Chapter Five.

Chapter Five.The Wreck of the “Dolorida.”“And therefore unto this poor child of EveThe thing forbidden was the one thing wanting,Without which all the rest were dust and ashes.”“Heardst ever the like of the gale this night, Barbara?” asked Blanche, as she stood twisting up her hair before the mirror, one morning towards the close of August.“’Twas a cruel rough night, in sooth,” was the answer. “Yet the wind is westerly. God help the poor souls that were on the sea this night! They must have lacked the same.”“’Twas ill for the Spaniard, I reckon,” said Blanche lightly.“’Twas ill for life, Mistress Blanche,” returned Barbara, gravely. “There be English on the wild waters, beside Spaniards. The Lord avert evil from them!”“Nay, I go not about to pray that ill be avoided from those companions,” retorted Blanche in scorn. “They may drown, every man of them, for aught I care.”“They be some woman’s childre, every man,” was Barbara’s reply.“O Blanche!” interposed Clare, reproachfully. “Do but think of their childre at home: and the poor mothers that are watching in the villages of Spain for their lads to come back to them! How canst thou wish them hurt?”“How touching a picture!” said Blanche in the same tone.“In very deed, I would not by my good-will do them none ill,” responded Barbara; “I would but pray and endeavour myself that they should do none ill to me.”“How should they do thee ill, an’ they were drowned?” laughed Blanche.The girl was not speaking her real sentiments. She was neither cruel nor flinty-hearted, but was arguing and opposing, as she often did, sheerly from a spirit of contradiction, and a desire to astonish her little world; Blanche’s vanity was of the Erostratus character. While she longed to be liked and admired, she would have preferred that people should think her disagreeable, rather than not think of her at all.“But, Blanche,” deprecated Clare, who did not enter into this peculiarity of her sister, “do but fancy, if one of these very men did seek thy gate, all wet and weary and hungered, and it might be maimed in the storm, without so much as one penny in his pocket for to buy him fire and meat—thou wouldst not shut the door in his face?”“Nay, truly, for I would take a stout cudgel and drive him thence.”“O Blanche!”“O Clare!” said Blanche mockingly.“I could never do no such a thing,” added Clare, in a low tone.“What, thou wouldst lodge and feed him?”“Most surely.”“Then shouldst thou harbour the Queen’s enemy.”“I should harbour mine own enemy,” said Clare. “And thou wist who bade us, ‘If thine enemy hunger, feed him.’”“Our Lord said that to His disciples.”“And are not we His disciples?”“Gramercy, maiden! Peter, and John, and Andrew, and the like. ’Twas never meant for folk in these days?”“Marry La’kin! What say you, Mistress Blanche?—that God’s Word was not meant for folk now o’ days?”“Oh ay,—some portion thereof.”“Well-a-day! what will this world come to? I was used to hear say, in Queen Mary’s days, that the great Council to London were busy undoing what had been done in King Harry’s and King Edward’s time: but I ne’er heard that the Lord had ta’en His Word in pieces, and laid up an handful thereof as done withal.”“Barbara, thou hast the strangest sayings!”“I cry you mercy, Mistress mine,—’tis you that speak strangely.”“Come hither, and help me set this edge of pearl. Prithee, let such gear a-be. We be no doctors of the schools, thou nor I.”“We have souls to be saved, Mistress Blanche.”“Very well: and we have heads to be dressed likewise. Tell me if this cap sit well behind; I am but ill pleased withal.”Heavy rapid steps came down the corridor, and with a hasty knock, Jennet put her head in at the door.“Mrs Blanche! Mrs Clare! If you ’ll none miss th’ biggest sight ever you saw, make haste and busk (dress) you, and come down to hall. There’s th’ biggest ship ever were i’ these parts drove ashore o’ Penny Bank. Th’ Master, and Dick, and Sim, and Abel ’s all gone down to th’ shore, long sin’.”“What manner of ship, Jennet?” asked both the girls at once.“I’m none fur learnt i’ ships,” said Jennet, shaking her head. “Sim said ’twere a Spaniard, and Dick said ’twere an Englishman; and Abel bade ’em both hold their peace for a pair o’ gaumless (stupid) noodles.”“But what saith my father?” cried excited Blanche, who had forgotten all about the fit of her cap.“Eh, bless you!—he’s no noodle: Why, he said he’d see ’t afore he told anybody what ’t were.”“Barbara, be quick, dear heart, an’ thou lovest me. Let the cap be; only set my ruff.—Jennet! can we see it hence?”“You’ll see ’t off th’ end o’ th’ terrace, right plain afore ye,” said Jennet, and summarily departed.There was no loitering after that. In a very few minutes the two girls were dressed, Blanche’s ruff being satisfactory in a shorter time than Barbara could ever remember it before. Clare stayed for her prayers, but Blanche dashed off without them, and made her way to the end of the terrace, where her sister presently joined her.“She is a Spaniard!” cried Blanche, in high excitement. “Do but look on her build, Clare. She is not English-built, as sure as this is Venice ribbon.”Clare disclaimed, with a clear conscience, all acquaintance with shipbuilding, and declined even to hazard a guess as to the nationality of the ill-fated vessel. But Blanche was one of those who must be (or seem to be; either will do) conversant with every subject under discussion. So she chattered on, making as many blunders as assertions, until at last, just at the close of a particularly absurd mistake, she heard a loud laugh behind her.“Well done, Blanche!” said her father’s voice. “I will get thee a ship, my lass. Thou art as fit to be a sea-captain, and come through a storm in the Bay of Biscay, as—thy popinjay.” (Parrot.)“O Father, be there men aboard yonder ship?” said Clare, earnestly.“Ay, my lass,” he replied, more gravely. “An hundred and seventy souls—there were, last night, Clare.”“And what?”—Clare’s face finished the question.“There be nine come ashore,” he added in the same tone.“And the rest, Father?” asked Clare piteously.“Drowned, my lass, every soul, in last night’s storm.”“O Father, Father!” cried Clare’s tender heart.“Good lack!” said Blanche. “Is she English, Father?”“The Dolorida, of Cales, (Cadiz) my maid.”“Spanish!” exclaimed Blanche, her excitement returning. “And what be these nine men, Father?”“There be two of them poor galley-slaves; two sailors; and four soldiers, of the common sort. No officers; but one young gentleman, of a good house in Spain, that was come abroad for his diversion, and to see the sight.”“Who is this gentleman, Father?—What manner of man is he?”Sir Thomas was a little amused by the eagerness of his daughter’s questions.“His name is Don John de Las Rojas, (a fictitious person) Mistress Blanche,—of a great house and ancient, as he saith, in Andalusia: and as to what manner of man,—why, he hath two ears, and two eyes, and one nose, and I wis not how many teeth—”“Now prithee, Father, mock me not! Where is her—”“What shouldest say, were I to answer, In a chamber of Enville Court?”“Here, Father?—verily, here? Shall I see him?”“That hangeth on whether thine eyes be shut or open. Thou must tarry till he is at ease.”“At ease!—what aileth him?”Sir Thomas laughed. “Dost think coming through a storm at sea as small matter as coming through a gate on land? He hath ’scaped rarely well; there is little ails him save a broken arm, and a dozen or so of hard bruises; but I reckon a day or twain will pass ere it shall be to his conveniency to appear in thy royal presence, my Lady Blanche.”“But what chamber hath he?—and who is with him?—Do tell me all thereabout.”“Verily, curiosity is great part of Eve’s legacy to her daughters. Well, an’ thou must needs know, he is in the blue chamber; and thine aunt and Jennet be with him; and I have sent Abel to Bispham after the leech. (Doctor.) What more, an’t like the Lady Blanche?”“Oh, what like is he?—and how old?—and is he well-favoured?—and—”“Nay, let me have them by threes at the most. He is like a young man with black hair and a right wan face.—How old? Well, I would guess, an’ he were English, something over twenty years; but being Spanish, belike he is younger than so.—Well-favoured? That a man should look well-favoured, my Lady Blanche, but now come off a shipwreck, and his arm brake, and after fasting some forty hours,—methinks he should be a rare goodly one. Maybe a week’s dieting and good rest shall better his beauty.”“Hath he any English?”“But a little, and that somewhat droll: yet enough to make one conceive his wants. His father and mother both, he told me, were of the Court when King Philip dwelt here, and they have learned him some English for this his journey.”“Doth his father live?”“Woe worth the day! I asked him not. I knew not your Grace should desire to wit it.”“And his mother? Hath he sisters?”“Good lack! ask at him when thou seest him. Alack, poor lad!—his work is cut out, I see.”“But you have not told me what shall come of them.”“I told thee not! I have been answering thy questions thicker than any blackberries. My tongue fair acheth; I spake not so much this week past.”“How do you mock me, Father!”“I will be sad as a dumpling, my lass. I reckon, Mistress, all they shall be sent up to London unto the Council, without there come command that the justices shall deal with them.”“And what shall be done to them?”“Marry, an’ I had my way, they should be well whipped all round, and packed off to Spain. Only the galley-slaves, poor lads!—they could not help themselves.”“Here ’s the leech come, Master,” said Jennet, behind them.Sir Thomas hastened back into the house, and the two sisters followed more slowly.“Oh, behold Aunt Rachel!” said Blanche. “She will tell us somewhat.”Now, only on the previous evening, Rachel had been asserting, in her strongest and sternest manner, that nothing,—no, nothing on earth!—should ever make her harbour a Spaniard. They were one and all “evil companions;” they were wicked Papists; they were perturbators of the peace of our Sovereign Lady the Queen; hanging was a luxury beyond their deserts. It might therefore have been reasonably expected that Rachel, when called upon to serve one of these very obnoxious persons, would scornfully refuse assistance, and retire to her own chamber in the capacity of an outraged Briton. But Rachel, when she spoke in this way, spoke in the abstract, with a want of realisation. When the objectionable specimen of the obnoxious mass lifted a pair of suffering human eyes to her face, the ice thawed in a surprisingly sudden manner from the surface of her flinty heart, and the set lips relaxed into an astonishingly pitying expression.Blanche, outwardly decorous, but with her eyes full of mischief, walked up to Rachel, and desired to know how it fared with the Spanish gentleman.“Poor lad! he is in woeful case!” answered the representative of the enraged British Lion. “What with soul and body, he must have borne well-nigh the pangs of martyrdom this night. ’Tis enough to make one’s heart bleed but to look on him. And to hear him moan to himself of his mother, poor heart! when he thinks him alone—at least thus I take his words: I would, rather than forty shillings, she were nigh to tend him.”From which speech it will be seen that when Rachel did “turn coat,” she turned it inside out entirely.“Good lack, Aunt Rachel! what is he but an evil companion?” demanded irreverent Blanche, with her usual want of respect for the opinions of her elders.“If he were the worsest companion on earth, child, yet the lad may lack his wounds dressed,” said Rachel, indignantly.“And a Papist!”“So much the rather should we show him the betterness of our Protestant faith, by Christian-wise tending of him.”“And an enemy!” pursued Blanche, proceeding with the list.“Hold thy peace, maid! Be we not bidden in God’s Word to do good unto our enemies?”“And a perturbator of the Queen’s peace, Aunt Rachel!”“This young lad hath not much perturbed the Queen’s peace, I warrant,” said Rachel, uneasily,—a dim apprehension of her niece’s intentions crossing her mind at last.“Nay, but hanging is far too good for him!” argued Blanche, quoting the final item.“Thou idle prating hussy!” cried Rachel, turning hastily round to face her,—vexed, and yet laughing. “And if I have said such things in mine heat, what call hast thou to throw them about mine ears? Go get thee about thy business.”“I have no business, at this present, Aunt Rachel.”“Lack-a-daisy! that a cousin (then used in the general sense of relative) of mine should say such a word! No business, when a barrelful of wool waiteth the carding, and there is many a yard of flax, to be spun, and cordial waters to distil, and a full set of shirts to make for thy father, and Jack’s gown to guard (trim) anew with lace, and thy mother’s new stomacher—”“Oh, mercy, Aunt Rachel!” cried lazy Blanche, putting her hands over her ears.But Mistress Rachel was merciless—towards Blanche.“No business, quotha!” resumed that astonished lady. “And Margaret’s winter’s gown should, have been cut down ere now into a kirtle, and Lucrece lacketh both a hood and a napron, and thine own partlets have not yet so much as the first stitch set in them. No business! Prithee, stand out of my way, Madam Idlesse, for I have no time to spend in twirling of my thumbs. And when thou find thy partlets rags, burden not me withal. No business, by my troth!”Muttering which, Rachel stalked away, while Blanche, instead of fetching needle and thread, and setting to work on her new ruffs, fled into the garden, and ensconcing herself at the foot of the ash-tree, gazed up at the windows of the blue chamber, and erected magnificent castles in the air. Meanwhile, Clare, who had heard Rachel’s list of things waiting to be done, and had just finished setting the lace upon Jack’s gown, quietly possessed herself of a piece of fine lawn, measured off the proper length, and was far advanced in one of Blanche’s neglected ruffs before that young lady sauntered in, when summoned by the breakfast-bell.The leech thought well of the young Spaniard’s case. The broken arm was not a severe fracture—“right easy to heal,” said he in a rather disappointed manner; the bruises were nothing but what would disappear with time and one of Rachel’s herbal lotions. In a few weeks, the young man might expect to be fully recovered. And until that happened, said Sir Thomas, he should remain at Enville Court.But the other survivors of the shipwreck did not come off so easily. On the day after it, one of the soldiers and one of the galley-slaves died. The remaining galley-slave, a Moorish prisoner, very grave and silent, and speaking little Spanish; the two sailors, of whom one was an Italian; and one of the soldiers, were quartered in the glebe barn—the rest in one of Sir Thomas Enville’s barns. Two of the soldiers were Pyrenees men, and spoke French. All of them, except the Moor and the Italian, were possessed by abject terror, expecting to be immediately killed, if not eaten. The Italian, who was no stranger to English people, and into whose versatile mind nothing sank deep, was the only blithe and cheerful man in the group. The Moor kept his feelings and opinions to himself. But the others could utter nothing but lamentations, “Ay de mi!” (alas for me) and “Soy muerto!” (literally, “I am dead”—a common lamentation in Spain.) with mournful vaticinations that their last hour was at hand, and that they would never see Spain again. Sir Thomas Enville could just manage to make himself understood by the Italian, and Mr Tremayne by the two Pyreneans. No one else at Enville Court spoke any language but English. But Mrs Rose, a Spanish lady’s daughter, who had been accustomed to speak Spanish for the first twenty years of her life; and Mrs Tremayne, who had learned it from her; and Lysken Barnevelt, who had spoken it in her childhood, and had kept herself in practice with Mrs Rose’s help—these three went in and out among the prisoners, interpreted for the doctor, dressed the wounds, cheered the down-hearted men, and at last persuaded them that Englishmen were not cannibals, and that it was not certain they would all be hung immediately.There was one person at Enville Court who would have given much to be a fourth in the band of helpers. Clare was strongly disposed to envy her friend Lysken, and to chafe against the bonds of conventionalism which bound her own actions. She longed to be of some use in the world; to till some corner of the vineyard marked out specially for her; to find some one for whom, or something for which she was really wanted. Of course, making and mending, carding and spinning, distilling and preserving, were all of use: somebody must do them. But somebody, in this case, meant anybody. It was not Clare who was necessary. And Lysken, thought Clare, had deeper and higher work. She had to deal with human hearts, while Clare dealt only with woollen and linen. Was there no possibility that some other person could see to the woollen and linen, and that Clare might be permitted to work with Lysken, and help the human hearts as well?But Clare forgot one essential point—that a special training is needed for work of this kind. Cut a piece of cambric wrongly, and after all you do but lose the cambric: but deal wrongly with a human heart, and terrible mischief may ensue. And this special training Lysken had received, and Clare had never had. Early privation and sorrow had been Lysken’s lesson-book.Clare found no sympathy in her aspirations. She had once timidly ventured a few words, and discovered quickly that she would meet with no help at home. Lady Enville was shocked at such notions; they were both unmaidenly and communistic: had Clare no sense of what was becoming in a knight’s step-daughter? Of course Lysken Barnevelt was nobody; it did not matter what she did. Rachel bade her be thankful that she was so well guarded from this evil world, which was full of men, and that was another term for wild beasts and venomous serpents. Margaret could not imagine what Clare wanted; was there not enough to do at home? Lucrece was demurely thankful to Providence that she was content with her station and circumstances. Blanche was half amused, and half disgusted, at the idea of having anything to do with those dirty stupid people.So Clare quietly locked up her little day-dream in her own heart, and wished vainly that she had been a clergyman’s daughter. Before her eyes there rose a sunny vision of imaginary life at the parsonage, with Mr and Mrs Tremayne for her parents, Arthur and Lysken for her brother and sister, and the whole village for her family. The story never got far enough for any of them to marry; in fact, that would have spoilt it. Beyond the one change of place, there were to be no further changes. No going away; no growing old; “no cares to break the still repose,” except those of the villagers, who were to be petted and soothed and helped into being all good and happy. Beyond that point, Clare’s dream did not go.Let her dream on a little longer,—poor Clare! She was destined to be rudely awakened before long.

“And therefore unto this poor child of EveThe thing forbidden was the one thing wanting,Without which all the rest were dust and ashes.”

“And therefore unto this poor child of EveThe thing forbidden was the one thing wanting,Without which all the rest were dust and ashes.”

