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.”
“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.
I beheld the pageants splendid, that adorned those days of old; Stately dames, like queens attended, knights who bore the Fleece of Gold.
IN another week the festivities were over, and she waited anxiously, dreading each day more and more that her gift had been forgotten or misunderstood, or that her old companion disdained or refused to take notice of her; then trying to console herself by remembering the manifold engagements and distractions of the bride.
Happily, Grisell thought, Ridley was absent when Leonard Copeland came one evening to supper. He was lodged among the guards of the Duke in the palace, and had much less time at his disposal than formerly, for Duke Charles insisted on the most strict order and discipline among all his attendants. Moreover, there were tokens of enmity on the part of the French on the border of the Somme, and Leonard expected to be despatched to the camp which was being formed there. He was out of spirits. The sight and speech of so many of his countrymen had increased the longing for home.