THE LONELY BRIDE
Grace for the callant
If he marries our muckle-mouth Meg.
BROWNING.
“THE recreant! Shall we follow him?” was the cry of Lord Whitburn’s
younger squire, Harry Featherstone, with his hand on his horse’s neck, in
spite of the torrents of rain and the fresh flash that set the horses
quivering.
“No! no!” roared the Baron. “I tell you no! He has fulfilled his
promise; I fulfil mine. He has his freedom. Let him go! For the rest,
we will find the way to make him good husband to you, my wench,” and as
Harry murmured something, “There’s work enow in hand without spending our
horses’ breath and our own in chasing after a runaway groom. A brief
space we will wait till the storm be over.”
Grisell shrank back to pray at a little side altar, telling her beads,
and repeating the Latin formula, but in her heart all the time giving
thanks that she was going back to Bernard and her mother, whose needs had
been pressing strongly on her, yet that she might do right by this
newly-espoused husband, whose downcast, dejected look had filled her, not
with indignation at the slight to her—she was far past that—but with
yearning compassion for one thus severed from his true love.
When the storm had subsided enough for these hardy northlanders to ride
home, and Grisell was again perched behind old Cuthbert Ridley, he asked,
“Well, my Dame of Copeland, dost peak and pine for thy runaway
bridegroom?”
“Nay, I had far rather be going home to my little Bernard than be away
with yonder stranger I ken not whither.”
“Thou art in the right, my wench. If the lad can break the marriage by
pleading precontract, you may lay your reckoning on it that so he will.”
When they came home to the attempt at a marriage-feast which Lady
Whitburn had improvised, they found that this was much her opinion.
“He will get the knot untied,” she said. “So thick as the King and his
crew are with the Pope, it will cost him nothing, but we may, for very
shame, force a dowry out of his young knighthood to get the wench into
Whitby withal!”
“So he even proffered on his way,” said the Baron. “He is a fair and
knightly youth. ’Tis pity of him that he holds with the Frenchwoman.
Ha, Bernard, ’tis for thy good.”
For the boy was clinging tight to his sister, and declaring that his
Grisly should never leave him again, not for twenty vile runaway
husbands.
Grisell returned to all her old habits, and there was no difference in
her position, excepting that she was scrupulously called Dame Grisell
Copeland. Her father was soon called away by the summons to Parliament,
sent forth in the name of King Henry, who was then in the hands of the
Earl of Warwick in London. The Sheriff’s messenger who brought him the
summons plainly said that all the friends of York, Salisbury, and Warwick
were needed for a great change that would dash the hopes of the
Frenchwoman and her son.
He went with all his train, leaving the defence of the castle to Ridley
and the ladies, and assuring Grisell that she need not be downhearted.
He would yet bring her fine husband, Sir Leonard, to his marrow bones
before her.
Grisell had not much time to think of Sir Leonard, for as the summer
waned, both her mother and Bernard sickened with low fever. In the
lady’s case it was intermittent, and she spent only the third day in her
bed, the others in crouching over the fire or hanging over the child’s
bed, where he lay constantly tossing and fevered all night, sometimes
craving to be on his sister’s lap, but too restless long to lie there.
Both manifestly became weaker, in spite of all Grisell’s simple
treatment, and at last she wrung from the lady permission to send Ridley
to Wearmouth to try if it was possible to bring out Master Lambert Groot
to give his advice, or if not, to obtain medicaments and counsel from
him.
The good little man actually came, riding a mule. “Ay, ay,” quoth
Ridley, “I brought him, though he vowed at first it might never be, but
when he heard it concerned you, mistress—I mean Dame Grisell—he was ready
to come to your aid.”
Good little man, standing trim and neat in his burgher’s dress and little
frill-like ruff, he looked quite out of place in the dark old hall.
Lady Whitburn seemed to think him a sort of magician, though inferior
enough to be under her orders. “Ha! Is that your Poticary?” she
demanded, when Grisell brought him up to the solar. “Look at my bairn,
Master Dutchman; see to healing him,” she continued imperiously.
Lambert was too well used to incivility from nobles to heed her manner,
though in point of fact a Flemish noble was far more civilised than this
North Country dame. He looked anxiously at Bernard, who moaned a little
and turned his head away. “Nay, now, Bernard,” entreated his sister;
“look up at the good man, he that sent you the sugar-balls. He is come
to try to make you well.”