“Heardst ever the like of the gale this night, Barbara?” asked Blanche, as she stood twisting up her hair before the mirror, one morning towards the close of August.

“’Twas a cruel rough night, in sooth,” was the answer. “Yet the wind is westerly. God help the poor souls that were on the sea this night! They must have lacked the same.”

“’Twas ill for the Spaniard, I reckon,” said Blanche lightly.

“’Twas ill for life, Mistress Blanche,” returned Barbara, gravely. “There be English on the wild waters, beside Spaniards. The Lord avert evil from them!”

“Nay, I go not about to pray that ill be avoided from those companions,” retorted Blanche in scorn. “They may drown, every man of them, for aught I care.”

“They be some woman’s childre, every man,” was Barbara’s reply.

“O Blanche!” interposed Clare, reproachfully. “Do but think of their childre at home: and the poor mothers that are watching in the villages of Spain for their lads to come back to them! How canst thou wish them hurt?”

“How touching a picture!” said Blanche in the same tone.

“In very deed, I would not by my good-will do them none ill,” responded Barbara; “I would but pray and endeavour myself that they should do none ill to me.”

“How should they do thee ill, an’ they were drowned?” laughed Blanche.

The girl was not speaking her real sentiments. She was neither cruel nor flinty-hearted, but was arguing and opposing, as she often did, sheerly from a spirit of contradiction, and a desire to astonish her little world; Blanche’s vanity was of the Erostratus character. While she longed to be liked and admired, she would have preferred that people should think her disagreeable, rather than not think of her at all.

“But, Blanche,” deprecated Clare, who did not enter into this peculiarity of her sister, “do but fancy, if one of these very men did seek thy gate, all wet and weary and hungered, and it might be maimed in the storm, without so much as one penny in his pocket for to buy him fire and meat—thou wouldst not shut the door in his face?”

“Nay, truly, for I would take a stout cudgel and drive him thence.”

“O Blanche!”

“O Clare!” said Blanche mockingly.

“I could never do no such a thing,” added Clare, in a low tone.

“What, thou wouldst lodge and feed him?”

“Most surely.”

“Then shouldst thou harbour the Queen’s enemy.”

“I should harbour mine own enemy,” said Clare. “And thou wist who bade us, ‘If thine enemy hunger, feed him.’”

“Our Lord said that to His disciples.”

“And are not we His disciples?”

“Gramercy, maiden! Peter, and John, and Andrew, and the like. ’Twas never meant for folk in these days?”

“Marry La’kin! What say you, Mistress Blanche?—that God’s Word was not meant for folk now o’ days?”

“Oh ay,—some portion thereof.”

“Well-a-day! what will this world come to? I was used to hear say, in Queen Mary’s days, that the great Council to London were busy undoing what had been done in King Harry’s and King Edward’s time: but I ne’er heard that the Lord had ta’en His Word in pieces, and laid up an handful thereof as done withal.”

“Barbara, thou hast the strangest sayings!”

“I cry you mercy, Mistress mine,—’tis you that speak strangely.”

“Come hither, and help me set this edge of pearl. Prithee, let such gear a-be. We be no doctors of the schools, thou nor I.”

“We have souls to be saved, Mistress Blanche.”

“Very well: and we have heads to be dressed likewise. Tell me if this cap sit well behind; I am but ill pleased withal.”

Heavy rapid steps came down the corridor, and with a hasty knock, Jennet put her head in at the door.

“Mrs Blanche! Mrs Clare! If you ’ll none miss th’ biggest sight ever you saw, make haste and busk (dress) you, and come down to hall. There’s th’ biggest ship ever were i’ these parts drove ashore o’ Penny Bank. Th’ Master, and Dick, and Sim, and Abel ’s all gone down to th’ shore, long sin’.”

“What manner of ship, Jennet?” asked both the girls at once.

“I’m none fur learnt i’ ships,” said Jennet, shaking her head. “Sim said ’twere a Spaniard, and Dick said ’twere an Englishman; and Abel bade ’em both hold their peace for a pair o’ gaumless (stupid) noodles.”

“But what saith my father?” cried excited Blanche, who had forgotten all about the fit of her cap.

“Eh, bless you!—he’s no noodle: Why, he said he’d see ’t afore he told anybody what ’t were.”

“Barbara, be quick, dear heart, an’ thou lovest me. Let the cap be; only set my ruff.—Jennet! can we see it hence?”

“You’ll see ’t off th’ end o’ th’ terrace, right plain afore ye,” said Jennet, and summarily departed.

There was no loitering after that. In a very few minutes the two girls were dressed, Blanche’s ruff being satisfactory in a shorter time than Barbara could ever remember it before. Clare stayed for her prayers, but Blanche dashed off without them, and made her way to the end of the terrace, where her sister presently joined her.

“She is a Spaniard!” cried Blanche, in high excitement. “Do but look on her build, Clare. She is not English-built, as sure as this is Venice ribbon.”

Clare disclaimed, with a clear conscience, all acquaintance with shipbuilding, and declined even to hazard a guess as to the nationality of the ill-fated vessel. But Blanche was one of those who must be (or seem to be; either will do) conversant with every subject under discussion. So she chattered on, making as many blunders as assertions, until at last, just at the close of a particularly absurd mistake, she heard a loud laugh behind her.

“Well done, Blanche!” said her father’s voice. “I will get thee a ship, my lass. Thou art as fit to be a sea-captain, and come through a storm in the Bay of Biscay, as—thy popinjay.” (Parrot.)

“O Father, be there men aboard yonder ship?” said Clare, earnestly.

“Ay, my lass,” he replied, more gravely. “An hundred and seventy souls—there were, last night, Clare.”

“And what?”—Clare’s face finished the question.

“There be nine come ashore,” he added in the same tone.

“And the rest, Father?” asked Clare piteously.

“Drowned, my lass, every soul, in last night’s storm.”

“O Father, Father!” cried Clare’s tender heart.

“Good lack!” said Blanche. “Is she English, Father?”

“The Dolorida, of Cales, (Cadiz) my maid.”

“Spanish!” exclaimed Blanche, her excitement returning. “And what be these nine men, Father?”

“There be two of them poor galley-slaves; two sailors; and four soldiers, of the common sort. No officers; but one young gentleman, of a good house in Spain, that was come abroad for his diversion, and to see the sight.”

“Who is this gentleman, Father?—What manner of man is he?”

Sir Thomas was a little amused by the eagerness of his daughter’s questions.

“His name is Don John de Las Rojas, (a fictitious person) Mistress Blanche,—of a great house and ancient, as he saith, in Andalusia: and as to what manner of man,—why, he hath two ears, and two eyes, and one nose, and I wis not how many teeth—”

“Now prithee, Father, mock me not! Where is her—”

“What shouldest say, were I to answer, In a chamber of Enville Court?”

“Here, Father?—verily, here? Shall I see him?”

“That hangeth on whether thine eyes be shut or open. Thou must tarry till he is at ease.”

“At ease!—what aileth him?”

Sir Thomas laughed. “Dost think coming through a storm at sea as small matter as coming through a gate on land? He hath ’scaped rarely well; there is little ails him save a broken arm, and a dozen or so of hard bruises; but I reckon a day or twain will pass ere it shall be to his conveniency to appear in thy royal presence, my Lady Blanche.”

“But what chamber hath he?—and who is with him?—Do tell me all thereabout.”

“Verily, curiosity is great part of Eve’s legacy to her daughters. Well, an’ thou must needs know, he is in the blue chamber; and thine aunt and Jennet be with him; and I have sent Abel to Bispham after the leech. (Doctor.) What more, an’t like the Lady Blanche?”

“Oh, what like is he?—and how old?—and is he well-favoured?—and—”

“Nay, let me have them by threes at the most. He is like a young man with black hair and a right wan face.—How old? Well, I would guess, an’ he were English, something over twenty years; but being Spanish, belike he is younger than so.—Well-favoured? That a man should look well-favoured, my Lady Blanche, but now come off a shipwreck, and his arm brake, and after fasting some forty hours,—methinks he should be a rare goodly one. Maybe a week’s dieting and good rest shall better his beauty.”

“Hath he any English?”

“But a little, and that somewhat droll: yet enough to make one conceive his wants. His father and mother both, he told me, were of the Court when King Philip dwelt here, and they have learned him some English for this his journey.”

“Doth his father live?”

“Woe worth the day! I asked him not. I knew not your Grace should desire to wit it.”

“And his mother? Hath he sisters?”

“Good lack! ask at him when thou seest him. Alack, poor lad!—his work is cut out, I see.”

“But you have not told me what shall come of them.”

“I told thee not! I have been answering thy questions thicker than any blackberries. My tongue fair acheth; I spake not so much this week past.”

“How do you mock me, Father!”

“I will be sad as a dumpling, my lass. I reckon, Mistress, all they shall be sent up to London unto the Council, without there come command that the justices shall deal with them.”

“And what shall be done to them?”

“Marry, an’ I had my way, they should be well whipped all round, and packed off to Spain. Only the galley-slaves, poor lads!—they could not help themselves.”

“Here ’s the leech come, Master,” said Jennet, behind them.

Sir Thomas hastened back into the house, and the two sisters followed more slowly.

“Oh, behold Aunt Rachel!” said Blanche. “She will tell us somewhat.”

Now, only on the previous evening, Rachel had been asserting, in her strongest and sternest manner, that nothing,—no, nothing on earth!—should ever make her harbour a Spaniard. They were one and all “evil companions;” they were wicked Papists; they were perturbators of the peace of our Sovereign Lady the Queen; hanging was a luxury beyond their deserts. It might therefore have been reasonably expected that Rachel, when called upon to serve one of these very obnoxious persons, would scornfully refuse assistance, and retire to her own chamber in the capacity of an outraged Briton. But Rachel, when she spoke in this way, spoke in the abstract, with a want of realisation. When the objectionable specimen of the obnoxious mass lifted a pair of suffering human eyes to her face, the ice thawed in a surprisingly sudden manner from the surface of her flinty heart, and the set lips relaxed into an astonishingly pitying expression.

Blanche, outwardly decorous, but with her eyes full of mischief, walked up to Rachel, and desired to know how it fared with the Spanish gentleman.

“Poor lad! he is in woeful case!” answered the representative of the enraged British Lion. “What with soul and body, he must have borne well-nigh the pangs of martyrdom this night. ’Tis enough to make one’s heart bleed but to look on him. And to hear him moan to himself of his mother, poor heart! when he thinks him alone—at least thus I take his words: I would, rather than forty shillings, she were nigh to tend him.”

From which speech it will be seen that when Rachel did “turn coat,” she turned it inside out entirely.

“Good lack, Aunt Rachel! what is he but an evil companion?” demanded irreverent Blanche, with her usual want of respect for the opinions of her elders.

“If he were the worsest companion on earth, child, yet the lad may lack his wounds dressed,” said Rachel, indignantly.

“And a Papist!”

“So much the rather should we show him the betterness of our Protestant faith, by Christian-wise tending of him.”

“And an enemy!” pursued Blanche, proceeding with the list.

“Hold thy peace, maid! Be we not bidden in God’s Word to do good unto our enemies?”

“And a perturbator of the Queen’s peace, Aunt Rachel!”

“This young lad hath not much perturbed the Queen’s peace, I warrant,” said Rachel, uneasily,—a dim apprehension of her niece’s intentions crossing her mind at last.

“Nay, but hanging is far too good for him!” argued Blanche, quoting the final item.

“Thou idle prating hussy!” cried Rachel, turning hastily round to face her,—vexed, and yet laughing. “And if I have said such things in mine heat, what call hast thou to throw them about mine ears? Go get thee about thy business.”

“I have no business, at this present, Aunt Rachel.”

“Lack-a-daisy! that a cousin (then used in the general sense of relative) of mine should say such a word! No business, when a barrelful of wool waiteth the carding, and there is many a yard of flax, to be spun, and cordial waters to distil, and a full set of shirts to make for thy father, and Jack’s gown to guard (trim) anew with lace, and thy mother’s new stomacher—”

“Oh, mercy, Aunt Rachel!” cried lazy Blanche, putting her hands over her ears.

But Mistress Rachel was merciless—towards Blanche.

“No business, quotha!” resumed that astonished lady. “And Margaret’s winter’s gown should, have been cut down ere now into a kirtle, and Lucrece lacketh both a hood and a napron, and thine own partlets have not yet so much as the first stitch set in them. No business! Prithee, stand out of my way, Madam Idlesse, for I have no time to spend in twirling of my thumbs. And when thou find thy partlets rags, burden not me withal. No business, by my troth!”

Muttering which, Rachel stalked away, while Blanche, instead of fetching needle and thread, and setting to work on her new ruffs, fled into the garden, and ensconcing herself at the foot of the ash-tree, gazed up at the windows of the blue chamber, and erected magnificent castles in the air. Meanwhile, Clare, who had heard Rachel’s list of things waiting to be done, and had just finished setting the lace upon Jack’s gown, quietly possessed herself of a piece of fine lawn, measured off the proper length, and was far advanced in one of Blanche’s neglected ruffs before that young lady sauntered in, when summoned by the breakfast-bell.

The leech thought well of the young Spaniard’s case. The broken arm was not a severe fracture—“right easy to heal,” said he in a rather disappointed manner; the bruises were nothing but what would disappear with time and one of Rachel’s herbal lotions. In a few weeks, the young man might expect to be fully recovered. And until that happened, said Sir Thomas, he should remain at Enville Court.

But the other survivors of the shipwreck did not come off so easily. On the day after it, one of the soldiers and one of the galley-slaves died. The remaining galley-slave, a Moorish prisoner, very grave and silent, and speaking little Spanish; the two sailors, of whom one was an Italian; and one of the soldiers, were quartered in the glebe barn—the rest in one of Sir Thomas Enville’s barns. Two of the soldiers were Pyrenees men, and spoke French. All of them, except the Moor and the Italian, were possessed by abject terror, expecting to be immediately killed, if not eaten. The Italian, who was no stranger to English people, and into whose versatile mind nothing sank deep, was the only blithe and cheerful man in the group. The Moor kept his feelings and opinions to himself. But the others could utter nothing but lamentations, “Ay de mi!” (alas for me) and “Soy muerto!” (literally, “I am dead”—a common lamentation in Spain.) with mournful vaticinations that their last hour was at hand, and that they would never see Spain again. Sir Thomas Enville could just manage to make himself understood by the Italian, and Mr Tremayne by the two Pyreneans. No one else at Enville Court spoke any language but English. But Mrs Rose, a Spanish lady’s daughter, who had been accustomed to speak Spanish for the first twenty years of her life; and Mrs Tremayne, who had learned it from her; and Lysken Barnevelt, who had spoken it in her childhood, and had kept herself in practice with Mrs Rose’s help—these three went in and out among the prisoners, interpreted for the doctor, dressed the wounds, cheered the down-hearted men, and at last persuaded them that Englishmen were not cannibals, and that it was not certain they would all be hung immediately.

There was one person at Enville Court who would have given much to be a fourth in the band of helpers. Clare was strongly disposed to envy her friend Lysken, and to chafe against the bonds of conventionalism which bound her own actions. She longed to be of some use in the world; to till some corner of the vineyard marked out specially for her; to find some one for whom, or something for which she was really wanted. Of course, making and mending, carding and spinning, distilling and preserving, were all of use: somebody must do them. But somebody, in this case, meant anybody. It was not Clare who was necessary. And Lysken, thought Clare, had deeper and higher work. She had to deal with human hearts, while Clare dealt only with woollen and linen. Was there no possibility that some other person could see to the woollen and linen, and that Clare might be permitted to work with Lysken, and help the human hearts as well?

But Clare forgot one essential point—that a special training is needed for work of this kind. Cut a piece of cambric wrongly, and after all you do but lose the cambric: but deal wrongly with a human heart, and terrible mischief may ensue. And this special training Lysken had received, and Clare had never had. Early privation and sorrow had been Lysken’s lesson-book.

Clare found no sympathy in her aspirations. She had once timidly ventured a few words, and discovered quickly that she would meet with no help at home. Lady Enville was shocked at such notions; they were both unmaidenly and communistic: had Clare no sense of what was becoming in a knight’s step-daughter? Of course Lysken Barnevelt was nobody; it did not matter what she did. Rachel bade her be thankful that she was so well guarded from this evil world, which was full of men, and that was another term for wild beasts and venomous serpents. Margaret could not imagine what Clare wanted; was there not enough to do at home? Lucrece was demurely thankful to Providence that she was content with her station and circumstances. Blanche was half amused, and half disgusted, at the idea of having anything to do with those dirty stupid people.

So Clare quietly locked up her little day-dream in her own heart, and wished vainly that she had been a clergyman’s daughter. Before her eyes there rose a sunny vision of imaginary life at the parsonage, with Mr and Mrs Tremayne for her parents, Arthur and Lysken for her brother and sister, and the whole village for her family. The story never got far enough for any of them to marry; in fact, that would have spoilt it. Beyond the one change of place, there were to be no further changes. No going away; no growing old; “no cares to break the still repose,” except those of the villagers, who were to be petted and soothed and helped into being all good and happy. Beyond that point, Clare’s dream did not go.

Let her dream on a little longer,—poor Clare! She was destined to be rudely awakened before long.

