CHAPTER I.

My father stood for his true king, Till standing it could do nae mair; The day is lost, and so are we,-- Nae wonder mony a heart is sair.

_Jacobite Song._

The sound of the organ pealed through the chapel of the English Augustine convent at Bruges: a bright gleam of sunshine, streaming through the painted window to the south of the altar, shone upon the clouds of incense which arose in silvery folds from the censers; it shone upon the white-robed assistants, upon the priests, and upon the calm brow of the young nun who had that moment taken the irrevocable vows which separated her from the world--a world of which she knew but little; but which, from the circumstances in which her family was placed, offered not to her the temptations it usually holds out to youth, beauty, and rank such as hers.

The Lady Lucy Herbert was the fourth daughter of William Marquis of Powis, who, having devoted himself to the cause of James the Second, and accompanied his queen in her flight to France, received from the exiled monarch, as a reward for his uncompromising loyalty, the empty titles of Marquis of Montgomery and Duke of Powis.

James afterwards appointed him steward and chamberlain to his household--offices which, although of small advantage, may have been gratifying to his feelings, as proofs of the estimation in which he was held by the master to whom he had sacrificed everything.

Upon the Duke of Powis's death, which took place in 1696, his widow placed her two youngest daughters in the English Augustine convent at Bruges; while the three elder remained with her at the melancholy shadow of a court still kept up at St. Germain's.

It was no grief to the widowed mother when she found that the bent of the young Lucy's mind was sincerely and enthusiastically directed towards a religious life. Although the attainder had been reversed, and her son had been restored to the Marquisate of Powis, it was not till some years afterwards that she had ventured to return to England; even then she lived in retirement and privacy. The widow of so zealous an adherent to King James could not be regarded without suspicion; her means were scanty; her elder daughters had not then made the advantageous alliances which they afterwards formed; and joyfully did she hail the vocation which she hoped would secure, to one of her children at least, a peaceful and tranquil existence, secure from any farther vicissitudes of fortune.

But to one person the decision of the Lady Lucy Herbert was a matter of deep and unmixed sorrow. Her younger sister, the Lady Winifred, loved her with all the devotion of a fresh and unpractised heart. They had been early separated from the rest of their family. At the period of their father's death, when their childish hearts had for the first time been made acquainted with grief, they had been thrown entirely on each other for support and consolation.

Though many years had now elapsed, the moment was still fresh in their memories, when their mother, in her mourning habit, with pale cheek and streaming eyes, delivered them over to the care of the friend who was to convey them to Bruges. The sad countenances and black garments of their sisters, and of the few domestics who still remained of their former establishment, coupled with the vague, ill-defined feeling, half resembling fear, half shame, which children experience when they witness grief more intense than their young minds can comprehend, had left a deep impression upon both the youthful pensioners. When first they found themselves in the convent, with none but strangers around them, the timid Winifred clung instinctively to her sister; while Lady Lucy, forced, as it were, to become the prop and stay of one younger and weaker than herself, acquired at an early age the habit of seeking strength and support from above.

Loving and admiring her sister as did the Lady Winifred, it may excite wonder that she did not imbibe her strict religious notions; that she also should not have looked forward with joy to the idea of devoting herself to pious seclusion, and thus, at the same time, preserving the society of the being she most loved on earth. But it was not so. On the contrary, she felt her sister's vows as a barrier of separation between them.

Although she had no wish to wander beyond the walls of the little convent garden, though she seldom even went to the parlour grate, and never wished to avail herself of the occasional opportunities which occurred to the pensioners of mixing in society, still she felt an instinctive horror of irrevocable vows, to renounce--they knew not what. It was with a feeling amounting to despair that she witnessed the funeral rites, that she heard the service for the dead, that she saw the black veil dropped between her sister and the world, of whose pains and pleasures they could form no idea. Moreover, these vows for ever precluded the possibility of her seeing their native country in company with that beloved sister; and in the heart of the Lady Winifred there existed the strong instinctive affection for the land of her forefathers, which the coldest and the most hardened are not wholly without, but which in minds of a more ardent temperament amounts almost to a ruling passion. She had never beheld the British shores, she had never breathed British air, and yet she felt as if England was her home--her natural resting-place.

When first the young girls had been sent to Bruges, an old and faithful servant of the name of Evans had accompanied them. She was a native of Wales, and had been born in the neighbourhood of the ancient seat of the Herbert family, Poole Castle, in Montgomeryshire.

