Hereward, the Last of the English Part 17

And so they were: and so are their descendants of Scotland and Northumbria, unto this very day.

The boy sprang from his horse, and walked among them and round them in delight. He admired and handled their long-handled double axes; their short sea-bows of horn and deer-sinew; their red Danish jerkins; their blue sea-cloaks, fastened on the shoulder with rich brooches; and the gold and silver bracelets on their wrists. He wondered at their long s.h.a.ggy beards, and still more at the blue patterns with which the English among them, Hereward especially, were tattooed on throat and arm and knee.

"Yes, you are Vikings,--just such as my Uncle Robert tells me of."

Hereward knew well the exploits of Robert le Frison in Spain and Greece.

"I trust that your n.o.ble uncle," he asked, "is well? He was one of us poor sea-c.o.c.ks, and sailed the swan's path gallantly, till he became a mighty prince. Here is a man here who was with your n.o.ble uncle in Byzant."

And he thrust forward the old master.

The boy's delight knew no bounds. He should tell him all about that in St.

Bertin.

Then he rode back to the ship, and round and round her (for the tide by that time had left her high and dry), and wondered at her long snake-like lines, and carven stem and stern.

"Tell me about this ship. Let me go on board of her. I have never seen a ship inland at Mons there; and even here there are only heavy ugly busses, and little fishing-boats. No. You must be all hungry and tired. We will go to St. Bertin at once, and you shall be feasted royally. Hearken, villains!" shouted he to the peasants. "This ship belongs to the fair sir here,--my guest and friend; and if any man dares to steal from her a stave or a nail, I will have his thief's hand cut off."

"The ship, fair lord," said Hereward, "is yours, not mine. You should build twenty more after her pattern, and man them with such lads as these, and then go down to

'Miklagard and Spanialand, That lie so far on the lee, O!'

as did your n.o.ble uncle before you."

And so they marched inland, after the boy had dismounted one of his men, and put Hereward on the horse.

"You gentlemen of the sea can ride as well as sail," said the chatelain, as he remarked with some surprise Hereward's perfect seat and hand.

"We should soon learn to fly likewise," laughed Hereward, "if there were any booty to be picked up in the clouds there overhead"; and he rode on by Arnulf's side, as the lad questioned him about the sea, and nothing else.

"Ah, my boy," said Hereward at last, "look there, and let those be Vikings who must."

And he pointed to the rich pastures, broken by strips of corn-land and snug farms, which stretched between the sea and the great forest of Flanders.

"What do you mean?"

But Hereward was silent. It was so like his own native fens. For a moment there came over him the longing for a home. To settle down in such a fair fat land, and call good acres his own; and marry and beget stalwart sons, to till the old estate when he could till no more. Might not that be a better life--at least a happier one--than restless, homeless, aimless adventure? And now, just as he had had a hope of peace,--a hope of seeing his own land, his own folk, perhaps of making peace with his mother and his king,--the very waves would not let him rest, but sped him forth, a storm-tossed waif, to begin life anew, fighting he cared not whom or why, in a strange land.

So he was silent and sad withal.

"What does he mean?" asked the boy of the Abbot.

"He seems a wise man: let him answer for himself."

The boy asked once more.

"Lad! lad!" said Hereward, waking as from a dream. "If you be heir to such a fair land as that, thank G.o.d for it, and pray to Him that you may rule it justly, and keep it in peace, as they say your grandfather and your father do; and leave glory and fame and the Vikings' b.l.o.o.d.y trade to those who have neither father nor mother, wife nor land, but live like the wolf of the wood, from one meal to the next."

"I thank you for those words, Sir Harold," said the good Abbot, while the boy went on abashed, and Hereward himself was startled at his own saying, and rode silent till they crossed the drawbridge of St. Bertin, and entered that ancient fortress, so strong that it was the hiding-place in war time for all the treasures of the country, and so sacred withal that no woman, dead or alive, was allowed to defile it by her presence; so that the wife of Baldwin the Bold, ancestor of Arnulf, wishing to lie by her husband, had to remove his corpse from St. Bertin to the Abbey of Blandigni, where the Counts of Flanders lay in glory for many a generation.

The pirates entered, not without gloomy distrust, the gates of that consecrated fortress; while the monks in their turn were (and with some reason) considerably frightened when they were asked to entertain as guests forty Norse rovers. Loudly did the elder among them bewail (in Latin, lest their guests should understand too much) the present weakness of their monastery, where St. Bertin was left to defend himself and his monks all alone against the wicked world outside. Far different had been their case some hundred and seventy years before. Then St. Valeri and St.

Riquier of Ponthieu, transported thither from their own resting-places in France for fear of the invading Northmen, had joined their suffrages and merits to those of St. Bertin, with such success that the abbey had never been defiled by the foot of the heathen. But, alas! the saints, that is their bodies, after a while became homesick; and St. Valeri appearing in a dream to Hugh Capet, bade him bring them back to France in spite of Arnulf, Count of those parts, who wished much to retain so valuable an addition to his household G.o.ds.

