Anticipation of the possibility of it hewed division between the young man’s pride of being and his warmer feelings.  Had he been free of the dread of subjection, he would have sunk to kiss the feet of the statuesque young woman, arms in air, firm-fronted over the hideous death that tore at her skirts.

CHAPTER XXXIV

A survey of the ride of the Welsh cavaliers escorting the countess of Fleetwood to Kentish Esslemont

A formal notification from the earl, addressed to the Countess of Fleetwood in the third person, that Esslemont stood ready to receive her, autocratically concealed her lord’s impatience to have her there; and by the careful precision with which the stages of her journey were marked, as places where the servants despatched to convey their lady would find preparations for her comfort, again alarmed the disordered mother’s mind on behalf of the child she deemed an object of the father’s hatred, second to his hatred of the mother.  But the mother could defend herself, the child was prey the child of a detested wife was heir to his title and estates.  His look at the child, his hasty one look down at her innocent, was conjured before her as resembling a kick at a stone in his path.  His indifference to the child’s Christian names pointed darkly over its future.

The distempered wilfulness of a bruised young woman directed her thoughts.  She spoke them in the tone of reason to her invalid friend Rebecca Wythan, who saw with her, felt with her, yearned to retain her till breath was gone.  Owain Wythan had his doubts of the tyrant guilty of maltreating this woman of women.  ‘But when you do leave Wales,’ he said, ‘you shall be guarded up to your haven.’

Carinthia was not awake to his meaning then.  She sent a short letter of reply, imitating the style of her lord; very baldly stating, that she was unable to leave Wales because of her friend’s illness and her part as nurse.  Regrets were unmentioned.

Meanwhile Rebecca Wythan was passing to death.  Not cheerlessly, more and more faintly, her thread of life ran to pause, resembling a rill of the drought; and the thinner-it grew, the shrewder were her murmurs for Carinthia’s ears in commending ’the most real of husbands of an unreal wife’ to her friendly care of him when he would no longer see the shadow he had wedded.  She had the privilege of a soul beyond our minor rules and restrainings to speak her wishes to the true wife of a mock husband-no husband; less a husband than this shadow of a woman a wife, she said; and spoke them without adjuring the bowed head beside her to record a promise or seem to show the far willingness, but merely that the wishes should be heard on earth in her last breath, for a good man’s remaining one chance of happiness.  On the theme touching her husband Owain, it was verily