"I say not nay, but that all day,It is both writ and said,That woman's faith is, as who sayeth,All utterly decayed;But neverthelesse, right good witnesseIn this case might be laid,That they love true and continue—Recorde the Not-browne mayde;Which, when her love came her to prove,To her to make his mone,Wolde have him part—for in her hartShe loved him but alone."
"I say not nay, but that all day,It is both writ and said,That woman's faith is, as who sayeth,All utterly decayed;But neverthelesse, right good witnesseIn this case might be laid,That they love true and continue—Recorde the Not-browne mayde;Which, when her love came her to prove,To her to make his mone,Wolde have him part—for in her hartShe loved him but alone."
"I say not nay, but that all day,It is both writ and said,That woman's faith is, as who sayeth,All utterly decayed;But neverthelesse, right good witnesseIn this case might be laid,That they love true and continue—Recorde the Not-browne mayde;Which, when her love came her to prove,To her to make his mone,Wolde have him part—for in her hartShe loved him but alone."
"I say not nay, but that all day,
It is both writ and said,
That woman's faith is, as who sayeth,
All utterly decayed;
But neverthelesse, right good witnesse
In this case might be laid,
That they love true and continue—
Recorde the Not-browne mayde;
Which, when her love came her to prove,
To her to make his mone,
Wolde have him part—for in her hart
She loved him but alone."
The Not-Browne Mayde.
How true a thing is it of the human heart, and alas! how pitiful a thing, that use has such wondrous power over it, whether for good or for evil; but mostly—perhaps because such is its original nature—unto evil. Custom will harden the softest spirit to the ice-brook's temper, and blind the clearest philosophic eye to all discrimination, that things the most horrible to behold shall be beheld with pleasure, and things the most unjust regarded as simple justice, or, at least, as the inevitable course and pervading law of nature. True as this is, in all respects, in none is it more clearly or fatally discoverable than in every thing connected with what may be called slavery, in the largest sense—including the subjugation, by whatever means, not only of man to man, but even of animals to the human race. In all such cases, it would appear that the hardening and deteriorating influence of habit, and perhaps the unavoidable tendency to believe every thing subordinate as in itself inferior, soon brings the mind to regard the power to enforce and the capacity to perform, as the rule of justice between the worker and the master.
The generally good and kind-hearted man, who has all his life been used to see his beasts of burden dragging a few pounds' weight above their proper and merciful load, soon comes to regard the extraordinary measure as the proper burden, and to look upon the hapless brute, which is pining away by inches, in imperceptible and insensible decay, as merely performing the work, and filling the station, to perform and fill which it was created. And so, and yet more fatally, as regards the subjugation of man, or a class of men, to man. We commence by degrading, and end by thinking of him as of one naturally degraded. We reduce him to the standard and condition of a brute, then assume that he is but a brute in feelings, intellect, capacity to acquire, and thence argue—in the narrowest of circles—that being but a brute, it is but right and natural to deal with him as what he is. Nor is this tendency of the human mind limited in its operation to actual slavery; but prevails, more or less, in relation to all servitude and inferiority, voluntary or involuntary; so that many of the best, all indeed but the very best, among us, come in the end to look upon all, placed by circumstances and society in inferior positions, as inferiors in very deed, and as naturally unequal to themselves in every capacity, even that of enjoyment, and to regard them, in fact, as a subordinate class of animals and beings of a lower range of creation.
This again, still working in a circle, tends really to lower the inferior person; and, by the tendency of association, the inferior class; until degenerating still, as must occur, from sire to son, through centuries, the race itself sinks from social into natural degradation.
This had already occurred in a very great degree in the Saxon serfs of England, who had been slaves of Saxons, for many centuries, before the arrival of the Norman conquerors. The latter made but small distinction, in general, between the free-born and the slave of the conquered race, but reduced them all to one common state of misery and real or quasi-servitude—for many, who had once been land-holders and masters, sunk into a state of want and suffering so pitiable and so abject, that, generation succeeding generation with neither the means nor the ambition to rise, they became almost undistinguishable from the original serfs, and in many instances either sold themselves into slavery to avoid actual starvation, or were seized and enslaved, in defiance of all law, in the dark and troublous time which followed the Norman conquest.
There being then two classes of serfs existing on British soil, though not recognized as different by law, or in any wise differing in condition, Kenric, himself descended in the third degree from a freeman and landholder, exhibited a fair specimen at the first; although it by no means followed of course that men in his relative position were actually superior to the progeny of those, who could designate no point before which their ancestors were free. And this became evident, at once, to those who looked at the characters of Kenric the Dark, and Eadwulf the Red, of whom the former was in all respects a man of sterling qualities, frank, bold demeanor, and all the finer characteristics of independent, hardy, English manhood; while the second, though his own brother, was a rude, sullen, thankless, spiritless, obstinate churl, with nothing of the man, except his sordid, sensual appetites, and every thing of the beast, except his tameless pride and indomitable freedom.
