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Updated: June 22, 2025
I give you, Mistress Clorinda Wildairs Mistress Clorinda, the enslaver of six years old bumpers, lads! bumpers!"
"I am but a man and I think 'twas rage I felt that such a thing should be cast to ravening wolves." "You," she cried, as if half alarmed; "you have seen her?" "'Tis the beauty of Wildairs you speak of surely," he answered; "and I have seen her once and heard of her often." "Oh, Gerald," said her Grace, "'tis cruel.
I am too sober an old fogy to hunt with them when I have no young blood near to spur me. Sir Jeoffry Wildairs will be with them if he has not yet broke his neck." The country they hunted over proved indeed rough, and the sport exciting.
On a wintry morning at the close of 1690, the sun shining faint and red through a light fog, there was a great noise of baying dogs, loud voices, and trampling of horses in the courtyard at Wildairs Hall; Sir Jeoffry being about to go forth a-hunting, and being a man with a choleric temper and big, loud voice, and given to oaths and noise even when in good-humour, his riding forth with his friends at any time was attended with boisterous commotion.
That woman it was who had wed Lord Dunstanwolde and made him a blissful man, that woman had been since then her sister, her protector, and her friend; 'twas she who had watched by my lord's body, and spoke low words to him, and stroked his poor dead hand; 'twas she who laid his wife's hair and her child's, and the little picture, on his still breast; 'twas she who sate by the widowed girl at Wildairs and 'twas she, she made glorious by love, who stood and smiled among the window's daffodils.
At first 'twas in the days when she had been but Clo Wildairs her ladyship had begun to befriend her through a mere fanciful caprice, being half-amused, half-touched, to find her, by sheer chance, one day, stolen into her chambers to gaze in delighted terror at some ball finery spread upon a bed.
The coming of the second threw him into a rage, the third into a fury; and the birth of a fourth being announced, he stormed like a madman, would not look at it, and went upon a debauch so protracted and disgraceful as to be the scandal of the county and the subject of gossip for many a day. From that hour the innocent Lady Wildairs did not raise her head.
For some reason he felt vaguely depressed, and, searching within himself for a reason, recognised that the slight cloud resting upon his spirits recalled to him a feeling of his early childhood no other than the sense of restless unhappiness he had felt years ago when he had first overheard the story of the wretched Lady of Wildairs and her neglected children.
The less serious, or less worldly, especially the sentimental spinsters and matrons and romantic young, who had heard and enjoyed the rumours of Mistress Clorinda Wildairs' strange early days, were prone to build much upon a certain story of that time. "Sir John Oxon was her first love," they said.
"A pretty fool and baby who was my cousin married a reprobate, Jeof Wildairs, and this is his daughter and is a shameless baggage. Egad! you must have seen her on the hunting-field when you were with us riding in coat and breeches and with her mane of hair looped under her hat."
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