Hereward, the Last of the English Part 76

"So charming a courtier,--so sweet a minstrel,--so agreeable a newsmonger,--could I keep you in a cage forever, and hang you on a bough, I were but too happy: but you are too fine a bird to sing in captivity. So you must go, I fear, and leave us to the nightingales. And I will take for your ransom--"

Abbot Thorold's heart beat high.

"Thirty thousand silver marks."

"Thirty thousand fiends!"

"My beau Sire, will you undervalue yourself? Will you degrade yourself? I took Abbot Thorold, from his talk, to be a man who set even a higher value on himself than other men set on him. What higher compliment can I pay to your vast worth, than making your ransom high accordingly, after the spirit of our ancient English laws? Take it as it is meant, beau Sire; be proud to pay the money; and we will throw you Sir Ascelin into the bargain, as he seems a friend of Siward's."

Thorold hoped that Hereward was drunk, and might forget, or relent; but he was so sore at heart that he slept not a wink that night. But in the morning he found, to his sorrow, that Hereward had been as sober as himself.

In fine, he had to pay the money; and was a poor man all his days.

"Aha! Sir Ascelin," said Hereward apart, as he bade them all farewell with many courtesies. "I think I have put a spoke in your wheel about the fair Alftruda."

"Eh? How? Most courteous victor?"

"Sir Ascelin is not a very wealthy gentleman."

Ascelin laughed a.s.sent.

"Nudus intravi, nudus exeo--England; and I fear now, this mortal life likewise."

"But he looked to his rich uncle the Abbot, to further a certain marriage-project of his. And, of course, neither my friend Gilbert of Ghent, nor my enemy William of Normandy, are likely to give away so rich an heiress without some gratification in return."

"Sir Hereward knows the world, it seems."

"So he has been told before. And, therefore, having no intention that Sir Ascelin, however worthy of any and every fair lady, should marry this one; he took care to cut off the stream at the fountain-head. If he hears that the suit is still pushed, he may cut off another head beside the fountain's."

"There will be no need," said Ascelin, laughing again. "You have very sufficiently ruined my uncle, and my hopes."

"My head?" said he, as soon as Hereward was out of hearing. "If I do not cut off thy head ere all is over, there is neither luck nor craft left among Normans. I shall catch the Wake sleeping some day, let him be never so wakeful."

CHAPTER x.x.xVI.

HOW ALFTRUDA WROTE TO HEREWARD.

The weary months ran on, from summer into winter, and winter into summer again, for two years and more, and neither Torfrida nor Hereward were the better for them. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: and a sick heart is but too apt to be a peevish one. So there were fits of despondency, jars, mutual recriminations. "If I had not taken your advice, I should not have been here." "If I had not loved you so well, I might have been very differently off,"--and so forth. The words were wiped away the next hour, perhaps the next minute, by sacred kisses; but they had been said, and would be recollected, and perhaps said again.

Then, again, the "merry greenwood" was merry enough in the summer tide, when shaughs were green, and

"The woodwele sang, and would not cease, Sitting upon the spray.

So loud, it wakened Robin Hood In the greenwood where he lay."

But it was a sad place enough, when the autumn fog crawled round the gorse, and dripped off the hollies, and choked alike the breath and the eyesight; when the air sickened with the graveyard smell of rotting leaves, and the rain-water stood in the clay holes over the poached and sloppy lawns.

