret, with a little laugh and blush.

“Thou wilt learn in time, my dear. Thou art rather too fond of saying all thou meanest. That is not wise—for a woman. Of course a man ought to tell his wife every thing. But there is no need for a wife always to be chattering to her husband: she must have her little secrets, and he ought to respect them. Now, as to Sir Richard, I can see as well as possible the kind of management he will require; thou must quietly suggest ideas to him, gently and diffidently, as if thou wert desirous of his opinion: but whenever he takes them up, mind and always let him think he is getting his own way. He has a strong will, against which a foolish woman would just run full tilt, and spoil every thing. A wise one will quietly get her own way, and let him fancy he has got his. That is thy work, Magot.”

Margaret shook her bright head with a laugh. Such work as that was not at all in her line.

It took only a day for the girls to discover that the Belasez who had come back to them in October was not the Belasez who had gone away from them at Whitsuntide. She seemed almost a different being. Quite as amiable, as patient, as refined, as before, there was something about her which they instantly perceived, but to which they found it hard to give a name. It was not exactly any one thing. It was not sadness, for at times she seemed more bright and lively than they remembered her of old: it was not ill-temper, for her patience was proof against any amount of teasing. But her moods were far more variable than they used to be. A short time after she had been playing with little Marie, all smiles and sunshine, they would see tears rush to her eyes, which she seemed anxious to conceal. And at times there was an expression of distress and perplexity in her face, evidently not caused by any intricacy in the pattern she was working.

Indirect questions produced none but evasive answers. Each of the girls had her own idea as to the solution of the enigma. Margaret, very naturally, pronounced Belasez in love. Eva, one of whose sisters had been recently ill, thought she was anxious about her brother. Marie suggested that too much damson tart might be a satisfactory explanation,—that having been the state of things with herself a few days before. Hawise, who governed her life by a pair of moral compasses, was of opinion that Belasez thought it proper to look sorrowful in her circumstances, and therefore did so except in an emergency. Doucebelle alone was silent: but her private thought was that no one of the four had come near the truth.

When Belasez had been about a week at the Castle, one afternoon she and Doucebelle were working alone in the wardrobe. The Countess and Margaret were away for the day, on a visit to the Abbess of Thetford; Eva and Marie were out on the leads; Hawise was busy in her own apartments. Belasez had been unusually silent that morning. She worked on in a hurried, nervous way, never speaking nor looking up, and a lovely arabesque pattern grew into beauty under her deft fingers. Suddenly Doucebelle said—

“Belasez, does life never puzzle thee?”

Belasez looked up, with almost a frightened expression in her eyes.

“Can anything puzzle one more?” she said: “unless it were the perplexity which is hovering over my soul.”

“Is that anything in which I could help thee?”

“It is something in which no human being could help me—only He before whom the inhabitants of the earth are as grasshoppers.”

There was silence for a moment. Then, in a low, hushed tone, Belasez said—

“Doucebelle, didst thou ever do a thing which must be either very right, or very wrong, and thou hadst no means whereby to know which it was?”

“No,” answered Doucebelle slowly. “I can scarcely imagine such a thing.”

“Scarcely imagine the thing, or the uncertainty?”

“The uncertainty. Because I should ask the priest.”

“The priest!—where is he?”

Doucebelle looked up in surprise at the tone, and saw that Belasez was in tears.

“We had priests,” said the young Jewess. “We had sons of Aaron, and a temple, and an altar, and a holy oracle, whereby the Blessed One made known His will in all matters of doubt and perplexity to His people. But where are they now? The mountains of Zion are desolate, and the foxes walk upon them. The light has died out of the sacred gems, even if they themselves were to be found. We have walked contrary to Him,—ah! where is the unerring prophet that shall tell us how we did it?—and He walks contrary to us, and is punishing us seven times for our sins. We are in the desert, in the dark. And the pillar of fire has gone back into Heaven, and the Angel of the Covenant leadeth us no more.”

Doucebelle was almost afraid to speak, lest she should say something which might do more harm than good. She only ventured after a pause to remark—

“Still there are priests.”

“Yours? I know what they would tell me.” Belasez’s fervent voice had grown constrained all at once.

“Yes, thou dost not believe them, I suppose,” said Doucebelle, with a baffled feeling.

“I want a prophet, Doucebelle, not a priest. Nay, He knows, the Holy One, that we want a priest most bitterly; that we have no sacrifice wherewith to stand before Him,—no blood to make atonement. But we want the prophet to point us to the priest. Let us know, by revelation from Heaven, that this man, or that man, is the accepted Priest of the Most High, and trust us to bring our fairest lambs in sacrifice.”

“Belasez, I believe that the Lamb was offered, twelve hundred years ago, and the sacrifice which alone God will accept for the sins of men is over for ever, and is of everlasting efficacy.”

“I know.” Belasez’s face was more troubled than before.

“If thou canst not trust His priests, couldst thou not trust Him?”

“Trust whom?” exclaimed Belasez, with her eyes on fire. “O Doucebelle, Doucebelle, I know not how to bear it! I thought I was so strong to stand up against all falsehood and error,—and here, one man, with one word,—Let me hold my peace. But O that Thou wouldst rend the heavens, that Thou wouldst come down! Hast Thou but one blessing, O Thou that art a Father unto Israel? Or are we so much worse off than our fathers in the desert? Nay, are we not in the desert, with no leader to guide us, no fiery pillar to bid us rest here, or journey thither? Why hast Thou given the dearly-beloved of Thy soul into the hands of her enemies? Is it—is it, because we hid our faces—from Him!”

And to Doucebelle’s astonishment, Belasez covered her face with her apron, and sobbed almost as if her heart were breaking.

“Poor Belasez!” said Doucebelle, gently. “It is often better to tell out what troubles us, than to keep it to ourselves.”

“If thou wert a daughter of Israel, I should tell it thee, and ask thy counsel. I need some one’s counsel sorely.”

“And canst thou not trust me, Christian though I am?”

“Oh no, it is not that. Thou dost not understand, Doucebelle. Thou couldst not enter into my difficulty unless thou wert of my faith. That is the reason. It is not indeed that I mistrust thee.”

“Hast thou told thy father?”

“My father? No! He would be as much horrified to hear that such thoughts had ever entered my head, as the Lady would be if thou wert to tell her thou didst not believe any longer in thy Christ.”

“Then what canst thou do? Could thy mother help thee, or thy brother?”

“My mother would command me to dismiss such ideas from my mind, on pain of her curse. But I cannot dismiss them. And for Delecresse—I think he would stab me if he knew.”

“What sort of thoughts are they?”

“Wilt thou keep my secret, if I tell thee?”

“Indeed, I will not utter them without thy leave.” Belasez cut off her silk, laid down the armilaus, and clasped both hands round her knee.

