Chapter VIII The End of a Wedding-Day
“Aye, there’s a blank at my right hand
That ne’er can be made up to me.”
—HOGG.
“And how goes it with the fair Grisacres, Sellinger?”
The question was asked by King Edward IV., who was lounging in an attitude of lazy ease on a “day-bed,” the ancestor of the modern sofa. His Majesty’s life was spent in alternations between taking his ease in the very easiest of ways, and fits of fiery bravery when occasion called them forth. The gentleman addressed was Master Thomas St. Leger, a squire of the body, to whom Edward had granted the marriage of Jane Grisacres, one of the chamberers of his sister of Exeter. This meant that the young lady was an heiress, and that the gentleman was at liberty either to marry her himself, or to make merchandise of her to some other person. The inclinations of the lady were not considered. Her sole opportunity, therefore, if she did not admire her master, lay in making herself so extremely disagreeable to him that he might prefer to sell her.
“I humbly thank your Highness, all goes rarely well,” replied St. Leger, with a courtesy.
St. Leger was a good-looking man of some five and twenty years, with light hair, which, in accordance with fashion, he wore very long, and cut quite straight all round.
“That is well. I would fain do thee some grace for thy service,” said Edward, rising, and calling another of his squires to attend him, he lounged out of the room.
King Edward IV. was the handsomest man of his age. “A more beautiful person,” says Comines, “never did mine eyes behold.” He was very tall,—six feet three inches—of extremely fair complexion, light brown hair, and blue eyes—true Plantagenet colours: but he grew corpulent in his later years—a blemish which at this time had not begun to appear. Like most persons at that period, he wore his hair very long, but neither beard, whiskers, nor moustache.
“What though the face be fair,
What though the eye be bright,
What though the rare and flowing hair
Vie with the rich sunlight,—
If the soul which of all should the fairest be,
If the soul which must last through eternity
Be a dark and unholy thing?”
And certainly, in Edward’s case, the beauty of the outward man was very far from corresponding with the inner man of the heart.
A rather peculiar smile curled the lip of the squire after the King’s departure.
“His Highness would fain do me some grace—would he so?” he inquired half aloud, and to all appearance addressing himself to a fly which was marching up the diamond-shaped panes of the window. “What should he say, trow, an’ he wist of the grace which another thinks to do me?”
The same evening saw Mr. St. Leger a visitor at Coldharbour, for the purpose of carrying on that wooing which was now beginning to be thought decorous even in these cases where the lady was not free to refuse—though, of course, capable of omission if preferred. Half an hour he spent with Mistress Jane Grisacres in the hall—a half-hour which was a weary weight to him, and a moment of enchantment to her, for—alas for poor Jane Grisacres!—she loved the handsome suitor who cared so little about her. This business well over, Mr. St. Leger slipped out of the hall, and passed lightly up a spiral staircase, to do his real wooing in another chamber, to a lady who had double the beauty, and ten times the position, but not one per cent. of the heart, of poor Jane Grisacres.
Men and women do not leap, but grow, into monsters of iniquity. Dionysius the Tyrant, Pope Alexander the Sixth, Judge Jeffries, and Robespierre, were all innocent babies once. The heart not yet hardened in sin shrinks back from the first touch of what it recognises as evil, with the cry, “Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?”37
But when the evil is not recognised, how then? There is no shrinking from Satan when he comes to us clad in the robes of an angel of light. One of the most skilful touches of the wonderful tinker is that passage where Christian and Hopeful admit that they were forewarned to beware of the Flatterer. “But we did not imagine (said they) that this fine-spoken man had been he.”
When the Lady Anne of York, in her innocent girlhood, scarcely more than a child, stood at the altar with Henry Duke of Exeter, she would probably have repulsed with indignant horror the prophet who should have told her that ere twenty years were over, she would fling overboard, careless what fate he met, the husband who would have loved her if she had given him leave, for the sake of a young man who was merely attracted by her beauty, rank, and wealth. She was ready to do it now. Beginning by simply amusing herself with the young squire, then regarding him as a friend, she had reached a point at which she was willing to abnegate rank, and sacrifice even her hoarded wealth, sooner than part with him. The matter was easily managed. A Princess would find it no hard matter to obtain a divorce. Of course the King must be amused with some other reason than the true one, as he might not fancy a marriage between his sister and his servant. But it was easy enough to take him in, by a little virtuous indignation about the wicked Lancastrian proclivities of the Duke, which made it utterly impracticable for the Duchess ever to bear him again. Edward’s own constancy was not so remarkable that he could afford to be severe upon Anne.