Chapter Six.Cositas De España.“On earth no word is said, I ween,But’s registered in Heaven:What’s here a jest, is there a sinWhich may never be forgiven.”Blanche Enville sat on the terrace, on a warm September afternoon, with a half-finished square of wool-work in her hand, into which she was putting a few stitches every now and then. She chose to imagine herself hard at work; but it would have fatigued nobody to count the number of rows which she had accomplished since she came upon the terrace. The work which Blanche was really attending to was the staple occupation of her life,—building castles in the air. At various times she had played all manner of parts, from a captive queen, a persecuted princess, or a duchess in disguise, down to a fisherman’s daughter saving a vessel in danger by the light in her cottage window. No one who knows how to erect the elegant edifices above referred to, will require to be told that whatever might be her temporary position, Blanche always acquitted herself to perfection: and that any of the airydramatis personaewho failed to detect her consummate superiority was either compassionately undeceived, or summarily crushed, at the close of the drama.Are not these fantasies one of the many indications that all along life’s pathway, the old serpent is ever whispering to us his first lie,—“Ye shall be as gods?”At the close of a particularly sensational scene, when Blanche had just succeeded in escaping from a convent prison wherein the wicked. Queen her sister had confined her, the idea suddenly flashed upon the oppressed Princess that Aunt Rachel would hardly be satisfied with the state of the kettle-holder; and coming down in an instant from air to earth, she determinately and compunctiously set to work again. The second row of stitches was growing under her hands when, by that subtle psychological process which makes us aware of the presence of another person, though we may have heard and seen nothing, Blanche became conscious that she was no longer alone. She looked up quickly, into the face of a stranger; but no great penetration was needed to guess that the young man before her was the shipwrecked Spaniard.Blanche’s first idea on seeing him, was a feeling of wonder that her father should have thought him otherwise than “well-favoured.” He was handsome enough, she thought, to be the hero of any number of dramas.The worthy Knight’s ideas as to beauty by no means coincided with those of his daughter. Sir Thomas thought that to look well, a man must not be—to use his own phrase—“lass-like and finnicking.” It was all very well for a woman to have a soft voice, a pretty face, or a graceful mien: but let a man be tall, stout, well-developed, and tolerably rough. So that the finely arched eyebrows, the languishing liquid eyes, the soft delicate features, and the black silky moustache, which were the characteristics of Don Juan’s face, found no favour with Sir Thomas, but were absolute perfection in the captivated eyes of Blanche. When those dark eyes looked admiringly at her, she could see no fault in them; and when a voice addressed her in flattering terms, she could readily enough overlook wrong accents and foreign idioms.“Most beautiful lady!” said Don Juan, addressing himself to Blanche, and translating literally into English the usual style of his native land.The epithet gave Blanche a little thrill of delight. No one—except the mythical inhabitants of the airy castles—had ever spoken to her in this manner before. And undoubtedly there was a zest in the living voice of another human being, which was unfortunately lacking in the denizens of Fairy Land. Blanche had never sunk so low in her own opinion as she did when she tried to frame an answer. She was utterly at a loss for words. Instead of the exquisitely appropriate language which would have risen to her lips at once if she had not addressed a human being, she could only manage to stammer out, in most prosaic fashion, a hope that he was better. But her consciousness of inferiority deepened, when Don Juan replied promptly, with a low bow, and the application of his left hand to the place where his heart was supposed to be, that the sight of her face had effected a full and immediate cure of all his ills.Oh, for knowledge what to say to him, with due grace and effect! Why was she not born a Spanish lady? And what would he think of her, with such plebeian work as this in her hand! “How he must despise me!” thought silly Blanche. “Why, I have not even a fan to flutter.”Don Juan was quite at his ease. Shyness and timidity were evidently not in the list of his failings.“I think me fortunate, fair lady,” sighed he, with another bow, “that this the misfortune me has made acquainted with your Grace. In my country, we say to the ladies; Grant me the soles of your foots. But here the gentlemen humble not themselves so low. I beseech your Grace, therefore, the favour to kiss you the hand.”Blanche wondered if all Spanish ladies were addressed as “your Grace.” (Note 1.) How delightful! She held out her hand like a queen, and Don Juan paid his homage.“Your Grace see me much happinessed. When I am again in my Andalusia, I count it the gloriousest hour of my life that I see your sweet country and the beautifullest of his ladies.”How far either Don Juan or Blanche might ultimately have gone in making themselves ridiculous cannot be stated, because at this moment Margaret—prosaic, literal Margaret—appeared on the terrace.“Blanche! Aunt Rachel seeketh thee.—Your servant, Master! I trust you are now well amended?”Don Juan was a very quick reader of character. He instantly realised the difference between the sisters, and replied to Margaret’s inquiry in a calm matter-of-fact style. Blanche moved slowly away. She felt as if she were leaving the sunshine behind her.“Well, of all the lazy jades!” was Rachel’s deserved greeting. “Three rows and an half, betwixt twelve of the clock and four! Why, ’tis not a full row for the hour! Child, art thou ’shamed of thyself?”“Well, just middling, Aunt Rachel,” said Blanche, pouting a little.“Blanche,” returned her Aunt very gravely, “I do sorely pity thine husband—when such a silly thing may win one—without he spend an hundred pound by the day, and keep a pack of serving-maids a-louting at thy heels.”“I hope he may, Aunt Rachel,” said Blanche coolly.“Eh, child, child!” And Rachel’s head was ominously shaken.From that time Don Juan joined the family circle at meals. Of course he was a prisoner, but a prisoner on parole, very generously treated, and with little fear for the future. He was merely a spectator, having taken no part in the war; there were old friends of his parents among the English nobility: no great harm was likely to come to him. So he felt free to divert himself; and here was a toy ready to his hand.The family circle were amused with the names which he gave them. Sir Thomas became “Don Tomas;” Lady Enville was “the grand Señora.” Margaret and Lucrece gave him some trouble; they were not Spanish names. He took refuge in “Doña Mariquita” (really a diminutive of Maria), and “Doña Lucia.” But there was no difficulty about “Doña Clara” and “Doña Blanca,” which dropped from his lips (thought Blanche) like music. Rachel’s name, however, proved impracticable. He contented himself with “Señora mia” when he spoke to her, and, “Your Lady Aunt” when he spoke of her.He was ready enough to give some account of himself. His father, Don Gonsalvo, Marquis de Las Rojas, was a grandee of the first class, and a Lord in Waiting to King Philip; his mother, Doña Leonor de Torrejano, had been in attendance on Queen Mary. He had two sisters, whose names were Antonia and Florela; and a younger brother, Don Hernando. (All fictitious persons.)It flattered Blanche all the more that in the presence of others he was distantly ceremonious; but whenever they were alone, he was continually, though very delicately, hinting his admiration of her, and pouring soft speeches into her entranced ears. So Blanche, poor silly child I played the part of the moth, and got her wings well singed in the candle.Whatever Blanche was, Don Juan himself was perfectly heart-whole. Of course no grandee of Spain could ever descend so low as really to contemplate marriage with a merecaballero’sdaughter, and of a heretic country; that was out of the question. Moreover, there was a family understanding that, a dispensation being obtained, he was to marry his third cousin, Doña Lisarda de Villena, (A fictitious person) a lady of moderate beauty and fabulous fortune. This arrangement had been made while both were little children, nor had Don Juan the least intention of rendering it void. He was merely amusing himself.It often happens that such amusements destroy another’s happiness. And it sometimes happens that they lead to the destruction of another’s soul.Don Juan won golden opinions from Sir Thomas and Lady Enville. He was not wanting in sense, said the former (to whom the sensible side of him had been shown); and, he was right well-favoured, and so courtly! said Lady Enville—who had seen the courtly aspect.“Well-favoured!” laughed Sir Thomas. “Calleth a woman yonder lad well-favoured? Why, his face is the worst part of him: ’tis all satin and simpers!”Rachel had not the heart to speak ill of the invalid whom she had nursed, while she admitted frankly that there were points about him which she did not like: but these, no doubt, arose mainly from his being a foreigner and a Papist. Margaret said little, but in her heart she despised him. And presently Jack came home, when the volunteers were disbanded, and, after a passage of arms, became the sworn brother of the young prisoner. He was such a gentleman! said Master Jack. So there was not much likelihood of Blanche’s speedy disenchantment.“Marry, what think you of the lad, Mistress Thekla?” demanded Barbara one day, when she was at “four-hours” at the parsonage.“He is very young,” answered Mrs Tremayne, who always excused everybody as long as it was possible. “He will amend with time, we may well hope.”“Which is to say, I admire him not,” suggested Mrs Rose, now a very old woman, on whom time had brought few bodily infirmities, and no, mental ones.“Who doth admire him, Barbara, at the Court?” asked Mr Tremayne.“Marry La’kin! every soul, as methinks, save Mistress Meg, and Sim, and Jennet. Mistress Meg—I misdoubt if she doth; and Sim says he is a nincompoop; (silly fellow) and Jennet saith, he is as like as two peas to the old fox that they nailed up on the barn door when she was a little maid. But Sir Thomas, and my Lady, and Master Jack, be mighty taken with him; and Mistress Rachel but little less: and as to Mistress Blanche, she hath eyes for nought else.”“Poor Blanche!” said Thekla.“Blanche shall be a mouse in a trap, if she have not a care,” said Mrs Rose, with a wise shake of her head.“Good lack, Mistress! she is in the trap already, but she wot it not.”“When we wot us to be in a trap, we be near the outcoming,” remarked the Rector.“Of a truth I cannot tell,” thoughtfully resumed Barbara, “whether this young gentleman be rare deep, or rare shallow. He is well-nigh as ill to fathom as Mistress Lucrece herself. Lo’ you, o’ Sunday morrow, Sir Thomas told him that the law of the land was for every man and woman in the Queen’s dominions to attend the parish church twice of the Sunday, under twenty pound charge by the month if they tarried at home, not being let by sickness: and I had heard him say himself that he looked Don John should kick thereat. But what doth Don John but to take up his hat, and walk off to the church, handing of Mistress Rachel, as smiling as any man; and who as devote as he when he was there?—Spake the Amen, and sang in the Psalm, and all the rest belike. Good lack! I had thought the Papists counted it sinful for to join in a Protestant service.”“Not alway,” said Mr Tremayne. “Maybe he hath the priest’s licence in his pocket.”“I wis not what he hath,” responded Barbara, sturdily, “save and except my good will; and that he hath not, nor is not like to have,—in especial with Mistress Blanche, poor sely young maiden! that wot not what she doth.”“He may have it, then, in regard to Clare?” suggested Mrs Rose mischievously.“Marry La’kin!” retorted Barbara in her fiercest manner. “But if I thought yon fox was in any manner of fashion of way a-making up to my jewel,—I could find it in my heart to put rats-bane in his pottage!”Sir Thomas transmitted to London the news of the wreck of the Dolorida, requesting orders concerning the seven survivors: at the same time kindly writing to two or three persons in high places, old acquaintances of the young man’s parents, to ask their intercession on behalf of Don Juan. But the weeks passed away, and as yet no answer came. The Queen and Council were too busy to give their attention to a small knot of prisoners.On the fourth of September in the Armada year, 1588, died Robert Dudley, the famous Earl of Leicester, who had commanded the army of defence at Tilbury. This one man—and there was only one such—Elizabeth had never ceased to honour. He retained her favour unimpaired for thirty years, through good report—of which there was very little; and evil report—of which there was a great deal. He saw rival after rival rise and flourish and fall: but to the end of his life, he stood alone as the one whose brilliant day was unmarred by storm,—the King of England, because the King of her Queen. What was the occult power of this man, the last of the Dudleys of Northumberland, over the proud spirit of Elizabeth? It was not that she had any affection for him: she showed that plainly enough at his death, when her whole demeanour was not that of mourning, but of release. He was a man of extremely bad character,—a fact patent to all the world: yet Elizabeth kept him at her side, and admitted him to her closest friendship,—though she knew well that the rumours which blackened his name did not spare her own. He never cleared himself of the suspected murder of his first wife; he never tried to clear himself of the attempted murder of the second, whom he alternately asserted and denied to be his lawful wife, until no one knew which story to believe. But the third proved his match. There was strong cause for suspicion that twelve years before, Robert Earl of Leicester had given a lesson in poisoning to Lettice Countess of Essex: and now the same Lettice, Countess of Leicester, had not forgotten her lesson. Leicester was tired of her; perhaps, too, he was a little afraid of what she knew. The deft and practised poisoner administered a dose to his wife. But Lettice survived, and poisoned him in return. And so the last of the Dudleys passed to his awful account.His death made no difference in the public rejoicing for the defeat of the Armada. Two days afterwards, the Spanish banners were exhibited from Paul’s Cross, and the next morning were hung on London Bridge. The nineteenth of November was a holiday throughout the kingdom. On Sunday the 24th, the Queen made her famous thanksgiving progress to Saint Paul’s, seated in a chariot built in the form of a throne, with four pillars, and a crowned canopy overhead. The Privy Council and the House of Lords attended her. Bishop Pierce of Salisbury preached the sermon, from the very appropriate text, afterwards engraved on the memorial medals,—“He blew with His wind, and they were scattered.”All this time no word came to decide the fate of Don Juan. It was not expected now before spring. A winter journey from Lancashire to London was then a very serious matter.“So you count it not ill to attend our Protestant churches, Master?” asked Blanche of Don Juan, as she sat in the window-seat, needlework in hand. It was a silk purse, not a kettle-holder, this time.“How could I think aught ill, Doña Blanca, which I see your Grace do?” was the courtly reply of Don Juan.“But what should your confessor say, did he hear thereof?” asked Blanche, provokingly.“Is a confessor a monster in your eyes, fair lady?” said Don Juan, with that smile which Blanche held in deep though secret admiration.“I thought they were rarely severe,” she said, bending her eyes on her work.“Ah, Señora, our faith differs from yours much less than you think. What is a confessor, but a priest—a minister? The Señor Tremayne is a confessor, when one of his people shall wish his advice. Where lieth the difference?”Blanche was too ignorant to know where it lay.“I accounted there to be mighty difference,” she said, hesitatingly.“Valgame los santos! (The saints defend me!)—but a shade or two of colour. Hold we not the same creeds as you? Your Book of Common Prayer—what is it but the translation of ours? We worship the same God; we honour the same persons, as you. Where, then, is the difference? Our priests wed not; yours may. We receive the Holy Eucharist in one kind; you, in both. We are absolved in private, and make confession thus; you, in public. Be these such mighty differences?”If Don Juan had thrown a little less dust in her eyes, perhaps Blanche might have had sense enough to ask him where the Church of Rome had found her authority for her half of these differences, since it certainly was not in Holy Scripture: and also, whether that communion held such men as Cranmer, Latimer, Calvin, and Luther, in very high esteem? But the dust was much too thick to allow any stronger reply from Blanche than a feeble inquiry whether these really were all the points of difference.“What other matter offendeth your Grace? Doubtless I can expound the same.”“Why, I have heard,” said Blanche faintly, selecting one of the smaller charges first, “that the Papists do hold Mary, the blessed Virgin, to have been without sin.”“Some Catholics have that fantasy,” replied Don Juan lightly. “It is only a few. The Church binds it not on the conscience of any. You take it—you leave it—as you will.”“Likewise you hold obedience due to the Bishop of Rome, instead of only unto your own Prince, as with us,” objected Blanche, growing a shade bolder.“That, again, is but in matters ecclesiastical. In secular matters, I do assure your Grace, the Pope interfereth not.”Blanche, who had no answers to these subtle explainings away of the facts, felt as if all her outworks were being taken, one by one.“Yet,” she said, bringing her artillery to bear on a new point, “you have images in your churches, Don John, and do worship unto them?”The word worship has changed its meaning since the days of Queen Elizabeth. To do worship, and to do honour, were then interchangeable terms.Don Juan smiled. “Have you no pictures in your books, Doña Blanca? These images are but as pictures for the teaching of the vulgar, that cannot read. How else should we learn them? If some of the ignorant make blunder, and bestow to these images better honour than the Church did mean them, the mistake is theirs. No man really doth worship unto these, only the vulgar.”“But do not you pray unto the saints?”“We entreat the saints to pray for us; that is all.”“Then, in the Lord’s Supper—the mass, you call it,”—said Blanche, bringing up at last her strongest battering-ram, “you do hold, as I have been taught, Don John, that the bread and wine be changed into the very self body and blood of our Saviour Christ, that it is no more bread and wine at all. Now how can you believe a matter so plainly confuted by your very senses?”“Ah, if I had but your learning and wisdom, Señora!” sighed Don Juan, apparently from the bottom of his heart.Blanche felt flattered; but she was not thrown off the scent, as her admirer intended her to be. She still looked up for the answer; and Don Juan saw that he must give it.“Sweetest lady! I am no doctor of the schools, nor have I studied for the priesthood, that I should be able to expound all matters unto one of your Grace’s marvellous judgment and learning. Yet, not to leave so fair a questioner without answer—suffer that I ask, your gracious leave accorded—did not our Lord say thus unto the holy Apostles,—‘Hoc est corpus mens,’ to wit, ‘This is My Body?’”Blanche assented.“In what manner, then, was it thus?”“Only as a memorial or representation thereof, we do hold, Don John.”“Good: as the child doth present (represent) the father, being of the like substance, no less than appearance,—as saith the blessed Saint Augustine, and also the blessed Jeronymo, and others of the holy Fathers of the Church, right from the time of our Lord and His Apostles.”Don Juan had never read a line of the works of Jerome or Augustine. Fortunately for him, neither had Blanche,—a chance on which he safely calculated. Blanche was completely puzzled. She sat looking out of the window, and thinking with little power, and to small purpose. She had not an idea when Augustine lived, nor whether he read the service in his own tongue in a surplice, or celebrated the Latin mass in full pontificals. And if it were true that all the Fathers, down from the Apostles, had held the Roman view—for poor ignorant Blanche had not the least idea whether it were true or false—it was a very awkward thing. Don Juan stood and watched her face for an instant. His diplomatic instinct told him that the subject had better be dropped. All that was needed to effect this end was a few well-turned compliments, which his ingenuity readily suggested. In five minutes more the theological discussion was forgotten, at least by Blanche, as Don Juan was assuring her that in all Andalusia there were not eyes comparable to hers.Mr Tremayne and Arthur came in to supper that evening. The former quietly watched the state of affairs without appearing to notice anything. He saw that Don Juan, who sat by Lucrece, paid her the most courteous attention; that Lucrece received it with a thinly-veiled air of triumph; that Blanche’s eyes constantly followed, the young Spaniard: and he came to the conclusion that the affair was more complicated than he had originally supposed.He waited, however, till Arthur and Lysken were both away, until he said anything at home. When those young persons were safely despatched to bed, Mr and Mrs Tremayne and Mrs Rose drew together before the fire, and discussed the state of affairs at Enville Court.“Now, what thinkest, Robin?” inquired Mrs Rose. “Is Blanche,la pauvrette! as fully taken with Don Juan as Barbara did suppose?”“I am afeared, fully.”“And Don Juan?”“If I mistake not, is likewise taken with Blanche: but I doubt somewhat if he be therein as wholehearted as she.”“And what say the elders?” asked Mrs Tremayne.“Look on witheyeswhich see nought. But, nathless, there be one pair of eyes that see; and Blanche’s path is not like to run o’er smooth.”“What, Mistress Rachel?”“Nay, she is blind as the rest. I mean Lucrece.”“Lucrece! Thinkest she will ope the eyes of the other?”“I think she casteth about to turn Don Juan’s her way.”“Alack, poor Blanche!” said Mrs Tremayne. “Howso the matter shall go, mefeareth she shall not ’scape suffering.”“She is no match for Lucrece,” observed Mrs Rose.“Truth: but I am in no wise assured Don Juan is not,” answered Mr Tremayne with a slightly amused look. “As for Blanche, she is like to suffer; and I had well-nigh added, she demeriteth the same: but it will do her good, Thekla. At the least, if the Lord bless it unto her—be assured I meant not to leave out that.”“The furnace purifieth the gold,” said Mrs Tremayne sadly: “yet the heat is none the less fierce for that, Robin.”“Dear heart, whether wouldst thou miss the suffering rather, and the purifying, or take both together?”“It is soon over, Thekla,” said her mother, quietly.During the fierce heat of the Marian persecution, those words had once been said to Marguerite Rose. She had failed to realise them then. The lesson was learned now—thirty-five years later.“Soon over, to look back, dear Mother,” replied Mrs Tremayne. “Yet it never seems short to them that be in the furnace.”Mrs Rose turned rather suddenly to her son-in-law.“Robin, tell me, if thou couldst have seen thy life laid out before thee on a map, and it had been put to thy choice to bear the Little Ease, or to leave go,—tell me what thou hadst chosen?”For Mr Tremayne had spent several months in that horrible funnel-shaped prison, aptly termed Little Ease, and had but just escaped from it with life. He paused a moment, and his face grew very thoughtful.“I think, Mother,” he said at length, “that I had chosen to go through with it. I learned lessons in Little Ease that, if I had lacked now, I had been sorely wanting to my people; and—speaking as a man—that perchance I could have learned nowhere else.”“Childre,” responded the aged mother, “it seemeth me, that of all matter we have need to learn, the last and hardest is to give God leave to choose for us. At least, thus it hath been with me; it may be I mistake to say it is for all. Yet I am sure he is the happy man that learneth it soon. It hath taken me well-nigh eighty years. Thou art better, Robin, to have learned it in fifty.”“I count, Mother, we learn not all lessons in the same order,” said the Rector, smiling, “though there be many lessons we must all learn. ’Tis not like to be my last,—without I should die to-morrow—if I have learned it thoroughly now. And ’tis easier to leave in God’s hands, some choices than other.”Mrs Rose did not ask of what he was thinking, but she could guess pretty well. It would be harder to lose his Thekla now, than if he had come out of Little Ease and had found her dead: harder to lose Arthur in his early manhood, than to have seen him coffined with his baby brother and sisters, years ago. Mrs Tremayne drew a long sigh, as if she had guessed it too.“It would be easier to leave all things to God’s choice,” she said, “if only we dwelt nearer God.”Note 1. “Vuesa merced,” the epithet of ordinary courtesy, is literally “Your Grace.”