Bernard let her coax him to give his poor little wasted hand to the
leech, and looked with wonder in his heavy eyes at the stranger, who felt
his pulse, and asked to have him lifted up for better examination. There
was at first a dismal little whine at being touched and moved, but when a
pleasantly acid drop was put into his little parched mouth, he smiled
with brief content. His mother evidently expected that both he and she
herself would be relieved on the spot, but the Apothecary durst not be
hopeful, though he gave the child a draught which he called a febrifuge,
and which put him to sleep, and bade the lady take another of the like if
she wished for a good night’s rest.
He added, however, that the best remedy would be a pilgrimage to
Lindisfarne, which, be it observed, really meant absence from the foul,
close, feverish air of the castle, and all the evil odours of the court.
To the lady he thought it would really be healing, but he doubted whether
the poor little boy was not too far gone for such revival; indeed, he
made no secret that he believed the child was stricken for death.
“Then what boots all your vaunted chirurgery!” cried the mother
passionately. “You outlandish cheat! you! What did you come here for?
You have not even let him blood!”
“Let him blood! good madame,” exclaimed Master Lambert. “In his state,
to take away his blood would be to kill him outright!”
“False fool and pretender,” cried Lady Whitburn; “as if all did not ken
that the first duty of a leech is to take away the infected humours of
the blood! Demented as I was to send for you. Had you been worth but a
pinch of salt, you would have shown me how to lay hands on Nan the
witch-wife, the cause of all the scathe to my poor bairn.”
Master Lambert could only protest that he laid no claim to the skill of a
witch-finder, whereupon the lady stormed at him as having come on false
pretences, and at her daughter for having brought him, and finally fell
into a paroxysm of violent weeping, during which Grisell was thankful to
convey her guest out of the chamber, and place him under the care of
Ridley, who would take care he had food and rest, and safe convoy back to
Wearmouth when his mule had been rested and baited.
“Oh, Master Lambert,” she said, “it grieves me that you should have been
thus treated.”
“Heed not that, sweet lady. It oft falls to our share to brook the like,
and I fear me that yours is a weary lot.”
“But my brother! my little brother!” she asked. “It is all out of my
mother’s love for him.”
“Alack, lady, what can I say? The child is sickly, and little enough is
there of peace or joy in this world for such, be he high or low born.
Were it not better that the Saints should take him to their keeping,
while yet a sackless babe?”
Grisell wrung her hands together. “Ah! he hath been all my joy or bliss
through these years; but I will strive to say it is well, and yield my
will.”
The crying of the poor little sufferer for his Grisly called her back
before she could say or hear more. Her mother lay still utterly
exhausted on her bed, and hardly noticed her; but all that evening, and
all the ensuing night, Grisell held the boy, sometimes on her lap,
sometimes on the bed, while all the time his moans grew more and more
feeble, his words more indistinct. By and by, as she sat on the bed,
holding him on her breast, he dropped asleep, and perhaps, outwearied as
she was, she slept too. At any rate all was still, till she was roused
by a cry from Thora, “Holy St. Hilda! the bairn has passed!”
And indeed when Grisell started, the little head and hand that had been
clasped to her fell utterly prone, and there was a strange cold at her
breast.
Her mother woke with a loud wail. “My bairn! My bairn!” snatching him
to her arms. “This is none other than your Dutchman’s doings, girl.
Have him to the dungeon! Where are the stocks? Oh, my pretty boy! He
breathed, he is living. Give me the wine!” Then as there was no opening
of the pale lips, she fell into another tempest of tears, during which
Grisell rushed to the stair, where on the lowest step she met Lambert and
Ridley.
“Have him away! Have him away, Cuthbert,” she cried. “Out of the castle
instantly. My mother is distraught with grief; I know not what she may
do to him. O go! Not a word!”
They could but obey, riding away in the early morning, and leaving the
castle to its sorrow.
So, tenderly and sadly was little Bernard carried to the vault in the
church, while Grisell knelt as his chief mourner, for her mother, after
her burst of passion subsided, lay still and listless, hardly noticing
anything, as if there had fallen on her some stroke that affected her
brain. Tidings of the Baron were slow to come, and though Grisell sent a
letter by a wandering friar to York, with information of the child’s
death and the mother’s illness, it was very doubtful when or whether they
would ever reach him.