And what of the delicate maiden whose one tie to life was that father who was thus to be cast away and left to his fate? Her mother did not find it convenient to consider her. She was to be married to Thomas Grey. If she did not like him, worse luck! What more could be said? She must put up with her fate, as others had done before her.
It did, however, strike the Duchess that it might be as well to get her daughter’s marriage over before her own. The divorce could take place any time—the sooner the better. She had already induced her royal brother to make sundry small grants of minor offices and inexpensive manors to St. Leger: and His Majesty was just now very busy—partly occupied in settling political difficulties, and partly in recruiting his recent heavy exertions. Among the former were a quantity of pardons to Lancastrians who had submitted themselves—among whom was a mercer of London, by name William Caxton, whose thoughts were busy on the setting up of that quiet little printing-press at Westminster which was to revolutionise the world; the removal of Clarence from Court (where he was eternally quarrelling with Gloucester) by creating him Viceroy of Ireland; the re-arrest of Archbishop Neville, under cover of a friendly visit from the King, who gleefully appropriated his £20,000 worth of personalty, and broke up his mitre to make a crown for himself. Edward was still worried on the subject of Richmond, whom he was trying hard to induce to come to England, alleging as his sole object the desire to restore his dear young kinsman to his forfeited inheritance: but the Duke of Burgundy—with whom Richmond had now taken refuge—at the last moment stopped the negotiations, on hearing from the proverbial little bird that what Edward really wanted with his dear young kinsman was to show him the same civility which Herod did to John the Baptist. King Edward’s recourse, under these accumulated annoyances, for rest and refreshment, was as usual to a sylvan recreation which was a mixture of picnic and hunting tour, gorgeous pavilions being pitched for that galaxy of Court ladies without whom life would in his eyes have been a howling wilderness.
The Duchess of Exeter and her daughter were among the royal guests. The flirtation between the former and Mr. St. Leger was thereby considerably promoted: while the aversion of the Lady Anne for Mr. Thomas Grey was very far from lessened. The Duchess, however, pushed on the settlements and preparations: and soon after the King’s return to Westminster, both events were ready to happen. The divorce came first. On the twelfth of November, 1472, the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Exeter was dissolved by Papal bull: and in the following January, the Lady Anne de Holand was made to give her hand—not with her heart in it—to the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth.
On the evening before this sacrifice was offered at the shrine of politics and propriety, the Lady Anne, and several of her mother’s chamberers, were gathered at Coldharbour. The bride had been trying on her wedding-dress, which Jane Grisacres and Marion Rothwell were carefully folding up. It was of rich crimson velvet, heavily furred with ermine, and was almost too great a weight for the slight shoulders which drooped beneath it. Suddenly there was an exclamation from Jane.
“Help us, holy Mary! If I have not lost my locket!”
“Dear heart!” responded Marion. “Look and see if it have not catched in my Lady’s gown.”
The search was made, but without success.
“Woe is me! I had liefer have lost all mine having rather than yon locket,” lamented Jane.
“I know wherefore,” suggested the teazing Tamzine, in that tantalising style which is always meant to provoke a request for further explanation: and Marion, who was not devoid of curiosity, responded as Tamzine intended she should.
“Wherefore? The saints be about us! Had she not yon locket for a token of Master Sellinger? I know!” announced Miss Thomasine, in a tone which called the colour into Jane’s face.
The last-named young lady was still hunting for her lost treasure, in likely and unlikely places, with a running accompaniment of remarks addressed to nobody, such as are usual in similar cases.
“I am assured I put it on this morrow!—Dear, dear, but to think of it!—Where can it be?—I have looked every whither!—Had ever poor maid such an ill loss?”
“It had his hair in it, I warrant you,” said Marion, not ill-naturedly—she was not an ill-natured girl—but with that spice of enjoyable excitement at the least adventure or misadventure, which gave Rochefoucauld the occasion to observe that there is something exhilarating in the misfortunes of our friends.
“Not it, forsooth!” said Tamzine. “Master Sellinger is not he that should lay violent hands of his greatest treasure to please a woman.”
“Is his hair his greatest treasure?” laughed Marion.
“Trust me!” was Tamzine’s sententious response. “Have you ne’er beheld him shake it with yon delicate turn of his head that he hath? Why, he beareth it a good inch longer than any other in the Court.”
“Good lack! the man is a very popinjay,”38 said Marion. “He might be a maid, with his pouncet-box and his pomanders.”39
“And his little mirror stuck of a little poke40 of his doublet—have you ne’er watched him pull it forth when he counted him unseen?”