It was merry enough, too, when they were in winter quarters in friendly farm-houses, as long as the bright sharp frosts lasted, and they tracked the hares and deer merrily over the frozen snows; but it was doleful enough in those same farm-houses in the howling wet weather, when wind and rain lashed in through unglazed window, and ill-made roof, and there were coughs and colds and rheumatisms, and Torfrida ached from head to foot, and once could not stand upright for a whole month together, and every cranny was stuffed up with bits of board and rags, keeping out light and air as well as wind and water; and there was little difference between the short day and the long night; and the men gambled and wrangled amid clouds of peat-reek, over draughtboards and chessmen which they had carved for themselves, and Torfrida sat st.i.tching and sewing, making and mending, her eyes bleared with peat-smoke, her hands sore and coa.r.s.e from continual labor, her cheek bronzed, her face thin and hollow, and all her beauty worn away for very trouble. Then sometimes there was not enough to eat, and every one grumbled at her; or some one's clothes were not mended, and she was grumbled at again. And sometimes a foraging party brought home liquor, and all who could got drunk to drive dull care away; and Hereward, forgetful of all her warnings, got more than was good for him likewise; and at night she coiled herself up in her furs, cold and contemptuous; and Hereward coiled himself up, guilty and defiant, and woke her again and again with startings and wild words in his sleep. And she felt that her beauty was gone, and that he saw it; and she fancied him (perhaps it was only fancy) less tender than of yore; and then in very pride disdained to take any care of her person, and said to herself, though she dare not say it to him, that if he only loved her for her face, he did not love her at all. And because she fancied him cold at times, she was cold likewise, and grew less and less caressing, when for his sake, as well as her own, she should have grown more so day by day.

Alas for them! there are many excuses. Sorrow may be a softening medicine at last, but at first it is apt to be a hardening one; and that savage outlaw life which they were leading can never have been a wholesome one for any soul of man, and its graces must have existed only in the brains of harpers and gleemen. Away from law, from self-restraint, from refinement, from elegance, from the very sound of a church-going bell, they were sinking gradually down to the level of the coa.r.s.e men and women whom they saw; the worse and not the better parts of both their characters were getting the upper hand; and it was but too possible that after a while the hero might sink into the ruffian, the lady into a slattern and a shrew.

But in justice to them be it said, that neither of them had complained of the other to any living soul. Their love had been as yet too perfect, too sacred, for them to confess to another (and thereby confess to themselves) that it could in any wise fail. They had each idolized the other, and been too proud of their idolatry to allow that their idol could crumble or decay.

And yet at last that point, too, was reached. One day they were wrangling about somewhat, as they too often wrangled, and Hereward in his temper let fall the words. "As I said to Winter the other day, you grow harder and harder upon me."

Torfrida started and fixed on him wide, terrible, scornful eyes "So you complain of me to your boon companions?"

And she turned and went away without a word. A gulf had opened between them. They hardly spoke to each other for a week.

Hereward complained of Torfrida? What if Torfrida should complain of Hereward? But to whom? Not to the coa.r.s.e women round her; her pride revolted from that thought;--and yet she longed for counsel, for sympathy,--to open her heart but to one fellow-woman. She would go to the Lady G.o.diva at Crowland, and take counsel of her, whether there was any method (for so she put it to herself) of saving Hereward; for she saw but too clearly that he was fast forgetting all her teaching, and falling back to a point lower than that even from which she had raised him up.

To go to Crowland was not difficult. It was mid-winter. The dikes were all frozen. Hereward was out foraging in the Lincolnshire wolds. So Torfrida, taking advantage of his absence, proposed another foraging party to Crowland itself. She wanted stuff for clothes, needles, thread, what not.

A dozen stout fellows volunteered at once to take her. The friendly monks of Crowland would feast them royally, and send them home heaped with all manner of good things; while as for meeting Ivo Taillebois's men, if they had but three to one against them, there was a fair chance of killing a few, and carrying off their clothes and weapons, which would be useful. So they made a sledge, tied beef-bones underneath it, put Torfrida thereon, well wrapped in deer and fox and badger skin, and then putting on their skates, swept her over the fen to Crowland, singing like larks along the dikes.

And Torfrida went in to G.o.diva, and wept upon her knees; and G.o.diva wept likewise, and gave her such counsel as she could,--how if the woman will keep the men heroic, she must keep herself not heroic only, but devout likewise; how she herself, by that one deed which had rendered her name famous then, and famous (though she never dreamt thereof) now, and it may be to the end of time,--had once for all, tamed, chained, and as it were converted, the heart of her fierce young lord; and enabled her to train him in good time into the most wise, most just, most pious, of all King Edward's earls.

