London Pride | Page 4

and pious shelter, where the child might be reared in her mother's faith.
Lady Kirkland, the only daughter of the Marquise de Montrond, one of Queen Henrietta Maria's ladies-in-waiting, had been a papist, and, although Sir John had adhered steadfastly to the principles of the Reformed Church, he had promised his bride, and the Marquise, her mother, that if their nuptials were blessed with offspring, their children should be educated in the Roman faith--a promise difficult of performance in a land where a stormy tide ran high against Rome, and where Popery was a scarlet spectre that alarmed the ignorant and maddened the bigoted. And now, duly provided with a safe conduct from the regicide, Bradshaw, he was journeying to the city where he was to part with his daughter for an indefinite period. He had seen but little of her, and yet it seemed as hard to part thus as if she had prattled at his knees and nestled in his arms every day of her young life.
At last across the distance, against the wind-driven clouds of that stormy winter sky, John Kirkland saw the lights of the city--not many lights or brilliant of their kind, but a glimmer here and there--and behind the glimmer the dark bulk of masonry, roofs, steeples, watch-towers, bridges.
The carriage stopped at one of the gates of the city, and there were questions asked and answered, and papers shown, but there was no obstacle to the entrance of the travellers. The name of the Ursuline Convent acted like a charm, for Louvain was papist to the core in these days of Spanish dominion. It had been a city of refuge nearly a hundred years ago for all that was truest and bravest and noblest among English Roman Catholics, in the cruel days of Queen Elizabeth, and Englishmen had become the leading spirits of the University there, and had attracted the youth of Romanist England to the sober old Flemish town, before the establishment of Dr. Allan's rival seminary at Douai, Sir John could have found no safer haven for his little ewe lamb.
The tired horses blundered heavily along the stony streets, and crossed more than one bridge. The town seemed pervaded by water, a deep narrow stream like a canal, on which the houses looked, as if in feeble mockery of Venice--houses with steep crow-step gables, some of them richly decorated; narrow windows for the most part dark, but with here and there the yellow light of lamp or candle.
The convent faced a broad open square, and had a large walled garden in its rear. The coach stopped in front of a handsome doorway, and after the travellers had been scrutinised and interrogated by the portress through an opening in the door, they were admitted into a spacious hall, paved with black and white marble, and adorned with a statue of the Virgin Mother, and thence to a parlour dimly lighted by a small oil lamp, where they waited for about ten minutes, the little girl shivering with cold, before the Superior appeared.
She was a tall woman, advanced in years, with a handsome, but melancholy countenance. She greeted the cavalier as a familiar friend.
"Welcome to Flanders!" she said. "You have fled from that accursed country where our Church is despised and persecuted----"
"Nay, reverend kinswoman, I have fled but to go back again as fast as horses and sails can carry me. While the fortunes of my King are at stake, my place is in England, or it may be in Scotland, where there are still those who are ready to fight to the death in the royal cause. But I have brought this little one for shelter and safe keeping, and tender usage, trusting in you who are of kin to her as I could trust no one else--and, furthermore, that she may be reared in the faith of her dead mother."
"Sweet soul!" murmured the nun. "It was well for her to be taken from your troubled England to the kingdom of the saints and martyrs."
"True, reverend mother; yet those blasphemous levellers who call us 'Malignants' have dubbed themselves 'Saints.'"
"Then affairs go no better with you in England, I fear, Sir John?"
"Nay, madam, they go so ill that they have reached the lowest depth of infamy. Hell itself hath seen no spectacle more awful, no murder more barbarous, no horrider triumph of wickedness, than the crime which was perpetrated this day se'nnight at Whitehall."
The nun looked at him wistfully, with clasped hands, as one who half apprehended his meaning.
"The King!" she faltered, "still a prisoner?"
"Ay, reverend lady, but a prisoner in Paradise, where angels are his guards, and saints and martyrs his companions. He has regained his crown; but it is the crown of martyrdom, the aureole of slaughtered saints. England, our little England that