For in her
heart she was not changed, and had not yet and never would learn the
bitter lesson of humility. Furthermore, she knew better than they what
life and death had in store for her, since it had been revealed to her
by holier lips than those of any priest. Lips on which had been laid a
coal from the heavenly altar, and what they had foretold would come to
pass--that unearthly pilgrimage and purification--that destiny,
dreadful, ineluctable, that made her soul faint to think of it. Here, on
this earth, it was for her to toil, a slave with heavy irons on her
feet, in her master's fields and pleasure-grounds, and these gowned men
with shaven heads, wearing ropes of beads and crucifixes as emblems of
their authority--these were the taskmasters set over her, and to these,
she, Elfrida, one time queen in England, would bend in submission and
humbly confess her sins, and uncomplainingly take whatever austerities
or other punishments they decreed.
Here, then, at Amesbury itself, she began her works of expiation, and
found that she, too, like the unhappy man in the parable, could
experience some relief and satisfaction in her solitary embittered
existence in the work itself.
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