It lingered on for
years, this great lawsuit, and when it was finished the men of the
Church and the men of the Law had divided all that was richest of
the estate between them. There was still left the old manor-house
from which with each generation there came a soldier to uphold the
credit of the name and to show the five scarlet roses on the
silver shield where it had always been shown--in the van. There
were twelve bronzes in the little chapel where Matthew the priest
said mass every morning, all of men of the house of Loring. Two
lay with their legs crossed, as being from the Crusades. Six
others rested their feet upon lions, as having died in war. Four
only lay with the effigy of their hounds to show that they had
passed in peace.
Of this famous but impoverished family, doubly impoverished by law
and by pestilence, two members were living in the year of grace
1349--Lady Ermyntrude Loring and her grandson Nigel. Lady
Ermyntrude's husband had fallen before the Scottish spearsmen at
Stirling, and her son Eustace, Nigel's father, had found a
glorious death nine years before this chronicle opens upon the
poop of a Norman galley at the sea-fight of Sluys. The lonely old
woman, fierce and brooding like the falcon mewed in her chamber,
was soft only toward the lad whom she had brought up. All the
tenderness and love of her nature, so hidden from others that they
could not imagine their existence, were lavished upon him.
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