“Nay, verily! but doth he so? That passeth!”41
“Use your eyes,” said Tamzine. “Jane, sweet chuck, give up searching for a needle of a bottle of hay. The cat hath it, I’ll be bound, or some animal belike.”
In which Miss Tamzine was not so far wrong, seeing that the missing article lay in her own pocket.
“Cats eat no lockets, trow,” said Marion.
“Nay, but I cannot,” answered Jane in a distressed voice. “I had never yet heavier loss in all my life.”
“Good sooth, your life must have been a merry one,” said Tamzine.
“I have lost father and mother,” added Marion. “Somewhat passing a locket, belike.”
“I have lost worser than that,” said the cynical Tamzine, “for I had eleven hundred pound put out to usury, and he that had it paid me ne’er a plack.”
“Dear heart! how came that?” said Marion.
“Father Nokes said it came of the temptation of Satan, and the evilness of men’s hearts,” was the demure reply of Tamzine.
“What was your worst loss, Agnes?” asked Marion.
Agnes had to think. “I scarce can tell,” said she. “I were o’er young when my mother died to feel any loss.”
“What happy maids be ye!” came softly from Lady Anne, who had listened hitherto without joining. “Dear damsels, I pray you to thank God that the worsest loss ye know is the loss of death.”
“Can there be a worser, Madam?”
“Aye, Marion, there be losses in life far wofuller.”
“Your Ladyship scarce speaks from your own knowledge, methinks.”
“Aye, but I do!” answered the bride sadly. “We may lose our living, in a sorer fashion than our dead. The dead can go no further from us than they be: and the day cometh when we shall go to them. But the living may go further away from us till they never come back again: aye, and worser—for they may go further and further from God till they never come back to Him. And who shall measure the loss of a lost life?—who shall measure the loss of a lost soul?”
“Cheery talk for a bride of her wedding-eve!” muttered Marion, not for Lady Anne to hear.
Nor did she hear it. She sat by the table, resting her head upon her hand, and her thoughts evidently far away. Probably they were either on the life that lay before her, or on the father whom she might never see again.
“Oh dear!” exclaimed poor Jane, standing up from the cramped position in which she had been hunting for the missing locket. “I must give it up till daylight come. Our sweet Lady grant it be not truly lost!”
“Not a bit of it,” said Tamzine peremptorily: and reasonably enough, since she knew where it was.
“I will help you look for it to-morrow,” said Agnes kindly.
“Truly, I am beholden to you,” replied Jane. “I would give a gold half-angel to know where it were.”
“Give it me,” said Tamzine, holding out her hand. “I am going to-morrow even to see the White Witch of Bermondsey.”
“Wait and see if the locket be found afore the even,” wisely suggested Marion.
“Won’t be,” said Tamzine.
Jane, whose chief failing was being too easily led, paid over the five shillings to Tamzine without taking Marion’s advice.
“We must be early abed, maids,” said Lady Anne, rising, with a weary air. “We must needs be stirring early, and ’tis now so late the night shall not be long.”
She turned away from them, to go to her own chamber, with a hollow cough which smote painfully on Agnes Marston’s heart.
“Not long!” she said to herself, in another sense. “No, dear, gentle, suffering maiden—the night will not be long!”
The next morning rose brilliantly clear, and cruelly cold. There was a keen frost, and a keener east wind: but it was de rigueur that the bride must wear no covering on her head except a coronal of gems. She bore herself royally, with no sign of the outward sufferings which were consuming her life, any more than of the inward anguish which was gnawing at her heart. The marriage took place at Greenwich Palace, after a freezing voyage: and the bride was given away by her royal uncle. All the chamberers of course were present, and so were the people of England, represented by as many as could squeeze into the Palace chapel. Men and women of all ranks were there: but only two pairs of eyes noticed one man, muffled in a thick cloak as if he felt the cold, who stood back in the furthest corner. Agnes thought she could guess who he was; and she contrived to leave the chapel by the door close to which he stood. As she passed him in the crush, the Duke slipped a scrap of paper into her hand, with a significant look. Agnes hid it hastily, for it was not for a long time that she dared to examine it. There was a grand banquet to be gone through, and a series of dances and games in the Palace hall; and hours were over before Agnes could without notice slip away from the dancers, and in the recess of a window where no eyes saw her, unfold the Duke’s missive.
“I would fain speak with you,” it ran. “Dare you come alone to the waterside, without the little postern, as soon as the dark falleth? Risk nothing: but if you can come, you shall find me there.”
It was growing dusk already. Agnes listened for a moment to the sounds of mirth which came surging from the hall. No one would miss her there. She tied a hood over her head, and ran down to the little postern. True to his appointment, the Duke was walking slowly up and down, muffled in his cloak.
