English fiction -- 19th century; Marriage -- Fiction
Meanwhile Rebecca Wythan was passing to death. Not cheerlessly, more and
more faintly, her thread of life ran to pause, resembling a rill of the
drought; and the thinner-it grew, the shrewder were her murmurs for
Carinthia's ears in commending 'the most real of husbands of an unreal
wife' to her friendly care of him when he would no longer see the shadow
he had wedded. She had the privilege of a soul beyond our minor rules
and restrainings to speak her wishes to the true wife of a mock husband-
no husband; less a husband than this shadow of a woman a wife, she said;
and spoke them without adjuring the bowed head beside her to record a
promise or seem to show the far willingness, but merely that the wishes
should be heard on earth in her last breath, for a good man's remaining
one chance of happiness. On the theme touching her husband Owain, it was
verily to hear a soul speak, and have knowledge of the broader range, the
rich interflowings of the tuned discords, a spirit past the flesh can
find. Her mind was at the same time alive to our worldly conventions
when other people came under its light; she sketched them and their views
in her brief words between the gasps, with perspicuous, humorous
bluntness, as vividly as her twitched eyebrows indicated the laugh.
Gower Woodseer she read startlingly, if correctly.
Carinthia could not leave her. Attendance upon this dying woman was a
drinking at the springs of life.
Rebecca Wythan under earth, the earl was briefly informed of Lady
Fleetwood's consent to quit Wales, obedient to a summons two months old,
--and that she would be properly escorted; for the which her lord had
made provision. Consequently the tyrant swallowed his wrath, little
conceiving the monstrous blow she was about to strike.
In peril of fresh floods from our Dame, who should be satisfied with the
inspiring of these pages, it is owned that her story of 'the four and
twenty squires of Glamorgan and Caermarthen in their brass-buttoned green
coats and buckskins, mounted and armed, an escort of the Countess of
Fleetwood across the swollen Severn, along midwinter roads, up to the
Kentish gates of Esslemont,' has a foundation, though the story is not
the more credible for her flourish of documentary old ballad-sheets,
printed when London's wags had ears on cock to any whisper of the doings.
of their favourite Whitechapel Countess; and indeed hardly depended on
whispers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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