Hereward, the Last of the English Part 21

"That is not well done, Arnulf, to talk of ladies to men whom they do not know."

Arnulf looked up, puzzled and pained; for she spoke haughtily.

"I know naught of your new friend. He may be a low-born man, for anything that I can tell."

"He is not! He is as n.o.ble as I am. Everything he says and does--every look--shows it."

"You are young,--as you have shown by talking of me to him. But I have given you my advice"; and she moved languidly away. "Let him tell your grandfather who he is, or remain suspected."

The boy went away sadly.

Early the next morning he burst into Torfrida's room as she was dressing her hair.

"How now? Are these manners for the heir of Flanders?"

"He has told all!"

"He has!" and she started and dropt her comb.

"Pick up that comb, girl. You need not go away. I have no secrets with young gentlemen."

"I thought you would be glad to hear."

"I? What can I want in the matter, save that your grandfather should be satisfied that you are entertaining a man worthy to be your guest?"

"And he is worthy: he has told my grandfather who he is."

"But not you?"

"No. They say I must not know yet. But this I know, that they welcomed him, when he told them, as if he had been an earl's son; and that he is going with my Uncle Robert against the Frieslanders."

"And if he be an earl's son, how comes he here, wandering with rough seamen, and hiding his honest name? He must have done something of which he is ashamed."

"I shall tell you nothing," said Arnulf, pouting.

"What care I? I can find out by art magic if I like."

"I don't believe all that. Can you find out, for instance, what he has on his throat?"

"A beard."

"But what is under that beard?"

"A goitre."

"You are laughing at me."

"Of course I am, as I shall at any one who challenges me to find out anything so silly, and so unfit."

"I shall go."

"Go then." For she knew very well that he would come back again.

"Nurse," said Torfrida to the old Lapp woman, when they were alone, "find out for me what is the name of this strange champion, and what he has beneath his beard."

"Beneath his beard?"

"Some scar, I suppose, or secret mark. I must know. You will find out for your Torfrida, will you not, nurse?"

"I will make a charm that will bring him to you, were all the icebergs of Quenland between you and him: and then you can see for yourself."

"No, no, no! not yet, nurse!" and Torfrida smiled. "Only find me out that one thing: that I must know."

And yet why she wanted to know, she could not tell herself.

The old woman came back to her, ere she went to bed.

"I have found it out all, and more. I know where to get scarlet toadstools, and I put the juice in his men's ale: they are laughing and roaring now, merry-mad every one of them."

"But not he?"

"No, no. He is with the Marquis. But in madness comes out truth; and that long hook-nosed body-varlet of his has told us all."

And she told Torfrida who Hereward was, and the secret mark.

"There is a cross upon his throat, beneath his chin, p.r.i.c.ked in after their English fashion."

Torfrida started.

"Then,--then the spell will not work upon him; the Holy Cross will turn it off."

"It must be a great Cross and a holy one that will turn off my charms,"

said the old hag, with a sneer, "whatever it may do against yours. But on the back of his hand,--that will be a mark to know him by,--there is p.r.i.c.ked a bear,--a white bear that he slew." And she told the story of the fairy bear; which Torfrida duly stored up in her heart.

"So he has the Cross on his throat," thought Torfrida to herself. "Well, if it keep off my charm, it will keep off others, that is one comfort; and one knows not what fairies or witches or evil creatures he may meet with in the forests and the fens."

The discovery of Hereward's rank did not, doubtless, lessen Torfrida's fancy for him. She was ambitious enough, and proud enough of her own lineage, to be full glad that her heart had strayed away--as it must needs stray somewhere--to the son of the third greatest man in England. As for his being an outlaw, that mattered little. He might be inlawed, and rich and powerful, any day in those uncertain, topsy-turvy times; and, for the present, his being a wolf's head only made him the more interesting to her. Women like to pity their lovers. Sometimes--may all good beings reward them for it--they love merely because they pity. And Torfrida found it pleasant to pity the insolent young c.o.xcomb, who certainly never dreamed of pitying himself.

When Hereward went home that night, he found the Abbey of St. Bertin in horrible confusion. His men were grouped outside the gate, chattering like monkeys; the porter and the monks, from inside, entreating them, vainly, to come in and go to bed quietly.

But they would not. They vowed and swore that a great gulf had opened all down the road, and that one step more would tumble them in headlong. They manifested the most affectionate solicitude for the monks, warning them, on their lives, not to step across the threshold, or they would be swallowed (as Martin, who was the maddest of the lot, phrased it) with Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. In vain Hereward stormed; a.s.sured them that the supposed abyss was nothing but the gutter; proved the fact by kicking Martin over it. The men determined to believe their own eyes, and after a while fell asleep, in heaps, in the roadside, and lay there till morning, when they woke, declaring, as did the monks, that they had been all bewitched. They knew not--and happily the lower orders, both in England and on the Continent, do not yet know--the potent virtues of that strange fungus, with which Lapps and Samoiedes have, it is said, practised wonders for centuries past.

The worst of the matter was, that Martin Lightfoot, who had drank most of the poison, and had always been dreamy and uncanny, in spite of his shrewdness and humor, had, from that day forward, something very like a bee in his bonnet.

But before Count Robert and Hereward could collect sufficient troops for the invasion of Holland, another chance of being slain in fight arose, too tempting to be overlooked; namely, the annual tournament at Pont de l'Arche above Rouen, where all the n.o.blest knights of Normandy would a.s.semble, to win their honor and ladies' love by hewing at each other's sinful bodies. Thither, too, the best knights of Flanders must needs go, and with them Hereward. Though no knight, he was allowed in Flanders, as he had been in Scotland, to take his place among that honorable company.

For, though he still refused the honor of knighthood, on the ground that he had, as yet, done no deed deserving thereof, he was held to have deserved it again and again, and all the more from his modesty in declining it.

So away they all went to Pont de l'Arche, a right gallant meinie: and Torfrida watched them go from the lattice window.