“May Christ bless you, my good damsel!” he said warmly, as Agnes made her appearance. “I do heartily trust that no ill shall hap to you for this grace. Now tell me quickly, for I would not keep you to your harm—what manner of man is this Master Grey? Since he were babe have I never seen him. What is in him?—what hath he done?”
Ah, Agnes knew of one thing he had done, which so far as in her lay must be kept from the ears of Anne’s father for ever. Could she look up into those mournful, longing eyes, and tell him that the man into whose hands his one darling had fallen was one of the murderers of Prince Edward? She cast her eyes downwards, and played nervously with her chatelaine.
“Methinks, my gracious Lord, not much hath been yet known of the young gentleman.”
“Perchance, not much,” answered the Duke quietly: “yet something, my gentle maid, which you would fain not tell me.”
Agnes took refuge in the smaller of the two evil actions of which she knew Grey to be guilty. The smaller—yet showing, as straws show how the wind blows, that he was capable of the greater.
“I have seen him not o’er good to his dog,” said she. “But I know not much of his conditions.”
The Duke sighed. “Doth my little maid love him?” he asked. “Was she willing to wed with him?”
It was an unusual idea for that time, and would scarcely have been asked but by an exceptionally tender-hearted parent. Agnes shook her head.
“O my darling, my darling! My little white dove!”
“My Lord,” said Agnes tremulously, “it will not be for long.”
“I know it. And then—I shall have nothing left to live for.”
Agnes Marston was one of those shy, undemonstrative, yet deeply-feeling natures, to whom talking of any thing they feel deeply is all but impossible. The fervent souls who wear their hearts upon their sleeves never comprehend a nature like this. They always think them cold, impassive, unfeeling. Yet such have shown themselves capable of martyr death: and they beyond all others can live the martyr life.42 The most suffering life, and the most saintly, is the life that has no outlet except towards God.
As she stood there by the river, listening to the soft lapping of the water against the bank, Agnes felt as though she could have given any thing to comfort that desolate man. Yet what could she say that might comfort him? To quote God’s Word, for a woman, and especially in English, would put herself in jeopardy: but she did not mind that, if it would do him any good. Agnes did not realise that the Duke had been educated by a Lollard stepmother, herself the daughter of a martyr of Jesus Christ.
“‘Youre liif is hidde with Crist in God.’” She made the quotation very tremblingly. Amazed indeed she was at the style of its reception. The Duke’s hand fell softly on her head as if in blessing, and—most astonishing of all—the quotation went on.
“‘For whanne Crist schal apere youre liif, thanne also ye schuln apere with him in glorie... Where is not male and female,... larlarus and scita, bonde man and fre man; but alle thingis and in alle thingis Crist.’ I thank you, heartily, my good maid. Aye, and methinks it runneth next,—‘As the Lord forgaf to you, so also ye.’ It is well. I count that shall last us both for this little while. ‘Alle thingis and in alle thingis, Crist.’”
Agnes was silent. She had taken a text: if her hearer would preach the sermon to himself, it was far better than any comment on her part.
“I scarce looked to find one of that sort in Coldharbour now,” said the Duke, with a smile which made him but look the sadder. “But you must have a care, Mistress Agnes. We be no longer under King Henry, that would not see a Christian man nor woman ill-usen. Yet I would fain, whenso you find safe chance, that you should speak such words to my little maid as you have spoken to me to-night. She cannot remember her grandmother, that should have learned them to her, as she did to me.”
“My gracious Lord, the Lady Anne wist thereof far more and better than I.”
The light came to the Duke’s eyes, for the first time that sorrowful night.
“Then we shall meet again,” he said. “Not long—no, not long! God keep you, Mistress Agnes, and give you, for this little while,—give all of us—to have, ‘alle thingis and in alle thingis, Crist.’”
Once more, light and warm, his hand rested on her head: and the next moment he was gone. She stood still and silent, with the feeling of that hand upon her head—of that last word in her ear. It was as if Christ Himself had blessed her. A sense of deep peace sank into Agnes Marston’s heart. The little while to be spent on this side the cold river seemed so very little, and the golden gates of Paradise so very near. She would never forget those words—never forget that tone—“alle thingis, and in alle thingis, Crist.”
“Agnes! Agnes Marston! Where art, hussy? Dost look for thy betters to waste their breath a-bawling of thee? Art any better than thou shouldst be, a-chattering to strange men at postern doors? Come in this minute, for shame of thy face, and tell me who is thy gallant. Some penny-go-quick pot-loving companion, I’ll be bound. Come hither, I say!”