“When your great festivals draw nigh,” she said, “four times in every year, we Israelites are driven into your churches, and forced to listen to a discourse from one of your priests. Until that day, I have never paid any attention to what I deemed blasphemy. I have listened for a moment, but at the first word of error, or the first repetition of one of your sacred names, I have always stopped my ears, and heard no more. But this last Midsummer, when we were driven into Lincoln Cathedral, the new Bishop was in the pulpit. And he spake not like the other priests. I could not stop my ears. Why should I, when he read the words of one of our own prophets, and in the holy tongue, rendering it into French as he went on? And Delecresse said it was correctly translated, for I asked him afterwards. He saw nothing in it different from usual. But it was terrible to me! He read words that I never knew were in our Scriptures—concerning One whom it seemed to me must be—must be, He whom you call Messiah. ‘As a root out of a dry ground’—‘no form nor comeliness’—‘no beauty that we should desire Him,’—‘despised and rejected of men’—and lastly, ‘we hid our faces from Him.’ For we did, Doucebelle,—we did! I could think of nothing else for a while. For we did not hide them from others. We welcomed Judas of Galilee, and Barchocheba, and many another who rose up in our midst, claiming to be sent of God. But He, who claimed to be The Sent One,—we crucified Him. We did not crucify them. We hid our faces from Him, and from Him alone. And then I heard more words, for the Bishop kept reading on. ‘We all like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way’—ah, was that not true of the dispersed of Judah?—‘and the Lord hath made to meet upon Him the iniquities of us all.’ Doucebelle, it was like carrying a lamp into a dark chamber, and beholding every thing in it suddenly illuminated. Was that what it all meant? Was the Bishop right, when he said afterwards, that it was not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sin? Were they all not realities, as I had always thought them, but shadows, pointing forward through the ages, to the One who was to come, to the Blood which could take away sin? Did our own Scripture say so? ‘The Man that is My Fellow’—he read it, from one of our very own prophets. And ‘we hid our faces from Him!’ If He from whom we hid our faces—for there was but one such—if He were the Sent of God, the Man that is His Fellow, the Lamb whose blood maketh atonement for the soul,—why then, what could there be for us but tribulation and wrath and indignation from before the Holy One for ever? Was it any marvel that we were punished seventy times for our sins, if we had done that?”

Belasez drew a long breath, and altered her position.

“And, if we had not done that, what had we done? The old perplexity came back on me, worse than ever. What had we done? We were not idolaters any more; we were not profane; we kept the rest of the holy Sabbath. Yet the Blessed One was angry with us,—He hid His face from us: and the centuries went on, and we were exiles still,—still under the displeasure of our heavenly King. And what had we done?—if we had not hidden our faces from Him who was the Man that is His Fellow. And then—”

Belasez paused again, and a softer, sadder expression came into her eyes.

“And then the Bishop read some other words,—I suppose they were from your sacred books: I do not think they came from ours. He read that ‘because this Man continueth to eternity, untransferable hath He the priesthood.’ He read that ‘if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, and He is the propitiation for our sins.’ And again he read some grand words, said by this Man Himself,—‘I am the First and the Last, and the Living One: and I was dead, and am alive for evermore; and with Me are the keys of Sheol and of death.’ Oh, it was so different, Doucebelle, from your priests’ sermons generally! There was not a word about that strange thing you call the Church,—not a word about the maiden whom you worship. It was all about Him who was to be the Sent of God. And I thought—may I be forgiven of the Holy One, if it were wicked!—I thought this was the Priest that would suit me: this was the Prophet that could teach me: this was the Man, who, if only I knew that to do it was truth and not error, was light and not darkness, was life and not death, I could be content to follow to the world’s end. And how am I to know it?”

Doucebelle looked up earnestly, and the girls’ eyes met. One of them was groping in the darkness in search of Christ. The other had groped her way through the darkness, and had caught hold of Him. She did not see His Face very clearly, but enough so to be sure that it was He.

“Belasez, dear maid, He said one other thing. ‘Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ Trust me, the surest way to find out who He is, is to come to Him.”

“What meanest thou? He is not on earth.”

“He is where thy need is,” answered Doucebelle gently. “In any labyrinth out of which we know not the way,—over any grave where our hearts lie buried,—we can meet Him.”

“But how? Thy words are a riddle to me.”

“Call Him, and see if He do not come to thee. And if He and thou do but meet, it does not much matter by which track thou earnest thither.”

Belasez was silent, and seemed to be thinking deeply.

“Doucebelle,” she said at last, “are there two sorts of Christians? Because thy language is like the Bishop of Lincoln’s. All the priests, and other Christians, whom I have heard before, spoke in quite another strain.”

“There are live Christians, and dead ones. I know not of any third sort.”

“The dead ones must be fearfully in the majority!” said Belasez: “I mean, if thou and the Bishop are live ones.”

“That may be true, I am afraid,” replied Doucebelle.

“It must be the breathing of the Holy One that makes the difference,” observed Belasez, very thoughtfully. “For it is written, that Adonai formed man of the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils the neshama of life; and man became a living soul. Thus He breathed the life into man at first, in the day of the creation of Adam. Surely, in the day when the soul of man becomes alive to the will of the Holy One, He must breathe into him the second time, that he may live.”

“Belasez, what are your sacred books? You seem to have some.”

“We gave them to you,” was Belasez’s reply. “But ye have added to them.”

“But the Scriptures were given to the Church!” remonstrated Doucebelle with some surprise.

“I know not what ye mean by the Church,” answered the Jewess. “They were ours,—given to our fathers, revealed to them by the Holy One. We gave them to you,—or ye filched them from us,—I scarcely know which. And ye have added other books, which we cannot recognise.”

The flash of fervent confidence had died away, and Belasez was once more the reserved, impenetrable Jewish maiden, to whom Gentile Christians were unclean animals, and their doctrines to be mentioned only with scorn and abhorrence. And as Marie came dancing in at that moment, the conversation was not renewed. But it made a great impression upon Doucebelle, who ever afterwards added to her prayers the petition,—“Fair Father, Jesu Christ, teach Belasez to know Thee.” (“Bel Père”—then one of the common epithets used in prayer.)

But to every one in general, and to Doucebelle in particular, Belasez seemed shut up closer than ever.

The January of 1236 came, and with it the royal marriage. The ceremonial took place at Canterbury, and Earl Hubert was present, as his office required of him. The Countess excused herself on the ground of slight illness, which would make it very irksome for her to travel in winter. Her “intimate enemies” kindly suggested that she was actuated by pique, since a time had been when she might have been herself Queen of England. But they did not know Margaret of Scotland. Pique and spite were not in her. Her real motive was something wholly different. She was not naturally ambitious, nor did she consider the crown of England so highly superior to the gemmed coronal of a Scottish Princess; and she had never held King Henry in such personal regard as to feel any regret at his loss. Her true object in remaining at Bury was to “manage” the marriage of Margaret with Richard de Clare. It was to be a clandestine match, except as concerned a few favoured witnesses; and Earl Hubert was to be kept carefully in the dark till all was safely over. The wedding was to be one “per verba de presenti” then as sacred by the canon law as if it had been performed by a priest in full canonicals; and as a matter of absolute necessity, no witness was required at all. But the Countess thought it more satisfactory to have one or two who could be trusted not to chatter till the time came for revelation. She chose Doucebelle along with herself, as the one in whose silence she had most confidence. Thus, in that January, in the dead of the night, the four indicated assembled in the bed-chamber of the Countess, and the bride and bridegroom, joining hands, said simply—

“In the presence of God and of these persons, I, Richard, take thee, Margaret, to my wedded wife:” and, “In the same presence I, Margaret, take thee, Richard, to my wedded husband.”

And according to canon and statute law they were legally married, nor could anything short of a divorce part them again.

“Now then, go to bed,” said the Countess, addressing Doucebelle: “and beware, every soul of you, that not a word comes out till I tell you ye may speak.”

“Belasez, when wilt thou be wed?” inquired Margaret, the next morning. If the thoughts of the bride ran upon weddings, it was not much to be wondered.

“Next summer,” said Belasez, as coolly as if the question had been when she would finish her embroidery. There was no shadow of emotion of any kind to be seen.

“Oh, art thou handfast?” replied Margaret, interested at once.

“I was betrothed in my cradle,” was the answer of the Jewish maiden.

“To a Jew, of course?”

