The Well in the Desert Part 6

"Isabel! Isabel!"

Philippa was deeply touched; for the name, twice repeated, broke in a wail of tender, mournful love, from the lips of the blind nun.

"Mother," she pleaded, "if you know anything of her, for the holy Virgin's love tell it to me, her child. I have missed her and longed for her all my life. Surely I have a right to know her story who gave me that life!"

"Thou shalt know," responded Mother Joan in a choked voice. "But, child, name me Mother Joan no longer. Call me what I am to thee--Aunt.

Thy mother was my sister."

And then Philippa knew that she stood upon the threshold of all her long-nursed hopes.

"But tell me first," pursued the nun, "how that upstart treated thee-- Alianora."

"She was not unkind to me," answered Philippa hesitatingly. "She did not give me precedence over her daughters, but then she is of the blood royal, and I am not. But--"

"Not royal!" exclaimed Mother Joan in extremely treble tones. "Have they brought thee up so ignorantly as that? Not of the blood royal, quotha! Child, by our Lady's hosen, thou art fifty-three steps nearer the throne than she! We were daughters of Alianora, whose mother was Joan of Acon, [Acre, where Joan was born], daughter of King Edward of Westminster; and she is but the daughter of Henry, the son of Edmund, son of Henry of Winchester." [Henry the Third.]

Philippa was silent from astonishment.

"Go on," said the nun. "What did she to thee?"

"She did little," said Philippa in a low voice. "She only left undone."

"Ah!" replied Mother Joan. "The one half of the _Confiteor_. The other commonly marcheth apace behind."

"Then," said Philippa, "my mother was--"

"Isabel La Despenser, younger daughter of the Lord Hugh Le Despenser the younger, Earl of Gloucester, and grand-daughter of Hugh the elder, Earl of Winchester. Thou knowest their names well, if not hers."

"I know nothing about them," replied Philippa, shaking her head. "None ever told me. I only remember to have heard them named at Arundel as very wicked persons, and rebels against the King."

"Holy Virgin!" cried Mother Joan. "Rebels!--against which King?"

"I do not know," answered Philippa.

"But I do!" exclaimed the blind woman, bitterly. "Rebels against a rebel! Traitors to a traitress! G.o.d reward Isabelle of France for all the shame and ruin that she brought on England! Was the crown that she carried with her worth the price which she cost that carried it? Well, she is dead now--gone before G.o.d to answer all that long and black account of hers. Methinks it took some answering. Child, my father did some ill things, and my grandfather did more; but did either ever anything to merit the shame and agony of those two gibbets at Hereford and Bristol? Gibbets for them, that had sat in the King's council, and aided him to rule the realm,--and one of them a white-haired man over sixty years! [See Note 5.] And what had they done save to anger the tigress? G.o.d help us all! We be all poor sinners; but there be some, at the least in men's eyes, a deal blacker than others. But thou wouldst know her story, not theirs: yet theirs is the half of hers, and the tale were unfinished if I told it not."

"What was she like?" asked Philippa.

Mother Joan pa.s.sed her hand slowly over the features of her niece.

"Like, and not like," she said. "Thy features are sharper cut than hers; and though in thy voice there is a sound of hers, it is less soft and low. Hers was like the wind among the strings of an harp hanging on the wall. Thy colouring I cannot see. But if thou be like her, thine hair is glossy, and of chestnut hue; and thine eyes are dark and mournful."

"Tell me about her, Aunt, I pray you," said Philippa.

Joan La Despenser smoothed down her monastic habit, and leaned her head back against the wall. There was evidently some picture of memory's bringing before her sightless eyes, and her voice itself had a lower and softer tone as she spoke of the dead sister. But her first words were not of her.

