A ROMANCE
OF
THE TIMES OF RICHARD III.
BY G. P. R. JAMES.
CHAPTER I.
Of all the hard-working people on the earth, there are none so serviceable to her neighbours as the moon. She lights lovers and thieves. She keeps watch-dogs waking. She is a constant resource to poets and romance-writers. She helps the compounders of almanacks amazingly. She has something to do with the weather, and the tides, and the harvest; and in short she has a finger in every man's pie, and probably more or less effect upon every man's brain. She is a charming creature in all her variations. Her versatility is not the offspring of caprice; and she is constant in the midst of every change.
I will have a moon, say what you will, my dear Prebend; and she shall more or less rule every page of this book.
There was a sloping piece of ground looking to the south east, with a very small narrow rivulet running at the bottom. On the opposite side of the stream was another slope, as like the former as possible, only looking in the opposite direction. Titian, and Vandyke, and some other painters, have pleased themselves with depicting, in one picture, the same face in two or three positions; and these two slopes looked exactly like the two profiles of one countenance. Each had its little clumps of trees scattered about. Each had here and there a hedgerow, somewhat broken and dilapidated; and each too had towards its northern extremity a low chalky bank, through which the stream seemed to have forced itself, in those good old times when rivers first began to go on pilgrimages towards the sea, and, like many other pilgrims that we wot of made their way through all obstacles in a very unceremonious manner.
Over these two slopes about the hour of half past eleven, post meridian, the moon was shining with a bright but fitful sort of splendour; for ever and anon a light fleecy cloud, like a piece of swansdown borne by the wind, would dim the brightness of her rays, and cast a passing shadow on the scene below. Half an hour before, indeed, the radiant face of night's sweet queen had been veiled by a blacker curtain, which had gathered thick over the sky at the sun's decline; but, as the moon rose high, those dark vapours became mottled with wavy lines of white, and gradually her beams seemed to drink them up.
It may be asked if those two sloping meadows, with their clumps of trees, and broken hedgerows, and the little stream flowing on between them, was all that the moonlight showed? That would depend upon where the eye of the observer was placed. Near the lower part of the valley, formed by the inclination of the land, nothing else could be perceived; but walk half way up towards the top, on either side, and the scene was very much altered. Gradually rising, as the eye rose, appeared, stretching out beyond the chalky banks to the north, through which the rivulet came on, a large-grey indistinct mass stretching all along from east to west, the rounded lines of which, together with some misty gaps, taking a blueish white tint in the moonlight, showed it to be some ancient forest, lying at the distance probably of two or three miles from the spot first mentioned.
But there were other objects displayed by the moonlight; for as those soft clouds, sweeping rapidly past, varied her light, and cast bright gleams or grey shadows on the ground, every here and there, especially on the south western slope, a brilliant spot would sparkle forth, flashing back the rays; and a nearer look showed naked swords, and breast-plates, and casques, while every now and then, under the increasing light, that which seemed a hillock took the form of a horse or of a human being, lying quietly on the green turf, or cast motionless down beneath a hedge or an old hawthorn tree.
Were they sleeping there in that dewy night? Ay, sleeping that sleep which fears not the blast, nor the tempest nor the dew, which the thunder cannot break, and from which no trumpet but one shall ever rouse the sleeper.
From sunset till that hour, no living thing, unless it were fox or wolf, had moved upon the scene. The battle was over, the pursuers recalled, the wounded removed; the burial of the dead, if it was to be cared for at all, postponed till another day; and all the fierce and base passions which are called forth by civil contest had lain down to sleep before the hour of which I speak. Even the human vulture, which follows on the track of warring armies to feed upon the spoils of the dead, had gorged itself upon that field, and left the rich arms and housings to be carried away on the morning following.
The fiercer and the baser passions, I have said, now slept; but there were tenderer affections which woke, and through that solemn and sad scene, with no light but that of the moon, with no sound but that of the sighing wind, some four or five persons were seen wandering about, half an hour before midnight. Often, as they went, they bent down at this spot or at that, and gazed at some object on the ground. Sometimes one of them would kneel, and twice they turned over a dead body which had fallen with the face downwards. For more than an hour they went on, pausing at times to speak to each other, and then resuming their examination--I know not whether to call it search; for certainly they seemed to find nothing if they did search, although they left hardly a square yard of the whole field unexplored.
It was nearly one o'clock on the following morning, when with slow steps they took their way over the rise; and the next moment the sound of horses' feet going at a quick pace broke the silence. That sound, in the absence of every other noise, might be heard for nearly ten minutes; and then all was stillness and solitude once more.
CHAPTER II.
Years had passed, long years, since the little scene took place which I have described in the preceding chapter. The heads were grey which were then proud of the glossy locks of youth. Middle life was approaching old age; and children had become men.
It was evening. The sun had gone down some two hours before; and the lights were lighted in a large comfortable well-furnished room. The ceilings were vaulted. The doorways and the two windows were richly decorated with innumerable mouldings; and the discoloured stone work around them, the clustered pillars at the sides, the mullions which divided the windows, and the broad pointed arches above, spoke that style of architecture known as the early English. The tables, the chairs, the cupboard at the side, were all of old oak, deep in colour and rich in ornament. The floor was covered with rushes, over which, in the centre, was spread a piece of tapestry; and the stone work of the walls between the pillars was hidden by tapestry likewise, on one side representing the siege of Troy, on the other the history of David and Goliath, and on a third the loves of Mars and Venus, which, though somewhat too luscious for our irritable imaginations, did not in those days at all shock the chaste inhabitants of a nunnery. The fourth side of the room was untapestried, for there spread the immense, wide, open chimney, with a pile of blazing logs on the hearth, and, in the open space above the arch, a very early painting of the Madonna and child, with gilt glories around the heads of both, and the meek eyes of the virgin fixed upon the somewhat profuse charms of the goddess of love on the other side.
This is description enough. The reader can easily conceive the parlour of an abbess towards the end of the fifteenth century, the heterogeneous contents of which would be somewhat tedious to detail.
Let no one, however, form a false idea of the poor abbess of Atherston, from the admission into her own private chamber of such very ungodly personages as Mars and Venus. She had found them there when she became abbess of the convent, and looked upon them and their loves as upon any other piece of needlework. Nay, more, had it ever occurred to her that there was anything improper in having them there, she would probably have removed them, though to get a more decent piece of tapestry might have cost her four or five marks. Not that she was at all stiff, rigid, and severe, for she was the merriest little abbess in the world; but she combined with great gaiety of heart an infinite deal of innocence and simplicity, which were