The Rival Heirs Part 4

Long and loud was the revelry in the castle of Aescendune that night; as it is written in the old ballad of Imogene:

"The tables groaned with the weight of the feast, And many and n.o.ble were the guests."

But no spectral form sat beside the bride, although there were not wanting those who half imagined the dead Edmund might appear--roused even from the grave, to see the seat he had occupied so many years in honour and worth, filled by this dark-browed Norman stranger.

"Let us drink," said the courtly bishop, "to the health and happiness of Norman lord and English lady, and may their union be a type of the union betwixt the two people, who, forgetting that they met as worthy foes at Senlac, may live as brethren under the n.o.blest king in Christendom."

The toast was drunk with acclamations; even the English guests thought they meant it in the delirium of the jovial scene, and fancied for a moment that Englishman and Norman might yet live in peace.

"Is it not sweet?" said the good prior to one of the English guests. "It reminds me of the happy time when it is said the wolf shall lie down with the lamb."

"Methinks the lamb is likely in this case to lie down inside the wolf, especially if he be a Norman wolf."

But the speaker, whose attendance was compulsory, or he had not been there, had few sympathisers at the moment.

"Let us hope for the best. Sir Hugo will not, cannot forget the solemn covenant he has made today, to love and to cherish, till death part him and his bride."

"I hardly think, good father, that day is far off, judging by her looks."

The wax tapers cast a sweet, soft light over the pale, sad features of Winifred of Aescendune, daughter of Herstan {vii} of Clifftown, on the Thames, who had but lately, full of years, gone to his rest, spared the sad days of the Conquest--days utterly unantic.i.p.ated by those who died while Edward the Confessor yet reigned in peace, ere Harold visited the Norman court and swore over the holy bones.

She was but fulfilling a sad duty--at least she thought so--as she played her ill-omened part, sacrificing herself for her boy and her only daughter Edith. For what was the alternative? Was it not to go forth as fugitives and vagabonds on the face of the earth--a prey to every foreign n.o.ble--leaving her own dear people of Aescendune to the wolf, without intercessor or protector.

And thus it came to pa.s.s that Winifred of Aescendune married Hugo de Malville.

CHAPTER IV. THE NORMAN PAGES.

In the days of chivalry the first step towards the degree of knighthood was that of page. Boys of n.o.ble birth, about their twelfth year, were generally transferred from the home of their childhood to the castle of some gallant baron to learn the customs of war and peace at his hand, and to acquire habits of good order and discipline. These lads fared harder by far than modern boys do at our great schools; they slept on harder couches, rose earlier, and had less dainty food. They were forced to pay implicit obedience to their superiors; modesty in demeanour, as becoming their age, was strictly required before their elders; and they had to perform many offices which would now be deemed menial.

First they learned how to manage their horses with ease and dexterity; next how to use the sword, the bow, and the lance. They had to attend upon their lords in hunting--the rules of which, like those of mimic war, had to be carefully studied. The various blasts of the horn, indicating when the hounds were slipped, when the prey was flying, and when it stood at bay, had to be acquired, as also the various tracks of the wild animals--the fox, the wolf, the bear, the wild boar. Nights and days were frequently spent in the pathless woods, and the face of the country had to be carefully studied, while pluck and address were acquired by the necessity of prompt.i.tude when the wild beast stood at bay.

And when the deer or hart was slain they had to "brittle," or break him up, with all precision, and during the banquet they had frequently to carve the haunch or chine, and to do it with some gracefulness.

All these arts were being acquired at the castle of Aescendune by Etienne de Malville, Louis de Marmontier, Pierre de Morlaix, and Wilfred of Aescendune, all of the age of fifteen or sixteen, but more advanced physically than boys of such years would be now; and, sooth to say, the boys had a stern preceptor in Hugo de Malville.

They slept in a common dormitory in one of the towers, on beds resembling boxes, stuffed with straw, with the skins of the wolf or bear for coverlets. They sprang out when the morning horn blew the reveille. First they attended the early ma.s.s in St. Wilfred's monastic church, said at daybreak--for the Normans were very exact in such duties--after which they fenced, rode, or wrestled, and in mimic war gained an appet.i.te for breakfast.

They ate dried meats, as a rule, with their cakes of bread, and washed them down with thin wine or mead, much diluted, and then the forest was generally the rendezvous.

On winter evenings, or when the weather was very bad, the chaplain was expected to teach them a little reading or writing in Latin or Norman French--never in English; and this was almost all the learning they acquired, in the modern sense of the word.

But they knew a hundred things modern boys know nothing at all about, and every muscle and nerve was braced to be steady and true, whether for fight or sport. Our young pages could find their way in the deep woods by observing the moss on the trees, or the sides on which the oaks or elms threw their branches the most freely; and when benighted they could sleep with patience on a couch of withered leaves, and not suffer with a cold in the head the next day. They feared neither wolf nor bear, nor, for that matter, anything save disgrace.