“On earth no word is said, I ween,But’s registered in Heaven:What’s here a jest, is there a sinWhich may never be forgiven.”

“On earth no word is said, I ween,But’s registered in Heaven:What’s here a jest, is there a sinWhich may never be forgiven.”

Blanche Enville sat on the terrace, on a warm September afternoon, with a half-finished square of wool-work in her hand, into which she was putting a few stitches every now and then. She chose to imagine herself hard at work; but it would have fatigued nobody to count the number of rows which she had accomplished since she came upon the terrace. The work which Blanche was really attending to was the staple occupation of her life,—building castles in the air. At various times she had played all manner of parts, from a captive queen, a persecuted princess, or a duchess in disguise, down to a fisherman’s daughter saving a vessel in danger by the light in her cottage window. No one who knows how to erect the elegant edifices above referred to, will require to be told that whatever might be her temporary position, Blanche always acquitted herself to perfection: and that any of the airydramatis personaewho failed to detect her consummate superiority was either compassionately undeceived, or summarily crushed, at the close of the drama.

Are not these fantasies one of the many indications that all along life’s pathway, the old serpent is ever whispering to us his first lie,—“Ye shall be as gods?”

At the close of a particularly sensational scene, when Blanche had just succeeded in escaping from a convent prison wherein the wicked. Queen her sister had confined her, the idea suddenly flashed upon the oppressed Princess that Aunt Rachel would hardly be satisfied with the state of the kettle-holder; and coming down in an instant from air to earth, she determinately and compunctiously set to work again. The second row of stitches was growing under her hands when, by that subtle psychological process which makes us aware of the presence of another person, though we may have heard and seen nothing, Blanche became conscious that she was no longer alone. She looked up quickly, into the face of a stranger; but no great penetration was needed to guess that the young man before her was the shipwrecked Spaniard.

Blanche’s first idea on seeing him, was a feeling of wonder that her father should have thought him otherwise than “well-favoured.” He was handsome enough, she thought, to be the hero of any number of dramas.

The worthy Knight’s ideas as to beauty by no means coincided with those of his daughter. Sir Thomas thought that to look well, a man must not be—to use his own phrase—“lass-like and finnicking.” It was all very well for a woman to have a soft voice, a pretty face, or a graceful mien: but let a man be tall, stout, well-developed, and tolerably rough. So that the finely arched eyebrows, the languishing liquid eyes, the soft delicate features, and the black silky moustache, which were the characteristics of Don Juan’s face, found no favour with Sir Thomas, but were absolute perfection in the captivated eyes of Blanche. When those dark eyes looked admiringly at her, she could see no fault in them; and when a voice addressed her in flattering terms, she could readily enough overlook wrong accents and foreign idioms.

“Most beautiful lady!” said Don Juan, addressing himself to Blanche, and translating literally into English the usual style of his native land.

The epithet gave Blanche a little thrill of delight. No one—except the mythical inhabitants of the airy castles—had ever spoken to her in this manner before. And undoubtedly there was a zest in the living voice of another human being, which was unfortunately lacking in the denizens of Fairy Land. Blanche had never sunk so low in her own opinion as she did when she tried to frame an answer. She was utterly at a loss for words. Instead of the exquisitely appropriate language which would have risen to her lips at once if she had not addressed a human being, she could only manage to stammer out, in most prosaic fashion, a hope that he was better. But her consciousness of inferiority deepened, when Don Juan replied promptly, with a low bow, and the application of his left hand to the place where his heart was supposed to be, that the sight of her face had effected a full and immediate cure of all his ills.

Oh, for knowledge what to say to him, with due grace and effect! Why was she not born a Spanish lady? And what would he think of her, with such plebeian work as this in her hand! “How he must despise me!” thought silly Blanche. “Why, I have not even a fan to flutter.”

Don Juan was quite at his ease. Shyness and timidity were evidently not in the list of his failings.

“I think me fortunate, fair lady,” sighed he, with another bow, “that this the misfortune me has made acquainted with your Grace. In my country, we say to the ladies; Grant me the soles of your foots. But here the gentlemen humble not themselves so low. I beseech your Grace, therefore, the favour to kiss you the hand.”

Blanche wondered if all Spanish ladies were addressed as “your Grace.” (Note 1.) How delightful! She held out her hand like a queen, and Don Juan paid his homage.

“Your Grace see me much happinessed. When I am again in my Andalusia, I count it the gloriousest hour of my life that I see your sweet country and the beautifullest of his ladies.”

How far either Don Juan or Blanche might ultimately have gone in making themselves ridiculous cannot be stated, because at this moment Margaret—prosaic, literal Margaret—appeared on the terrace.

“Blanche! Aunt Rachel seeketh thee.—Your servant, Master! I trust you are now well amended?”

Don Juan was a very quick reader of character. He instantly realised the difference between the sisters, and replied to Margaret’s inquiry in a calm matter-of-fact style. Blanche moved slowly away. She felt as if she were leaving the sunshine behind her.

“Well, of all the lazy jades!” was Rachel’s deserved greeting. “Three rows and an half, betwixt twelve of the clock and four! Why, ’tis not a full row for the hour! Child, art thou ’shamed of thyself?”

“Well, just middling, Aunt Rachel,” said Blanche, pouting a little.

“Blanche,” returned her Aunt very gravely, “I do sorely pity thine husband—when such a silly thing may win one—without he spend an hundred pound by the day, and keep a pack of serving-maids a-louting at thy heels.”

“I hope he may, Aunt Rachel,” said Blanche coolly.

“Eh, child, child!” And Rachel’s head was ominously shaken.

From that time Don Juan joined the family circle at meals. Of course he was a prisoner, but a prisoner on parole, very generously treated, and with little fear for the future. He was merely a spectator, having taken no part in the war; there were old friends of his parents among the English nobility: no great harm was likely to come to him. So he felt free to divert himself; and here was a toy ready to his hand.

The family circle were amused with the names which he gave them. Sir Thomas became “Don Tomas;” Lady Enville was “the grand Señora.” Margaret and Lucrece gave him some trouble; they were not Spanish names. He took refuge in “Doña Mariquita” (really a diminutive of Maria), and “Doña Lucia.” But there was no difficulty about “Doña Clara” and “Doña Blanca,” which dropped from his lips (thought Blanche) like music. Rachel’s name, however, proved impracticable. He contented himself with “Señora mia” when he spoke to her, and, “Your Lady Aunt” when he spoke of her.

He was ready enough to give some account of himself. His father, Don Gonsalvo, Marquis de Las Rojas, was a grandee of the first class, and a Lord in Waiting to King Philip; his mother, Doña Leonor de Torrejano, had been in attendance on Queen Mary. He had two sisters, whose names were Antonia and Florela; and a younger brother, Don Hernando. (All fictitious persons.)

It flattered Blanche all the more that in the presence of others he was distantly ceremonious; but whenever they were alone, he was continually, though very delicately, hinting his admiration of her, and pouring soft speeches into her entranced ears. So Blanche, poor silly child I played the part of the moth, and got her wings well singed in the candle.

Whatever Blanche was, Don Juan himself was perfectly heart-whole. Of course no grandee of Spain could ever descend so low as really to contemplate marriage with a merecaballero’sdaughter, and of a heretic country; that was out of the question. Moreover, there was a family understanding that, a dispensation being obtained, he was to marry his third cousin, Doña Lisarda de Villena, (A fictitious person) a lady of moderate beauty and fabulous fortune. This arrangement had been made while both were little children, nor had Don Juan the least intention of rendering it void. He was merely amusing himself.

It often happens that such amusements destroy another’s happiness. And it sometimes happens that they lead to the destruction of another’s soul.

Don Juan won golden opinions from Sir Thomas and Lady Enville. He was not wanting in sense, said the former (to whom the sensible side of him had been shown); and, he was right well-favoured, and so courtly! said Lady Enville—who had seen the courtly aspect.

“Well-favoured!” laughed Sir Thomas. “Calleth a woman yonder lad well-favoured? Why, his face is the worst part of him: ’tis all satin and simpers!”

Rachel had not the heart to speak ill of the invalid whom she had nursed, while she admitted frankly that there were points about him which she did not like: but these, no doubt, arose mainly from his being a foreigner and a Papist. Margaret said little, but in her heart she despised him. And presently Jack came home, when the volunteers were disbanded, and, after a passage of arms, became the sworn brother of the young prisoner. He was such a gentleman! said Master Jack. So there was not much likelihood of Blanche’s speedy disenchantment.

“Marry, what think you of the lad, Mistress Thekla?” demanded Barbara one day, when she was at “four-hours” at the parsonage.

“He is very young,” answered Mrs Tremayne, who always excused everybody as long as it was possible. “He will amend with time, we may well hope.”

“Which is to say, I admire him not,” suggested Mrs Rose, now a very old woman, on whom time had brought few bodily infirmities, and no, mental ones.

“Who doth admire him, Barbara, at the Court?” asked Mr Tremayne.

“Marry La’kin! every soul, as methinks, save Mistress Meg, and Sim, and Jennet. Mistress Meg—I misdoubt if she doth; and Sim says he is a nincompoop; (silly fellow) and Jennet saith, he is as like as two peas to the old fox that they nailed up on the barn door when she was a little maid. But Sir Thomas, and my Lady, and Master Jack, be mighty taken with him; and Mistress Rachel but little less: and as to Mistress Blanche, she hath eyes for nought else.”

“Poor Blanche!” said Thekla.

“Blanche shall be a mouse in a trap, if she have not a care,” said Mrs Rose, with a wise shake of her head.

“Good lack, Mistress! she is in the trap already, but she wot it not.”

“When we wot us to be in a trap, we be near the outcoming,” remarked the Rector.

“Of a truth I cannot tell,” thoughtfully resumed Barbara, “whether this young gentleman be rare deep, or rare shallow. He is well-nigh as ill to fathom as Mistress Lucrece herself. Lo’ you, o’ Sunday morrow, Sir Thomas told him that the law of the land was for every man and woman in the Queen’s dominions to attend the parish church twice of the Sunday, under twenty pound charge by the month if they tarried at home, not being let by sickness: and I had heard him say himself that he looked Don John should kick thereat. But what doth Don John but to take up his hat, and walk off to the church, handing of Mistress Rachel, as smiling as any man; and who as devote as he when he was there?—Spake the Amen, and sang in the Psalm, and all the rest belike. Good lack! I had thought the Papists counted it sinful for to join in a Protestant service.”

“Not alway,” said Mr Tremayne. “Maybe he hath the priest’s licence in his pocket.”

“I wis not what he hath,” responded Barbara, sturdily, “save and except my good will; and that he hath not, nor is not like to have,—in especial with Mistress Blanche, poor sely young maiden! that wot not what she doth.”

“He may have it, then, in regard to Clare?” suggested Mrs Rose mischievously.

“Marry La’kin!” retorted Barbara in her fiercest manner. “But if I thought yon fox was in any manner of fashion of way a-making up to my jewel,—I could find it in my heart to put rats-bane in his pottage!”

Sir Thomas transmitted to London the news of the wreck of the Dolorida, requesting orders concerning the seven survivors: at the same time kindly writing to two or three persons in high places, old acquaintances of the young man’s parents, to ask their intercession on behalf of Don Juan. But the weeks passed away, and as yet no answer came. The Queen and Council were too busy to give their attention to a small knot of prisoners.

On the fourth of September in the Armada year, 1588, died Robert Dudley, the famous Earl of Leicester, who had commanded the army of defence at Tilbury. This one man—and there was only one such—Elizabeth had never ceased to honour. He retained her favour unimpaired for thirty years, through good report—of which there was very little; and evil report—of which there was a great deal. He saw rival after rival rise and flourish and fall: but to the end of his life, he stood alone as the one whose brilliant day was unmarred by storm,—the King of England, because the King of her Queen. What was the occult power of this man, the last of the Dudleys of Northumberland, over the proud spirit of Elizabeth? It was not that she had any affection for him: she showed that plainly enough at his death, when her whole demeanour was not that of mourning, but of release. He was a man of extremely bad character,—a fact patent to all the world: yet Elizabeth kept him at her side, and admitted him to her closest friendship,—though she knew well that the rumours which blackened his name did not spare her own. He never cleared himself of the suspected murder of his first wife; he never tried to clear himself of the attempted murder of the second, whom he alternately asserted and denied to be his lawful wife, until no one knew which story to believe. But the third proved his match. There was strong cause for suspicion that twelve years before, Robert Earl of Leicester had given a lesson in poisoning to Lettice Countess of Essex: and now the same Lettice, Countess of Leicester, had not forgotten her lesson. Leicester was tired of her; perhaps, too, he was a little afraid of what she knew. The deft and practised poisoner administered a dose to his wife. But Lettice survived, and poisoned him in return. And so the last of the Dudleys passed to his awful account.

