A woful day it
was to all who loved the kindly Duke of York, or this same poor
house! As luck would have it, I fell in with Jock of Redesdale and a
few more honest fellows, who had 'scaped. We found none but friends
when we were well past the river. They succoured us at the first
abbey we came to. The rest have sped to their homes, and here am I."
Such was the tenor of Featherstone's doleful history of that blood-
thirsty Lancastrian victory. All had hung in dire suspense on his
words, and not till they were ended did Grisell become conscious that
her mother was sitting like a stone, with fixed, glassy eyes and
dropped lip, in the high-backed chair, quite senseless, and breathing
strangely.
They took her up and carried her upstairs, as one who had received
her death stroke as surely as had her husband and son on the slopes
between Sendal and Wakefield.
Grisell and Thora did their utmost, but without reviving her, and
they watched by her, hardly conscious of anything else, as they tried
their simple, ineffective remedies one after another, with no thought
or possibility of sending for further help, since the roads would be
impassable in the long January night, and besides, the Lancastrians
might make them doubly perilous. Moreover, this dumb paralysis was
accepted as past cure, and needing not the doctor but the priest.
Before the first streak of dawn on that tardy, northern morning,
Ridley's ponderous step came up the stair, into the feeble light of
the rush candle which the watchers tried to shelter from the
draughts.
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