Loyalty to the family of Herbert had grown with her growth and strengthened with her strength, and was only balanced by the attachment to her country, which is generally more enthusiastic in the inhabitants of mountainous districts than of any other.

The young girl had listened for hours together to old Evans's glowing descriptions of the cloud-capped Snowdon, the green mountains, the smiling valleys, the rapid streams, the wreaths of mist,--all the varied beauties of her own Wales. From the windows of their convent they could descry nothing but the flat and uninteresting country which surrounds Bruges: but when the clouds formed themselves into a thousand fantastic shapes, old Evans would point out to them how one mass resembled such a mountain near their ancestral castle--how another was the very picture of Snowdon when he wore his white cap of clouds, as she familiarly expressed herself. She would describe to them the peculiar customs of Wales--the snowy caps, the small black hats, of the women,--would expatiate on the light form and airy step with which they trod the mountain paths--would picture to them how beautiful were the white sheep dotting the soft green of the steep and swelling hills, till the youthful Lady Winifred's heart would burn within her to flee to the home of her ancestors.

Nor, though Evans afterwards returned to her mistress, the duchess, when she established herself in England, did these impressions fade away.

The nunnery was all composed of English, most of whom had been driven into exile by the adherence of their families to that of Stuart; thence it naturally arose that all their ideas of prosperity, happiness, splendour and gaiety, were blended with the memory of England. These recollections also partook of the colouring thrown around them by the joyousness of youth; so that perhaps in no spot of earth had patriotism a firmer hold on the human heart than in the English Augustine convent at Bruges. There also did King James the Third, as he was ever styled, reign without a rival. To every inhabitant of the convent was his cause endeared by the sacrifice of friends, of property, of rank, or of situation; and all those whose age or disposition inclined them to hope, rather than to despond, looked forward with superstitious confidence to the time when "the king should enjoy his own again."

It was an additional grief to the Lady Winifred that her sister's vows would prevent her ever witnessing the glorious restoration which was to take place at some future and unknown period; and it was with a feeling of desolation keener than any emotion she had experienced since the grief of childhood at her father's death, that she retired for the first time to her solitary apartment as one of the pensioners; while her sister--her friend, her companion by day and by night--was now a professed nun, immured within her narrow cell, and henceforward subject to all the rules and regulations of the order.

The Lady Lucy's vocation had been so decided, and her only surviving parent's consent so unhesitating, that her noviciate had been shortened; and it seemed to Lady Winifred a sudden and violent separation.

During the next year, her thoughts, which could no longer be communicated as they arose in the hourly companionship of sisterhood, turned more frequently than ever towards her native land; her studies were all of the glorious deeds of England; she read none but English poets; she carolled none but English ballads; and she hailed with joy the intelligence that her eldest sister, the Lady Mary, was united to the eldest son of Carril Viscount Molineux, and that an alliance was in treaty between the Lady Frances and the Earl of Seaforth, for she hoped her mother might wish for her society when her sisters were honourably disposed of in marriage.

Since she had taken the vows, the Lady Lucy had unavoidably been not only less her companion, but moreover the constant practice of religious forms and exercises occupied her mind as well as her time. She was unable to sympathise with Lady Winifred: her lot was cast within her convent walls; and she would have considered it a vain and sinful indulgence to let her thoughts wander towards scenes or pleasures, which she had renounced. At the age of fifteen, therefore, the Lady Winifred's mind had been thrown back upon itself; and it gradually acquired a gentle reserve, a mild thoughtfulness, which suited well the cast of her features. The placid brow, and the full white eyelids,--the rounded cheek, which, except when some sudden emotion called up an evanescent bloom, was pale as the white rose consecrated to the Jacobite party,--were not calculated to strike at first sight; but any one who had once looked upon her, could not choose but look again. The dove-like eyes, the lips so full of expression, the whole form so aristocratic in its mould, so feminine in its movements, so delicate, so fragile,--all were rather like a poet's dream, than a being formed to encounter the chances and changes of this rough work-day world. Her slender throat gleamed white from the close, narrow mantilla of black silk edged with lace, which, according to the fashion of the time and country, was closely fastened down the front; her soft brown hair was smoothly parted off her brow, and tucked under the little white cap, enclosing the back of the head, which is still worn in the Low Countries, and which formed part of the dress of the young pensioners.

The character, the countenance, the features, and the habit, all seemed in unison with each other.