Oh, what a revulsion it was! But Agnes did not hesitate a moment. Her conscience was clean as snow. She ran up the spiral staircase, and found herself in the awful, because angry, presence of the Mistress of the Household, Lady Elizabeth Darcy.
“Come up to the light, and let me look at thee!”
Agnes stood the scrutiny without flinching.
“Now then—with whom wert thou talking yonder?”
“Please it you, Madam, with a gentleman whose daughter is a maid of my cognisance, and he, knowing the same, did desire to have some speech of me touching her.”
“Yonder’s a jolly hearing! Get thy tale up better another time. Wherefore should such meet thee after dark, behind posterns? He should have come up to the hall, and desired speech of thee like an honest man. Now then, tell me another story, and let it be the true one, this time.”
“Madam, I have spoken truth. An’ I tell your Ladyship any other tale, it must needs be false.”
The two pairs of eyes met, and the Lady Elizabeth’s fell first.
“Holy Mary! but thou art a brazen piece of goods as ever I saw! Come with me to thy Lady. She must be told of this.”
Agnes followed silently. Wild horses should not drag that secret from her keeping.
The Duchess of Exeter—who had just divorced her own husband in order to marry another man—was inexpressibly horrified at the moral turpitude of Agnes Marston. Was she to allow of such scandals in her house? No, indeed! The only atonement that Agnes could make was to declare then and there the name and business of her companion. The Duchess was doubtful whether, after any disclosures or expressions of penitence, she would be justified in overlooking the matter.
Agnes kept silence. She had repeated her explanation, and she held to it as the simple truth: but not another word would she utter.
“Wilt not even say thou art sorry?” demanded Lady Darcy, who, now that the Duchess had taken up the matter so warmly, was herself cooling down.
Sorry! would she ever be sorry, all her life long, for what had passed in those few minutes?
“No, Madam. I am not sorry.”
“Nor ashamed?”
“Nor ashamed, in any wise.” And Agnes lifted her clear, honest eyes to her examiners.
“Verily, this passes!” cried the Duchess. “Dost look to tarry any longer in mine house, thou good-for-nought?”
“At your pleasure, Madam.”
“Then thou mayest write to my Lord Marnell, and tell him I send him back a thing that is no better than she should be.”
Agnes, whose sense of the ludicrous was very delicate, thought she would be quite safe in making that report.
“I’ll have thy sister in the stead of thee. She is a well-looking maid enough, and of good conditions. I saw her this last week, when she that was Queen Margaret was sent from Windsor to Wallingford.”
Agnes felt quietly amused. It was Frideswide who had been the Duke’s first friend, not she. He would be no worse by the exchange—whatever she might be.
“Dost hear, hussy?”
“Aye, Madam, an’t like you.”
“Then begone!”
And so—for Agnes Marston—closed the Lady Anne’s wedding-day.
She went quietly enough upstairs to the room shared by the chamberers of the Duchess. For a moment she stopped at the summit, with her hand on the banister. A sharp pain was shooting through her heart, but whence and what it was she did not know herself.
“What does it matter?” she said to herself, looking out of the window at the starry night. “Only such a little while! ‘Alle thingis, and in alle thingis, Crist!’”
Notes
37 These words have passed into an English proverb, and are here used in their current sense: but it should be remembered that in that sense they are not a Scriptural quotation, the key-note word being omitted from the sentence. Hazael really said, “Thy servant the dog, shall he do this great thing?” In other words, Is so mean a creature as I to attain to so high a position as you intimate? His feeling, therefore, was not righteous indignation, but rather rapturous astonishment.
38 Parrot.
39 The pomander, now becoming old-fashioned, was a ball of sweet-scented drugs enclosed in a network of metal, which was held in the warm hand to call out its fragrance: the pouncet box had taken its place, and was filled with sweet powder.
40 Pocket is the diminutive of poke.
41 Surpasses belief.
42 I would fain take this opportunity of protesting against a very common misapprehension (as it appears to me) of a passage of Scripture, by which hearts have been made sad which I believe God would not have made sad. How often the fervent nature condemns the shy and silent with “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” If the latter cannot speak, it is assumed, it is because it cannot feel, or is only half-hearted; if love be in your heart, it must come out of your lips: Christ says so! But does Christ say so? Let the context be carefully examined, and it will be found that Christ says, not that whatever is felt in the heart will come out of the mouth—but that whatever does come out of the mouth must first have originated in the heart. I venture to submit that this passage does not deal with the counter-proposition at all: and that between the two there is as much difference as between saying all one thinks, and meaning all one says.