Mistress Jean was making the elder-flower wine--
'And what brings the Laird at sic a like time?'
LADY NAIRN, THE LAIRD OF COCKPEN
Summer was nearly ended, and Lucy Thistlewood was presiding in the
great kitchen of the Manor-house, standing under the latticed
window near the large oak-table, a white apron over her dress,
presiding over the collecting of elder-berries for the brew of
household-wine for the winter. The maids stood round her with an
array of beechen bowls or red and yellow crocks, while barefooted,
bareheaded children came thronging in with rush or wicker baskets
of the crimson fruit, which the maids poured in sanguine cascades
into their earthenware; and Lucy requited with substantial slices
of bread and cheese, and stout homely garment mostly of her own
sewing.
Lucy was altogether an inmate of her father's house. She had not
even been at Hurst Walwyn for many months; for her step-mother's
reiterated hopes that Berenger would make her his consolation for
all he had suffered from his French spouse rendered it impossible
to her to meet him with sisterly unconsciousness; and she therefore
kept out of the way, and made herself so useful at home, that Dame
Annora only wondered how it had been possible to spare her so long,
and always wound up her praises by saying, that Berenger would
learn in time how lucky he had been to lose the French puppet, and
win the good English housewife.
If only tidings would have come that the puppet was safe married.
That was the crisis which all the family desired yet feared for
Berenger, since nothing else they saw would so detach his thoughts
from the past as the leave him free to begin life again. The
relapse brought on by the cruel reply to Osbert's message had been
very formidable: he was long insensible or delirious and then came
a state of annihilated thought, then of frightfully sensitive
organs, when light, sound, movement, or scent were alike agony; and
when he slowly revived, it was with such sunken spirits, that his
silence was as much from depression as from difficulty of speech.
His brain was weak, his limbs feeble, the wound in his mouth never
painless; and all this necessarily added to his listless
indifference and weariness, as though all youthful hope and
pleasure were extinct in him. He had ceased to refer to the past.
Perhaps he had thought it over, and seen that the deferred escape,
the request for the pearls, the tryst at the palace, and detention
from the king's chamber, made an uglier case against Eustacie than
he could endure to own even to himself. If his heart trusted, his
mind could not argue out her defence, and his tongue would not
serve him for discussion with his grandfather, the only person who
could act for him.