"Holy Virgin!" she said, "when thou didst create the world, wherefore didst thou make women? For women have but two fates: either they are black-souled, like the tigress Isabelle, and then they prosper and thrive, as she did; or else they are white snowdrops, like our dead darling, and then they are martyrs. A few die in the cradle--those whom thou lovest best; and what fools are we to weep for them! Ah me! things be mostly crooked in this world. Is there another, me wondereth, where they grow straight?--where the black-souled die on the gibbets, and the white-souled wear the crowns? I would like to die, and change to that Golden Land, if there be. Methinks it is far off."

It was a Land "very far off." And over the eyes of Joan La Despenser the blinding film of earth remained; for she had not drunk of the Living Water.

"The founder of our house,"--thus Mother Joan began her narrative,--"was my grandfather's father, slain, above an hundred years ago, at the battle of Evesham. He left an infant son, not four years old when he died. This was my grandfather, Hugh Le Despenser, Earl of Winchester, who at the age of twenty-five advanced the fortunes of his house by wedding a daughter of Warwick, Isabel, the young widow of the Lord de Chaworth, and the mother's mother of Alianora of Lancaster. Thou and thy father's wife, therefore, are near akin. This Isabel (after whom thy mother was named) was a famed beauty, and brought moreover a very rich dower. My grandfather and she had many children, but I need only speak of one--my hapless father.

"King Edward of Caernarvon loved my father dearly. In truth, so did Edward of Westminster, who bestowed on him, ere he was fully ten years old, the hand of his grand-daughter, my mother, Alianora de Clare, who brought him in dower the mighty earldom of Gloucester. The eldest of us was Hugh my brother; then came I; next followed my other brothers, Edward, Gilbert, and Philip; and last of all, eight years after me, came Isabel thy mother.

"From her birth this child was mine especial care. I was alway a thoughtful, quiet maiden, more meet for cloister than court; and I well remember, though 'tis fifty years ago, the morrow when my baby-sister was put into mine arms, and I was bidden to have a care of her. Have a care of her! Had she never pa.s.sed into any worse care than mine-- well-a-day! Yet, could I have looked forward into the future, and have read Isabel's coming history, I might have thought that the wisest and kindest course I could take would be to smother her in her cradle.

"Before she was three years old, she pa.s.sed from me. My Lord of Arundel--Earl Edmund that then was--was very friendly with my father; and he desired that their families should be drawn closer together by the marriage of Richard Fitzalan, his son and heir--a boy of twelve years--with one of my father's daughters. My father, thus appealed unto, gave him our snowdrop.

"'Not Joan,' said he; 'Joan is G.o.d's. She shall be the spouse of Christ in Shaftesbury Abbey.'

"So it came that ere my darling was three years old, they twined the bride-wreath for her hair, and let it all down flowing, soft and s.h.i.+ning, from beneath her golden fillet. Ah holy Virgin! had it been thy pleasure to give me that cup of gall they mixed that day for her, and to her the draught of pure fresh water thou hast held to me!

Perchance I could have drunk it with less pain than she did; and at least it would have saved the pain to her.

"That was in the fourteenth year of Edward of Caernarvon. [1320.] So long as Earl Edmund of Arundel lived, there was little to fear. He, as I said, loved my father, and was a father to Isabel. The Lady of Arundel likewise was then living, and was careful over her as a mother.

Knowest thou that the Lady Griselda, of such fame for her patient endurance, was an ancestress of thy father? It should have been of thy mother. Hers was a like story; only that to her came no reward, no happy close.

"But ere I proceed, I must speak of one woeful matter, which I do believe to have been the ruin of my father. He was never loved by the people--partly, I think, because he gave counsel to the King to rule, as they thought, with too stern a hand; partly because my grandfather loved money too well, nor was he over careful how he came thereby; partly because the Queen hated him, and she was popular; but far above all these for another reason, which was the occasion of his fall, and the ruin of all who loved him.