“Of course! To Leo the son of Hamon of Norwich, my father’s greatest friend.”

“Is he a nice young man?”

“I never saw him.”

“Why, Belasez!”

“The maidens of my people are strictly secluded. It is not so with Christians.”

Yet it was less strange to these Christian girls than it would be to the reader. They lived in times when the hand of an heiress was entirely at the disposal of her guardian, who might marry her to some one whom she had never seen. As to widows, they were in the gift of the Crown, unless they chose (as many did) to make themselves safe by paying a high price for “liberty to marry whom they would.” Even then, such a thing was known as the Crown disregarding the compact. Let it be added, since much good cannot be said of King John, that he at least was careful to fulfil his engagements of this description. His son was less particular.

Margaret looked at Belasez with a rather curious expression.

“And how dost thou like the idea,” she asked, “of being wife to one whom thou hast never seen?”

“I do not think about it,” said Belasez, in the same tone as before. “What is to be will be.”

“But what is to be,” said Margaret, “may be very delightful, or it may be very horrid.”

“Yes, no doubt,” was the cool answer. “I shall see when the time comes.”

Margaret turned away, with a shrug of her shoulders and a comic look in her eyes which nearly upset the gravity of the rest.

Note 1. These lines are (or were) to be seen, written with a diamond upon a pane of glass in a window of the Hôtel des Pays-Bas, Spa, Belgium, with the date 1793. I do not know whether they are to be found in the writings of any poet.

Chapter Six.

The New Confessor.

“Had the knight looked up to the page’s face,
No smile the word had won;
Had the knight looked up to the page’s face,
I ween he had never gone:
Had the knight looked back to the page’s geste,
I ween he had turned anon,—
For dread was the woe in the face so young,
And wild was the silent geste that flung
Casque, sword, to earth as the boy down-sprung,
And stood—alone, alone!”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Nobody enjoyed the spring of the year 1236. Rain poured down, day after day, as if it were the prelude to a second Deluge. The Thames overflowed its banks to such an extent that the lawyers had to return home in boats, floated by the tide into Westminster Hall. There was no progress, except by boat or horse, through the streets of the royal borough.

Perhaps the physical atmosphere slightly affected the moral and political, for men’s minds were much unsettled, and their tempers very captious. The King, with his usual fickleness and love of novelty, had thrown himself completely into the arms of the horde of poor relations whom the new Queen brought over with her, particularly of her uncle, Guglielmo of Savoy, the Bishop of Valentia, whom he constituted his prime minister. By his advice new laws were promulgated which extremely angered the English nobles, who complained that they were held of no account in the royal councils. The storms were especially violent in the North, and there people took to seeing prophetic visions of dreadful import. Beside all this, France was in a very disturbed state, which boded ill to the English provinces across the sea. The Counts of Champagne, Bretagne, and La Marche, used strong language concerning the disgraceful fact that “France, the kingdom of kingdoms, was governed by a woman,” Queen Blanche of Castilla being Regent during the minority of her son, Saint Louis. It is a singular fact that while the name of Blanche has descended to posterity as that of a woman of remarkable wisdom, discretion, and propriety of life, the popular estimate of her during her regency was almost exactly the reverse.

Meanwhile, the royal marriage festivities went on uproariously at Canterbury. There was not a peacock-pie the less on account either of the black looks of the English nobles, or of the very shallow condition of the royal treasury. To King Henry, who had no intention of paying any bills that he could help, what did it signify how much things cost, or whether the sum total were twenty pence or twenty thousand pounds?

The feasts having at last come to an end, King Henry left Canterbury for Merton Abbey, and Earl Hubert accompanied him. What became of the Queen is not stated: nor are we told whether His Majesty thus went “into retreat” to seek absolution for his past transgressions, or from the lamentable necessity of paying his debts.

On the 20th of January, the royal penitent emerged from his retreat, to be crowned with his bride at Westminster. Earl Hubert of course was present; and the Countess thought proper to feel well enough to join him for the occasion. The ceremony was a most splendid one,—very different from that first hurried coronation of the young Henry on his father’s death, when, all the regalia having been lost in fording the Wash, he was crowned with a gold collar belonging to his mother. The Archbishop of Canterbury was the officiating priest. The citizens of London, hereditary Butlers of England, presented three hundred and sixty cups of gold and silver, at which the eyes of the royal and acquisitive pair doubtless glistened, and which, in all probability, were melted down in a month to pay for the coronation banquet. King Henry paid a bill just often enough to prevent his credit from falling into a hopelessly disreputable condition. The Earl of Chester—one of Earl Hubert’s two great enemies—bore Curtana, “the sword of Saint Edward,” says the monk of Saint Albans, “to show that he is Earl of the Palace, and has by right the power of restraining the King if he should commit an error.” Either Earl Ranulph de Blundeville was very neglectful of his office, or else he must have found it anything but a sinecure. The Constable of Chester attended the Earl; his office was to restrain not the King, but the people, by keeping them off with his wand when they pressed too close. The Earl of Pembroke, husband of Princess Marjory of Scotland, carried a wand before the King, cleared the way, superintended the banquet, and arranged the guests. The basin was presented by a handsome young foreigner, Simon de Montfort, youngest son of the Count de Montfort, and cousin of the Earl of Chester, to whose good offices in the first instance he probably owed his English preferment. He had not yet become the most powerful man in the kingdom, the darling of the English people, the husband of the King’s sister, the man whom, on his own testimony,—much as he feared a thunderstorm,—Henry feared “more than all the thunder and lightning in the world!” The Earl of Arundel should have been the cup-bearer; but being too young to discharge the office, his kinsman the Earl of Surrey officiated for him. The citizens of Winchester were privileged to cook the banquet; and the Abbot of Westminster kept every thing straight by sprinkling holy water.

Once more, the banquet over, the King returned into retreat at Merton to get rid of his additional shortcomings. Never was man so pious as this Monarch,—if piety consisted of tithing mint, anise, and cummin, and of neglecting the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.

It was a sharp frosty morning in February. Margaret, Doucebelle, and Belasez were at work in the bower, while Father Nicholas was hearing Marie read Latin in the ante-chamber. The other chaplains were also present,—Father Warner, who, with Nicholas, belonged to the Earl; and Father Bruno, the chaplain of the Countess. Also present was Master Aristoteles, the reverend physician of the household. Fortunately for herself, Marie was by no means shy, and she feared the face of no human creature unless it were Father Warner, who, Margaret used to say, had eyes in the back of his head, and could hear what the cows were thinking about in the meadow. He was an extremely strict disciplinarian when on duty, but he never interfered with the proceedings of a brother tutor.

Father Bruno was a new inmate of the household. He had come from Lincoln, with a recommendation from the recently-appointed Bishop, but had been there too short a time to show his character, since he was a silent man, who appeared to see everything and to say nothing.

“Very well, my daughter. Thou hast been a good, attentive maiden this morning,” said Father Nicholas, when the reading was finished.

“Then, Father, will you let me off my sums?” was Marie’s quick response.

Marie hated arithmetic, which was Doucebelle’s favourite study.

“Nay, my child,” said Father Nicholas, in an amused tone; “that is not my business. Thou must ask Father Warner.”

“Please, Father Warner, will you let me off my sums?” pleaded Marie, but in a more humble style.

“Certainly not, daughter. Fetch them at once.”

Marie left the room with a grieved face.

“No news abroad, I suppose, my brethren?” suggested Master Aristoteles, in his brisk, simple, innocent manner.

“Nay, none but what we all knew before,” said Father Nicholas.

“Methinks the world wags but slowly,” said Master Aristoteles.