But in vain. Hugh Capet was a man who took few denials. With knights and men-at-arms he came, and Count Arnulf had to send home the holy corpses with all humility, and leave St. Bertin all alone.

Whereon St. Valeri appeared in a dream to Hugh Capet, and said unto him, "Because thou hast zealously done what I commanded, thou and thy successors shall reign in the kingdom of France to everlasting generations." [Footnote: "Histoire des Comtes de Flandre," par E. le Glay.

E. gestis SS. Richarii et Walerici.]

However, there was no refusing the grandson and heir of Count Baldwin; and the hearts of the monks were comforted by hearing that Hereward was a good Christian, and that most of his crew had been at least baptized. The Abbot therefore took courage, and admitted them into the hospice, with solemn warnings as to the doom which they might expect if they took the value of a horse-nail from the patrimony of the blessed saint. Was he less powerful or less careful of his own honor than St. Lieven of Holthem, who, not more than fifty years before, had struck stone-blind four soldiers of the Emperor Henry's, who had dared, after warning, to plunder the altar?

[Footnote: Ibid.] Let them remember, too, the fate of their own forefathers, the heathens of the North, and the check which, one hundred and seventy years before, they had received under those very walls. They had exterminated the people of Walcheren; they had taken prisoner Count Regnier; they had burnt Ghent, Bruges, and St. Omer itself, close by; they had left naught between the Scheldt and the Somme, save stark corpses and blackened ruins. What could withstand them till they dared to lift audacious hands against the heavenly lord who sleeps there in Sithiu? Then they poured down in vain over the Heilig-Veld, innumerable as the locusts.

Poor monks, strong in the protection of the holy Bertin, sallied out and smote them hip and thigh, singing their psalms the while. The ditches of the fortress were filled with unbaptized corpses; the piles of vine-twigs which they lighted to burn down the gates turned their flames into the Nors.e.m.e.n's faces at the bidding of St. Bertin; and they fled from that temporal fire to descend into that which is eternal, while the gates of the pit were too narrow for the mult.i.tude of their miscreant souls.

[Footnote: This gallant feat was performed in the A. D. 891.]

So the Nors.e.m.e.n heard, and feared; and only cast longing eyes at the gold and tapestries of the altars, when they went in to ma.s.s.

For the good Abbot, gaining courage still further, had pointed out to Hereward and his men that it had been surely by the merits and suffrages of the blessed St. Bertin that they had escaped a watery grave.

Hereward and his men, for their part, were not inclined to deny the theory. That they had miraculously escaped, from the accident of the tide being high, they knew full well; and that St. Bertin should have done them the service was probable enough. He, of course, was lord and master in his own country, and very probably a few miles out to sea likewise.

So Hereward a.s.sured the Abbot that he had no mind to eat St. Bertin's bread, or accept his favors, without paying honestly for them; and after ma.s.s he took from his shoulders a handsome silk cloak (the only one he had), with a great Scotch Cairngorm brooch, and bade them buckle it on the shoulders of the great image of St. Bertin.

At which St. Bertin was so pleased (being, like many saints, male and female, somewhat proud after their death of the finery which they despised during life), that he appeared that night to a certain monk, and told him that if Hereward would continue duly to honor him, the blessed St. Bertin, and his monks at that place, he would, in his turn, insure him victory in all his battles by land and sea.

After which Hereward stayed quietly in the abbey certain days; and young Arnulf, in spite of all remonstrances from the Abbot, would never leave his side till he had heard from him and from his men as much of their adventures as they thought it prudent to relate.

CHAPTER VII.

HOW HEREWARD WENT TO THE WAR AT GUISNES.

The dominion of Baldwin of Lille,--Baldwin the Debonair,--Marquis of Flanders, and just then the greatest potentate in Europe after the Kaiser of Germany and the Kaiser of Constantinople, extended from the Somme to the Scheldt, including thus much territory which now belongs to France.

His forefathers had ruled there ever since the days of the "Foresters" of Charlemagne, who held the vast forests against the heathens of the fens; and of that famous Baldwin Bras-de-fer,--who, when the foul fiend rose out of the Scheldt, and tried to drag him down, tried cold steel upon him (being a practical man), and made his ghostly adversary feel so sorely the weight of the "iron arm," that he retired into his native mud,--or even lower still.

He, like a daring knight as he was, ran off with his (so some say) early love, Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald of France, a descendant of Charlemagne himself. Married up to Ethelwulf of England, and thus stepmother of Alfred the Great,--after his death behaving, alas for her!

not over wisely or well, she had verified the saying:

"Nous revenons toujours a nos premiers amours,"

and ran away with Baldwin.

Charles, furious that one of his earls, a mere lieutenant and creature, should dare to marry a daughter of Charlemagne's house, would have attacked him with horse and foot, fire and sword, had not Baldwin been the only man who could defend his northern frontier against the heathen Nors.e.m.e.n.

The Pope, as Charles was his good friend, fulminated against Baldwin the excommunication destined for him who stole a widow for his wife, and all his accomplices.

Baldwin and Judith went straight to Rome, and told their story to the Pope.