Chapter 22

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