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She lived there twenty years: she died there, fourteen years ago. "So the tide turned. The friends of Dame Isabelle died on the scaffold, four years later, even as he had died; and we heard it at Sempringham, and knew that God and the saints and angels had taken up our cause at last. Child, God's mill grindeth slowly, but it grindeth very small. Ah, well! she was our mother.
She had been told by her mother that the Grey Lady had passed a life of much suffering before she came to Sempringham; for silent as she was concerning the details of that life, Isabel had never tried to conceal the fact that it had been one of suffering.
Earl Richard, his son, was beheaded in London, in the spring of 1397; Earl Thomas, his grandson, fell at Agincourt, October 13, 1415. "No has visto un nino, que viene A dar un doblon que tiene, Porque le den una flor?" Lope de Vega. Philippa determined to return home by way of Sempringham.
We only heard at Sempringham, that on that night shrieks of agony rang through the vale of the Severn, and men woke throughout the valley, and whispered a requiem for the hapless soul which was departing in such horrible torment. And no sooner did Edward of Windsor gain his full power, than he shut up the wicked Jezebel his mother in the Castle of Rising.
On the morning that this news reached Kilquyt, an old man in the garb of the Dominican Order was slowly mounting the ascent which led from the Vale of Sempringham. The valley was just waking into spring life.
All classes, clerical and feudal, burgess and peasant, were compelled to contribute according to their revenues, the rule being one-fourth of the income for the year, and the same proportion of the movable property; all privileges and immunities of clergy and churches as well as of laymen were suspended; the Cistercians even who had a standing immunity from all exactions gave up their whole year's shearing of wool, and so did the order of Sempringham; the plate and, jewels of the churches and monasteries, held to be properly used for the redemption of captives, were surrendered or redeemed in money under a pledge of their restoration by the king.
A long conversation followed the departure of the Abbess. Joan took up the history where she had parted from Isabel, and told what had been her own lot since then; and Isabel in her turn recounted her story neither a long nor an eventful one; for it told only how she had been taken to Sempringham by the page, and had there settled herself, in the hermit's cell which happened to be vacant.
Dame Isabelle, on her first coming, had summoned my mother to surrender the Tower; and she, being affrighted, had resigned her charge, and was committed to the custody of the Lord de la Zouche. So we homeless ones bent our steps to Sempringham, where were two of my father's sisters, Joan and Alianora; and we prayed the holy nuns there to grant us shelter in their abode of peace.
In England they probably existed right up to the Danish invasions of 870, and disappeared in the general devastation of the country during the succeeding years. The organisation, however, appears again in this country in the C12, and even as late as the C15. The order of S. Gilbert of Sempringham in the C12 was a double one, and the only order which actually had birth in England.
The Living Water seemed as distant as before; but the thirst grew more intense. And yet, like Hagar in the wilderness, the Well was beside her all the time; but until the Angel of the Lord should open her eyes, she could not see it. She reached Sempringham, and took up her abode for the night in the convent, uncertain how long she would remain there.
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