The Last of the Barons — Complete by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton (books to read for self improvement TXT) 📕

to listen. The song was resumed— “Recall the single sunny time, In childhood’s April weather, When he and thou, the boy and girl, Roved hand in band together.” “When round thy young companion knelt The princes of the isle; And priest and people prayed their God, On England’s heir to smile.”

The earl uttered a half-stifled exclamation, but the minstrel heard not the interruption, and continued,—

“Methinks the sun hath never smiled Upon the exiled man, Like that bright morning when the boy Told all his soul to Anne.” “No; while his birthright but a name, A grandsire’s hero—sword, He would not woo the lofty maid To love the banished lord.” “But when, with clarion, fife, and drum, He claims and wins his own; When o’er the deluge drifts his ark, To rest upon a throne.” “Then, wilt thou deign to hear the hope That blessed the exiled man, When pining for his father’s crown To deck the brows of Anne?”

The song ceased, and there was silence within the chamber, broken but by Anne’s low yet passionate weeping. The earl gently strove to disengage her arms from his neck; but she, mistaking his intention, sank on her knees, and covering her face with her hands, exclaimed,—

“Pardon! pardon! pardon him, if not me!”

“What have I to pardon? What hast thou concealed from me? Can I think that thou hast met, in secret, one who—”

“In secret! Never, never, Father! This is the third time only that I have heard his voice since we have been at Amboise, save when—save when—”

“Go on.”

“Save when King Louis presented him to me in the revel under the name of the Count de F——, and he asked me if I could forgive his mother for Lord Clifford’s crime.”

“It is, then, as the rhyme proclaimed; and it is Edward of Lancaster who loves and woos the daughter of Lord Warwick!”

Something in her father’s voice made Anne remove her hands from her face, and look up to him with a thrill of timid joy. Upon his brow, indeed, frowned no anger, upon his lip smiled no scorn. At that moment all his haughty grief at the curse of circumstance which drove him to his hereditary foe had vanished. Though Montagu had obtained from Oxford some glimpse of the desire which the more sagacious and temperate Lancastrians already entertained for that alliance, and though Louis had already hinted its expediency to the earl, yet, till now, Warwick himself had naturally conceived that the prince shared the enmity of his mother, and that such a union, however politic, was impossible; but now indeed there burst upon him the full triumph of revenge and pride. Edward of York dared to woo Anne to dishonour, Edward of Lancaster dared not even woo her as his wife till his crown was won! To place upon the throne the very daughter the ungrateful monarch had insulted; to make her he would have humbled not only the instrument of his fall, but the successor of his purple; to unite in one glorious strife the wrongs of the man and the pride of the father,—these were the thoughts that sparkled in the eye of the king-maker, and flushed with a fierce rapture the dark cheek, already hollowed by passion and care. He raised his daughter from the floor, and placed her in her mother’s arms, but still spoke not.

“This, then, was thy secret, Anne,” whispered the countess; “and I half foreguessed it, when, last night, I knelt beside thy couch to pray, and overheard thee murmur in thy dreams.”

“Sweet mother, thou forgivest me; but my father—ah, he speaks not. One word! Father, Father, not even his love could console me if I angered thee!”

The earl, who had remained rooted to the spot, his eyes shining thoughtfully under his dark brows, and his hand slightly raised, as if piercing into the future, and mapping out its airy realm, turned quickly,—

“I go to the heir of Lancaster; if this boy be bold and true, worthy of England and of thee, we will change the sad ditty of that scrannel lute into such a storm of trumpets as beseems the triumph of a conqueror and the marriage of a prince!”