It was, therefore, even with one of the better class of these unfortunate men, a matter of personal character and temper, whether he retained something of the relative superiority he bore to his yet more unfortunate companions in slavery, or whether he sank self-lowered to their level. Nothing, it is true, had either to which he might aspire; no hope of bettering his condition; no chance of rising in the scale of humanity. Acts of emancipation, as rewards of personal service, had been rare even among the Saxons, since, the utmost personal service being due by the thrall to his lord, no act of personal service, unless in most extreme cases, could be esteemed a merit; and such serfs as owed their freedom to the voluntary commiseration of their owners, owed it, in the great majority of cases, to their superstition rather than to their mercy, and were liberated on the deathbed, when they could serve their masters in no otherwise, than in becoming an atonement for their sins, and smoothing their path through purgatory to paradise.
With the Normans, the chance of liberation was diminished an hundred-fold; for the degraded race, held in utter abhorrence and contempt, and looked upon as scarce superior to the abject Jew, was excluded from all personal contact with their haughty lords, who rarely so much as knew them by sight or by name—was incapable of serving them directly, in the most menial capacity—and, therefore, could hardly, by the wildest good fortune, hope for a chance of attracting even observation, much less such praise as would be like to induce the high boon of liberty.
Again, on the deathbed, the Norman knight or noble, scarce condescending to think of his serf as a human being, could never have entertained so preposterous an idea, as that the better or worse usage, nay! even the life or death of hundreds of these despised wretches could weigh either for him or against him, before the throne of grace. So that the deathbed emancipations, which had been so frequent before the conquest, and which were recommended and inculcated by abbots and prelates, while abbots and prelates were of Saxon blood, as acts acceptable on high, now that the high clergy, like the high barons of the realm, were strangers to the children of the soil, had fallen into almost absolute disuse.
In fact, in the twelfth century, the Saxon serf-born man had little more chance of acquiring his freedom, than an English peasant of the present day has of becoming a temporal or spiritual peer of the realm; and, lacking all object for emulation or exertion, these men too often justified the total indifference with which they were looked upon by the owners of the soil. This fact, or rather this condition of things in their physical and moral aspect, has been dwelt upon, somewhat at length, in order to show how it is possible that a gentleman of the highest birth, of intellects, acquirements, ideas of justice and right, vastly more correct than those entertained by the majority of his caste—a gentleman, sensitive, courteous, kindly, the very mirror of faith and honor—should have distorted devotion so noble, faith so disinterested, a sense of honor so high, a piety so pure, as that displayed by Kenric the Dark, in his refusal of the bright jewel liberty, in his eloquent assertion of his rights, his sympathies, his spiritual essence as a man, into an act ofoutrecuidance, almost into a personal affront to his own dignity. Yet, so it was, and alas! naturally so—for so little was he, or any of his fellows, used to consider his serf in the light of an arguing, thinking, responsible being, that probably Balaam was but little more astonished when his ass turned round on him and spoke, than was Yvo de Taillebois, when the serf of the soil stood up in his simple dignity as a man, and refused to be free, unless those he loved, whom it was his duty to support, cherish, shield, and comfort, might be free together with him. Certain it is, that he left the cottage which he had entered full of gratitude, and eager to be the bearer of good tidings, disappointed, exasperated against Kenric, vexed that his endeavors to prove his gratitude had been frustrated, and equally uncertain how he should disclose the unwelcome tidings to his daughter, and how reconcile to his host the conduct of the Saxon, which he had remained in the hope of fathoming, and explaining to his satisfaction.
In truth, he felt himself indignant and wounded at the unreasonable perduracy of the man, in refusing an inestimable boon, for what he chose to consider a cause so trivial; and this, too, though had he himself been in the donjon of the infidel, expecting momentary death by the faggot or the rack, and been offered liberty, life, empire, immortality, on condition of leaving the least-valued Christian woman to the harem of the Mussulman, he would have spurned the offer with his most arrogant defiance.
This seemed to him much as it would seem to the butcher, if the bull, with the knife at his throat, were to speak up and refuse to live, unless his favorite heifer might be allowed to share his fortunes. It appeared to him wondrous, indeed, but wondrously annoying, and almost absurd. In no respect did it strike him as one of the noblest and most generous deeds of self-abandonment of which the human soul is capable; though, had the self-same offer been spurned, as the slave spurned it, and in the very words which he had found in the rude eloquence of indignation, by belted knight or crowned king, he had unhesitatingly styled it an action of the highest glory, and worthy of immortal record in herald's tale or minstrel's story. Such is the weight of circumstance upon the noblest minds of men.
With his brow bent, and his arms folded on his breast, moodily, almost sorrowfully, did the good knight of Taillebois wend his way back toward the towers of Waltheofstow, making no effort to overtake his brother-in-arms and entertainer, whom he could clearly see stalking along before him, in no more placable mood than himself, but burying himself on his return in his own chamber, whence he made his appearance no more that evening; though he might hear Sir Philip storming through the castle, till the vaulted halls and passages resounded from barbican to battlement.
Meantime, in the lowly cottage of the serf—for the lord, though angry and indignant, had not failed of his plighted word—the lykewake of the dead boy went on—for that was a Saxon no less than a Celtic custom, though celebrated by the former with a sort of stolid decorum, as different as night is from day from the loud and barbarous orgies of their wilder neighbors.
