"Lord love thee, my dear aunt," answered the young lady; "I have never seen him since I was in swaddling clothes."
"And he was in a sorry-coloured pinked doublet, with a gay cloak on his shoulders, and a little bonnet on his head no bigger than the palm of my hand," cried the other young lady. "He could not be ten years old, and looked like some great man's little page. I remember it quite well, for I had seen seven years; and I thought it a great shame that my cousin Iola should have a husband given to her at five, and I none at seven."
"Given to her!" said the abbess, laughing.
"Well," rejoined the young lady, "I looked upon it as a sort of doll--a poppet."
"Not far wrong either, my dear," answered the abbess; "only you must take care how you knock its nose against the floor, or you may find out where the difference lies."
"Good lack, I have had dolls enough," answered the younger lady, "and could well spare this other one. But what must be must be; so there is no use to think of it.--Don't you believe, lady mother," she continued after a pause, interrupted by a sigh, "that it would be better if they let people choose husbands and wives for themselves?"
"Good gracious!" cried the abbess, "what is the child thinking of? Pretty choosing there would be, I dare say. Why lords' daughters would be taking rosy-cheeked franklins' sons; and barons' heirs would be marrying milkmaids."
"I don't believe it," said the young lady. "Each would choose, I think, as they had been brought up; and there would be more chance of their loving when they did wed."
"Nonsense, nonsense, Iola," cried her aunt. "What do you know about love--or I either for that matter? Love that comes after marriage is most likely to last, for, I suppose, like all other sorts of plants, it only lives a certain time and then dies away; so that if it begins soon, it ends soon."
"I should like my love to be like one of the trees of the park," said the young lady, looking down thoughtfully, "growing stronger and stronger, as it gets older, and outliving myself."
"You must seek for it in fairyland then, my dear," said the abbess. "You will not find it in this sinful world."
Just as she spoke, the great bell of the abbey, which hung not far from the window of the abbess's parlour, rang deep and loud; and the sound, unusual at that hour of the night, made the good old lady start.
"Virgin mother!" she exclaimed--it was the only little interjection she allowed herself. "Who can that be coming two hours after curfew?" and running to the door, with more activity than her plumpness seemed to promise, she exclaimed, "Sister Magdalen, sister Magdalen, do not let them open the gate; let them speak through the barred wicket."
"It is only Boyd, the woodman, lady," replied a nun, who was at the end of a short passage looking out into the court.
"What can he want at this hour?" said the abbess. "Could he not come before sundown? Well, take him into the parlour by the little door. I will come to him in a minute;" and returning into her own room again, the good lady composed herself after her agitation, by a moment's rest in her great chair; and, after expressing her surprise more than once, that the woodman should visit the abbey so late, she bade her two nieces follow her, and passed through a door, different to that by which she had previously gone out, and walked with stately steps along a short corridor leading to the public parlour of the abbey.
This was a large and handsome room, lined entirely with beautiful carved oak, and divided into two, lengthwise, by a screen of open iron-work painted blue and red, and richly gilt. Visitors on the one side could see, converse, and even shake hands with those on the other; but, like the gulf between Abraham and Dives, the iron bars shut out all farther intercourse. A sconce was lighted on the side of the nunnery; and when Iola and her cousin Constance followed their aunt into the room, they beheld, on the other side of the grate, the form of a tall powerful man, somewhat advanced in life, standing with his arms crossed upon his broad chest, and looking, to say sooth, somewhat gloomy. He might indeed, be a little surprised at being forced to hold communication with the lady abbess through the grate of the general parlour; for the good lady was by no means so strict in her notions of conventual decorum, as to exclude him, or any other of the servants and officers of the abbey, from her presence in the court-yard or in her own private sitting-room; and perhaps the woodman might think it did not much matter whether his visit was made by night or by day.
"Well, John Boyd," said the abbess, "in fortune's name, what brings you so late at night? Mary mother, I thought it was some of the roving bands come to try and plunder the abbey again, as they did last Martinmas twelvemonth; and we cannot expect such a blessed chance every time, as that good Sir Martin Rideout should be at hand to help our poor socmen. Had it not been for him, I wot, Peter our bailiff would have made but a poor hand of defending us."
"And a poor hand he did make," replied the woodman, in a cynical tone; "for he was nowhere to be found; and I had to pull him out of the buttery, to head the tenants. But I hear no more of rovers, lady, unless it be the men at Coleshill, and King Richard's posts, planted all along the highways, with twenty miles between each two, to look out for Harry of Richmond."
"Posts!" said the abbess; "posts planted on the highway! What mean you by posts?"
"Why men on horseback, lady mother," answered the woodman; "with sharp spurs and strong steeds to bear to Dickon, our king that is, news of Harry, our king that may be, if he chance to land any where upon the coast."
"Now Heaven assoil us!" cried the abbess; "what more war, more war? Will men never be content without deforming God's image in their fellow creatures, and burning and destroying even the fairest works of their own hands?"
"I fear not," answered the woodman, twisting round the broad axe that was hung in his leathern belt. "Great children and small are fond of bonfires; and nature and the devil between them made man a beast of prey. As to what brought me hither, madam, it, was to tell you that the wooden bridge in the forest wants repairing sadly. It would hardly bear up your mule, lady, with nothing but yourself and your hawk upon its back; much less a war-horse with a rider armed at point. As for my coming so late, I have been as far as Tamworth this morning, to sell the bavins, and didn't get back till after dark. So marking the bridge by the way, and thinking it would be better to begin on it early in the morning, I made bold to come up at night for fear anyone, riding along to church or market or otherwise, should find their way into the river, and say the abbess ought to mend her ways;" and he laughed at his own joke.
While he had been speaking, both the young ladies, though he was no stranger to them, had been gazing at him with considerable attention. He was, as I have said before, a tall and still very powerful man, although he seemed to have passed the age of fifty years. His shoulders were very broad, his arms long and muscular; but his body was small in proportion to the limbs, and the head in proportion to the height of the whole figure. His forehead was exceedingly broad and high, however; the crown of his head quite bald, with large masses of curling hair falling round his temples and on his neck. What his complexion originally had been, could not be discovered; for the whiteness of his hair and eye-brows and the sun-burnt weather-beaten hue of his skin afforded no indication. His teeth, however, were still good, his eyes large and bright, and the features fine, although the wide forehead was seamed with deep furrows, giving, apart from the rest of his appearance, a look of much greater age than that at which he had really arrived.
His dress was the ordinary woodman's garb of the time, which is well known to almost every one. There was the thick stiff leathern coat, which no broken branch or rugged thorn could pierce, the breeches of untanned hide, and the hoots of strong black leather, reaching above the knee. Round his waist, over his coat, he wore a broad belt, fastened by a brass buckle in front, and in it were stuck the implements of his craft, namely, a broad axe, which required no ordinary power of limb to wield, with the head uppermost, thrust under his left arm like a sword; a large billhook, having a broad stout piece of iron at the back, which might serve the purposes of a hammer; and an ordinary woodman's knife, the blade of which was about eighteen inches in length. His head was on ordinary occasions covered with a round cloth cap;