His death made no difference in the public rejoicing for the defeat of the Armada. Two days afterwards, the Spanish banners were exhibited from Paul’s Cross, and the next morning were hung on London Bridge. The nineteenth of November was a holiday throughout the kingdom. On Sunday the 24th, the Queen made her famous thanksgiving progress to Saint Paul’s, seated in a chariot built in the form of a throne, with four pillars, and a crowned canopy overhead. The Privy Council and the House of Lords attended her. Bishop Pierce of Salisbury preached the sermon, from the very appropriate text, afterwards engraved on the memorial medals,—“He blew with His wind, and they were scattered.”

All this time no word came to decide the fate of Don Juan. It was not expected now before spring. A winter journey from Lancashire to London was then a very serious matter.

“So you count it not ill to attend our Protestant churches, Master?” asked Blanche of Don Juan, as she sat in the window-seat, needlework in hand. It was a silk purse, not a kettle-holder, this time.

“How could I think aught ill, Doña Blanca, which I see your Grace do?” was the courtly reply of Don Juan.

“But what should your confessor say, did he hear thereof?” asked Blanche, provokingly.

“Is a confessor a monster in your eyes, fair lady?” said Don Juan, with that smile which Blanche held in deep though secret admiration.

“I thought they were rarely severe,” she said, bending her eyes on her work.

“Ah, Señora, our faith differs from yours much less than you think. What is a confessor, but a priest—a minister? The Señor Tremayne is a confessor, when one of his people shall wish his advice. Where lieth the difference?”

Blanche was too ignorant to know where it lay.

“I accounted there to be mighty difference,” she said, hesitatingly.

“Valgame los santos! (The saints defend me!)—but a shade or two of colour. Hold we not the same creeds as you? Your Book of Common Prayer—what is it but the translation of ours? We worship the same God; we honour the same persons, as you. Where, then, is the difference? Our priests wed not; yours may. We receive the Holy Eucharist in one kind; you, in both. We are absolved in private, and make confession thus; you, in public. Be these such mighty differences?”

If Don Juan had thrown a little less dust in her eyes, perhaps Blanche might have had sense enough to ask him where the Church of Rome had found her authority for her half of these differences, since it certainly was not in Holy Scripture: and also, whether that communion held such men as Cranmer, Latimer, Calvin, and Luther, in very high esteem? But the dust was much too thick to allow any stronger reply from Blanche than a feeble inquiry whether these really were all the points of difference.

“What other matter offendeth your Grace? Doubtless I can expound the same.”

“Why, I have heard,” said Blanche faintly, selecting one of the smaller charges first, “that the Papists do hold Mary, the blessed Virgin, to have been without sin.”

“Some Catholics have that fantasy,” replied Don Juan lightly. “It is only a few. The Church binds it not on the conscience of any. You take it—you leave it—as you will.”

“Likewise you hold obedience due to the Bishop of Rome, instead of only unto your own Prince, as with us,” objected Blanche, growing a shade bolder.

“That, again, is but in matters ecclesiastical. In secular matters, I do assure your Grace, the Pope interfereth not.”

Blanche, who had no answers to these subtle explainings away of the facts, felt as if all her outworks were being taken, one by one.

“Yet,” she said, bringing her artillery to bear on a new point, “you have images in your churches, Don John, and do worship unto them?”

The word worship has changed its meaning since the days of Queen Elizabeth. To do worship, and to do honour, were then interchangeable terms.

Don Juan smiled. “Have you no pictures in your books, Doña Blanca? These images are but as pictures for the teaching of the vulgar, that cannot read. How else should we learn them? If some of the ignorant make blunder, and bestow to these images better honour than the Church did mean them, the mistake is theirs. No man really doth worship unto these, only the vulgar.”

“But do not you pray unto the saints?”

“We entreat the saints to pray for us; that is all.”

“Then, in the Lord’s Supper—the mass, you call it,”—said Blanche, bringing up at last her strongest battering-ram, “you do hold, as I have been taught, Don John, that the bread and wine be changed into the very self body and blood of our Saviour Christ, that it is no more bread and wine at all. Now how can you believe a matter so plainly confuted by your very senses?”

“Ah, if I had but your learning and wisdom, Señora!” sighed Don Juan, apparently from the bottom of his heart.

Blanche felt flattered; but she was not thrown off the scent, as her admirer intended her to be. She still looked up for the answer; and Don Juan saw that he must give it.

“Sweetest lady! I am no doctor of the schools, nor have I studied for the priesthood, that I should be able to expound all matters unto one of your Grace’s marvellous judgment and learning. Yet, not to leave so fair a questioner without answer—suffer that I ask, your gracious leave accorded—did not our Lord say thus unto the holy Apostles,—‘Hoc est corpus mens,’ to wit, ‘This is My Body?’”

Blanche assented.

“In what manner, then, was it thus?”

“Only as a memorial or representation thereof, we do hold, Don John.”

“Good: as the child doth present (represent) the father, being of the like substance, no less than appearance,—as saith the blessed Saint Augustine, and also the blessed Jeronymo, and others of the holy Fathers of the Church, right from the time of our Lord and His Apostles.”

Don Juan had never read a line of the works of Jerome or Augustine. Fortunately for him, neither had Blanche,—a chance on which he safely calculated. Blanche was completely puzzled. She sat looking out of the window, and thinking with little power, and to small purpose. She had not an idea when Augustine lived, nor whether he read the service in his own tongue in a surplice, or celebrated the Latin mass in full pontificals. And if it were true that all the Fathers, down from the Apostles, had held the Roman view—for poor ignorant Blanche had not the least idea whether it were true or false—it was a very awkward thing. Don Juan stood and watched her face for an instant. His diplomatic instinct told him that the subject had better be dropped. All that was needed to effect this end was a few well-turned compliments, which his ingenuity readily suggested. In five minutes more the theological discussion was forgotten, at least by Blanche, as Don Juan was assuring her that in all Andalusia there were not eyes comparable to hers.

Mr Tremayne and Arthur came in to supper that evening. The former quietly watched the state of affairs without appearing to notice anything. He saw that Don Juan, who sat by Lucrece, paid her the most courteous attention; that Lucrece received it with a thinly-veiled air of triumph; that Blanche’s eyes constantly followed, the young Spaniard: and he came to the conclusion that the affair was more complicated than he had originally supposed.

He waited, however, till Arthur and Lysken were both away, until he said anything at home. When those young persons were safely despatched to bed, Mr and Mrs Tremayne and Mrs Rose drew together before the fire, and discussed the state of affairs at Enville Court.

“Now, what thinkest, Robin?” inquired Mrs Rose. “Is Blanche,la pauvrette! as fully taken with Don Juan as Barbara did suppose?”

“I am afeared, fully.”

“And Don Juan?”

“If I mistake not, is likewise taken with Blanche: but I doubt somewhat if he be therein as wholehearted as she.”

“And what say the elders?” asked Mrs Tremayne.

“Look on witheyeswhich see nought. But, nathless, there be one pair of eyes that see; and Blanche’s path is not like to run o’er smooth.”

“What, Mistress Rachel?”

“Nay, she is blind as the rest. I mean Lucrece.”

“Lucrece! Thinkest she will ope the eyes of the other?”

“I think she casteth about to turn Don Juan’s her way.”

“Alack, poor Blanche!” said Mrs Tremayne. “Howso the matter shall go, mefeareth she shall not ’scape suffering.”

“She is no match for Lucrece,” observed Mrs Rose.

“Truth: but I am in no wise assured Don Juan is not,” answered Mr Tremayne with a slightly amused look. “As for Blanche, she is like to suffer; and I had well-nigh added, she demeriteth the same: but it will do her good, Thekla. At the least, if the Lord bless it unto her—be assured I meant not to leave out that.”

“The furnace purifieth the gold,” said Mrs Tremayne sadly: “yet the heat is none the less fierce for that, Robin.”

“Dear heart, whether wouldst thou miss the suffering rather, and the purifying, or take both together?”

“It is soon over, Thekla,” said her mother, quietly.

During the fierce heat of the Marian persecution, those words had once been said to Marguerite Rose. She had failed to realise them then. The lesson was learned now—thirty-five years later.

“Soon over, to look back, dear Mother,” replied Mrs Tremayne. “Yet it never seems short to them that be in the furnace.”

Mrs Rose turned rather suddenly to her son-in-law.

“Robin, tell me, if thou couldst have seen thy life laid out before thee on a map, and it had been put to thy choice to bear the Little Ease, or to leave go,—tell me what thou hadst chosen?”

For Mr Tremayne had spent several months in that horrible funnel-shaped prison, aptly termed Little Ease, and had but just escaped from it with life. He paused a moment, and his face grew very thoughtful.

“I think, Mother,” he said at length, “that I had chosen to go through with it. I learned lessons in Little Ease that, if I had lacked now, I had been sorely wanting to my people; and—speaking as a man—that perchance I could have learned nowhere else.”

“Childre,” responded the aged mother, “it seemeth me, that of all matter we have need to learn, the last and hardest is to give God leave to choose for us. At least, thus it hath been with me; it may be I mistake to say it is for all. Yet I am sure he is the happy man that learneth it soon. It hath taken me well-nigh eighty years. Thou art better, Robin, to have learned it in fifty.”

“I count, Mother, we learn not all lessons in the same order,” said the Rector, smiling, “though there be many lessons we must all learn. ’Tis not like to be my last,—without I should die to-morrow—if I have learned it thoroughly now. And ’tis easier to leave in God’s hands, some choices than other.”

Mrs Rose did not ask of what he was thinking, but she could guess pretty well. It would be harder to lose his Thekla now, than if he had come out of Little Ease and had found her dead: harder to lose Arthur in his early manhood, than to have seen him coffined with his baby brother and sisters, years ago. Mrs Tremayne drew a long sigh, as if she had guessed it too.

“It would be easier to leave all things to God’s choice,” she said, “if only we dwelt nearer God.”

Note 1. “Vuesa merced,” the epithet of ordinary courtesy, is literally “Your Grace.”