The consecrated tapers blazed around the swathed and shrouded corpse, and sent long streams of light through the open door and lattices of the humble dwelling, as though it had been illuminated for a high rejoicing. The death hymn was chanted, and the masses sung by the gray brothers from the near Saxon cloister. The dole to the poor had been given, largely, out of the lord's abundance; and the voices of the rioting slaves, emancipated from all servitude and sorrow, for the nonce, by the humming ale and strong metheglin, were loud in praises of their bounteous master, until, drenched and stupefied with liquor, and drunk with maudlin sorrow, they staggered off to their respective dens, to snore away the fumes of their unusual debauch, until aroused at dawn by the harsh cry of the task-master.
By degrees the quiet of the calm summer night sank down over the dwelling and garden of Kenric, as guest after guest departed, until no one remained save one old Saxon brother, who sat by the simple coffin, telling his beads in silence, or muttering masses for the soul of the dead, apparently unconscious of any thing passing around him.
The aged woman had been removed, half by persuasion, half by gentle force, from the dwelling-room, and had soon sunk into the heavy and lethargic slumber which oftentimes succeeds to overwhelming sorrow. The peaceful moonlight streamed in through the open door of the cheerless home, like the grace of heaven into a disturbed and sinful heart, as one by one the tapers flickered in their sockets and expired. The shrill cry of the cricket, and the peculiar jarring note of the night-hawk, replaced the droning of the monkish chants, and the suppressed tumult of vulgar revelry; but, though there was solitude and silence without, there was neither peace nor heart-repose within.
Sorely shaken, and cruelly gored by the stag in trunk and limbs, and yet more sorely shaken in his mind by the agitation and excitement of the angry scene with his master, and by the internal conflict of natural selfishness with strong conscientious will, Kenric lay, with his eyes wide open, gazing on his dead nephew, although his mind was far away, with his head throbbing, and his every nerve jerking and tense with the hot fever.
But by his side, soothing his restless hand with her caressing touch, bathing his burning temples with cold lotions, holding the soft medicaments to his parched lips, beguiling his wild, wandering thoughts with gentle lover's chidings, and whispering of better days to come, sat the fair slave girl, Edith, his promised wife, for whose dear sake he had cast liberty to the four winds, and braved the deadly terrors of the unforgiving Norman frown.
She had heard enough, as she entered the house at that decisive moment, to comprehend the whole; and, if the proud and high-born knights were at a loss to understand, much less appreciate, the noble virtue of the serf, the poor uneducated slave girl had seen and felt it all—felt it thrill to her heart's core, and inspire her weakness with equal strength, equal devotion.
She had argued, she had prayed, she had implored, clinging to his knees, that for the love of Heaven, for the love of herself, he would accept the boon of freedom, and leave her to her fate, which would be sweeter far to her, she swore, from the knowledge of his prosperity, than it could be rendered by the fruition of the greatest worldly bliss. And then, when she found prayer and supplication fruitless, she, too, waxed strong and glorious. She lifted her hand to heaven, and swore before the blessed Virgin and her ever-living Son, that, would he yield to her entreaties and be free, she would be true to him, and to him alone, forever; but should he still persist in his wicked and mad refusal of God's own most especial gift of freedom, she would at least deprive him of the purpose of his impious resolution, place an impenetrable barrier between them two, and profess herself the bride of Heaven.
At length, as he only chafed and resisted more and more, till resistance and fever were working almost delirium—any thing but conviction and repentance—like a true woman, she betook herself from argument, and tears, and supplication, to comforting, consoling, and caressing; and, had the rage and fever of his body, or the terrible excitement of his tortured mind, been less powerful, she could not but have won the day, in the noblest of all strifes—the strife of mutual disinterestedness and devotion.
"O woman! in our hours of ease,Inconstant, coy, and hard to please;When pain and anguish rend the brow,A ministering angel thou!"
"O woman! in our hours of ease,Inconstant, coy, and hard to please;When pain and anguish rend the brow,A ministering angel thou!"
"O woman! in our hours of ease,Inconstant, coy, and hard to please;When pain and anguish rend the brow,A ministering angel thou!"
"O woman! in our hours of ease,
Inconstant, coy, and hard to please;
When pain and anguish rend the brow,
A ministering angel thou!"
"Four gray walls, and four square towers,Overlook a space of flowers,And the silent isle imbowers,The Lady of Shalott."
"Four gray walls, and four square towers,Overlook a space of flowers,And the silent isle imbowers,The Lady of Shalott."
"Four gray walls, and four square towers,Overlook a space of flowers,And the silent isle imbowers,The Lady of Shalott."
"Four gray walls, and four square towers,
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers,
The Lady of Shalott."
Tennyson.
High up in the gray square tower, which constituted the keep of the castle of Waltheofstow, there was a suite of apartments, the remains of which are discoverable to this day, known as the Lady's Bower; which had, it is probable, from the construction of the edifice, been set apart, not only as the private chambers of the chatelaine and ladies of the family, her casual guests and their attendants, but as what we should now call the drawing-rooms, wherein the more social hours of those rude days were passed, when the sexes intermingled, whether for the enjoyment of domestic leisure, or for gayety and pleasure.
