Part 6 (1/2)

”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.