Chapter Seven.A Spoke in the Wheel.“All the foolish workOf fancy, and the bitter close of all.”Tennyson.A few weeks after that conversation, Lucrece Enville sat alone in the bedroom which she shared with her sister Margaret. She was not shedding tears—it was not her way to weep: but her mortification was bitter enough for any amount of weeping.Lucrece was as selfish as her step-mother, or rather a shade more so. Lady Enville’s selfishness was pure love of ease; there was no deliberate malice in it. Any person who stood in her way might be ruthlessly swept out of it; but those who did not interfere with her pleasure, were free to pursue their own.The selfishness of Lucrece lay deeper. She not only sought her own enjoyment and aggrandisement; but she could not bear to see anything—even if she did not want it—in the possession of some one else. That was sufficient to make Lucrece long for it and plot to acquire it, though she had no liking for the article in itself, and would not know what to do with it when she got it.But in this particular instance she had wanted the article: and she had missed it. True, the value which she set upon it was rather for its adjuncts than for itself; but whatever its value, one thought was uppermost, and was bitterest—she had missed it.The article was Don Juan. His charm was twofold: first, he would one day be a rich man and a noble; and secondly, Blanche was in possession. Lucrece tried her utmost efforts to detach him from her sister, and to attach him to herself. And Don Juan proved himself to be her match, both in perseverance and in strategy.Blanche had not the faintest suspicion that anything of the sort had been going on. Don Juan himself had very quickly perceived the counterplot, and had found it a most amusing episode in the little drama with which he was beguiling the time during his forced stay in England.But nobody else saw either plot or counterplot, until one morning, when a low soft voice arrested Sir Thomas as he was passing out of the garden door.“Father, may I have a minute’s speech of you?”“Ay so, Lucrece? I was about to take a turn or twain in the garden; come with me, lass.”“So better, Father, for that I must say lacketh no other ears.”“What now?” demanded Sir Thomas, laughing. “Wouldst have money for a new chain, or leave to go to a merry-making? Thou art welcome to either, my lass.”“I thank you, Father,” said Lucrece gravely, as they paced slowly down one of the straight, trim garden walks: “but not so,—my words are of sadder import.”Sir Thomas turned and looked at her. Never until this moment, in all her four-and-twenty years, had his second daughter given him an iota of her confidence.“Nay, what now?” he said, in a perplexed tone.“I pray you, Father, be not wroth with me, for my reasons be strong, if I am so bold as to ask at you if you have yet received any order from the Queen’s Majesty’s Council, touching the disposing of Don John?”“Art thou turning states-woman, my lass? Nay, not I—not so much as a line.”“Might I take on me, saving your presence, Father, to say so much as—I would you would yet again desire the same?”“Why, my lass, hath Don John offenced thee, that thou wouldst fain be rid of him? I would like him to tarry a while longer. What aileth thee?”“Would you like him to marry Blanche, Father?”“Blanche!—marry Blanche! What is come over thee, child? Marry Blanche!”Sir Thomas’s tone was totally incredulous. He almost laughed in his contemptuous unbelief.“You crede it not, Father,” said Lucrece’s voice—always even, and soft, and low. “Yet it may be true, for all that.”“In good sooth, my lass: so it may. But what cause hast, that thou shouldst harbour such a thought?”“Nought more than words overheard, Father,—and divers gifts seen—and—”“Gifts! The child showed us none.”“She would scantly showyou, Father, a pair of beads of coral, with a cross of enamel thereto—”“Lucrece, dost thouknowthis?”Her father’s tone was very grave and stern now.“I do know it, of a surety. And if you suffer me, Father, to post you in a certain place that I wot of, behind the tapestry, you shall ere long know it too.”Lucrece’s triumphant malice had carried her a step too far. Her father’s open, upright, honest mind was shocked at this suggestion.“God forbid, girl!” he replied, hastily. “I will not play the eavesdropper on my own child. Hast thou done this, Lucrece?”Lucrece saw that she must make her retreat from that position, and she did so “in excellent order.”“Oh no, Father! how could I so? One day, I sat in the arbour yonder, and they two walked by, discoursing: and another day, when I sat in a window-seat in the hall, they came in a-talking, and saw me not. I could never do such a thing as listen unknown, Father!”“Right, my lass: but it troubled me to hear thee name it.”Sir Thomas walked on, lost in deep thought. Lucrece was silent until he resumed the conversation.“Beads, and a cross!” He spoke to himself.“I could tell you of other gear, Father,” said the low voice of the avenger. “As, a little image of Mary and John, which she keepeth in her jewel-closet; and a book wherein be prayers unto the angels and the saints. These he hath given her.”Lucrece was making the worst of a matter in which Don Juan was undoubtedly to blame, but Blanche was much more innocent than her sister chose to represent her. On the rosary Blanche looked as a long necklace, such as were in fashion at the time; and while the elaborate enamelled pendant certainly was a cross, it had never appeared to her otherwise than a mere pendant. The little image was so extremely small, that she kept it in her jewel-closet lest it should be lost. The book, Don Juan’s private breviary, was in Latin, in which language studious Lucrece was a proficient, whilst idle Blanche could not have declined a single noun. The giver had informed her that he bestowed this breviary on her, his best beloved, because he held it dearest of all his treasures; and Blanche valued it on that account. Lucrece knew all this: for she had come upon Blanche in an unguarded moment, with the book in her hand and the rosary round her neck, and had to some extent forced her confidence—the more readily given, since Blanche never suspected treachery.“I can ensure you, Father,” pursued the traitress, with an assumption of the utmost meekness, “it hath cost me much sorrow ere I set me to speak unto you.”“Hast spoken to Blanche aforetime?”“Not much, Father,” replied Lucrece, in a voice of apparent trouble. “I counted it fitter to refer the same unto your better wisdom; nor, I think, was she like to list me.”“God have mercy!” moaned the distressed father, thoroughly awake now to the gravity of the case.“Maybe, Father, you shall think I have left it pass too far,” pursued Lucrece, with well-simulated grief: “yet can you guess that I would not by my goodwill seem to carry complaint of Blanche.”“Thou hast well done, dear heart, and I thank thee,” answered her deceived father. “But leave me now, my lass; I must think all this gear over. My poor darling!”Lucrece glided away as softly as the serpent which she resembled in her heart.In half-an-hour Sir Thomas came back into the house, and sent Jennet to tell his sister that he wished to speak with her in the library. It was characteristic, not of himself, but of his wife, that in his sorrows and perplexities he turned instinctively to Rachel, not to her. When Lucrece’s intelligence was laid before Rachel, though perhaps she grieved less, she was even more shocked than her brother. That Blanche should think of quitting the happy and honourable estate of maidenhood, for the slavery of marriage, was in itself a misdemeanour of the first magnitude: but that she should have made her own choice, have received secret gifts, and held clandestine interviews—this was an awful instance of what human depravity could reach.“Now, what is to be done?” asked Sir Thomas wearily. “First with Don John, and next with Blanche.”“Him?—the viper! Pack him out of the house, bag and baggage!” cried the wrathful spinster. “The crocodile, to conspire against the peace of the house which hath received him in his need! Yet what better might you look for in a man and a Papist?”“Nay, Rachel; I cannot pack him out: he is my prisoner, think thou. I am set in charge of him until released by the Queen’s Majesty’s mandate. All the greater need is there to keep him and Blanche apart. In good sooth, I wis not what to do for the best—with Blanche, most of all.”“Blanche hath had too much leisure time allowed her, and too much of her own way,” said Rachel oracularly. “Hand her o’er to me—I will set her a-work. She shall not have an idle hour. ’Tis the only means to keep silly heads in order.”“Maybe, Rachel,—maybe,” said Sir Thomas with a sigh. “Yet I fear sorely that we must have Blanche hence. It were constant temptation, were she and Don John left in the same house; and though she might not break charge—would not, I trust—yet he might. I can rest no faith on him well! I must first speak to Blanche, methinks, and then—”“Speak to her!—whip her well! By my troth, but I would mark her!” cried Rachel, in a passion.“Nay, Rachel, that wouldst thou not,” answered her brother, smiling sadly. “Did the child but whimper, thy fingers would leave go the rod. Thy bark is right fearful, good Sister; but some men’s sweet words be no softer than thy bite.”“There is charity in all things, of course,” said Rachel, cooling down.“There is a deal in thee,” returned Sir Thomas, “for them that know where to seek it. Well, come with me to Orige; she must be told, I reckon: and then we will send for Blanche.”Rachel opened her lips, but suddenly shut them without speaking, and kept them drawn close. Perhaps, had she not thought better of it, what might have been spoken was not altogether complimentary to Lady Enville.That very comfortable dame sat in her cushioned chair in the boudoir—there were no easy-chairs then, except as rendered so by cushions; and plenty of soft thick cushions were a very necessary part of the furniture of a good house. Her Ladyship was dressed in the pink of the fashion, so far as it had reached her tailor at Kirkham; and she was turning over the leaves of a new play, entitled “The Comedie of Errour”—one of the earliest productions of the young Warwickshire actor, William Shakspere by name. She put her book down with a yawn when her husband and his sister came in.“How much colder ’tis grown this last hour or twain!” said she. “Prithee, Sir Thomas, call for more wood.”Sir Thomas shouted as desired—the quickest way of settling matters—and when Jennet had come and gone with the fuel, he glanced into the little chamber to see if it were vacant. Finding no one there, he drew the bolt and sat down.“Gramercy, Sir Thomas! be we all prisoners?” demanded his wife with a little laugh.“Orige,” replied Sir Thomas, “Rachel and I have a thing to show thee.”“I thought you looked both mighty sad,” remarked the lady calmly.“Dost know where is Blanche?”“Good lack, no! I never wis where Blanche is.”“Orige, wouldst like to have Blanche wed?”“Blanche!—to whom?”“To Don John de Las Rojas.”“Gramercy! Sir Thomas, you never mean it?”“He and Blanche mean it, whate’er I may.”“Good lack, how fortunate! Why, he will be a Marquis one day—and hath great store of goods and money. I never looked for such luck. Have you struck hands with him, Sir Thomas?”Sir Thomas pressed his lips together, and glanced at his sister with an air of helpless vexation. Had it just occurred to him that the pretty doll whom he had chosen to be the partner of his life was a little wanting in the departments of head and heart?“What, Orige—an enemy?” he said.“Don John is not an enemy,” returned Lady Enville, with a musical little laugh. “We have all made a friend of him.”“Ay—and have been fools, perchance, to do it. ’Tis ill toying with a snake. But yet once—a Papist?”“Good lack! some Papists will get to Heaven, trow.”“May God grant it!” replied Sir Thomas seriously. “But surely, Orige, surely thou wouldst never have our own child a Papist?”“I trust Blanche has too much good sense for such foolery, Sir Thomas,” said the lady. “But if no—well, ’tis an old religion, at the least, and a splendrous. You would never let such a chance slip through your fingers, for the sake of Papistry?”“No, Sister—for the sake of the Gospel,” said Rachel grimly.“Thou wist my meaning, Rachel,” pursued Lady Enville. “Well, in very deed, Sir Thomas, I do think it were ill done to let such a chance go by us. ’Tis like throwing back the gifts of Providence. Do but see, how marvellously this young man was brought hither! And now, if he hath made suit for Blanche, I pray you, never say him nay! I would call it wicked to do the same. Really wicked, Sir Thomas!”Lady Enville pinched the top cushion into a different position, with what was energy for her. There was silence for a minute. Rachel sat looking grimly into the fire, the personification of determined immobility. Sir Thomas was shading his eyes with his hand. He was drinking just then a very bitter cup: and it was none the sweeter for the recollection that he had mixed it himself. His favourite child—for Blanche was that—seemed to be going headlong to her ruin: and her mother not only refused to aid in saving her, but was incapable of seeing any need that she should be saved.“Well, Orige,” he said at last, “thou takest it other than I looked for. I had meant for to bid thee speak with Blanche. Her own mother surely were the fittest to do the same. But since this is so, I see no help but that we have her here, before us three. It shall be harder for the child, and I would fain have spared her. But if it must be,—why, it must.”“She demeriteth (merits) no sparing,” said Rachel sternly.“Truly, Sir Thomas,” responded his wife, “if I am to speak my mind, I shall bid Blanche God speed therein. So, if you desire to let (hinder) the same—but I think it pity a thousand-fold you should—you were better to see her without me.”“Nay, Orige! Shall I tell the child to her face that her father and her mother cannot agree touching her disposal?”“She will see it if she come hither,” was the answer.“But cannot we persuade thee, Orige?”“Certes, nay!” replied she, with the obstinacy of feeble minds. “Truly, I blame not Rachel, for she alway opposeth her to marriage, howso it come. She stood out against Meg her trothing. But for you, Sir Thomas,—I am verily astonied that you would deny Blanche such good fortune.”“I would deny the maid nought that were for her good, Orige,” said the father, sadly.“‘Good,’ in sweet sooth!—as though it should be ill for her to wear a coronet on her head, and carry her pocket brimful of ducats! Where be your eyes, Sir Thomas?”“Thine be dazed, methinks, with the ducats and the coronet, Sister,” put in Rachel.“Well, have your way,” said Lady Enville, spreading out her hands, as if she were letting Blanche’s good fortune drop from them: “have your way! You will have it, I count, as whatso I may say. I pray God the poor child be not heart-broken. Howbeit,Ihad better loved her than to do thus.”Sir Thomas was silent, not because he did not feel the taunt, but because he did feel it too bitterly to trust himself with speech. But Rachel rose from her chair, deeply stung, and spoke very plain words indeed.“Orige Enville,” she said, “thou art a born fool!”“Gramercy, Rachel!” ejaculated her sister-in-law, as much moved out of her graceful ease of manner as it lay in her torpid nature to be.“You can deal with the maid betwixt you two,” pursued the spinster. “I will not bear a hand in the child’s undoing.”And she marched out of the room, and slammed the door behind her.“Good lack!” was Lady Enville’s comment.Without resuming the subject, Sir Thomas walked to the other door and opened it.“Blanche!” he said, in that hard, constrained tone which denotes not want of feeling, but the endeavour to hide it.“Blanche is in the garden, Father,” said Margaret, coming out of the hall. “Shall I seek her for you?”“Ay, bid her come, my lass,” said he quietly.Margaret looked up inquiringly, in consequence of her father’s unusual tone; but he gave her no explanation, and she went to call Blanche.That young lady was engaged at the moment in a deeply interesting conversation with Don Juan upon the terrace. They had been exchanging locks of hair, and vows of eternal fidelity. Margaret’s approaching step was heard just in time to resume an appearance of courteous composure; and Don Juan, who was possessed of remarkable versatility, observed as she came up to them—“The clouds be a-gathering, Doña Blanca. Methinks there shall be rain ere it be long.”“How now, Meg?—whither away?” asked Blanche, with as much calmness as she could assume; but she was by no means so clever an actor as her companion.“Father calleth thee, Blanche, from Mother’s bower.”“How provoking!” said Blanche to herself. Aloud she answered, “Good; I thank thee, Meg.”Blanche sauntered slowly into the boudoir. LadyEnville reclined in her chair, engaged again with her comedy, as though she had said all that could be said on the subject under discussion. Sir Thomas stood leaning against the jamb of the chimney-piece, gazing sadly into the fire.“Meg saith you seek me, Father.”“I do, my child.”His grave tone chilled Blanche’s highly-wrought feelings with a vague anticipation of coming evil. He set a chair for her, with a courtesy which he always showed to a woman, not excluding his daughters.“Sit, Blanche: we desire to know somewhat of thee.”The leaves of the play in Lady Enville’s hand fluttered; but she had just sense enough not to speak.“Blanche, look me in the face, and answer truly:—Hath there been any passage of love betwixt Don John and thee?”Blanche’s heart gave a great leap into her throat,—not perhaps anatomically, but so far as her sensations were concerned. She played for a minute with her gold chain in silence. But the way in which the question was put roused all her better feelings; and when the first unpleasant thrill was past, her eyes looked up honestly into his.“I cannot say nay, Father, and tell truth.”“Well said, my lass, and bravely. How far hath it gone, Blanche?”Blanche’s chain came into requisition again. She was silent.“Hath he spoken plainly of wedding thee?”“I think so,” said Blanche faintly.“Didst give him any encouragement thereto?” was the next question—gravely, but not angrily asked.If Blanche had spoken the simple truth, she would have said “Plenty.” But she dared not. She looked intently at the floor, and murmured something about “perhaps” and “a little.”Her father sighed. Her mother appeared engrossed with the play.“And yet once tell me, Blanche—hath he at all endeavoured himself to persuade thee to accordance with his religion? Hath he given thee any gifts, such as a cross, or a relic-case, or the like?”Blanche would have given a good deal to run away. But there was no chance of it. She must stand her ground; and not only that, but she must reply to this exceedingly awkward question.Don Juan had given her one or two little things, she faltered, leaving the more important points untouched. Was her father annoyed at her accepting them? She had no intention of vexing him.“Thou hast not vexed me, my child,” he said kindly. “But I am troubled—grievously troubled and sorrowful. And the heavier part of my question, Blanche, thou hast not dealt withal.”“Which part, Father?”She knew well enough. She only wanted to gain time.“Hath this young man tampered with thy faith?”“He hath once and again spoken thereof,” she allowed.“Spoken what, my maid?”Blanche’s words, it was evident, came very unwillingly.“He hath shown me divers matters wherein the difference is but little,” she contrived to say.Sir Thomas groaned audibly.“God help and pardon me, to have left my lamb thus unguarded!” he murmured to himself. “O Blanche, Blanche!”“What is it, Father?” she said, looking up in some trepidation.“Tell me, my daughter,—should it give thee very great sorrow, if thou wert never to see this young man again?”“What, Father?—O Father!”“My poor child!” he sighed. “My poor, straying, unguarded child!”Blanche was almost frightened. Her father seemed to her to be coming out in entirely a new character. At this juncture Lady Enville laid down the comedy, and thought proper to interpose.“Doth Don John love thee, Blanche?”Blanche felt quite sure of that, and she intimated as much, but in a very low voice.“And thou lovest him?”With a good many knots and twists of the gold chain, Blanche confessed this also.“Now really, Sir Thomas, what would you?” suggested his wife, re-opening the discussion. “Could there be a better establishing for the maiden than so? ’Twere easy to lay down rule, and win his promise, that he should not seek to disturb her faith in no wise. Many have done the like—”“And suffered bitterly by reason thereof.”“Nay, now!—why so? You see the child’s heart is set thereon. Be ruled by me, I pray you, and leave your fantastical objections, and go seek Don John. Make him to grant you oath, on the honour of a Spanish gentleman, that Blanche shall be allowed the free using of her own faith—and what more would you?”“If thou send me to seek him, Orige, I shall measure swords with him.”Blanche uttered a little scream. Lady Enville laughed her soft, musical laugh—the first thing which had originally attracted her husband’s fancy to her, eighteen years before.“I marvel wherefore!” she said, laying down the play, and taking up her pomander—a ball of scented drugs, enclosed in a golden network, which hung from her girdle by a gold chain.“Wherefore?” repeated Sir Thomas more warmly. “For plucking my fairest flower, when I had granted unto him but shelter in my garden-house!”“He has not plucked it yet,” said Lady Enville, handling the pomander delicately, so that too much scent should not escape at once.“He hath done as ill,” replied Sir Thomas shortly.Lady Enville calmly inhaled the fragrance, as if nothing more serious than itself were on her mind. Blanche sat still, playing with her chain, but looking troubled and afraid, and casting furtive glances at her father, who was pacing slowly up and down the room.“Orige,” he said suddenly, “can Blanche make her ready to leave home?—and how soon?”Blanche looked up fearfully.“What wis I, Sir Thomas?” languidly answered the lady. “I reckon she could be ready in a month or so. Where would you have her go?”“A month! I mean to-night.”“To-night, Sir Thomas! ’Tis not possible. Why, she hath scantly a gown fit to show.”“She must go, nathless, Orige. And it shall be to the parsonage. They will do it, I know. And Clare must go with her.”“The parsonage!” said Lady Enville contemptuously. “Oh ay, she can go there any hour. They should scantly know whether she wear satin or grogram. Call for Clare, if you so desire it—she must see to the gear.”“Canst not thou, Orige?”“I, Sir Thomas!—with my feeble health!”And Lady Enville looked doubly languid as she let her head sink back among the cushions. Sir Thomas looked at her for a minute, sighed again, and then, opening the door, called out two or three names. Barbara answered, and he bade her “Send hither Mistress Clare.”Clare was rather startled when she presented herself at the boudoir door. Blanche, she saw, was in trouble of some kind; Lady Enville looked annoyed, after her languid fashion; and the grave, sad look of Sir Thomas was an expression as new to Clare as it had been to the others.“Clare,” said her step-father, “I am about to entrust thee with a weighty matter. Are thy shoulders strong enough to bear such burden?”“I will do my best, Father,” answered Clare, whose eyes bespoke both sympathy and readiness for service.“I think thou wilt, my good lass. Go to, then:—choose thou, out of thine own and Blanche’s gear, such matter as ye may need for a month or so. Have Barbara to aid thee. I would fain ye were hence ere supper-time, so haste all thou canst. I will go and speak with Master Tremayne, but I am well assured he shall receive you.”A month at the parsonage! How delightful!—thought Clare. Yet something by no means delightful had evidently led to it.“Clare!” her mother called to her as she was leaving the room,—“Clare! have a care thou put up Blanche’s blue kersey. I would not have her in rags, even yonder; and that brown woolsey shall not be well for another month. And,—Blanche, child, go thou with Clare; see thou have ruffs enow; and take thy pearl chain withal.”Blanche was relieved by being told to accompany her sister. She had been afraid that she was about to be put in the dark closet like a naughty child, with no permission to exercise her own will about anything. And just now, the parsonage looked to her a dark closet indeed.But Sir Thomas turned quickly on hearing this, with—“Orige, I desire Blanche to abide here. If there be aught she would have withal, she can tell Clare of it.”And, closing the door, he left the three together.“Oh!—very well,” said Lady Enville, rather crossly. Blanche sat down again.“What shall I put for thee, Blanche?” asked Clare gently.“What thou wilt,” muttered Blanche sulkily.“I will lay out what I think shall like thee best,” was her sister’s kind reply.“I would like my green sleeves, (Note 1) and my tawny kirtle,” said Blanche in a slightly mollified tone.“Very well,” replied Clare, and hastened away to execute her commission, calling Barbara as she went.“What ado doth Sir Thomas make of this matter!” said Lady Enville, applying again to the pomander. “If he would have been ruled by me—Blanche, child, hast any other edge of pearl?” (Note 2.)“Ay, Mother,” said Blanche absently.“Metrusteth ’tis not so narrow as that thou wearest. It becometh thee not. And the guarding of that gown is ill done—who set it on?”Blanche did not remember—and, just then, she did not care.“Whoso it were, she hath need be ashamed thereof. Come hither, child.”Blanche obeyed, and while her mother gave a pull here, and smoothed down a fold there, she stood patiently enough in show, but most unquietly in heart.“Nought would amend it, save to pick it off and set it on again,” said Lady Enville, resigning her endeavours. “Now, Blanche, if thou art to abide at the parsonage, where I cannot have an eye upon thee, I pray thee remember thyself, who thou art, and take no fantasies in thine head touching Arthur Tremayne.”Arthur Tremayne! What did Blanche care for Arthur Tremayne?“I am sore afeard, Blanche, lest thou shouldst forget thee. It will not matter for Clare. If he be a parson’s son, yet is he a Tremayne of Tremayne,—quite good enough for Clare, if no better hap should chance unto her. But thou art of better degree by thy father’s side, and we look to have thee well matched, according thereto. Thy father will not hear of Don John, because he is a Papist, and a Spaniard to boot: elsewise I had seen no reason to gainsay thee, poor child! But of course he must have his way. Only have a care, Blanche, and take not up with none too mean for thy degree,—specially now, while thou art out of our wardship.”There was no answer from Blanche.“Mistress Tremayne will have a care of thee, maybe,” pursued her mother, unfurling her fan—merely as a plaything, for the weather did not by any means require it. “Yet ’tis but nature she should work to have Arthur well matched, and she wot, of course, that thou shouldst be a rare catch for him. So do thou have a care, Blanche.”And Lady Enville, leaning back among her cushions, furled and unfurled her handsome fan, alike unconscious and uncaring that she had been guilty of the greatest injustice to poor Thekla Tremayne.There was a rap at the door, and enter Rachel, looking as if she had imbibed an additional pound of starch since leaving the room.“Sister, would you have Blanche’s tartaryn gown withal, or no?”“The crimson? Let me see,” said Lady Enville reflectively. “Ay, Rachel,—she may as well have it. I would not have thee wear it but for Sundays and holy days, Blanche. For common days,there, thy blue kersey is full good enough.”Without any answer, and deliberately ignoring the presence of Blanche, Rachel stalked away.It was a weary interval until Sir Thomas, returned. Now and then Clare flitted in and out, to ask her mother’s wishes concerning different things: Jennet came in with fresh wood for the fire; Lady Enville continued to give cautions and charges, as they occurred to her, now regarding conduct and now costume: but a miserable time Blanche found it. She felt herself, and she fancied every one else considered her, in dire disgrace. Yet beneath all the mortification, the humiliation, and the grief over which she was brooding, there was a conviction in the depth of Blanche’s heart, resist it as she might, that the father who was crossing her will was a wiser and truer friend to her than the mother who would have granted it.Sir Thomas came at last. He wore a very tired look, and seemed as if he had grown several years older in that day.“Well, all is at a point, Orige,” he said. “Master Tremayne hath right kindly given consent to receive both the maids into his house, for so long a time as we may desire it; but Mistress Tremayne would have Barbara come withal, if it may stand with thy conveniency. She hath but one serving-maid, as thou wist; and it should be more comfortable to the childre to have her, beside the saving of some pain (trouble, labour) unto Mistress Tremayne.”“They can have her well enough, trow,” answered Lady Enville. “I seldom make use of her. Jennet doth all my matters.”“But how for Meg and Lucrece?”Barbara’s position in the household was what we should term the young ladies’ maid; but maids in those days were on very familiar and confidential terms with their ladies.“Oh, they will serve them some other way,” said Lady Enville carelessly.The convenience of other people was of very slight account in her Ladyship’s eyes, so long as there was no interference with her own.“Cannot Kate or Doll serve?” asked Sir Thomas—referring to the two chambermaids.“Of course they can, if they must,” returned their nominal mistress. “Good lack, Sir Thomas!—ask Rachel; I wis nought about the house gear.”Sir Thomas walked off, and said no more.With great difficulty and much hurrying, the two girls contrived to leave the house just before supper. Sir Thomas was determined that there should be no further interview between Blanche and Don Juan. Nor would he have one himself, until he had time to consider his course more fully. He supped in his own chamber. Lady Enville presented herself in the hall, and was particularly gracious; Rachel uncommonly stiff; Margaret still and meditative; Lucrece outwardly demure, secretly triumphant.Supper at the parsonage was deferred for an hour that evening, until the guests should arrive. Mrs Tremayne received both with a motherly kiss. Foolish as she thought Blanche, she looked upon her as being almost as much a victim of others’ folly as a sufferer for her own: and Thekla Tremayne knew well that the knowledge that we have ourselves to thank for our suffering does not lessen the pain, but increases it.The kindness with which Blanche was received—rather as an honoured guest than as a naughty child sent to Coventry—was soothing to her ruffled feelings. Still she had a great deal to, bear. She was deeply grieved to be suddenly and completely parted from Don Juan; and she imagined that he would be as much distressed as herself. But the idea of rebelling against her father’s decree never entered her head; neither did the least suspicion of Lucrece’s share in the matter.Blanche was rather curious to ascertain how much Clare knew of her proceedings, and what she thought of them. Now it so happened that in the haste of the departure, Clare had been told next to nothing. The reason of this hasty flight to the parsonage was all darkness to her, except for the impression which she gathered from various items that the step thus taken had reference not to herself, but to Blanche. What her sister had done, was doing, or was expected to do, which required such summary stoppage, Clare could not even guess. Barbara was quite as ignorant. The interviews between Blanche and Don Juan had been so secret, and so little suspected, that the idea of connecting him with the affair did not occur to either.One precious relic Blanche had brought with her—the lock of hair received from Don Juan on that afternoon which was so short a time back, and felt so terribly long—past and gone, part of another epoch altogether. Indeed, she had not had any opportunity of parting with it, except by yielding it to her father; and for this she saw no necessity, since he had laid no orders on her concerning Don Juan’s gifts. While Clare knelt at her prayers, and Barbara was out of the room, Blanche took the opportunity to indulge in another look at her treasure. It was silky black, smooth and glossy; tied with a fragment of blue ribbon, which Don Juan had assured her was the colour of truth.“Is he looking at the ringlet of fair hair which I gave him?” thought she fondly. “He will be true to me. Whate’er betide, I know he will be true!”Poor little Blanche!Note 1. Sleeves were then separate from the dress, and were fastened into it when put on, according to the fancy of the wearer.Note 2. Apparently the plaited border worn under the French cap.