“Much too fast,” was the oracular reply of Father Warner.

“The pace of the world depends mainly on our own wishes, I take it,” said Father Nicholas. “He who would fain walk thinks the world is at a gallop; while he who desires to gallop reckons the world but jogging at a market-trot.”

“There has been a great massacre of Jews in Spain,” said Father Bruno, speaking for the first time.

All the conversation was plainly audible to the girls in the next room. When Father Bruno spoke, Belasez’s head went up suddenly, and her work stood still.

“Amen and Alleluia!” said Father Warner, who probably little suspected that he was using Hebrew words to express his abhorrence of the Hebrews.

“Nay, my brother!” answered Father Bruno, gravely. “Shall we thank God for the perdition of human souls?”

“Of course not,—of course not!” interposed Father Nicholas, quickly. “I am sure our Brother Warner thanked God for the vindication of the Divine honour.”

“And is not the Divine honour more fully vindicated by far,” demanded Father Bruno, “when a soul is saved from destruction, than when it is plunged therein?”

“Yes, yes, no doubt, no doubt!” eagerly assented Father Nicholas, who seemed afraid of a fracas.

“Curs!” said Father Warner, contemptuously. “They all belong to their father the Devil, and to him let them go. I would not give a farthing for a Jew’s soul in the market.”

Belasez’s eyes were like stars.

“Brother,” said Father Bruno, so gravely that it was almost sadly, “our Master was not of your way of thinking. He bade His apostles to begin at Jerusalem when they preached the good tidings of His kingdom. Have we done it?”

Master Aristoteles’ “Ah!” might mean anything, as the hearer chose to take it.

“Of course they did so. The Church was first at Jerusalem, before Saint Peter transferred it to Rome,” snapped Father Warner.

“Pardon me, my brother. I did not ask, Did they do so? I said, Have we done so?” explained Bruno.

“How could we?” responded Father Nicholas in a perplexed tone. “I never came across any of the evil race—holy Mary be my guard!—and if I had done, I should have crossed over the road, lest they should cast a spell on me.”

Belasez’s smile was one of contemptuous amusement.

“Pure foy! If I ever came across one, I should spit in his face!” cried Warner.

“Two might play at that game,” was the cool observation of Bruno.

“I’d have him hung on the new machine if he did!” exclaimed Warner.

The new machine was the gibbet, first set up in England in this year.

“Brethren,” said Bruno, “we are verily guilty, one and all. For weeks this winter, and I hear also last summer, there has been in this house a maiden of the Hebrew race, who has never learned the faith of Christ the Lord, has probably never heard His name except in blasphemy. Which of us four of His servants shall answer to God for that child’s soul?”

Margaret expected Belasez’s eyes to flash, and her lip to curl in scorn. To her great surprise, the girl caught up her work and went on with it hastily. Doucebelle, watching her with deep yet concealed interest, fancied she saw tears glistening on the samite.

“Really, I never—you put it so seriously, Brother Bruno!—I never looked at the matter in that way. I did not think—” and Father Nicholas came to a full stop. “You see, I have been so very busy illuminating that missal for the Lady. I really never never considered the thing so seriously.”

“Brother Nicholas,” answered Bruno, “the Devil was serious enough when he tempted our mother Eva. And Christ was serious when He bore away your sins and mine, and nailed them to His cross. And the angels of God are serious, when they look down and see us fighting with sin in the dark and weary day. What! God is serious, and Satan is serious, and the holy angels are serious,—and can we not be serious? Will the great Judge take that answer, think you? ‘Lord, I was so busy illuminating and writing, that I let the maiden slip into perdition, and Thou wilt find her there.’”

Belasez’s head was bowed lower than before.

“Brother Bruno! You are unreasonable,” interposed Warner. “We all have our duties to our Lord and Lady. And as to that contemptible insect in the Lady’s chamber,—well, I do not know what you think, but I would not scorch my fingers pulling her out of Erebus.”

The dark brows of the young Jewess were drawn close together.

“Ah, Brother Warner!” said Bruno. “Christ my Master scorched His fingers so much with me, that I cannot hesitate to burn mine in His service.”

Marie and her arithmetic seemed forgotten by all parties.

“I am afraid, Brother Bruno,” faltered Father Nicholas, “really afraid, I may have been too remiss. The poor girl!—of course, though she is a Jew—and they are very bad people, very—yet she has a soul to be saved; yes, undoubtedly. I will see what I can do. There are only about a dozen leaves of the missal,—and then that treatise on grace of congruity that I promised the Abbot of Ham—and,—let me see! I believe I engaged to write something for the Prior of Saint Albans. What was it, now? Where are my tables? Oh, here!—yes,—ah! that would not take long: a week might do it, I think. I will see,—I really will see, Brother Bruno,—when these little matters are disposed of,—what I can do for the girl.”

“Do! Give her ratsbane!” sneered Warner laconically.

Bruno’s reply was a quotation.

“‘While thy servant was busy here and there, he was gone.’”

Then he rose and left the room.

“Dear, dear!” said Father Nicholas. “Our brother Bruno means well,—very well indeed, I am sure: but those enthusiastic people like him—don’t you think they are very unsettling, Brother Warner? Really, he has made me feel quite uncomfortable. Why, the world would have to be turned upside down! We could never write, nor paint, nor cultivate letters—we should have to be incessantly preaching and confessing people.”

“Stuff! The fellow’s an ass!” was Father Warner’s decision. “Ha, chétife!—what has become of that little monkey, Damsel Marie? I must go and see after her.”

And he followed his colleague. Father Nicholas gathered his papers together, and from the silence that ensued, the girls gathered that the ante-chamber was deserted.

“Belasez,” said Doucebelle that night, as she was brushing her hair—the two slept in the wardrobe—“wert thou very angry with Father Bruno, this morning?”

Belasez looked up quickly.

“With him? No! I thought—”

But the thought progressed no further till Doucebelle said—“Well?”

“I thought,” said Belasez, combing out her own hair very energetically, “that I had at last found even a Christian priest who was worthy of him of whom the Bishop of Lincoln preached,—him whom you believe to be Messiah.”

“Then,” said Doucebelle, greatly delighted, “thou wilt listen to Father Bruno, if he talks to thee?”

“I would not if I could help it,” was Belasez’s equivocal answer.

“Belasez, I cannot quite understand thee. Sometimes thou seemest so different from what thou art at other times.”

“Because I am different. Understand me! Do I understand myself? The Holy One—to whom be praise!—He understands us all.”

“But sometimes thou art willing to hear and talk, and at others thou art close shut up like a coffer.”

“Because that is how I feel.”

“I wish thou wouldst tell thy feelings to Father Bruno.”

“I shall wait till he asks me, I think,” said Belasez a little drily.

“Well, I am sure he will.”

“I am not sure that he will—twice.”

“Why, what wouldst thou say to him?”

“He will hear if he wants to know.”

And Belasez thereupon “shut up like a coffer,” and seemed to have lost her tongue for the remainder of the night.

Doucebelle determined that, if she could possibly contrive it, without wounding the feelings of Father Nicholas, her next confession should be made to Father Bruno. He seemed to her to be a man made of altogether different metal from his colleagues. Master Aristoteles kept himself entirely to physical ailments, and never heard a confession, except from the sick in emergency. Father Nicholas was a very easy confessor, for his thoughts were usually in his beloved study, and whatever the confession might be, absolution seemed to follow as a matter of course. If his advice were asked on any point outside philology in all its divisions, he generally appeared to be rather taken by surprise, and almost as much puzzled as his penitent. His strongest reproof was—

“Ah, that was wrong, my child. Thou must not do that again.”

