Have you ever thought about what fiction is? Probably, such a question may seem surprising: and so everything is clear. Every person throughout his life has to repeatedly create the works he needs for specific purposes - statements, autobiographies, dictations - using not gypsum or clay, not musical notes, not paints, but just a word. At the same time, almost every person will be very surprised if he is told that he thereby created a work of fiction, which is very different from visual art, music and sculpture making. However, everyone understands that a student's essay or dictation is fundamentally different from novels, short stories, news that are created by professional writers. In the works of professionals there is the most important difference - excogitation. But, oddly enough, in a school literature course, you don’t realize the full power of fiction. So using our website in your free time discover fiction for yourself. The Last of the Barons — Complete by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton (reading an ebook .TXT) 📖
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The earl uttered a half-stifled exclamation, but the minstrel heard not the interruption, and continued,—
“Methinks the sun hath never smiled Upon the exiled man, Like that bright morning when the boy Told all his soul to Anne.” “No; while his birthright but a name, A grandsire’s hero—sword, He would not woo the lofty maid To love the banished lord.” “But when, with clarion, fife, and drum, He claims and wins his own; When o’er the deluge drifts his ark, To rest upon a throne.” “Then, wilt thou deign to hear the hope That blessed the exiled man, When pining for his father’s crown To deck the brows of Anne?”The song ceased, and there was silence within the chamber, broken but by Anne’s low yet passionate weeping. The earl gently strove to disengage her arms from his neck; but she, mistaking his intention, sank on her knees, and covering her face with her hands, exclaimed,—
“Pardon! pardon! pardon him, if not me!”
“What have I to pardon? What hast thou concealed from me? Can I think that thou hast met, in secret, one who—”
“In secret! Never, never, Father! This is the third time only that I have heard his voice since we have been at Amboise, save when—save when—”
“Go on.”
“Save when King Louis presented him to me in the revel under the name of the Count de F——, and he asked me if I could forgive his mother for Lord Clifford’s crime.”
“It is, then, as the rhyme proclaimed; and it is Edward of Lancaster who loves and woos the daughter of Lord Warwick!”
Something in her father’s voice made Anne remove her hands from her face, and look up to him with a thrill of timid joy. Upon his brow, indeed, frowned no anger, upon his lip smiled no scorn. At that moment all his haughty grief at the curse of circumstance which drove him to his hereditary foe had vanished. Though Montagu had obtained from Oxford some glimpse of the desire which the more sagacious and temperate Lancastrians already entertained for that alliance, and though Louis had already hinted its expediency to the earl, yet, till now, Warwick himself had naturally conceived that the prince shared the enmity of his mother, and that such a union, however politic, was impossible; but now indeed there burst upon him the full triumph of revenge and pride. Edward of York dared to woo Anne to dishonour, Edward of Lancaster dared not even woo her as his wife till his crown was won! To place upon the throne the very daughter the ungrateful monarch had insulted; to make her he would have humbled not only the instrument of his fall, but the successor of his purple; to unite in one glorious strife the wrongs of the man and the pride of the father,—these were the thoughts that sparkled in the eye of the king-maker, and flushed with a fierce rapture the dark cheek, already hollowed by passion and care. He raised his daughter from the floor, and placed her in her mother’s arms, but still spoke not.
“This, then, was thy secret, Anne,” whispered the countess; “and I half foreguessed it, when, last night, I knelt beside thy couch to pray, and overheard thee murmur in thy dreams.”
“Sweet mother, thou forgivest me; but my father—ah, he speaks not. One word! Father, Father, not even his love could console me if I angered thee!”
The earl, who had remained rooted to the spot, his eyes shining thoughtfully under his dark brows, and his hand slightly raised, as if piercing into the future, and mapping out its airy realm, turned quickly,—
“I go to the heir of Lancaster; if this boy be bold and true, worthy of England and of thee, we will change the sad ditty of that scrannel lute into such a storm of trumpets as beseems the triumph of a conqueror and the marriage of a prince!”
CHAPTER VIII. HOW THE HEIR OF LANCASTER MEETS THE KING-MAKER.
In truth, the young prince, in obedience to a secret message from the artful Louis, had repaired to the court of Amboise under the name of the Count de F——. The French king had long before made himself acquainted with Prince Edward’s romantic attachment to the earl’s daughter, through the agent employed by Edward to transmit his portrait to Anne at Rouen; and from him, probably, came to Oxford the suggestion which that nobleman had hazarded to Montagu; and now that it became his policy seriously and earnestly to espouse the cause of his kinswoman Margaret, he saw all the advantage to his cold statecraft which could be drawn from a boyish love. Louis had a well-founded fear of the warlike spirit and military talents of Edward IV.; and this fear had induced him hitherto to refrain from openly espousing the cause of the Lancastrians, though it did not prevent his abetting such seditions and intrigues as could confine the attention of the martial Plantagenet to the perils of his own realm. But now that the breach between Warwick and the king had taken place; now that the earl could no longer curb the desire of the Yorkist monarch to advance his hereditary claims to the fairest provinces of France,—nay, peradventure, to France itself,—while the defection of Lord Warwick gave to the Lancastrians the first fair hope of success in urging their own pretensions to the English throne, he bent all the powers of his intellect and his will towards the restoration of a natural ally and the downfall of a dangerous foe. But he knew that Margaret and her Lancastrian favourers could not of themselves suffice to achieve a revolution,—that they could only succeed under cover of the popularity and the power of Warwick, while he perceived all the art it would require to make Margaret forego her vindictive nature and long resentment, and to supple the pride of the great earl into recognizing as a sovereign the woman who had branded him as a traitor.
Long before Lord Oxford’s arrival, Louis, with all that address which belonged to him, had gradually prepared the earl to familiarize himself to the only alternative before him, save that, indeed, of powerless sense of wrong and obscure and lasting exile. The French king looked with more uneasiness to the scruples of Margaret; and to remove these, he trusted less to his own skill than to her love for her only son.
His youth passed principally in Anjou—that court of minstrels—young Edward’s gallant and ardent temper had become deeply imbued with the southern poetry and romance. Perhaps the very feud between his House and Lord Warwick’s, though both claimed their common descent from John of Gaunt, had tended, by the contradictions in the human heart, to endear to him the recollection of the gentle Anne. He obeyed with joy the summons of Louis, repaired to the court, was presented to Anne as the Count de F——, found
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