The fortress of warrior-lords, the prison of a queen, the Royalist
refuge--fallen now into such placid dreaminess of age. Into the
dark chamber above, desolate, legend-haunted, perchance in some
moment of the night there fell through the narrow window-niche a
pale moonbeam, touching the floor, the walls of stone; such light in
gloom as may have touched the face of Mary herself, wakeful with her
recollections and her fears. Musing it in her fancy, Irene thought
of love and death.
Had it come to her at length, that love which was so strange and
distant when, in ignorance, she believed it her companion? Verses in
her mind, verses that would never be forgotten, however lightly she
held them, sang and rang to a new melody. They were not poetry--
said he who wrote them. Yet they were truth, sweetly and nobly
uttered. The false, the trivial, does not so cling to memory year
after year.
They had helped her to know him, these rhyming lines, or so she
fancied. They shaped in her mind, slowly, insensibly, an image of
the man, throughout the lapse of time when she neither saw him nor
heard of him. Whether a true image how should she assure herself?
She only knew that no feature of it seemed alien when compared with
the impression of those two last days. Yet the picture was an ideal;
the very man she could honour, love; he and no other. Did she
perilously deceive herself in thinking that this ideal and the man
who spoke with her, were one?
It had grown without her knowledge, apart from her will, this
conception of Piers Otway.
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