So that confession to Father Nicholas, while eminently comfortable to a dead soul, was anything but satisfying to a living one.

Father Warner was a terrible confessor. His minute questions penetrated into every corner of soul and body. He took nothing for granted, good nor bad. Absolution was hard to get from him, and not to be had on any terms but those of severe penance. And yet it seemed to Doucebelle that there was an inner sanctuary of her heart from which he never even tried to lift the veil, a depth in her nature which he never approached. Was it because there was no such depth in his, and therefore he necessarily ignored its existence in another?

In one way or another, they were all miserable comforters. She wished to try Father Bruno.

Most unwittingly, Father Nicholas helped her to gain her end by requesting a holiday. He had heard a rumour that a Latin manuscript had been discovered in the library of Saint Albans’ Abbey, and Father Nicholas, in whose eyes the lost books of Livy were of more consequence than any thing else in the world except the Order of Saint Benedict, was unhappy till he had seen the manuscript.

The Countess, in the Earl’s absence, readily granted his request, and Doucebelle’s fear of hurting the feelings of her kind-hearted though careless old friend were no longer a bar in the way of consulting Father Bruno.

Father Warner, who was confessing the other half of the household, growled his disapprobation when Doucebelle begged to be included in the penitents of Father Bruno.

“Something new always catches a silly girl’s fancy!” said he.

But Doucebelle had no scruple about hurting his feelings, since she did not believe in their existence. So when her turn came, she knelt down in Bruno’s confessional.

At first she wondered if he were about to prove like Father Nicholas, for he did not ask her a single question till she stopped of herself. Then, instead of referring to any thing which she had said, he put one of weighty import.

“Daughter, what dost thou know of Jesus Christ?”

“I know,” said Doucebelle, “that He came to take away the sins of the world, and I humbly trust that He will take away mine.”

“That He will?” repeated Bruno. “Is it not done already?”

“I thought, Father, that it would be done when I die.”

“What has thy dying to do with that? If it be done at all, it was done when He died.”

“Then where are my sins, Father?” asked Doucebelle, feeling very much astonished. This was a new doctrine to her. But Bruno was an Augustinian, and well read in the writings of the Founder of his Order.

“They are where God cannot find them, my child. Therefore there is little fear of thy finding them. Understand me,—if thou hast laid them upon Christ our Lord.”

“I know I have,” said Doucebelle in a low voice.

“Then on His own authority I assure thee that He has taken them.”

“Father I may I really believe that?”

“May! Thou must, if thou wouldst not make God a liar.”

“But what, then, have I to do?”

“What wouldst thou do for me, if I had rescued thee from a burning house, and lost my own life in the doing of it?”

“I could do nothing,” said Doucebelle, feeling rather puzzled.

“Wouldst thou love or hate me?”

“O Father! can there be any question?”

“And supposing there were some thing left in the world for which thou knewest I had cared—a favourite dog or cat—wouldst thou leave it to starve, or take some care of it?”

“I think,” was Doucebelle’s earnest answer, “I should care for it as though it were my own child.”

“Then, daughter, see thou dost that for Him who did lose His own life in rescuing thee. Love Him with every fibre of thine heart, and love what He has loved for His sake. He has left with thee those for whom on earth He cared most,—the poor, the sick, the unhappy. Be they unto thee as thy dearest, and He the dearest of all.”

This was very unlike any counsel which Doucebelle had ever before received from a confessor. There was something here of which she could take hold. Not that Father Bruno had suggested a new course of action so much as that he had supplied a new motive power. To do good, to give alms, to be kind to poor and sick people, Doucebelle had been taught already: but the reason for it was either the abstract notion that it was the right thing to do, or that it would help to increase her little heap of human merit.

To all minds, but in particular to an ignorant one, there is an enormous difference between the personal and the impersonal. Tell a child that such a thing must be done because it is right, and the motive power is faint and vague, not unlikely to be overthrown by the first breath of temptation. But let the child understand that to do this thing will please or displease God, and you have supplied a far stronger energising power, in the intelligible reference to the will of a living Person.

Doucebelle felt this—as, more or less, we all do.

“Father,” she said, after a momentary pause, “I want your advice.”

“State thy perplexity, my daughter.”

“I hope, Father, you will not be angry; but a few days ago, when you and the other priests were talking in the ante-chamber about Belasez, the door was open, and we heard every word in the bower.”

“Did Belasez hear what was said?”

“Yes.”

“Ha! What did she say?”

“I asked her, at night, whether what you had said had wounded her. And she said, No: but she thought there was one Christian priest who was like what the Scripture described Christ to be.”

“Did she say that?” There was a tone of tender regret in the priest’s voice.

“She did. But, Father, I want to know how to deal with Belasez. Sometimes she will talk to me quite freely, and tell me all her thoughts and feelings: at other times I cannot get a word out of her.”

“Let her alone at the other times. What is the state of her mind?”

“She seems to have been very much struck, Father, with a sermon from your Bishop, wherein he proved out of her own Scriptures, she says, that our Lord is the Messiah whom the Jews believe. But I do not know if she has reached any point further than that. I think she hardly knows what to believe.”

“Only those sermons do good which God preaches,” said Bruno. Perhaps he spoke rather to himself than to Doucebelle. “Whenever the maiden will speak to thee, do not repulse her. Lead her, to the best of thy power, to see that Christ is God’s one cure for all evil. Yet He must teach it first to thyself.”

“I think He has done so—a little,” answered Doucebelle. “But, Father, will you not speak to her?”

“My child, we will both wait upon God, and speak the words He gives us, at the time He will. And remember,—whatever blunders men make,—Belasez is, after the flesh, nearer akin to Him than thou art. She is the kinswoman of the Lord Jesus. Let that thought spur thee on, if thou faint by the way.”

“Father! Our Lord was not a Jew?”

“He was a Jew, my daughter.”

Hardly any news could more have amazed Doucebelle.

“But why then do people use them so harshly?”

“Thou hadst better ask the people,” answered Bruno, drily.

“Father, is it right to use Jews so?”

“Thou hadst better ask the Lord.”

“What does He say, Father?”

“He said, speaking to Abraham, the father of them all, ‘I will bless him that blesseth thee, and curse him that curseth thee.’”

“Oh, I am so glad!” cried Doucebelle. “If you please, Father, I could not help loving Belasez: but I tried hard not to do so, because I thought it was wicked. It cannot be wrong to love a Jew, if Christ Himself were one.”

Bruno did not reply immediately. When he did, it was with a slight quiver in his voice which surprised Doucebelle.

“It can never be wrong to love,” he said. “But, daughter, let not thy love stop at liking the maid’s company. Let it go on till thou canst take it into Heaven.”

The strangest of all strange ideas was this to Doucebelle. She had been taught that love was always a weakness, and only too frequently a sin. That so purely earthly a thing could be taken into Heaven astonished her beyond measure.

“Father!” she said, in a tone of mingled amazement and inquiry.

“What now, my daughter?”

“People always speak of love as weak, if not wicked.”

“People often talk of what they do not understand, my child. ‘God is love.’ Think not, therefore, that God resembles a worldly fancy which springs to-day, and fades away to-morrow. His is the heavenly love which can never die, which is ready to sacrifice all things, which so looks to the true welfare of the beloved that it will give thee any earthly suffering rather than see thee sink into perdition by thy sins. This is real love, daughter: and thou canst not sin in giving it to Belasez or to any other.”

