CHAPTER XXII

My Lady Dunstanwolde is Widowed

There was a lady came back to town with the Earl and Countess, on their return from Dunstan’s Wolde, to which place they had gone after his lordship’s illness at Camylott.  This lady was one of the two elder sisters of her ladyship of Dunstanwolde, and ’twas said was her favourite and treated with great tenderness by her.  She was but a thin, humble little woman—­Mistress Anne Wildairs—­and singularly plain and timid to be the sister and chosen companion of one so brilliant and full of fire.  She was a pale creature with dull-hued heavy hair and soft dull eyes, which followed her ladyship adoringly whensoever it chanced they were in a room together.

“How can two beings so unlike be of the same blood?” people said; “and what finds my lady in her that she does not lose patience at her plainness and poor spirit?”

What she discovered in her, none knew as she herself did; but my Lord Dunstanwolde understood the tie between them, and so his Grace of Osmonde did, since an occasion when he had had speech with her ladyship upon the subject.

“I love her,” she said, with one of her strange, almost passionate, looks. “’Tis thought I can love neither man nor woman.  But that I can do, and without change; but I must love a thing not slight nor common.  Anne was the first creature to teach me what love meant.  Before, I had never seen it.  She was afraid of me and often thought I mocked at her, but I was learning from her pureness—­from her pureness,” she added, saying the words the second time in a lower voice and almost as if to herself.  And then the splendid sweet of her smile shone forth.  “She is so white—­good Anne,” she said.  “She is a saint and does not know I pray to her to intercede for me, and that I live my life hoping that some day I may make it as fair as hers.  She does not know, and I dare not tell her, for she would be made afraid.”

To Mistress Anne she seemed in truth a goddess.  Until taken under her protection, the poor woman had lived a lonely life, starved of all pleasures and affections.  At first—­’twas in the days when she had been but Clo Wildairs—­her ladyship had begun to befriend her through a mere fanciful caprice, being half-amused, half-touched, to find her, by sheer chance, one day, stolen into her chambers to gaze in delighted terror at some ball finery spread upon a bed.  To Mistress Clorinda the frightened creature had seemed a strange thing in her shy fearfulness, and she had for an hour amused herself and then suddenly been vaguely moved, and from that time had been friends with her.

“Perhaps I had no heart then, or ’twas not awake,” said her ladyship.  “I was but a fierce, selfish thing, like a young she-wolf.  Is a young she-wolf honest?” with a half-laugh.  “I was that, and feared nothing.  I ate and drank and sang and hunted poor beasts for my pleasure, and was as wild as one of them myself.  When I look back!”—­she flung up a white hand in a strange gesture—­“When I look back!”