I. WILLIAMS.
To lack beauty was a much more serious misfortune in the Middle Ages
than at present. Of course it was probable that there might be a
contract of marriage made entirely irrespective of attractiveness,
long before the development of either of the principal parties
concerned; but even then the rude, open-spoken husband would consider
himself absolved from any attention to an ill-favoured wife, and the
free tongues of her surroundings would not be slack to make her aware
of her defects. The cloister was the refuge of the unmarried woman,
if of gentle birth as a nun, if of a lower grade as a lay-sister; but
the fifteenth century was an age neither of religion nor of chivalry.
Dowers were more thought of than devotion in convents as elsewhere.
Whitby being one of the oldest and grandest foundations was sure to
be inaccessible to a high-born but unportioned girl, and Grisell in
her sense of loneliness saw nothing before her but to become an
anchoress, that is to say, a female hermit, such as generally lived
in strict seclusion under shelter of the Church.
"There at least," thought poor Grisell, "there would be none to sting
me to the heart with those jeering eyes of theirs. And I might feel
in time that God and His Saints loved me, and not long for my father
and mother, and oh! my poor little brother--yes, and Leonard
Copeland, and Sister Avice, and the rest. But would Sister Avice
call this devotion? Nay, would she not say that these cruel eyes and
words are a cross upon me, and I must bear them and love in spite--at
least till I be old enough to choose for myself?"
She was summoned to supper, and this increased the sense of
dreariness, for Bernard screamed that the grisly one should not come
near him, or he would not eat, and she had to take her meal of dried
fish and barley bread in the wide chimney corner, where there always
was a fire at every season of the year.
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