“Yet, Father,” said Doucebelle in a puzzled tone, “the religious give up love when they go into the cloister. I do not understand. A Sister of Saint Ursula may not leave her convent, even if her own mother lies dying, and pleads hard to see her. And though some priests do wed,”—this had not yet, in England, ceased to be the case—“yet people always seem to think the celibate priests more holy, as if that were more in accordance with the will of God. Yet God tells us to love each other. I cannot quite understand.”

If Doucebelle could have seen, as well as spoken, through the confessional grating, assuredly she would have stopped sooner. For the agony that was working in every line of Father Bruno’s face would have been terrible to her to see. But she only thought that it was a long while before he answered her, and she wondered at the hard, constrained tone in his voice.

“Child!” he said, “does any one but God ‘quite understand’? Do we understand ourselves?—and how much less each other? It is only love that understands. He who most loves God will best understand men. And for the rest,—O Lord who hast loved us, pardon the blunders and misunderstandings of Thy people, and save Thy servants that trust in Thee!—Now go, my child,—unless thou hast more to say. Absolvo te.”

Doucebelle rose and retired. But she did not know that Father Bruno heard no more confessions. She only heard that he was not at home when dinner was served; and when he appeared at supper, he looked very worn and white, as if after a weary journey.

Chapter Seven.

The Shadow of Long Ago.

“’Tis a fair, fair face, in sooth:
Larger eyes and redder mouth
Than mine were in my first youth.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

So faithfully had the Countess adhered to her plighted word that Belasez should be seen by no one, that not one of the priests had yet beheld her except Father Nicholas, and the meeting in that case had been accidental and momentary. But when Father Bruno announced to his brother priests his intention of seeking an interview with the Jewish maiden, Father Nicholas shook his head waggishly.

“Have a care of the toils of Satan, Brother Bruno!” said he. “The maiden may have the soul of a fiend, for aught I wot, yet hath she the face of an angel.”

“I thank thee. There is no fear!” answered Bruno, with a smile which made him look sadder.

The Countess had not returned from the coronation festivities, and the girls were alone in Margaret’s bower, when Father Bruno entered, with “God save all here!”

Belasez rose hastily, and prepared to withdraw.

“Wait, my child,” said the priest, gently: “I would speak with thee.”

But when she turned in answer, and he saw her face, some strange and terrible emotion seemed to convulse his own.

“Domine, in Te speravi!” fell from his trembling lips, as if he scarcely realised what he was saying.

Belasez looked at him with an astonished expression. Whatever were the cause of his singular emotion, it was evidently neither understood nor shared by her.

With a manifest effort of self-control, Bruno recovered himself.

“Sit down, daughters,” he said: for all had risen in reverence to the priest: and he seated himself on the settle, whence he had a full view of Belasez.

“And what is thy name, my daughter?”

“Belasez, at your service.”

“And thy father’s name?”

“Abraham of Norwich, if it please you.”

“Abraham—of Norwich! Not—not the son of Ursel of Norwich?”

“The same.”

Again that look of intense pain crossed Bruno’s face.

“No wonder!” he said, speaking not to Belasez. “The very face—the very look! No wonder!—And thy mother?”

“My mother is Licorice, the daughter of Kokorell of Lincoln.”

Bruno gave a little nod, as if he had known it before.

“Hast thou any brethren or sisters?”

“One brother only; his name is Delecresse.”

The reply seemed to extinguish Bruno’s interest. For a moment, as if his thoughts were far elsewhere, he played with a morsel of sewing-silk which he had picked up from the floor.

“The Lord is wiser than men,” he said at last, as if that were the conclusion to which his unseen thoughts had led him.

“Yes; and better,” answered the young Jewess.

“And better,” dreamily repeated the priest. “We shall know that one day, when we wake up to see His Face.”

“Amen,” said Belasez. “‘When we awake up after Thy likeness,’ saith David the Prophet, ‘we shall be satisfied with it.’”

“‘Satisfied!’ echoed Bruno. Art thou satisfied, my daughter?”

The answering “No!” appeared to come from the depths of Belasez’s heart.

“Shall I tell thee wherefore? There is but one thing that satisfies the soul of man. Neither in earth nor in Heaven is any man satisfied with aught else. My child, dost thou know what that is?”

Belasez looked up, her own face working a little now.

“You mean,” she said, “the Man whom ye call Christ.”

“I mean Him.”

“I know nothing about Him.” And Belasez resumed her embroidery, as if that were of infinitely greater consequence. “Dost thou know much about happiness?”

“Happiness!” exclaimed the girl. “I know what mirth is. Do you mean that? Or, I know what it is to feel as if one cared for nothing. Is that your meaning?”

“Happiness,” said Bruno, “is what thy King meant when he said, ‘I shall be satisfied with it.’ Dost thou know that?”

Belasez drew a long breath, and shook her head sadly.

“No,” she said. “I have never known that.”

“Because thou hast never known Jesus Christ.”

“I know He said, ‘I am the life,’” responded the girl slowly. “And life is not worth much. Perhaps it might be,—if one were satisfied.”

“Poor child! Is life not worth much to thee?” answered the priest in a pitying tone. “And thou art very young—not much over twenty.”

“I am under twenty. I am just eighteen.”

Once more Bruno’s face was convulsed.

“Just eighteen!” he said. “Yes—Licorice’s child! Yet she had no pity. Aye me—just eighteen!”

“Do you know my mother?” said Belasez in accents of mingled surprise and curiosity.

“I did—eighteen years ago.”

And Bruno rose hastily, as if he wished to dismiss the subject. Margaret dropped on her knees and requested his blessing, which he gave as though his thoughts were far away: and then he left the room slowly, gazing on Belasez to the last.

This was the first, but not by any means the last, interview between Father Bruno and the Jewish maiden. A month later, Doucebelle asked Belasez how she liked him.

“I do not like him; I love him,” said Belasez, with more warmth than usual.

“What a confession!” answered Doucebelle, playfully.

“Oh, not that sort of love!” responded Belasez with a tinge of scorn. “I think it must be the sort that we can take into Heaven with us.”

The next morning, Levina announced to the Countess, in a tone of gratified spite, that two persons were in the hall—an old man, unknown to her, and the young Jew, Delecresse. He had come for his sister.

Belasez received the news of her recall at first with a look of blank dismay, and then with a shower of passionate tears. Her deep attachment to her Christian friends was most manifest. She kissed the hand of the Countess and Margaret, warmly embraced Doucebelle, and then looked round as if something were wanting still.

“What is it, my maid?” kindly asked the Countess.

“Father Bruno!” faltered Belasez through her tears. “Oh, I must say farewell to Father Bruno!”

The Countess looked astonished, for she knew not that Bruno and Belasez had ever met. A few words from Doucebelle explained. Still the Countess was extremely dissatisfied.

“My maid,” she said, “thy father may think I have not kept my word. I ought to have told Father Bruno. I never thought of it, when he first came. I am very sorry. Has he talked with thee on matters of religion at all?”

“Yes.” Belasez explained no further.

“Dear, dear!” said the Countess. “He meant well, I suppose. And of course it is better thy soul should be saved. But I wish he had less zeal and more discretion.”

“Lady,” said Belasez, pausing for an instant, “if ever I enter the kingdom of the Blessed One above, I think I shall owe it to the Bishop of Lincoln and to Father Bruno.”

“That is well, no doubt,” responded the Countess, in a very doubtful tone. “Oh dear! what did make Father Bruno think of coming up here?”

As Belasez passed down towards the hall, Father Bruno himself met her on the stairs.

“Whither goest thou, my child?” he asked in some surprise.

“I am going—away.” Belasez’s tears choked her voice.