The keep of Waltheofstow consisted, as did indeed all the smaller fortalices of that date, when private dwellings, even of the great and powerful, were constructed with a view to defense above all beside, of one large massive building of an oblong square form, with a solid circular buttress at each angle, which, above the basement floor, was hollowed into a lozenge-shaped turret, extending above the esplanade of the highest battlements, and terminating at a giddy height in a crenellated and machicolated lookout, affording a shelter to the sentries, and a flanking defense to thecorps de logis.
For its whole height, from the guard-room, which occupied the whole ground-floor, to the battlements, one of these turrets contained the great winding stone staircase of the castle, lighted at the base by mere shot-holes and loops, but, as it rose higher and higher above the danger of escalade, by mullioned windows of increasing magnitude, until, at the very summit, it was surmounted by a beautifully-wrought lanthorn of Gothic stone-work. The other three, lighted in the same manner, better and better as they ascended, formed each a series of small pleasant rooms, opening upon the several stories, and for the most part were fitted as the sleeping-rooms of the various officers.
The whole floor, first above the guard-room, was divided into the kitchen, butteries, and household offices; while the next in order, being the third in elevation above the court-yard, was reserved in one superb parallelogram of ninety feet by sixty, well lighted by narrow lanceolated windows, and adorned with armors of plate and mail, scutcheons rich with heraldic bearings, antlers of deer and elk, horns of the bull, yet surviving, of the great Caledonian forests, skulls of the grizzly boars grinning with their ivory tusks, and banners dependent from the lofty groinings of the arched roof, trophies of many a glorious day. This was the knight's hall, the grand banqueting-saloon of the keep; while of its three turrets, one was the castle chapel, a second a smaller dining-hall, and the last the private cabinet and armory of the castellan. Above this, again, on the fourth plat, were bed-chambers of state, the larger armory, and the dormitories of the warders, esquires, pages, and seneschal, who alone dwelt within the keep, the rest of the garrison occupying the various out-buildings and towers upon the flanking walls and ramparts.
The fifth story, at least a hundred feet in air above the inner court, and nearly thrice that elevation above the base of the scarped mount on which the castle stood, contained the Lady's bower; and its whole area of ninety feet by sixty was divided, in the first instance, laterally by three partitions, into three apartments, each sixty feet in length by thirty wide. Of these, however, the first and last were subdivided equally in two squares of thirty feet. The whole of the bower, thus, contained a handsome ante-chamber, opening from the great staircase, with a large room for the waiting-women to the right, communicating with the turret chamber corresponding to the stairway. Beyond the vestibule, by which access was had to it, lay the grand ladies' hall, furnished with all the superabundance of splendor and magnificence, and all the lack of real convenience, which was the characteristic of the time; divans, and deep settles, and ponderous arm-chairs covered with gold and velvet; embroideries and emblazoned foot-cloths on the floor; mirrors of polished steel, emulating Venetian crystals, on the walls; mighty candelabra of silver gilt; tables of many kinds, some made for the convenience of long-forgotten games, some covered with cups and vessels of gold, silver, and richly-colored glass, and one or two, smaller, and set away in quiet nooks, with easy seats beside them, showing the feminine character of the occupants, by a lute, a gittern, and two or three other musical implements long since fallen into disuse; pages of music written in the old musical notation of the age; some splendidly-bound and illuminated missals and romances, in priceless manuscript, each actually worth its weight in gold; silks and embroideries; a working-stand, with a gorgeous surcoat of arms half finished, the needle sticking in the superb material where the fairy fingers had left it, when last called from their gentle task; and great vases full of the finest flowers of the season.
Such was the aspect of the room, beheld by the declining rays of the sun, which had already sunk so low that his stray beams, instead of falling downward through the gorgeous hues of the tinted-windows, streamed upward into that lofty place, playing on the richly-carved and gilded ceilings, catching here on a mirror, there on a vase of gold or silver, and sending hundreds of burning specks of light dancing through the motley haze of gold and purple, which formed the atmosphere of that almost royal bower.
From this rich withdrawing-room, strangely out of place in appearance, though not so in reality, in the old gray Norman fortress, among the din of arms and flash of harness, opened two bed-rooms, equal in costliness of decoration to the saloon without, each having its massive four-post bedstead in a recess, accessible by three or four broad steps, as if it were a throne of honor, each with its mirror and toilet, its appurtenances for the bath, its easy couches, and its chair of state; itsprie dieuand kneeling-hassock, in a niche, with a perfumed lamp burning before a rudely-painted picture of the Madonna, each having communication with a pretty turret-chamber, fitted with couch and reading-desk, and opening on a bartizan or balcony, which, though they were intended in times of war or danger for posts of vantage to the defense, whence to shower missiles or pour seething pitch or oil on the heads of assailants, were filled in the pleasant days of peace with shrubs and flowers, planted in large tubs and troughs, waving green and joyous, and filling the air with sweet smells two hundred feet above their dewy birth-place.
It may be added, that so thick and massive were the walls at this almost inaccessible height, that galleries had been, as it were, scooped out of them, offering easy communication from one room to another, and even private staircases from story to story, with secret closets large enough for the accommodation of a favorite page or waiting-damsel, where nothing of the sort would be expected, or could indeed exist, within a modern dwelling.
