Hence, when a wretched woman was mourning alone over the husband who
had just been hustled into his grave, the men were after her like
wolves, every one of her neighbours knowing exactly what she was
worth even to the fraction of a rood of land, or the last lamb that
had been dropped, or the litter of pigs that were rootling up the
beech-nuts in the woods. They gave her short time to make up her
mind. Sentiment? We in the East--the land of the wise men since time
was young--we know nothing of sentiment. We can hate with a sullen
tenacity of resentment which knows no forgiveness; but love--nay we
leave that for the "intense" of other climes. And women in the good
old times--positively women--love one man more than another? What
_they?_
"Whose love knows no distinction but of gender,
And ridicules the very name of choice!"
Why, where were you born?
The records of the marriages on the court rolls of the plague year
are hardly more startling than the deaths. Whether men and women paid
less to the lord for a license than they were compelled to pay if
they married without license I cannot tell; but that hundreds of
widows must have married only a few weeks or a few days after their
husbands' deaths is clear. Matilda's case was not a rare one. Alice
Foghal, at Lessingham, was another of those ladies who in a couple of
months had been the property successively of three husbands--the last
was actually a stranger.
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