“To thy father’s house?”

She bowed.

“Without Christ?”

“No, Father, not without Him,” sobbed the girl. “Nor,—if you will grant it to me at this moment—without baptism.”

“Dost thou believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?”

“I do.”

Bruno hesitated a minute, while an expression of deep pain flitted over his face.

“I cannot do it, Belasez.”

“O Father! do you reject me?”

“God forbid, my child! I do not reject thee in any wise: I only reject myself. Belasez, long years ago, Licorice thy mother did me a cruel wrong. If I baptise thee, I shall feel it to be my revenge on her. And I have no right thus to defile the snow-white robe of thy baptism because my hands are not clean, nor to mingle the revenge of earth with the innocence of Heaven. Wait a moment.”

And he turned and went rapidly down the stairs. Belasez waited till he came back. He was accompanied by Father Warner. She trembled at the ordeal which she guessed to await her, and soon found that she was not far wrong. Father Warner took her into the empty chapel, and required her to repeat the Creed (which of course she could not do), to tell him which were the seven deadly sins, and what the five commandments of the Church. Belasez had never heard of any of them. Warner shook his head sternly, and wondered what Brother Bruno could possibly mean by presenting this ignorant heathen as a fit candidate for baptism.

Belasez felt as if God and man alike would have none of her. Warner recommended her to put herself under the tuition of some priest at Norwich—which was to her a complete impossibility—and perhaps in a year or thereabouts, if she were diligent and obedient in following the orders of her director, she might hope to receive the grace of holy baptism.

She went out sobbing, and encountered Bruno at the head of the stairs.

“O Father Bruno!” faltered the girl. “Father Warner will not do it!”

“I was afraid so,” said Bruno, sadly. “I should not have thought of asking him had my Brother Nicholas been at home. Well, daughter, this is no fault of thine. Remember, we baptise only with water: but He whose ministers we are can baptise thee with the Holy Ghost and with fire. Let Him be thy Shepherd to provide for thee; thy Priest to absolve thee; thy King to command thine heart’s allegiance. So dwell thou to Him in this world now, that hereafter thou mayest dwell with Him for ever.”

Belasez stooped and kissed his hand. He gave her his blessing in fervent tones, bade her a farewell which gave him unmistakable pain, and let her depart. Belasez drew her veil closely over her face, and joined Delecresse and her father’s old friend Hamon in the hall.

“What a time thou hast been!” said Delecresse, discontentedly. “Do let us go now. I want to be outside this accursed Castle.”

But to Belasez it seemed like stepping out of the sunlit fold into the dreary wilderness beyond.

As they passed the upper end of the hall, Belasez paused for an instant to make a last reverence to Margaret, who sat there talking with her unacknowledged husband, Sir Richard de Clare. The black scowl on the face of her brother drew her attention at once.

“Who is that young Gentile?” he demanded.

“Sir Richard de Clare, Lord of Gloucester.”

“What hast thou against him?” asked old Hamon.

“That is the youth that threw my cap into a pool, a year ago, and called me a Jew cur,” said Delecresse, between his teeth.

“Pooh, pooh!” said old Hamon. “We all have to put up with those little amenities. Never mind it, child.”

“I’ll never mind it—till the time come!” answered Delecresse, in an undertone. “Then—I think I see how to wipe it off.”

Belasez found her mother returned from Lincoln. She received a warm welcome from Abraham, a much cooler one from Licorice, and was very glad, having arrived at home late, to go to bed in her own little chamber, which was inside that of her parents. She soon dropped asleep, but was awoke ere long by voices in the adjoining room, distinctly audible through the curtain which alone separated the chambers. They spoke in Spanish, the language usually employed amongst themselves by the English Sephardim.

“Ay de mi, (‘Woe is me!’) that it ever should have been so!” said the voice of Licorice. “What did the shiksah (Note 1) want with her?”

“I told thee, wife,” answered Abraham, in a slightly injured tone, “she wanted the child to embroider a scarf.”

“And I suppose thou wert too anxious to fill thy saddle-bags to care for the danger to her?”

“There was no danger at all, wife. The Countess promised all I asked her. And I made thirteen gold pennies clear profit. Thou canst see the child is no worse—they have been very kind to her: she said as much.”

“Abraham, son of Ursel, thou art a very wise man!”

“What canst thou mean, Licorice?”

“‘Kind to her!’ If they had starved her and beaten her, there might have been no harm done. Canst thou not see that the girl’s heart is with her Christian friends? Why, she had been crying behind her veil, quietly, all the journey.”

“Well, wife? What then?”

“‘What then?’ Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob! ‘What then?’ Why, then—she will do like Anegay.”

“The God of our fathers forbid it!” cried Abraham, in tones of horror and distress.

“It is too late for that,” said Licorice, with a short, contemptuous laugh. “Thou shouldst have said that a year ago, and have kept the child at home.”

“We had better marry her at once,” suggested Abraham, still in a voice of deep pain.

“‘There are no birds in last year’s nest,’ old man,” was the response. “Marry her or let it alone, the child’s heart is gone from us. She has left behind her in yonder Castle those for whom she cares more than for us, and, I should not wonder also, a faith dearer to her than ours. It will be Anegay over again. Ah, well! Like to like! What else could we expect?”

“Can she hear us, Licorice?”

“Not she! She was fast asleep an hour ago.”

“Wife, if it be so, have we not deserved it?”

“Abraham, don’t be a fool!” cried Licorice, so very snappishly that it sounded as if her conscience might have responded a little to the accusation.

“I cannot but think thou didst evil, Licorice,—thou knowest how and when.”

“I understand thee, of course. It was the only thing to do.”

“I know thou saidst so,” answered Abraham in an unconvinced tone. “Yet it went to my heart to hear the poor child’s sorrowful moan.”

“Thy heart is stuffed with feathers.”

“I would rather it were so than with stones.”

“Thanks for the compliment!”

“Nay, I said nothing about thee. But, Licorice, if it be as thou thinkest, do not let us repeat that mistake.”

“I shall repeat no mistakes, I warrant thee.”

The conversation ceased rather suddenly, except for one mournful exclamation from Abraham,—“Poor Anegay!”

Anegay! where had Belasez heard that name before? It belonged to no friend or relative, so far as she knew. Yet that she had heard it before, and that in interesting connection with something, she was absolutely certain.

Belasez dropped asleep while she was thinking. It seemed to her that hardly a minute passed before she woke again, to hear her mother moving in the next room, and to see full daylight streaming in at the window.

And suddenly, just as she awoke, it rushed upon her when and how she had heard of Anegay.

She saw herself, a little child, standing by the side of Licorice. With them was old Belya, the mother of Hamon, and before them stood an enormous illuminated volume at which they were looking. Belasez found it impossible to remember what had been said by Belya; but her mother’s response was as vivid in her mind as if the whole scene were of yesterday.

“Hush! The child must not know. Yes, Belya, thou art right. That was taken from Anegay’s face.”

What was it that was taken? And dimly before Belasez’s mental eyes a picture seemed to grow, in which a king upon his throne, and a woman fainting, were the principal figures. Esther before Ahasuerus!

That was it, of course. And Belasez sprang up, with a determination to search through her father’s books, and to find the picture which had been taken from Anegay’s face.

But, after all, who was Anegay?

Licorice was in full tide of business and porridge-making, in her little kitchen, when Belasez presented herself with an apology for being late.

“Nay, folks that go to bed at nine may well not rise till five,” said Licorice, graciously. “Throw more salt in here, child, and fetch the porringers whilst I stir it. Call thy father and Delecresse,—breakfast will be ready by the time they are.”