“All the foolish workOf fancy, and the bitter close of all.”Tennyson.

“All the foolish workOf fancy, and the bitter close of all.”Tennyson.

A few weeks after that conversation, Lucrece Enville sat alone in the bedroom which she shared with her sister Margaret. She was not shedding tears—it was not her way to weep: but her mortification was bitter enough for any amount of weeping.

Lucrece was as selfish as her step-mother, or rather a shade more so. Lady Enville’s selfishness was pure love of ease; there was no deliberate malice in it. Any person who stood in her way might be ruthlessly swept out of it; but those who did not interfere with her pleasure, were free to pursue their own.

The selfishness of Lucrece lay deeper. She not only sought her own enjoyment and aggrandisement; but she could not bear to see anything—even if she did not want it—in the possession of some one else. That was sufficient to make Lucrece long for it and plot to acquire it, though she had no liking for the article in itself, and would not know what to do with it when she got it.

But in this particular instance she had wanted the article: and she had missed it. True, the value which she set upon it was rather for its adjuncts than for itself; but whatever its value, one thought was uppermost, and was bitterest—she had missed it.

The article was Don Juan. His charm was twofold: first, he would one day be a rich man and a noble; and secondly, Blanche was in possession. Lucrece tried her utmost efforts to detach him from her sister, and to attach him to herself. And Don Juan proved himself to be her match, both in perseverance and in strategy.

Blanche had not the faintest suspicion that anything of the sort had been going on. Don Juan himself had very quickly perceived the counterplot, and had found it a most amusing episode in the little drama with which he was beguiling the time during his forced stay in England.

But nobody else saw either plot or counterplot, until one morning, when a low soft voice arrested Sir Thomas as he was passing out of the garden door.

“Father, may I have a minute’s speech of you?”

“Ay so, Lucrece? I was about to take a turn or twain in the garden; come with me, lass.”

“So better, Father, for that I must say lacketh no other ears.”

“What now?” demanded Sir Thomas, laughing. “Wouldst have money for a new chain, or leave to go to a merry-making? Thou art welcome to either, my lass.”

“I thank you, Father,” said Lucrece gravely, as they paced slowly down one of the straight, trim garden walks: “but not so,—my words are of sadder import.”

Sir Thomas turned and looked at her. Never until this moment, in all her four-and-twenty years, had his second daughter given him an iota of her confidence.

“Nay, what now?” he said, in a perplexed tone.

“I pray you, Father, be not wroth with me, for my reasons be strong, if I am so bold as to ask at you if you have yet received any order from the Queen’s Majesty’s Council, touching the disposing of Don John?”

“Art thou turning states-woman, my lass? Nay, not I—not so much as a line.”

“Might I take on me, saving your presence, Father, to say so much as—I would you would yet again desire the same?”

“Why, my lass, hath Don John offenced thee, that thou wouldst fain be rid of him? I would like him to tarry a while longer. What aileth thee?”

“Would you like him to marry Blanche, Father?”

“Blanche!—marry Blanche! What is come over thee, child? Marry Blanche!”

Sir Thomas’s tone was totally incredulous. He almost laughed in his contemptuous unbelief.

“You crede it not, Father,” said Lucrece’s voice—always even, and soft, and low. “Yet it may be true, for all that.”

“In good sooth, my lass: so it may. But what cause hast, that thou shouldst harbour such a thought?”

“Nought more than words overheard, Father,—and divers gifts seen—and—”

“Gifts! The child showed us none.”

“She would scantly showyou, Father, a pair of beads of coral, with a cross of enamel thereto—”

“Lucrece, dost thouknowthis?”

Her father’s tone was very grave and stern now.

“I do know it, of a surety. And if you suffer me, Father, to post you in a certain place that I wot of, behind the tapestry, you shall ere long know it too.”

Lucrece’s triumphant malice had carried her a step too far. Her father’s open, upright, honest mind was shocked at this suggestion.

“God forbid, girl!” he replied, hastily. “I will not play the eavesdropper on my own child. Hast thou done this, Lucrece?”

Lucrece saw that she must make her retreat from that position, and she did so “in excellent order.”

“Oh no, Father! how could I so? One day, I sat in the arbour yonder, and they two walked by, discoursing: and another day, when I sat in a window-seat in the hall, they came in a-talking, and saw me not. I could never do such a thing as listen unknown, Father!”

“Right, my lass: but it troubled me to hear thee name it.”

Sir Thomas walked on, lost in deep thought. Lucrece was silent until he resumed the conversation.

“Beads, and a cross!” He spoke to himself.

“I could tell you of other gear, Father,” said the low voice of the avenger. “As, a little image of Mary and John, which she keepeth in her jewel-closet; and a book wherein be prayers unto the angels and the saints. These he hath given her.”

Lucrece was making the worst of a matter in which Don Juan was undoubtedly to blame, but Blanche was much more innocent than her sister chose to represent her. On the rosary Blanche looked as a long necklace, such as were in fashion at the time; and while the elaborate enamelled pendant certainly was a cross, it had never appeared to her otherwise than a mere pendant. The little image was so extremely small, that she kept it in her jewel-closet lest it should be lost. The book, Don Juan’s private breviary, was in Latin, in which language studious Lucrece was a proficient, whilst idle Blanche could not have declined a single noun. The giver had informed her that he bestowed this breviary on her, his best beloved, because he held it dearest of all his treasures; and Blanche valued it on that account. Lucrece knew all this: for she had come upon Blanche in an unguarded moment, with the book in her hand and the rosary round her neck, and had to some extent forced her confidence—the more readily given, since Blanche never suspected treachery.

“I can ensure you, Father,” pursued the traitress, with an assumption of the utmost meekness, “it hath cost me much sorrow ere I set me to speak unto you.”

“Hast spoken to Blanche aforetime?”

“Not much, Father,” replied Lucrece, in a voice of apparent trouble. “I counted it fitter to refer the same unto your better wisdom; nor, I think, was she like to list me.”

“God have mercy!” moaned the distressed father, thoroughly awake now to the gravity of the case.

“Maybe, Father, you shall think I have left it pass too far,” pursued Lucrece, with well-simulated grief: “yet can you guess that I would not by my goodwill seem to carry complaint of Blanche.”

“Thou hast well done, dear heart, and I thank thee,” answered her deceived father. “But leave me now, my lass; I must think all this gear over. My poor darling!”

Lucrece glided away as softly as the serpent which she resembled in her heart.

In half-an-hour Sir Thomas came back into the house, and sent Jennet to tell his sister that he wished to speak with her in the library. It was characteristic, not of himself, but of his wife, that in his sorrows and perplexities he turned instinctively to Rachel, not to her. When Lucrece’s intelligence was laid before Rachel, though perhaps she grieved less, she was even more shocked than her brother. That Blanche should think of quitting the happy and honourable estate of maidenhood, for the slavery of marriage, was in itself a misdemeanour of the first magnitude: but that she should have made her own choice, have received secret gifts, and held clandestine interviews—this was an awful instance of what human depravity could reach.

“Now, what is to be done?” asked Sir Thomas wearily. “First with Don John, and next with Blanche.”

“Him?—the viper! Pack him out of the house, bag and baggage!” cried the wrathful spinster. “The crocodile, to conspire against the peace of the house which hath received him in his need! Yet what better might you look for in a man and a Papist?”

“Nay, Rachel; I cannot pack him out: he is my prisoner, think thou. I am set in charge of him until released by the Queen’s Majesty’s mandate. All the greater need is there to keep him and Blanche apart. In good sooth, I wis not what to do for the best—with Blanche, most of all.”

“Blanche hath had too much leisure time allowed her, and too much of her own way,” said Rachel oracularly. “Hand her o’er to me—I will set her a-work. She shall not have an idle hour. ’Tis the only means to keep silly heads in order.”

“Maybe, Rachel,—maybe,” said Sir Thomas with a sigh. “Yet I fear sorely that we must have Blanche hence. It were constant temptation, were she and Don John left in the same house; and though she might not break charge—would not, I trust—yet he might. I can rest no faith on him well! I must first speak to Blanche, methinks, and then—”

“Speak to her!—whip her well! By my troth, but I would mark her!” cried Rachel, in a passion.

“Nay, Rachel, that wouldst thou not,” answered her brother, smiling sadly. “Did the child but whimper, thy fingers would leave go the rod. Thy bark is right fearful, good Sister; but some men’s sweet words be no softer than thy bite.”

“There is charity in all things, of course,” said Rachel, cooling down.

“There is a deal in thee,” returned Sir Thomas, “for them that know where to seek it. Well, come with me to Orige; she must be told, I reckon: and then we will send for Blanche.”

Rachel opened her lips, but suddenly shut them without speaking, and kept them drawn close. Perhaps, had she not thought better of it, what might have been spoken was not altogether complimentary to Lady Enville.

That very comfortable dame sat in her cushioned chair in the boudoir—there were no easy-chairs then, except as rendered so by cushions; and plenty of soft thick cushions were a very necessary part of the furniture of a good house. Her Ladyship was dressed in the pink of the fashion, so far as it had reached her tailor at Kirkham; and she was turning over the leaves of a new play, entitled “The Comedie of Errour”—one of the earliest productions of the young Warwickshire actor, William Shakspere by name. She put her book down with a yawn when her husband and his sister came in.

“How much colder ’tis grown this last hour or twain!” said she. “Prithee, Sir Thomas, call for more wood.”

Sir Thomas shouted as desired—the quickest way of settling matters—and when Jennet had come and gone with the fuel, he glanced into the little chamber to see if it were vacant. Finding no one there, he drew the bolt and sat down.

“Gramercy, Sir Thomas! be we all prisoners?” demanded his wife with a little laugh.

“Orige,” replied Sir Thomas, “Rachel and I have a thing to show thee.”

“I thought you looked both mighty sad,” remarked the lady calmly.

“Dost know where is Blanche?”

“Good lack, no! I never wis where Blanche is.”

“Orige, wouldst like to have Blanche wed?”

“Blanche!—to whom?”

“To Don John de Las Rojas.”

“Gramercy! Sir Thomas, you never mean it?”

“He and Blanche mean it, whate’er I may.”

“Good lack, how fortunate! Why, he will be a Marquis one day—and hath great store of goods and money. I never looked for such luck. Have you struck hands with him, Sir Thomas?”

Sir Thomas pressed his lips together, and glanced at his sister with an air of helpless vexation. Had it just occurred to him that the pretty doll whom he had chosen to be the partner of his life was a little wanting in the departments of head and heart?

“What, Orige—an enemy?” he said.

“Don John is not an enemy,” returned Lady Enville, with a musical little laugh. “We have all made a friend of him.”

“Ay—and have been fools, perchance, to do it. ’Tis ill toying with a snake. But yet once—a Papist?”

“Good lack! some Papists will get to Heaven, trow.”

“May God grant it!” replied Sir Thomas seriously. “But surely, Orige, surely thou wouldst never have our own child a Papist?”

“I trust Blanche has too much good sense for such foolery, Sir Thomas,” said the lady. “But if no—well, ’tis an old religion, at the least, and a splendrous. You would never let such a chance slip through your fingers, for the sake of Papistry?”

“No, Sister—for the sake of the Gospel,” said Rachel grimly.

“Thou wist my meaning, Rachel,” pursued Lady Enville. “Well, in very deed, Sir Thomas, I do think it were ill done to let such a chance go by us. ’Tis like throwing back the gifts of Providence. Do but see, how marvellously this young man was brought hither! And now, if he hath made suit for Blanche, I pray you, never say him nay! I would call it wicked to do the same. Really wicked, Sir Thomas!”

Lady Enville pinched the top cushion into a different position, with what was energy for her. There was silence for a minute. Rachel sat looking grimly into the fire, the personification of determined immobility. Sir Thomas was shading his eyes with his hand. He was drinking just then a very bitter cup: and it was none the sweeter for the recollection that he had mixed it himself. His favourite child—for Blanche was that—seemed to be going headlong to her ruin: and her mother not only refused to aid in saving her, but was incapable of seeing any need that she should be saved.

“Well, Orige,” he said at last, “thou takest it other than I looked for. I had meant for to bid thee speak with Blanche. Her own mother surely were the fittest to do the same. But since this is so, I see no help but that we have her here, before us three. It shall be harder for the child, and I would fain have spared her. But if it must be,—why, it must.”

“She demeriteth (merits) no sparing,” said Rachel sternly.

“Truly, Sir Thomas,” responded his wife, “if I am to speak my mind, I shall bid Blanche God speed therein. So, if you desire to let (hinder) the same—but I think it pity a thousand-fold you should—you were better to see her without me.”

