Star of Mercia Part 7

In a little while from now, on the first day of March, I must go hence to the place where is life without end, rest without labour, and joy without sorrow--where is health and no pain, youth and no old age, peace and no contention, music and no discord. I charge you pray always, in all your undertakings, spiritual and bodily; and be good, little people, for the best usage is goodness."

His last words on earth were just as simple:

"Take me with Thee!"

Star of Mercia

"_Hic regina detestatur Amplexus illicitos; Spreta mortem machinatur Ob amores vet.i.tos._"

"Nay, Ethelfrith, bide thou here in quiet!" said Cynerith. "Tush, girl!

art no child now, at sixteen years old! Why, thou hast witnessed the death of many a fledgling rook. The sun must not stain thy cheeks this day, and that thou knowest! The young man cannot now be afar off, G.o.d help! Nay, good lack! I will not have such pouting! It is my behest that thou stay at home."

In reality, the Lady Ethelfrith could scarcely be said to pout; and she knew her mother too well to venture a protest. The party set forth--Offa the King, the imperious Cynerith his Queen, their son the Atheling, and Eadburh their handsome elder daughter, wife of Beorhtric, King of Wess.e.x, and now on a visit to her parents' court--and the young Ethelfrith, debarred from the sport, climbed to the upper room which was her own sleeping-chamber, and looked out over the shire of Hereford.

If she leant out and turned sideways, her window commanded a view of the highway that ran by the gates of King Offa's palace of Sutton. She peered idly in that direction, without emotion of any sort--even anger, or curiosity. Below her lay the orchard-close, bright green under foot, and rosy overhead with the vernal glory of the apple-trees. It was the fairest day of the fair month of May; but its beauty awoke in Ethelfrith a dull, continuous pain. She was seldom happy, poor little princess: she thought much, but there was no one to whom she could tell her ideas, or who would give her sympathy. The King was always occupied; her brother was as spare of speech as herself; her mother was the Queen and unapproachable, except when she jested coa.r.s.ely; and she feared her sister, the Queen of Wess.e.x. There were many puzzling things in her everyday world which had only just begun to claim her attention.

She was a very fairy-like being, so small and slim and fragile; her complexion was as delicate as the apple-blossom; she had soft eyes, grey as the plumage of a dove and a soft mouth with an obstinate curve; her hair was of the purest, palest gold, just saved from being flaxen and colourless. A strange child, surely, for those two robust persons, Offa and Cynerith. Just now she was wondering why they had not told her before yesterday of Ethelbert of East Anglia, his coming and its purpose. Every one about the palace had known of it but herself. She had overheard what had been whispered to a servant of her sister's from Wess.e.x, in the orchard, upon the foregoing afternoon, by one of her father's henchmen, whose eyes had shed a marvellously tender light while he gazed upon her, King Offa's daughter.

"She is the star and flower of all Mercia," this henchman had said, "and she is to wed Lord Ethelbert, the star of the Eastern Angles."

Although she had remarked it, the expression of the speaker's countenance had in no wise stirred her sensibilities; she had been a little ruffled in temper, perhaps--no more. For Ethelfrith had no affinities with the courtiers; the overfed, voluptuous women and their satellites filled her with a cold disgust. The nuns of Marden, she thought, led peaceful lives, and bore in their faces a truly joyous light. Yet she had no longing for the seclusion of a religious house.

She would sometimes, however--though very rarely--go to visit the sisters and spend a day in their company. The reverend mother was a motherly woman indeed; she was very gentle with the princess, and careful to refrain in her presence from any allusion to her life or her kinsfolk that might dash her girlish, half-childish dreams. When the maiden returned to her ordinary surroundings, how the glare and the chatter tired her head and oppressed her whole dainty frame! So it came about that the Lady Ethelfrith was little accounted by the great folk of Mercia: she was always silent, usually prim, and sometimes brusque; and to some she seemed a cross, spoilt child, and to others, witless.

Then there had been her mother's half-teasing words of the evening before; that was really all she knew! At the thought of King Ethelbert, a sharper pain than the ache of loneliness amid natural beauties struck through her heart. She remembered the Queen's parting injunctions. Her childhood was surely at an end. This Ethelbert would be coming by the highway to the halls of Sutton before long.

Impatiently she turned away from the dusty road. Her eyes lighted upon the flowering gorse-bushes that blazed upon the outskirts of an upland covert in the distance. There ran through her head a riddle of her nursery days, couched in the rhyming metre which the Mercians had begun to imitate from the neighbouring Welsh.

"Yellow and green, Sharp and keen, Grows in the mene.

The King can't ride it, no more can the Queen."

Song after song, carol after carol, lay after lay, came tripping after--some of G.o.d and the saints and ghostly blessedness; some of love and mirth; others of woe. A smile hovered about the lips of Ethelfrith.

She loved songs--they were often her only solace.

She would walk in the garden--no, she would not. The sun was too hot--the wind was too cold. She had just decided to wile away the time by strumming upon her cither, when she descried figures approaching along the road. They were hors.e.m.e.n, many hors.e.m.e.n; a mighty train. And there, unmistakably, was the banner of some great one. It was not a lord of Mercia, nor a lord of Wess.e.x! Ethelfrith rushed from her room, down the stairs, and headlong into the orchard-close, in a fit of wild shyness.

