Two Penniless Princesses by Charlotte M. Yonge (the two towers ebook TXT) 📖

‘Most true, my child. Ah! have I not felt the same? But we must wait His time.’

‘It was I—it was I,’ continued Eleanor, ‘who set Jean upon this journey, leaving my brother and Mary and the bairns. And the farther we go, the more there is of vain show and plotting and scheming, and I am weary and heartsick and homesick of it all, and shall grow worse and worse. Oh! shelter me here, in your good and holy house, dear Reverend Mother, and maybe I could learn to do the holy work you do in my own country.’

How well Esclairmonde knew it all, and what aspirations had been hers! She took Elleen’s hand kindly and said, ‘Dear maid, I can only aid you by words! I could not keep you here. Your uncle the Cardinal would not suffer you to abide here, nor can I take sisters save by consent of the Queen—and now we have no Queen, of the King, and—’

‘Oh no, I could not ask that,’ said Eleanor, a deep blush mounting, as she remembered what construction might be put on her desire to remain in the King’s neighbourhood. ‘Ah! then must I go on—on—on farther from home to that Court which they say is full of sin and evil and vanity? What will become of me?’

‘If the religious life be good for you, trust me, the way will open, however unlikely it may seem. If not, Heaven and the saints will show what your course should be.’

‘But can there be such safety and holiness, save in that higher path?’ demanded Eleanor.

‘Nay, look at your own kinswoman, Dame Lilias—look at the Lady of Salisbury. Are not these godly, faithful women serving God through their duty to man—husband, children, all around? And are the longings and temptations to worldly thoughts and pleasures of the flesh so wholly put away in the cloister?’

‘Not here,’ began Eleanor, but Mother Clare hushed her.

‘Verily, my child,’ she added, ‘you must go on with your sister on this journey, trusting to the care and guidance of so good a woman as my beloved old friend, Dame Lilias; and if you say your prayers with all your heart to be guarded from sin and temptation, and led into the path that is fittest for you, trust that our blessed Master and our Lady will lead you. Have you the Pater Noster in the vulgar tongue?’ she added.

‘We—we had it once ere my father’s death. And Father Malcolm taught us; but we have since been so cast about that—that—I have forgotten.’

‘Ah! Father Malcolm taught you,’ and Esclairmonde took the girl’s hand. ‘You know how much I owe to Father Malcolm,’ she softly added, as she led the maiden to a carved rood at the end of the cloister, and, before it, repeated the vernacular version of the Lord’s Prayer till Eleanor knew it perfectly, and promised to follow up her ‘Pater Nosters’ with it.

And from that time there certainly was a different tone and spirit in Eleanor.

David, urged by his father, who still publicly ignored the young Douglas, persuaded him to write to his father now that there could be no longer any danger of pursuit, and the messenger Sir Patrick was sending to the King would afford the last opportunity. George growled and groaned a good deal, but perhaps Father Romuald pressed the duty on him in confession, for in his great relief at his lady’s going off unplighted from London, he consented to indite, in the chamber Father Romuald shared with two of the Cardinal’s chaplains, in a crooked and crabbed calligraphy and language much more resembling Anglo-Saxon than modern English, a letter to the most high and mighty, the Yerl of Angus, ‘these presents.’

But when he was entreated to assume his right position in the troop, he refused. ‘Na, na, Davie,’ he said, ‘gin my father chooses to send me gear and following, ‘tis all very weel, but ‘tisna for the credit of Scotland nor of Angus that the Master should be ganging about like a land-louper, with a single laddie after him—still less that he should be beholden to the Drummonds.’

‘Ye would win to the speech of the lassie,’ suggested David, ‘gin that be what ye want!’

‘Na kenning me, she willna look at me. Wait till I do that which may gar her look at me,’ said the chivalrous youth.

He was not entirely without means, for the links of a gold chain which he had brought from home went a good way in exchange, and though he had spoken of being at his own charges, he had found himself compelled to live as one of the train of the princesses, who were treated as the guests first of the Duke of York, then of the Cardinal, who had given Sir Patrick a sum sufficient to defray all possible expenses as far as Bourges, besides having arranged for those of the journey with Suffolk whose rank had been raised to that of a Marquis, in honour of his activity as proxy for the King.