Thus, the inconveniences of such an abode, all except the height to which it was necessary for the female inmates to climb, were more imaginary than real; and it was perfectly easy, and indeed usual, for the ladies of such a castle to pass to and fro from the rooms of their husbands, fathers, or brothers, and even from the knights' hall to their own bower, without meeting any of the retainers of the place, except what may be called the peaceful and familiar servants of the household.
Through the thick-vaulted roofs of stone, which rendered every story of the keep a separate fortress, no sound of arms, of revelry or riot, could ascend to the region of the ladies; and if their comforts were inferior to those of our modern beauties, their magnificence, their splendor of costume, of equipage, of followings, their power at home, and their influence abroad, where they shone as "Queens of Love and Beauty," were held the arbiters of fame and dispensers of honor, where their smiles were held sufficient guerdon for all wildest feats of bravery, their tears expiable by blood only, their importance in the outer world of arms, of romance, of empire, were at the least as far superior; and it may be doubted, whether some, even the most spoiled of our modern fair ones, would not sigh to exchange, with the dames and demoiselles of the twelfth century, their own soft empire of the ball-room for the right to hold Courts of Love, as absolute unquestioned sovereigns, to preside at tilt and tournament, and send the noblest and the most superb of champions into mortal combat, or yet more desperate adventure, by the mere promise of a sleeve, a kerchief, or a glove.
She, however, who now occupied alone the Lady's Bower of Waltheofstow was none of your proud and court-hardened ladies, who could look with no emotion beyond a blush of gratified vanity on the blood of an admirer or a lover. Though for her, young as she was, steeds had been spurred to the shock, and her name shouted among the splintering of lances and the crash of mortal conflict, she was still but a simple, amiable, and joyous child, who knew more of the pleasant fields and waving woodlands of her fair lake-country, than of the tilt-yard, the court pageant, or the carousal, and who better loved to see the heather-blossom and the blue-bell dance in the free air of the breezy fells, than plumes and banners flaunt and flutter to the blare of trumpets.
The only child of Sir Yvo de Taillebois, a knight and noble of the unmixed Norman blood, a lineal descendant of one of those hardy barons who, landing with Duke William on his almost desperate emprise, had won "the bloody hand" at Hastings, and gained rich lands in the northern counties during the protracted struggle which ensued, the Lady Guendolen had early lost her mother, a daughter of the noble house of Morville, and not a very distant relative of the good knight, Sir Philip, whose hospitality she was now partaking with her father.
To a girl, for the most part, the loss of a mother, before she has reached the years of discretion, is one never to be repaired, more especially where the surviving parent is so much occupied with duties, martial or civil, as to render his supervision of her bringing-up impossible. It is true that, in the age of which I write, the accomplishments possessed by the most delicate and refined of ladies were few and slight, as compared to those now so sedulously inculcated to our maidens, so regularly abandoned by our matrons; and that, at a period later by several centuries, he who has been styled, by an elegant writer,3the last of the Norman barons, great Warwick the Kingmaker, held it a boast that his daughters possessed no arts, no knowledge, more than to spin and to be chaste.
Yet even this small list of feminine attainments was far beyond the teaching of the illiterate and warlike barons, who knew nought of the pen, save when it winged the gray-goose shaft from the trusty yew, and whose appropriate and ordinary signatures were the impress of their sword-hilts on the parchments, which they did not so much as pretend to read; and, in truth, the Kingmaker's statement must either be regarded as an exaggeration, or the standard of female accomplishment had degenerated, as is not unlikely to have been actually the case, during the cruel and devastating wars of the Roses, which, how little soever they may have affected the moral, political, or agricultural condition of the English people at large, had unquestionably dealt a blow to the refinement, the courtesy, the mental culture, and personal polish of the English aristocracy, from which they began only to recover in the reigns of the later Tudors.
But in the case of the fair Guendolen, neither did the loss of her mother deprive her of the advantages of her birth, nor would the incapacity of her father, had the occasion been allowed him of superintending the culture of his child, have done so; for he was—at that day rarer in England than was a wolf, though literary culture had received some impulse from the present monarch, and his yet more accomplished father, Beauclerc—a man of intellectual ability, and not a little cultivation.
He had been largely employed by both princes on the continent, in diplomatic as well as military capacities; had visited Provence, the court of poetry and minstrelsy, and thegai science; had dwelt in the Norman courts of Italy, and even in Rome herself, then the seat of all the rising schools of literature, art, and science; and while acquiring, almost of necessity, the tongues of southern Europe, had both softened and enlarged his mind by not a few of their acquirements. Of this advantage, however, it was only of late years, when she was bursting into the fairest dawn of adolescence, that she had been permitted to profit; for, between her fifth and her fifteenth years, she had seen but little of her father, who, constantly employed, either as a statesman at home, an embassador abroad, or a conquering invader of the wild Welsh marches, or the wilder and more barbarous shores of Ireland, had rarely been permitted to call a day his own, much less to devote himself to those home duties and pleasures for which he was, beyond doubt, more than ordinarily qualified.