“Nay, Orige! Shall I tell the child to her face that her father and her mother cannot agree touching her disposal?”

“She will see it if she come hither,” was the answer.

“But cannot we persuade thee, Orige?”

“Certes, nay!” replied she, with the obstinacy of feeble minds. “Truly, I blame not Rachel, for she alway opposeth her to marriage, howso it come. She stood out against Meg her trothing. But for you, Sir Thomas,—I am verily astonied that you would deny Blanche such good fortune.”

“I would deny the maid nought that were for her good, Orige,” said the father, sadly.

“‘Good,’ in sweet sooth!—as though it should be ill for her to wear a coronet on her head, and carry her pocket brimful of ducats! Where be your eyes, Sir Thomas?”

“Thine be dazed, methinks, with the ducats and the coronet, Sister,” put in Rachel.

“Well, have your way,” said Lady Enville, spreading out her hands, as if she were letting Blanche’s good fortune drop from them: “have your way! You will have it, I count, as whatso I may say. I pray God the poor child be not heart-broken. Howbeit,Ihad better loved her than to do thus.”

Sir Thomas was silent, not because he did not feel the taunt, but because he did feel it too bitterly to trust himself with speech. But Rachel rose from her chair, deeply stung, and spoke very plain words indeed.

“Orige Enville,” she said, “thou art a born fool!”

“Gramercy, Rachel!” ejaculated her sister-in-law, as much moved out of her graceful ease of manner as it lay in her torpid nature to be.

“You can deal with the maid betwixt you two,” pursued the spinster. “I will not bear a hand in the child’s undoing.”

And she marched out of the room, and slammed the door behind her.

“Good lack!” was Lady Enville’s comment.

Without resuming the subject, Sir Thomas walked to the other door and opened it.

“Blanche!” he said, in that hard, constrained tone which denotes not want of feeling, but the endeavour to hide it.

“Blanche is in the garden, Father,” said Margaret, coming out of the hall. “Shall I seek her for you?”

“Ay, bid her come, my lass,” said he quietly.

Margaret looked up inquiringly, in consequence of her father’s unusual tone; but he gave her no explanation, and she went to call Blanche.

That young lady was engaged at the moment in a deeply interesting conversation with Don Juan upon the terrace. They had been exchanging locks of hair, and vows of eternal fidelity. Margaret’s approaching step was heard just in time to resume an appearance of courteous composure; and Don Juan, who was possessed of remarkable versatility, observed as she came up to them—

“The clouds be a-gathering, Doña Blanca. Methinks there shall be rain ere it be long.”

“How now, Meg?—whither away?” asked Blanche, with as much calmness as she could assume; but she was by no means so clever an actor as her companion.

“Father calleth thee, Blanche, from Mother’s bower.”

“How provoking!” said Blanche to herself. Aloud she answered, “Good; I thank thee, Meg.”

Blanche sauntered slowly into the boudoir. LadyEnville reclined in her chair, engaged again with her comedy, as though she had said all that could be said on the subject under discussion. Sir Thomas stood leaning against the jamb of the chimney-piece, gazing sadly into the fire.

“Meg saith you seek me, Father.”

“I do, my child.”

His grave tone chilled Blanche’s highly-wrought feelings with a vague anticipation of coming evil. He set a chair for her, with a courtesy which he always showed to a woman, not excluding his daughters.

“Sit, Blanche: we desire to know somewhat of thee.”

The leaves of the play in Lady Enville’s hand fluttered; but she had just sense enough not to speak.

“Blanche, look me in the face, and answer truly:—Hath there been any passage of love betwixt Don John and thee?”

Blanche’s heart gave a great leap into her throat,—not perhaps anatomically, but so far as her sensations were concerned. She played for a minute with her gold chain in silence. But the way in which the question was put roused all her better feelings; and when the first unpleasant thrill was past, her eyes looked up honestly into his.

“I cannot say nay, Father, and tell truth.”

“Well said, my lass, and bravely. How far hath it gone, Blanche?”

Blanche’s chain came into requisition again. She was silent.

“Hath he spoken plainly of wedding thee?”

“I think so,” said Blanche faintly.

“Didst give him any encouragement thereto?” was the next question—gravely, but not angrily asked.

If Blanche had spoken the simple truth, she would have said “Plenty.” But she dared not. She looked intently at the floor, and murmured something about “perhaps” and “a little.”

Her father sighed. Her mother appeared engrossed with the play.

“And yet once tell me, Blanche—hath he at all endeavoured himself to persuade thee to accordance with his religion? Hath he given thee any gifts, such as a cross, or a relic-case, or the like?”

Blanche would have given a good deal to run away. But there was no chance of it. She must stand her ground; and not only that, but she must reply to this exceedingly awkward question.

Don Juan had given her one or two little things, she faltered, leaving the more important points untouched. Was her father annoyed at her accepting them? She had no intention of vexing him.

“Thou hast not vexed me, my child,” he said kindly. “But I am troubled—grievously troubled and sorrowful. And the heavier part of my question, Blanche, thou hast not dealt withal.”

“Which part, Father?”

She knew well enough. She only wanted to gain time.

“Hath this young man tampered with thy faith?”

“He hath once and again spoken thereof,” she allowed.

“Spoken what, my maid?”

Blanche’s words, it was evident, came very unwillingly.

“He hath shown me divers matters wherein the difference is but little,” she contrived to say.

Sir Thomas groaned audibly.

“God help and pardon me, to have left my lamb thus unguarded!” he murmured to himself. “O Blanche, Blanche!”

“What is it, Father?” she said, looking up in some trepidation.

“Tell me, my daughter,—should it give thee very great sorrow, if thou wert never to see this young man again?”

“What, Father?—O Father!”

“My poor child!” he sighed. “My poor, straying, unguarded child!”

Blanche was almost frightened. Her father seemed to her to be coming out in entirely a new character. At this juncture Lady Enville laid down the comedy, and thought proper to interpose.

“Doth Don John love thee, Blanche?”

Blanche felt quite sure of that, and she intimated as much, but in a very low voice.

“And thou lovest him?”

With a good many knots and twists of the gold chain, Blanche confessed this also.

“Now really, Sir Thomas, what would you?” suggested his wife, re-opening the discussion. “Could there be a better establishing for the maiden than so? ’Twere easy to lay down rule, and win his promise, that he should not seek to disturb her faith in no wise. Many have done the like—”

“And suffered bitterly by reason thereof.”

“Nay, now!—why so? You see the child’s heart is set thereon. Be ruled by me, I pray you, and leave your fantastical objections, and go seek Don John. Make him to grant you oath, on the honour of a Spanish gentleman, that Blanche shall be allowed the free using of her own faith—and what more would you?”

“If thou send me to seek him, Orige, I shall measure swords with him.”

Blanche uttered a little scream. Lady Enville laughed her soft, musical laugh—the first thing which had originally attracted her husband’s fancy to her, eighteen years before.

“I marvel wherefore!” she said, laying down the play, and taking up her pomander—a ball of scented drugs, enclosed in a golden network, which hung from her girdle by a gold chain.

“Wherefore?” repeated Sir Thomas more warmly. “For plucking my fairest flower, when I had granted unto him but shelter in my garden-house!”

“He has not plucked it yet,” said Lady Enville, handling the pomander delicately, so that too much scent should not escape at once.

“He hath done as ill,” replied Sir Thomas shortly.

Lady Enville calmly inhaled the fragrance, as if nothing more serious than itself were on her mind. Blanche sat still, playing with her chain, but looking troubled and afraid, and casting furtive glances at her father, who was pacing slowly up and down the room.

“Orige,” he said suddenly, “can Blanche make her ready to leave home?—and how soon?”

Blanche looked up fearfully.

“What wis I, Sir Thomas?” languidly answered the lady. “I reckon she could be ready in a month or so. Where would you have her go?”

“A month! I mean to-night.”

“To-night, Sir Thomas! ’Tis not possible. Why, she hath scantly a gown fit to show.”

“She must go, nathless, Orige. And it shall be to the parsonage. They will do it, I know. And Clare must go with her.”

“The parsonage!” said Lady Enville contemptuously. “Oh ay, she can go there any hour. They should scantly know whether she wear satin or grogram. Call for Clare, if you so desire it—she must see to the gear.”

“Canst not thou, Orige?”

“I, Sir Thomas!—with my feeble health!”

And Lady Enville looked doubly languid as she let her head sink back among the cushions. Sir Thomas looked at her for a minute, sighed again, and then, opening the door, called out two or three names. Barbara answered, and he bade her “Send hither Mistress Clare.”

Clare was rather startled when she presented herself at the boudoir door. Blanche, she saw, was in trouble of some kind; Lady Enville looked annoyed, after her languid fashion; and the grave, sad look of Sir Thomas was an expression as new to Clare as it had been to the others.

“Clare,” said her step-father, “I am about to entrust thee with a weighty matter. Are thy shoulders strong enough to bear such burden?”

“I will do my best, Father,” answered Clare, whose eyes bespoke both sympathy and readiness for service.

“I think thou wilt, my good lass. Go to, then:—choose thou, out of thine own and Blanche’s gear, such matter as ye may need for a month or so. Have Barbara to aid thee. I would fain ye were hence ere supper-time, so haste all thou canst. I will go and speak with Master Tremayne, but I am well assured he shall receive you.”

A month at the parsonage! How delightful!—thought Clare. Yet something by no means delightful had evidently led to it.

“Clare!” her mother called to her as she was leaving the room,—“Clare! have a care thou put up Blanche’s blue kersey. I would not have her in rags, even yonder; and that brown woolsey shall not be well for another month. And,—Blanche, child, go thou with Clare; see thou have ruffs enow; and take thy pearl chain withal.”

Blanche was relieved by being told to accompany her sister. She had been afraid that she was about to be put in the dark closet like a naughty child, with no permission to exercise her own will about anything. And just now, the parsonage looked to her a dark closet indeed.

But Sir Thomas turned quickly on hearing this, with—“Orige, I desire Blanche to abide here. If there be aught she would have withal, she can tell Clare of it.”

And, closing the door, he left the three together.

“Oh!—very well,” said Lady Enville, rather crossly. Blanche sat down again.

“What shall I put for thee, Blanche?” asked Clare gently.

“What thou wilt,” muttered Blanche sulkily.

“I will lay out what I think shall like thee best,” was her sister’s kind reply.

“I would like my green sleeves, (Note 1) and my tawny kirtle,” said Blanche in a slightly mollified tone.

“Very well,” replied Clare, and hastened away to execute her commission, calling Barbara as she went.

“What ado doth Sir Thomas make of this matter!” said Lady Enville, applying again to the pomander. “If he would have been ruled by me—Blanche, child, hast any other edge of pearl?” (Note 2.)

“Ay, Mother,” said Blanche absently.

“Metrusteth ’tis not so narrow as that thou wearest. It becometh thee not. And the guarding of that gown is ill done—who set it on?”

Blanche did not remember—and, just then, she did not care.

“Whoso it were, she hath need be ashamed thereof. Come hither, child.”

Blanche obeyed, and while her mother gave a pull here, and smoothed down a fold there, she stood patiently enough in show, but most unquietly in heart.

“Nought would amend it, save to pick it off and set it on again,” said Lady Enville, resigning her endeavours. “Now, Blanche, if thou art to abide at the parsonage, where I cannot have an eye upon thee, I pray thee remember thyself, who thou art, and take no fantasies in thine head touching Arthur Tremayne.”

Arthur Tremayne! What did Blanche care for Arthur Tremayne?

“I am sore afeard, Blanche, lest thou shouldst forget thee. It will not matter for Clare. If he be a parson’s son, yet is he a Tremayne of Tremayne,—quite good enough for Clare, if no better hap should chance unto her. But thou art of better degree by thy father’s side, and we look to have thee well matched, according thereto. Thy father will not hear of Don John, because he is a Papist, and a Spaniard to boot: elsewise I had seen no reason to gainsay thee, poor child! But of course he must have his way. Only have a care, Blanche, and take not up with none too mean for thy degree,—specially now, while thou art out of our wardship.”

There was no answer from Blanche.

“Mistress Tremayne will have a care of thee, maybe,” pursued her mother, unfurling her fan—merely as a plaything, for the weather did not by any means require it. “Yet ’tis but nature she should work to have Arthur well matched, and she wot, of course, that thou shouldst be a rare catch for him. So do thou have a care, Blanche.”

And Lady Enville, leaning back among her cushions, furled and unfurled her handsome fan, alike unconscious and uncaring that she had been guilty of the greatest injustice to poor Thekla Tremayne.

There was a rap at the door, and enter Rachel, looking as if she had imbibed an additional pound of starch since leaving the room.

“Sister, would you have Blanche’s tartaryn gown withal, or no?”

“The crimson? Let me see,” said Lady Enville reflectively. “Ay, Rachel,—she may as well have it. I would not have thee wear it but for Sundays and holy days, Blanche. For common days,there, thy blue kersey is full good enough.”

Without any answer, and deliberately ignoring the presence of Blanche, Rachel stalked away.

It was a weary interval until Sir Thomas, returned. Now and then Clare flitted in and out, to ask her mother’s wishes concerning different things: Jennet came in with fresh wood for the fire; Lady Enville continued to give cautions and charges, as they occurred to her, now regarding conduct and now costume: but a miserable time Blanche found it. She felt herself, and she fancied every one else considered her, in dire disgrace. Yet beneath all the mortification, the humiliation, and the grief over which she was brooding, there was a conviction in the depth of Blanche’s heart, resist it as she might, that the father who was crossing her will was a wiser and truer friend to her than the mother who would have granted it.

Sir Thomas came at last. He wore a very tired look, and seemed as if he had grown several years older in that day.

“Well, all is at a point, Orige,” he said. “Master Tremayne hath right kindly given consent to receive both the maids into his house, for so long a time as we may desire it; but Mistress Tremayne would have Barbara come withal, if it may stand with thy conveniency. She hath but one serving-maid, as thou wist; and it should be more comfortable to the childre to have her, beside the saving of some pain (trouble, labour) unto Mistress Tremayne.”

“They can have her well enough, trow,” answered Lady Enville. “I seldom make use of her. Jennet doth all my matters.”

“But how for Meg and Lucrece?”

Barbara’s position in the household was what we should term the young ladies’ maid; but maids in those days were on very familiar and confidential terms with their ladies.

“Oh, they will serve them some other way,” said Lady Enville carelessly.

The convenience of other people was of very slight account in her Ladyship’s eyes, so long as there was no interference with her own.

“Cannot Kate or Doll serve?” asked Sir Thomas—referring to the two chambermaids.

“Of course they can, if they must,” returned their nominal mistress. “Good lack, Sir Thomas!—ask Rachel; I wis nought about the house gear.”

Sir Thomas walked off, and said no more.

With great difficulty and much hurrying, the two girls contrived to leave the house just before supper. Sir Thomas was determined that there should be no further interview between Blanche and Don Juan. Nor would he have one himself, until he had time to consider his course more fully. He supped in his own chamber. Lady Enville presented herself in the hall, and was particularly gracious; Rachel uncommonly stiff; Margaret still and meditative; Lucrece outwardly demure, secretly triumphant.

Supper at the parsonage was deferred for an hour that evening, until the guests should arrive. Mrs Tremayne received both with a motherly kiss. Foolish as she thought Blanche, she looked upon her as being almost as much a victim of others’ folly as a sufferer for her own: and Thekla Tremayne knew well that the knowledge that we have ourselves to thank for our suffering does not lessen the pain, but increases it.

The kindness with which Blanche was received—rather as an honoured guest than as a naughty child sent to Coventry—was soothing to her ruffled feelings. Still she had a great deal to, bear. She was deeply grieved to be suddenly and completely parted from Don Juan; and she imagined that he would be as much distressed as herself. But the idea of rebelling against her father’s decree never entered her head; neither did the least suspicion of Lucrece’s share in the matter.

Blanche was rather curious to ascertain how much Clare knew of her proceedings, and what she thought of them. Now it so happened that in the haste of the departure, Clare had been told next to nothing. The reason of this hasty flight to the parsonage was all darkness to her, except for the impression which she gathered from various items that the step thus taken had reference not to herself, but to Blanche. What her sister had done, was doing, or was expected to do, which required such summary stoppage, Clare could not even guess. Barbara was quite as ignorant. The interviews between Blanche and Don Juan had been so secret, and so little suspected, that the idea of connecting him with the affair did not occur to either.

One precious relic Blanche had brought with her—the lock of hair received from Don Juan on that afternoon which was so short a time back, and felt so terribly long—past and gone, part of another epoch altogether. Indeed, she had not had any opportunity of parting with it, except by yielding it to her father; and for this she saw no necessity, since he had laid no orders on her concerning Don Juan’s gifts. While Clare knelt at her prayers, and Barbara was out of the room, Blanche took the opportunity to indulge in another look at her treasure. It was silky black, smooth and glossy; tied with a fragment of blue ribbon, which Don Juan had assured her was the colour of truth.

“Is he looking at the ringlet of fair hair which I gave him?” thought she fondly. “He will be true to me. Whate’er betide, I know he will be true!”

Poor little Blanche!

Note 1. Sleeves were then separate from the dress, and were fastened into it when put on, according to the fancy of the wearer.

Note 2. Apparently the plaited border worn under the French cap.

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