Page:The fortunes of Perkin Warbeck.djvu/197

Rh untired self-devotion are hers, when she sacrifices herself for him she loves.

The cart moved on, Richard saw not whither; they almost stuck in some flat, low fields, and at last arrived at a solitary, miserable hut. Monina awoke, when they stopped, and the gipsy told them that this wretched dwelling was to be their asylum: the apartment they entered was poor beyond meanness—a bed of straw piled in one corner, a rude bench, formed the furniture; the walls were ragged and weather-stained, and the outer crumbling rafters were visible through the broken ceiling: there appeared to be neither food nor fire. The inhabitant of the hovel alone was there,—a white-looking, emaciated female; yet with a look of such sweetness and patience, that she seemed the very enshrinement of Christian resignation, the type of sorrow and suffering, married to meek obedience to the supreme will. She had roused herself from slumber at the voice of the gipsy, and gathered her scant garments around her—scant and poor they were; her coarse woollen dress was tied by a girdle of rope round her slender waist; her head was wrapped in a kerchief; her feet were bare.

"Jane," said the old woman, "you will not refuse the shelter of your roof to these poor wanderers?"

Such an address seemed strange, for the rich attire of her guests ill-accorded with her poverty-stricken home; but she turned with a smile—she spoke—and then a throb of agony seemed to convulse her frame—her head swam; Richard rushed forward to prevent her falling, but she shrunk from him, and leaned on the old woman, who said with a look of triumph, "I knew how it would be; it is vain to hide a bright light behind a veil of gauze! Yes, Jane, this is his son; and you may save him from danger and death."

Jane Shore, the once lovely mistress of King Edward, now the miserable outcast of the world's scorn, heard these words, as if they had been spoken to her in a dream. After the death of her royal lover, she had obeyed the impulse that made her cling to the soft luxuries of life, and yielded to solicitations which tended to guard her from the sharp visitation of the world. She had become the mistress of the marquess of Dorset; but sorrow and penury were destined to pursue her in their worst shape—and wherefore? She had been good and humane; and in spite of her error, even the sternest moralist might have pitied her. But she was all woman,—fearful of repulse, dreading insult; more willing to lie down and die, than, fallen and miserable, to solicit uncertain relief: squalid poverty, famine, and lonely suffering, were hers; yet in all she preserved an