Yet, however unfortunate she might have been in this particular, she had been as happy in other respects, and had been brought up under circumstances which had produced no better consequences on her head than on her heart, on the graces of her mind and body, than on the formation of her feminine and gentle character.
"The sweetest lady of the time,—Well worthy of the golden primeOf good Haroun Alraschid."
"The sweetest lady of the time,—Well worthy of the golden primeOf good Haroun Alraschid."
"The sweetest lady of the time,—Well worthy of the golden primeOf good Haroun Alraschid."
"The sweetest lady of the time,—
Well worthy of the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid."
Alfred Tennyson.
A sister of Guendolen's departed mother, Abbess of St. Hilda, a woman of unusual intellect, and judgment, character and feelings, in no degree inferior to her talents, had taken charge of her orphan niece immediately after the mother's death, and had brought her up, a flower literally untouched by the sun as by the storms of the world, in the serene and tranquil life of the cloister, when the cloister was indeed the seat of piety, and purity, and peace; in some cases the only refuge from the violence and savage lusts of those rugged days; never then the abode, at least in England, of morose bigotry or fierce fanaticism, but the home of quiet contemplation, of meek virtue, and peaceful cheerfulness.
The monasteries and priories of those days were not the sullen gaols of the soul, the hives of drones, or the schools of ignorance and bitter sectarian persecution which they have become in these latter days, nor were their inmates then immured as the tenants of the dungeon cell.
The abbey lands were ever the best tilled; the abbey tenants ever the happiest, the best clad, the richest, and the freest of the peasantry of England. The monks, those of Saxon race especially, were the country curates of the twelfth century; it was they who fed the hungry, who medicined the sick, who consoled the sad at heart, who supported the widow and the fatherless, who supported the oppressed, and smoothed the passage through the dark portals to the dying Christian. There were no poor laws in those days, nor alms-houses; the open gates and liberal doles of the old English abbeys bestowed unstinted and ungrudging charity on all who claimed it. The abbot on his soft-paced palfrey, or the prioress on her well-trained jennet, as they made their progresses through the green fields and humble hamlets of their dependents, were hailed ever with deferential joy and affectionate reverence; and the serf, who would lout sullenly before the haughty brow of his military chief, and scowl savagely with hand on the dudgeon hilt after he had ridden past, would run a mile to remove a fallen trunk from the path of the jolly prior, or three, to guide the jennet of the mild-eyed lady abbess through the difficult ford, or over the bad bit of the road, and think himself richly paid by a benediction.
In such a tranquil tenor had been passed the early years of the beautiful young Guendolen; and while she learned every accomplishment of the day—for in those days the nunneries were the schools of all that was delicate, and refined, and gentle, the schools of the softer arts, especially of music and illumination, as were the monasteries the shrines which alone kept alive the fire of science, and nursed the lamp of letters, undying through those dark and dreary ages—she learned also to be humble-minded, no less than holy-hearted, to be compassionate, and kind, and sentient of others' sorrows; she learned, above all things, that meekness and modesty, and a gentle bearing toward the lowliest of her fellow-beings, were the choicest ornaments to a maiden of the loftiest birth.
Herself a Norman of the purest Norman strain, descended from those of whom, if not kings themselves, kings were descended, who claimed to be the peers of the monarchs to whom their own good swords gave royalty, she had never imbibed one idea of scorn for the conquered, the debased, the downfallen Saxon.
The kindest, the gentlest, the sagest, and at the same time the most refined and polished of all her preceptors, her spiritual pastor also, and confessor, was an old Saxon monk, originally from the convent of Burton on the Trent, who had migrated northward, and pitched the tent of his declining years in a hermitage situate in the glade of a deep Northumbrian wood, not far removed from the priory over which her aunt presided with so much dignity and grace.
He had been a pilgrim, a prisoner in the Holy Land, had visited the wild monasteries of Lebanon and Athos; he had seen the pyramids "piercing the deep Egyptian sky," had mused under the broken arches of the Coliseum, and listened, like the great historian of Rome, to the bare-footed friars chanting their hymns among the ruins of Jupiter Capitoline.
Like Ulysses, he had seen the lands, he had studied the manners, and learned to speak the tongues, of many men and nations; nor, while he had learned in the east strange mysteries of science, though he had solved the secrets of chemistry, and learned, long before the birth of "starry Galileo," to know the stars with their uprisings and their settings; though he knew the nature, the properties, the secret virtues, and the name of every floweret of the forest, of every ore of the swart mine, he had not neglected the gentler culture, which wreathes so graciously the wrinkled brow of wisdom. Not a poet himself, so far as the weaving the mysterious chains of rhythm, he was a genuine poet of the heart. Not a blush, not a smile, not a tear, not a frown on the lovely face of nature, but awakened a response in his large and sympathetic soul; not an emotion of the human heart, from the best to the basest, but struck within him some chord of deep and hidden feeling; to read an act of self-devoted courage, of charity, of generosity, of self-denial, would make his flesh quiver, his hair rise, his cheek burn. To hear of great deeds would stir him as with the blast of a war trumpet. He was one, in fact, of those gifted beings who could discern
"Music in running brooks,Sermons in stones, and good in every thing;"
"Music in running brooks,Sermons in stones, and good in every thing;"
"Music in running brooks,Sermons in stones, and good in every thing;"
"Music in running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing;"
and as he felt himself, so had he taught her to feel; and of what he knew himself, much he had taught her to know likewise.