The imputation of cowardice, or of any mean vice, such as lying, was only to be avenged by bloodshed. No gentleman could bear it and retain his claim to the name. But there were higher duties inculcated wheresoever the obligations of chivalry were fully carried out: the duty of succouring the distressed, or redressing wrong--of devotion to G.o.d and His Church, and hatred of the devil and his works.

Alas! how often one aspect of chivalry alone, and that the worst, was found to exist; the ideal was too high for fallen nature. Our youthful readers will be able to judge which aspect was uppermost at Aescendune under its first Norman lords.

Nought was changed in the outward aspect of the scene, save that a stern Norman castle, with its dungeons and towers, was rising in the place of the old hall, doomed to destruction because it was ill adapted for defensive warfare.

Such defect had hardly been appreciated in the days of the old English thane, for England had enjoyed half a century of comparative peace, and her people had begun to build like those who sat at peace beneath their own "vine and fig tree," ere the Normans brought the stern realities of war into the unhappy land, or rather of serfdom, oppression, and slavery, only varied by convulsive struggles for liberty--always, alas! destined to be made in vain.

The four pages were one day wandering in the outskirts of the forest, clothed in light hunting dresses--tunics, confined by broad belts and edged with fur; while leggings protected the feet and ankles from thorns. They each had hunting spears and bows, which were borne by young thralls, with sheaves of arrows strung to their backs, while they held dogs by leashes of leather.

He who bore the air of the leader of the party was tall and dark, of slender build, but with all those characteristics which denoted the conquering race; the fearless eye, the haughty air of those born to command. A second, our readers would have recognised as a typical English boy; his nut-brown hair and blue eyes contrasted strongly with the features of his companions, so marked then were those differences which have long since vanished--vanished, or at least have become so shared amongst the English people, that none can say which is of Anglo-Saxon, which of Norman blood, by the cast of the face.

And this English lad, whose dress in no wise distinguished him from his companions, was evidently ill at ease amongst them; from time to time he reddened as Etienne, Pierre, or Louis called the unhappy thralls "English swine," "young porkers," or the like, and bestowed upon them far more kicks than coins.

"You forget, Etienne, that I am English."

"Nay, my brother Wilfred, thou wilt not allow me to do that, but of course in thy case 'n.o.blesse oblige.'"

These last words were uttered with a most evident sneer, and the other lads laughed aloud; whereupon the English lad reddened, then his fists clenched, and a looker-on would have expected an immediate outbreak, when suddenly a change pa.s.sed over his features, as if he were making a violent effort at self composure.

"Thou hast dropped an arrow, thou young porker," cried Etienne, the while he struck a violent blow with his switch across the face and eyes of one of his attendants; "dost thou think there are so few of thy fellow swine to shoot, that arrows are useless in these woods!

Ah! look at that sight there, and take timely warning."

The sight in question was a gallows, from which rotted, pendant, the corpse of an unhappy Englishman, hanged for killing a deer.

"If every oak in Aescendune woods bore such acorns, civilised folk might soon be happy."

Wilfred uttered a deep malediction, which he could not suppress, and, leaving the party, disappeared from sight in the woods.

One of the Norman lads looked after him with some little appearance of sympathy, and when he had gone, said:

"Is it like gentlemen to torment each other thus?"

"Not each other, certainly!"

"He is your brother in a way, the son of your stepmother, the lady of Aescendune."

"He is in a way, but some brothers would be better out of the way than in it, besides--why does he not show fight? A Norman would with half the provocation."

"You could not fight with him," said Louis de Marmontier, who was the youngest of the pages who were learning "chivalry" at the castle of Aescendune, in company with Etienne and Wilfred, under the fostering care of the baron.

"I don't know," said the fierce young Norman, and, breaking off the conversation, switched savagely at the head of a thistle close at hand, which he neatly beheaded.

The others quite understood the action and the bitterness with which he spoke, for they knew that he considered himself defrauded of the lands of Aescendune by the arrangements Bishop Geoffrey had effected in favour of Wilfred.

Meanwhile, plunging into a thicket, and crossing a brook, Wilfred arrived by a shorter route first at the hall, and made his way to his mother's bower, situated in a portion of the ancient building not yet destroyed, although doomed to make way for Norman improvements.

The lady of Aescendune sat lonely in her bower; her features were pale, and she seemed all too sad for one so highly born, and so good a friend to the suffering and the poor; her gaze was like that of one whose thoughts are far away--perhaps they had strayed into Paradise in search of him whose loss was daily making earth more like a desert to her.

Wilfred came and stood beside her, and her hand played with his flowing hair until she felt that he was sobbing by her side.

"What is the matter, my dear boy?"