MORA DE NORELLE

Symon, Bishop of Worcester, chid himself for restlessness.  Surely for once his mind had lost control of his limbs.

No sooner did he decide to walk the smooth lawns around the Castle, than he found himself mounting to the battlements; and now, though he had installed himself for greatly needed repose in a deep seat in the hall chamber, yet here he was, pacing the floor, or moving from one window to another.

By dint of hard riding he had reached Warwick while the sun, though already dipped beneath the horizon, still flecked the sky with rosy clouds, and spread a golden mantle over the west.

The lord of the Castle was away, in attendance on the King; but all was in readiness for the arrival of the Bishop, and great preparations had been made for the reception of Sir Hugh d’Argent.  His people, having left Worcester early that morning, were about in the courtyard, as the Bishop rode in.

As he passed through the doorway, an elderly woman, buxom, comely, and of motherly aspect, whom he easily divined to be the tire-woman of whom the Knight had spoken, came forward to meet him.

“Good my lord,” she said, her eagerness allowing of scant ceremony, “comes Sir Hugh d’Argent hither this night?”

“Aye,” replied the Bishop, looking with kindly eyes upon Mora’s old nurse.  “Within two hours, he should be here.”

“Comes he alone, my lord?” asked Mistress Deborah.

“Nay,” replied the Bishop, “the Countess of Norelle, a very noble lady to whom the Knight is betrothed, rides hither with him.”

“The saints be praised!” exclaimed the old woman, and turned away to hide her tears.

Whilst his body-servant prepared a bath and laid out his robes, the Bishop mounted to the ramparts and watched the gold fade in the west.  He glanced at the river below, threading its way through the pasture land; at the billowy masses of trees; at the gay parterre, bright with summer flowers.  Then he looked long in the direction of the city from which he had come.

During his strenuous ride, the slow tramp of the men-at-arms, had sounded continually in his ears; the outline of that helpless figure, lying at full length upon the stretcher, had been ever before his eyes.

He could not picture the arrival at the hostel, the removal of the covering, the uprising of the Prioress to face life anew, enfolded in the arms of her lover.

As in a weary dream, in which the mind can make no headway, but returns again and yet again to the point of distress, so, during the entire ride, the Bishop had followed that stretcher through the streets of Worcester city, until it seemed to him as if, before the pall was lifted, the long-limbed, graceful form beneath it would have stiffened in death.

“A corpse for a bride!  A corpse for a bride!” the hoofs of the black mare Shulamite had seemed to beat out upon the road.  “Alas, poor Knight!  A corpse for a bride!”