Seeing, hearing, knowing him to be what he was, and, as is the wont ever with young and ingenuous minds, imagining him to be something far wiser, greater, and better than he really was, she was content at first, while other men were yet unknown to her, to hold him something almost supernaturally, ineffably beneficent and wise; and this incomparable being she knew also to be a Saxon. She saw her aunt, who, gentle as she was, and gracious, had yet a touch of the old Norse pride of blood, untutored by the teachings of religion, and untamed by the discipline of the church, bow submissively to his advice, defer respectfully to his opinion, hang persuaded on his eloquence—and yet he was a Saxon.
When she burst from girlhood into womanhood—when her father, returned from the honors and the toils of foreign service, introduced her into the grand scenes of gorgeous chivalry and royal courtesy, preparatory to placing her at the head of his house—though she mingled with the paladins and peers of Normandy and Norman England, she saw not one who could compare in wisdom, in eloquence, in all that is highest and most heaven-reaching in the human mind, with the old Saxon, Father Basil.
How then could she look upon the race from which he sprang as inferior—as low and degraded by the hand of nature—when not the sagest statesman, the most royal prince, the proudest chevalier, the gentlest troubadour, could vie with him in one point of intellect or of refinement—with him, the Saxon priest, son himself, as he himself had told her, of a Saxon serf.
These were the antecedents, this the character of the beautiful girl, who, on the morning following her adventure in the forest, lay, supported by a pile of cushions, on one of the broad couches in the Lady's Bower of Waltheofstow, inhaling the fresh perfumed breath of the western air, as it swept in, over the shrubs and flowers in the bartizan, through the window of the turret chamber. She was beautiful as ever, but very pale, and still suffering, as it would seem, from the effects of her fall and the injuries she had received in the struggle with the terrible wild beast; for, whenever she attempted to move or to turn her body, an expression of pain passed for a moment across the pure, fair face, and once a slight murmur escaped from her closed lips.
One or two waiting-maids, of Norman race, attended by the side of her couch, one of them cooling her brow with a fan of peacock's feathers, the other sprinkling perfumes through the chamber, and now and again striving to amuse her by reading aloud from a ponderous illuminated tome, larger than a modern cyclopedia, the interminable adventures and sufferings of that true love, whose "course never did run smooth," and feats of knightly prowess, recorded in one of the interminable romances of the time. But to none of these did the Lady Guendolen seriously incline her ear; and the faces of the attendant girls began to wear an expression, not of weariness only, but of discontent, and, perhaps, even of a deeper and bitterer feeling.
The Lady Guendolen was ill at ease; she was, most rare occurrence for one of her soft though impulsive disposition, impatient, perhaps querulous.
She could not be amused by any of their efforts. Her mind was far away; she craved something which they could not give, and was restless at their inability. Three times since her awakening, though the hour was still early, she had inquired for Sir Yvo, and had sent to desire his presence. The first time, her messengers brought her back word that he had not yet arisen; the second, that he was breakfasting, but now, in the knight's hall with Sir Philip, and the Sieurs of Maltravers, De Vesey, and Mauleverer, who had ridden over to Waltheofstow to fly their hawks, and that he would be with her ere long; and the third, that the good knight must have forgotten, for that he had taken horse and ridden away with the rest of the company into the meadows by the banks of brimful Idle, to enjoy the "Mystery of Rivers," as it was the fashion to term the sport of falconry, in the high-flown language of the chase.
For a moment her pale face flushed, her eye flashed, and she bit her lip, and drummed impatiently with her little fingers on the velvet-pillows which supported her aching head; then, smiling at her own momentary ill-humor, she bade her girl Marguerite go seek the Saxon maiden, Edith, if she were in the castle, and if not, to see that a message should be sent down for her to the serfs' quarter.
With many a toss of her pretty head, and many a wayward feminine expression of annoyance, which from ruder lips would probably have taken the shape of an imprecation, the injured damsel betook herself, through winding passages and stairways in the thickness of the wall, to the pages' waiting-chamber on the next floor below. Then tripping, with a demure look, into the square vaulted room, in which were lounging three gayly-dressed, long-haired boys, one twanging a guitar in the embrasure of the window, and the other two playing at tables on a board covered with a scarlet cloth—
"Here, Damian," she said, somewhat sharply, for the temper of the mistress is sure to be reflected in that of the maid, losing nothing by the transmission, "for what are you loitering there, with that old tuneless gittern, when the Lady Guendolen has been calling for you this hour past?"
"And how, in the name of St. Hubert," replied the boy, who had rather been out with the falconers on the breezy leas, than mewed in the hall to await a lady's pleasure—"how, in the name of St. Hubert! should I know that the Lady Guendolen had called for me, when no one has been near this old den since Sir Yvo rode forth on brown Roncesval, with Diamond on his fist? And as for my gittern being tuneless, I've heard you tell a different tale, pretty Mistress Marguerite. But let us have your message, if you've got one; for I see you're as fidgety as a thorough-bred sorrel filly, and as hot-tempered, too."