Breakfast was half over when Licorice inquired of her daughter whom she had seen at Bury Castle.

“Oh! to speak to, only the Countess and her daughter, Damsel Margaret, and the other young damsels, Doucebelle, Eva, and Marie; and Levina, the Lady’s dresser. They showed me some others through the window, so that I knew their names and faces.”

Belasez quietly left out the priests.

“And what knights didst thou see there?”

“Through the window? Sir Hubert the Earl, and Sir Richard of Gloucester, and Sir John the Earl’s son, and Sir John de Averenches. Oh! I forgot Dame Hawise, Sir John’s wife; but I never saw much of her.”

“There was no such there as one named Bruno de Malpas, I suppose?” asked Licorice, with assumed carelessness. “No, there was no knight of that name.” But in her heart Belasez felt that the name belonged to the priest, Father Bruno.

A few more questions were asked her, of no import, and then they rose. When Licorice set her free from household duties, Belasez took her way to the little closet over the porch which served as her father’s library. He was the happy possessor of eleven volumes,—a goodly number at that date. Eight she passed by, knowing them to contain no pictures. The ninth was an illuminated copy of the Brut, which of course began, as all chronicles then did, with the creation; but Belasez looked through it twice without finding any thing to satisfy her. Next came the Chronicle of Benoit, but the illuminations in this were merely initials and tail-pieces in arabesque. There was only one left, and it was the largest volume in the collection. Belasez could not remember having ever opened it. She pulled it down now, just missing a sprained wrist in the process, and found it to be a splendid copy of the Hagiographa, with full-page pictures, glowing with colours and gold. Of course, the illuminations had been executed by Christian hands; but all these books had come to Abraham in exchange for bad debts, and he was not so consistent as to refuse to look at the representations of created things, however wicked he might account it to produce them. Belasez turned over the stiff leaves, one after another, till she reached the Book of Esther. Yes, surely that was the picture she remembered. There sat the King Ahasuerus on a curule chair, wearing a floriated crown and a mantle clasped at the neck with a golden fibula; and there fainted Queen Esther in the arms of her ladies, arrayed in the tight gown, the pocketing sleeve, the wimple, and all other monstrosities of the early Plantagenet era. A Persian satrap, enclosed in a coat of mail and a surcoat with a silver shield, whereon an exceedingly rampant red lion was disporting itself, appeared to be coming to the help of his liege lady; while a tall white lily, in a flower-pot about twice the size of the throne, occupied one side of the picture. To all these details Belasez paid no attention. The one thing at which she looked was the face of the fainting Queen, which was turned full towards the spectator. It was a very lovely face of a decidedly Jewish type. But what made Belasez glance from it to the brazen mirror fixed to the wall opposite? Was it Anegay of whom Bruno had been thinking when he murmured that she was so like some one? Undoubtedly there was a likeness. The same pure oval face, the smooth calm brow, the dark glossy hair: but it struck Belasez that her own features, as seen in the mirror, were the less prominently Jewish.

And, once more, who was Anegay?

How little it is possible to know of the innermost heart of our nearest friends! Belasez went through all her duties that day, without rousing the faintest suspicion in the mind of her mother that she had heard a syllable of the conversation between her parents the night before. Yet she thought of little else. Her household work was finished, and she sat in the deep recess of the window at her embroidery, when Delecresse came and stood beside her.

“Belasez, who was that damsel that sat talking with my Lord of Gloucester in the hall when we passed through?”

“That was the Damsel Margaret, daughter of Sir Hubert the Earl.”

“What sort of a maiden is she?”

“Very sweet and gentle. I liked her extremely. She was always most kind to me.”

“Is she attached to my Lord of Gloucester?”

It was a new idea to Belasez.

“Really, I never thought of that, Cress. But I should not at all wonder if she be. She is constantly talking of him.”

“Does he care for her?”

“I fancy he does, by the way I have seen him look up at her windows.”

“Yes, I could tell that from his face.”

The tone of her brother’s voice struck Belasez unpleasantly.

“Cress! what dost thou mean?”

“It is a pity that the innocent need suffer with the guilty,” answered Delecresse, contemptuously. “But it mostly turns out so in this world.”

Belasez grasped her brother’s wrists.

“Cress, thou hast no thought of revenging thyself on Sir Richard of Gloucester for that boyish trick he once played on thee?”

“I’ll be even with him, Belasez. No man—least of all a Christian dog—shall insult me with impunity.”

“O Cress, Cress! Thou must not do it. Hast thou forgotten that vengeance belongeth to the Holy One, to whom be glory? And for such a mere nothing as that!”

“Nothing! Dost thou call it nothing for a son of Abraham to be termed a Jew cur by one of those creeping things of Gentiles? Is not the day at hand when they shall be our ploughmen and vine-dressers?”

“Well, then,” answered Belasez, assuming a playfulness which she was far from feeling, “when Sir Richard is thy ploughman, thou canst knock his cap off.”

“Pish! They like high interest, these Christians. I’ll let them have it, the other way about.”

“Cress, what dost thou mean to do?”

“I mean that he shall pay me every farthing that he owes,” said Delecresse through his clenched teeth. “I cannot have it in gold coins, perhaps. It will suit me as well in drops of blood,—either from his veins or from his heart.”

“Delecresse, thou shalt not touch the Damsel Margaret, if that be the meaning of those terrible words.”

“I am not going to touch her,” replied Delecresse, scornfully, “even with the tongs he took to my cap. I would not touch one of the vile insects for all the gold at Norwich!”

“But what dost thou mean?”

“Hold thou thy peace. I was a fool to tell thee.”

“What art thou going to do?” persisted Belasez.

“What thou wilt hear when it is done,” said Delecresse, walking away.

He left poor Belasez in grief and terror. Some misery, of what sort she could not even guess, was impending over her poor friend Margaret. How was it possible to warn her?—and of what was she to be warned?

A few minutes were spent in reflection, and then Belasez’s work was hastily folded, and she went in search of her father. Abraham listened with a perplexed and annoyed face.

“That boy always lets his hands go before his head! But what can I do, daughter? In good sooth, I would not willingly see any injury done to the Christians that have been so kind to thee. Where is Cress?”

“He went into the kitchen,” said Belasez. Abraham shuffled off in that direction, in the loose yellow slippers which were one of the recognised signs of a Jew.

“Delecresse is just gone out,” he said, coming back directly. “I will talk to him when he comes in.”

But twelve days elapsed before Delecresse returned.

“Cress, thou wilt not do anything to Sir Richard of Gloucester?” earnestly pleaded Belasez, when she found him alone.

“No,” said Delecresse, with a glitter in his eyes which was not promising.

“Hast thou done any thing?”

“All I mean to do.”

“O Cress, what hast thou done?”

“Go to bed!” was the most lucid explanation which all the eager entreaties of Belasez could obtain from her brother.

Note 1. The feminine singular of the Hebrew word rendered, in the A.V., “creeping things.” Dr Edersheim tells us that this flattering term is commonly employed in speaking of a Gentile.

Chapter Eight.

In the Dark.

“I trust Thee, though I cannot see
Thy light upon my pathway shine;
However dark, Lord, let it be
Thy way, not mine!”

“If it stand with your good liking, may a man have speech of Sir Piers de Rievaulx?”

It was a tall youth who asked the question, and he stood under the porch of a large Gothic house, on the banks of the Thames near Westminster. The night was wet and dark, and it was the second of April 1236.

“And who art thou, that would speak with the knight my master?”

“What I have to say to him is of consequence. Who I may be does not so much matter.”