And Torfrida said yes, and yes, and yes, and felt in her heart that she knew all that already. Had not she, too, taught, entreated, softened, civilized? Had not she, too, spent her life upon a man, and that man a wolf's-head and a landless outlaw, more utterly than G.o.diva could ever have spent hers on one who lived lapped in luxury and wealth and power?

Torfrida had done her best, and she had failed, or at least fancied in her haste that she had failed.

What she wanted was, not counsel, but love. And she clung round the Lady G.o.diva, till the broken and ruined widow opened all her heart to her, and took her in her arms, and fondled her as if she had been a babe. And the two women spoke few words after that, for indeed there was nothing to be said. Only at last, "My child, my child," cried G.o.diva, "better for thee, body and soul, to be here with me in the house of G.o.d, than there amid evil spirits and deeds of darkness in the wild woods."

"Not a cloister, not a cloister," cried Torfrida, shuddering, and half struggling to get away.

"It is the only place, poor wilful child, the only place this side the grave, in which, we wretched creatures, who for our sins are women born, can find aught of rest or peace. By us sin came into the world, and Eve's curse lies heavy on us to this day, and our desire is to our lords, and they rule over us; and when the slave can work for her master no more, what better than to crawl into the house of G.o.d, and lay down our crosses at the foot of His cross and die? You too will come here, Torfrida, some day, I know it well. You too will come here to rest."

"Never, never," shrieked Torfrida, "never to these horrid vaults. I will die in the fresh air! I will be buried under the green hollies; and the nightingales as they wander up from my own Provence, shall build and sing over my grave. Never, never!" murmured she to herself all the more eagerly, because something within her said that it would come to pa.s.s.

The two women went into the church to Matins, and prayed long and fervently. And at the early daybreak the party went back laden with good things and hearty blessings, and caught one of Ivo Taillebois's men by the way, and slew him, and got off him a new suit of clothes in which the poor fellow was going courting; and so they got home safe into the Bruneswald.

But Torfrida had not found rest unto her soul. For the first time in her life since she became the bride of Hereward, she had had a confidence concerning him and unknown to him. It was to his own mother,--true. And yet she felt as if she had betrayed him: but then had he not betrayed her?

And to Winter of all men?

It might have been two months afterwards that Martin Lightfoot put a letter into Torfrida's hand.

The letter was addressed to Hereward; but there was nothing strange in Martin's bringing it to his mistress. Ever since their marriage, she had opened and generally answered the very few epistles with which her husband was troubled.

She was going to open this one as a matter of course, when glancing at the superscription she saw, or fancied she saw, that it was in a woman's hand.

She looked at it again. It was sealed plainly with a woman's seal; and she looked up at Martin Lightfoot. She had remarked as he gave her the letter a sly significant look in his face.

"What doest thou know of this letter?" she inquired sharply.

"That it is from the Countess Alftruda, whomsoever she may be."

A chill struck through her heart. True, Alftruda had written before, only to warn Hereward of danger to his life,--and hers. She might be writing again, only for the same purpose. But still, she did not wish that either Hereward, or she, should owe Alftruda their lives, or anything. They had struggled on through weal and woe without her, for many a year. Let them do so without her still. That Alftruda had once loved Hereward she knew well. Why should she not? The wonder was to her that every woman did not love him. But she had long since gauged Alftruda's character, and seen in it a persistence like her own, yet as she proudly hoped of a lower temper; the persistence of the base weasel, not of the n.o.ble hound: yet the creeping weasel might endure, and win, when the hound was tired out by his own gallant pace. And there was a something in the tone of Alftruda's last letter which seemed to tell her that the weasel was still upon the scent of its game. But she was too proud to mistrust Hereward, or rather, to seem to mistrust him. And yet--how dangerous Alftruda might be as a rival, if rival she choose to be. She was up in the world now, free, rich, gay, beautiful, a favorite at Queen Matilda's court, while she--