"Hast thou ever heard of the Boni-Homines? They have other names-- Albigenses, Waldenses, Cathari, Men of the Valleys. They are a sect of heretics, dwelling originally in the dominions of the Marquis of Monferrato, toward the borders betwixt France, Italy, and Spain: men condemned by the Church, and holding certain evil opinions touching the holy doctrine of grace of condignity, and free-will, and the like. Yet some of them, I must confess, lead not unholy lives."

Philippa merely answered that she had heard of these heretics.

"Well," resumed the blind woman, "my father became entangled with these men. How or wherefore I know not. He might have known that their doctrines had been condemned by the holy Council of Lumbars two hundred years back. But when the Friars Predicants were first set up by the blessed Dominic, under leave of our holy Father the Pope, many of these sectaries crept in among them. A company went forth from Ashridge, and another from Edingdon--the two houses of this brood of serpents. And one of them, named Giles de Edingdon, fell in with my father, and taught him the evil doctrines of these wretches, whom Earl Edmund of Cornwall (of the blood royal), that wedded a daughter of our house, had in his unwisdom brought into this land; for he was a wicked man and an ill liver. [See Note 6.] King Edward of Caernarvon likewise listened to these men, and did but too often according to their counsels.

"Against my grandfather and others, but especially against these men of Edingdon and Ashridge, Dame Isabelle the Queen set herself up. King Edward had himself sent her away on a certain mission touching the homage due to the King of France for Guienne; for he might not adventure to leave the realm at that time. But now this wicked woman gathered together an army, and with Prince Edward, and the King's brother the Earl of Kent, who were deluded by her enchantments, she came back and landed at Orewell, and thence marched with flying colours to Bristol, men gathering everywhere to her standard as she came.

"We were in Bristol on that awful day. My mother, the King had left in charge of the Tower of London; but in Bristol, with the King, were my grandfather and father my Lord and Lady of Arundel, their son Richard, and Isabel, and myself. I was then a maiden of sixteen years. When Dame Isabelle's banners floated over the gates of the city, and her trumpets summoned the citizens to surrender, King Edward, who was a timid man, flung himself into the castle for safety, and with him all of us, saving my grandfather, and my Lord of Arundel, who remained without, directing the defence.

"The citizens of Bristol, thus besieged (for she had surrounded the town), sent to ask Dame Isabelle her will, offering to surrender the city on condition that she would spare their lives and property. But she answered by her trumpeter, that she would agree to nothing unless they would first surrender the Earls of Winchester and Arundel; 'for,'

saith she, 'I am come purposely to destroy them.' Then the citizens consulted together, and determined to save their lives and property by the sacrifice of the n.o.blest blood in England, and (as it was shown afterwards) of the blood royal. They opened their gates, and yielded up my grandfather and thine to her will."

Note 1. Hilding: a word derived from the Anglo-Saxon, and used indiscriminately to denote a young person of either s.e.x.

Note 2. Wimple: the covering for the neck, worn by secular women as well as nuns, and either with or without a veil or hood. It had been in fas.h.i.+on for two centuries or thereabouts, but was now beginning to be generally discarded.

Note 3. In accordance with the custom of the time, by which persons were commonly named from their birth-places, Edward the First, the Second, and the Third are respectively designated Edward of Westminster, of Caernarvon, and of Windsor.

Note 4. The copped-hat was the high-crowned brimless hat then fas.h.i.+onable, the parent of the modern one. An instance of it will be found in the figure of Bolingbroke, plate xvi. of the ill.u.s.trations to Cretan's History of Richard the Second, Archaeologia, vol. xx.

Note 5. One historian after another has copied Froissart's a.s.sertion that Hugh Le Despenser the elder at his death was an old man of ninety, and none ever took the trouble to verify the statement; yet the _post-mortem_ inquisition of his father is extant, certifying that he was born in the first week in March 1261; so that on October 8, 1326, the day of his execution, he was only sixty-five.

Note 6. It will be understood that this was the light in which the monks regarded Earl Edmund.

CHAPTER FIVE.