Grisly Grisell by Yonge, Charlotte Mary, 1823-1901

"More by token," said he, "that the house of this Master Caxton as you call him seems to me no canny haunt. Tell me what you will of making manifold good books or bad, I'll never believe but that Dr. Faustus and the Devil hatched the notion between them for the bewilderment of men's brains and the slackening of their hands."

Thus Ridley made little more attempt to persuade his young lady to come forth to the spectacles of the next fortnight to which he rushed, through crowds and jostling, to behold, with the ardour of an old warrior, the various tilts and tourneys, though he grumbled that they were nothing but child's play and vain show, no earnest in them fit for a man.

Clemence, however, was all eyes, and revelled in the sight of the wonders, the view of the Tree of Gold, and the champion thereof in the lists of the Hotel de Ville, and again, some days later, of the banquet, when the table decorations were mosaic gardens with silver trees, laden with enamelled fruit, and where, as an interlude, a whale sixty feet long made its entrance and emitted from its jaws a troop of Moorish youths and maidens, who danced a saraband to the sound of tambourines and cymbals! Such scenes were bliss to the deaf housewife, and would enliven the silent world of her memory all the rest of her life.

The Duchess Isabel had retired to the Grey Sisters, such scenes being inappropriate to her mourning, and besides her apartments being needed for the influx of guests. There, in early morning, before the revels began, Grisell ventured to ask for an audience, and was permitted to follow the Duchess when she returned from mass to her own apartments.

"Ah! my lace weaver. Have you had your share in the revels and pageantries?"

"I saw the procession, so please your Grace."

"And your old playmate in her glory?"

"Yea, madame. It almost forestalled the glories of Heaven!"

"Ah! child, may the aping of such glory beforehand not unfit us for the veritable everlasting glories, when all these things shall be no more."

The Duchess clasped her hands, almost as a foreboding of the day when her son's corpse should lie, forsaken, gashed, and stripped, beside the marsh.

But she turned to Grisell asking if she had come with any petition.

"Only, madame, that it would please your Highness to put into the hands of the new Duchess herself, this offering, without naming me."

She produced her exquisite fabric, which was tied with ribbons of blue and silver in an outer case, worked with the White Rose.

The Dowager-Duchess exclaimed, "Nay, but this is more beauteous than all you have wrought before. Ah! here is your own device! I see there is purpose in these patterns of your web. And am I not to name you?"

"I pray your Highness to be silent, unless the Duchess should divine the worker. Nay, it is scarce to be thought that she will."

"Yet you have put the flower that my English mother called 'Forget- me-not.' Ah, maiden, has it a purpose?"

"Madame, madame, ask me no questions. Only remember in your prayers to ask that I may do the right," said Grisell, with clasped hands and weeping eyes.

CHAPTER XXIX--DUCHESS MARGARET