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Updated: October 29, 2025
"Noble lady, whoever thou art, in thine old age, and thine hour of care, may thy child, like this poor girl, forsake all gayer comrades for a parent's side!" The answer touched the Lady of Bonville, and involuntarily she extended her hand to Sibyll. With a swelling heart, Sibyll, as proud as herself, bent silently over that rival's hand.
Was it wonderful that, while that head drooped upon his breast, while in that enchanted change which Love the softener makes in lips long scornful, eyes long proud and cold, he felt that Katherine Nevile tender, gentle, frank without boldness, lofty without arrogance had replaced the austere dame of Bonville, whom he half hated while he wooed, oh, was it wonderful that the soul of Hastings fled back to the old time, forgot the intervening vows and more chill affections, and repeated only with passionate lips, "Katherine, loved still, loved ever, mine, mine, at last!"
And bedded deep in that exquisite and charming nature lay the dangerous and fatal weakness which has cursed so many victims, broken so many hearts, the vanity of the sex. We may now readily conceive how little predisposed was Sibyll to the blunt advances and displeasing warnings of the Lady Bonville, and the more so from the time in which they chanced.
Her bosom swelled beneath the brocaded gorget, and when the door closed on Hastings, she pressed her hands convulsively together, and her dark eyes were raised upward. "My child, thou art entangling thy skein," said the lady of Bonville, as she passed one of the maidens, towards the casement, which she opened, "the air to-day weighs heavily!"
Till the issue was clear, he had been kept a prisoner. When it was beyond doubt, he was hanged. Sybill was found lying dead at her father's feet. Her heart was already broken, for the husband of Margaret de Bonville having died, Lord Hastings had been recalled to the side of his old love, his thought of marriage with Sybill being abandoned for ever.
He caught the hand of the dame of Bonville, lifted it to his lips, and saying, "May fortune one day permit me to face as the earl's son the earl's foes," made his graceful reverence, glided from the garden, gained his barge, and was rowed to the huge pile of Baynard's Castle, lately reconstructed, but in a gloomy and barbaric taste, and in which, at that time, he principally resided with his mother, the once peerless Rose of Raby.
Stung by the coldness even more than by the disdain of the Lady Bonville, and enraged to find that no taunt of his own, however galling, could ruffle a dignity which was an insult both to memory and to self-love, Hastings had exerted more than usual, both at the banquet and in the revel, those general powers of pleasing, which, even in an age when personal qualifications ranked so high, had yet made him no less renowned for successes in gallantry than the beautiful and youthful king.
If the war-trump blew, his very vassals would laugh at a Bonville's banner, and beneath the flag of poor William Hastings would gladly march the best chivalry of the land. And this it is, I say, that galls her. For evermore she is driven to compare the state she holds as the dame of the accepted Bonville with that she lost as the wife of the disdained Hastings."
"With submission to the Lord Hastings, sire, whom we know that love sometimes blinds, and whose allegiance to the earl's fair sister, the Lady of Bonville, perchance somewhat moves him to forget the day when Lord Warwick " "Cease, my lord," said Hastings, white with suppressed anger; "these references beseem not the councils of grave men."
I was also introduced to the families of James Harford, John Lury, Matthew Wright, Philip, Debell Tucket, Thomas Bonville, and John Waring; all of whom were of the same religious society. I gained an introduction, also, soon afterwards, to George Fisher.
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