There was her waiting-maid, and there were several aged ladies who cared not to look on at the shooting of the rooks. All confused, she stammered to them of her surmise--how that the King of East Anglia was even at their gates. What should they do, with her parents away?

"Why, lady, there is no need for fear," said one kind-hearted matron.

Even as she spoke a servant appeared in the orchard doorway, ushering with every token of respect a company of n.o.bly-attired, travel-stained men. In another moment the little group beneath the trees had become aware of the leader of the party--a young man, very lithe, very muscular, with an energetic open countenance, and the bluest, brightest eyes that Ethelfrith had ever seen. Their glance wandered from one to another of the women, and came to rest upon King Offa's youngest daughter.

It seemed to her that the universe whirled around her: she had to strain at her insteps in order to keep herself upright. Then she heard him saying:

"O lady, forgive me that I know not whom I should greet! Do I speak to the high and mighty lady, the Lady Ethelfrith of Mercia?"

She curtsied, and hung her head; she was pallid now, who had been crimson the instant before; her tongue refused to utter audible sound.

"I am Ethelbert of East Anglia," continued the stranger. "Here am I at King Offa's bidding. They have told you of my coming?"

"Indeed, I am Ethelfrith," said she. "I do greatly grieve--my father and mother.... Oh, my lord, will ye not be seated? I had forgotten....

Ye will deem me unmannerly...."

"Nay, lady, surely nay," said Ethelbert earnestly; and he seated himself beside her upon a bench built round the trunk of an ancient apple-tree. He had begun to address her once more in his kindly tones, when a bustling noise reached them from within the palace, and in another moment the whole court was about them. Offa, the welcoming host, Cynerith, with her ready, witty talk. And Eadburh, whose person and taste in adornment made her give the effect of a full-blown poppy.

Ethelfrith felt faded and nerveless beside her. She shrank into the background.

"In a good hour!" cried Offa. "Ye have spoken with my little daughter, I see: no need to make you known one to another. I trow ye are weary from your wayfaring. Come with me, and ye shall bathe you, and have meat and drink. And then, Ethelbert Etheldred's son, I will show you my horses, my hounds, and my hawks, and ye shall say whether ye have other such in East Anglia."

And they all departed into the house, leaving the princess alone.

She, pondering dazedly, thought that a thunderstorm had broken.

But the sun was shining as it had shone all day: the little stream which bounded the orchard from the meadows beyond was as blue as the sky whose colour it borrowed. The earth beneath her feet seemed to pant forth the scent, sweet and languorous, of white wild violets. A cuckoo shouted insistently. The air was vibrant with the voices of created things. A glimmering sulphur-moth came fluttering before her.

Ethelfrith began to run. About and about she chased it, screaming in her excitement; and presently she fell on her knees, panting, by the brookside, her arms clasped around a clump of meadowsweet and forget-me-not.

Summer was summer once again.

They were all upon a green knoll, sheltered by ash and elm. They had flown their hawks with some success, and were now enjoying shade and repose, while their attendants laid the midday meal before them.

Ethelfrith looked often at Ethelbert. He was listening somewhat impatiently to Eadburh, whose florid beauty was evidently little to his taste.

"Lord King," she was saying, "ye seem to me in no wise a monkish man. I thought, from what I had heard, that surely ye would betake you to the life of the cloister, or else bind yourself to all of a saint's life in your kingly halls. I beseech you say, had ye ever such a meaning?"

"They were my youthful thoughts," said Ethelbert. "But I have put them far from me. A king's life is for a king, and no monk's life. Besides, I am the last of my father's house."

He rose, and crossed to Ethelfrith, offering to pour mead into her drinking-horn.

Now Cynerith had looked often and long at Ethelbert since his coming.

"A harmless boy!" she remarked to her daughter Eadburh; and then she said "Fore heaven! the handsomest boy I have seen this many a year!"

Eadburh laughed her horse-laugh.

"Are all things to thy liking, fair lady?" said Ethelbert to Ethelfrith.

"Why, greatly to my liking, O King!" answered she.

Suddenly Cynerith called out, "Child, where is thine amethyst brooch?

Is it lost, then, thou naughty one?"

"My lady," said the girl, trembling, "I did give it.... Ye saw the beggars. One there was that might have been a leper; and there were little children. O mother, be not wroth! I could not do else--woeful was their crying. I sent them unto the sisters, who will feed them and care for them this night; and I gave my brooch unto the woman with the baby in her arms."

"Fie upon thee, fie upon thee!" cried the Queen. "Is my daughter altogether a fool? I will not have thee go among such filthy folk, to touch them belike! Precious stones give I not thee for this!"

"All beggars and such sc.u.m should be whipped and branded," said Eadburh, little guessing that in years to come she herself would roam a foreign city,[14] begging her bread. "Lord father, think ye not that it would be well that when a bondman have not work enough, or when he feign himself a cripple, his lord might sell him beyond seas? So do I often tell King Beorhtric."