"Sorrel filly, indeed!" said the girl, half-laughing, half-indignant. "I wish you could see my lady, Damian, if you call me fidgety and hot-tempered. I wish you could see my lady, that's just all, this morning."
"The message, the message, Marguerite, if there be one, or if you have aught in your head but to make mischief."
"Why, I do believe my lady's bewitched since her fall; for nothing will go down with her now-a-days but that pink-and-white, flaxen-haired doll, Edith. I can't think what she sees in her, that she must needs ever have the clumsy Saxon wench about her. I should think gentle Norman blood might serve her turn."
"I don't know, Marguerite," answered the boy, wishing to tease her; "Edith is a very pretty girl, indeed; I don't know but she's the very prettiest I ever saw. Dark-haired and dark-eyed people always admire their opposites, they say; and for my part, I think her blue eyes glance as if they reflected heaven's own light in them; and her flaxen-hair looks like a cloud high up in heaven, that has just caught the first golden glitter of the morning sunbeams. And clumsy! how can you call her clumsy, Marguerite? I am sure, when she came flitting down the hill, with her long locks flowing in the breeze, and her thin garments streaming back from her shapely figure, she looked liker to a creature of the air, than to a mere mortal girl, running down a sandy road. I should like to see you run like her, Mistress Marguerite."
"Me run!" exclaimed the Norman damsel, indignantly; "when ever did you see a Norman ladyrun? But you're just like the rest of them; caught ever by the first fresh face. Well, sir, since you're so bewitched, like my pretty lady above stairs, with your Saxon angel, the message I have brought you will just meet your humor. You will see, sir, if this Saxon angel be in the castle, sir; and if she be not, sir, your magnificence will proceed to the Saxon quarter, and request her angelship to come forthwith to my lady's chamber, and to come quickly, too. And you can escort her, Sir Page, and lend her your hand up the hill; and steal a kiss, if you can, Sir Page, on the way!"
"Just so, Mistress Marguerite," returned the boy, "just so. Your commands shall be obeyed to the letter. And as to the kiss, I'll try, if I can get a chance; but I'm afraid she's too modest to kiss young men."
And, taking up his dirk and bonnet from the board, he darted out of the room, without awaiting her reply, having succeeded, to his heart's content, in chafing her to somewhat higher than blood-heat; so that she returned to her lady's bower even more discomposed than when she left it; but Guendolen was too much occupied with other thoughts to notice the girl's ill-temper, and within half an hour a light foot was heard at the door, and the Saxon slave girl entered.
"How can I serve you, dear lady?" she said, coming up, and kneeling at the couch side. "You are very pale. I trust you be not the worse this morning."
"Very weak, Edith, and sore all over. I feel as if every limb were broken; and I want you, with your gentle hand and gentle voice, to soothe me."
"Ah! dearest lady, our Holy Mother send that your spirit never may be so sore as to take no heed of the body's aching, nor your heart so broken as to know not whether your limbs were torn asunder."
"Weep not for him that dieth,For his struggling soul is free,And the world from which it fliethIs a world of misery;But weep for him that wearethThe collar and the chain;To the agony he beareth,Death were but little pain."
"Weep not for him that dieth,For his struggling soul is free,And the world from which it fliethIs a world of misery;But weep for him that wearethThe collar and the chain;To the agony he beareth,Death were but little pain."
"Weep not for him that dieth,For his struggling soul is free,And the world from which it fliethIs a world of misery;But weep for him that wearethThe collar and the chain;To the agony he beareth,Death were but little pain."
"Weep not for him that dieth,
For his struggling soul is free,
And the world from which it flieth
Is a world of misery;
But weep for him that weareth
The collar and the chain;
To the agony he beareth,
Death were but little pain."
Caroline Norton.
"What mean you, Edith?" inquired the girl, raising herself from her pillow, as her attention was called to the unusually subdued tones of the Saxon maiden, who was, in her ordinary mood, so gay and joyous, and who appeared to be the general favorite of all around her; "what mean you, Edith?" she repeated; "you can not be speaking of yourself; you, who are ever blithesome and light-hearted as the bee on the blossom, or the bird on the bough. You can have no sorrows of the heart, I think, so penetrating as to make all outward bodily pains forgotten, and yet—you are pale, you are weeping? Tell me, girl—tell me, dear Edith, and let me be your friend."
"Friend! lady," said the girl, looking at her wistfully, yet doubtfully withal; "youmyfriend, noble lady! That were indeed impossible. I will not say, that to the poor, to the Saxon, to theslave, there can benofriend, under heaven; but that you—you, a noble and a Norman! Alas! alas! that were indeed impossible!"
"Impossible!" cried Guendolen, eagerly, forgetting her ailments in her fine and feeling excitement. "Wherefore, how should it be impossible? One God made us both, Edith; and made us both out of one clay, with one life here on earth, and one hereafter; both children of one fallen race, and heirs of one promise; both daughters of one fair, free land; both Englishwomen—then why not friends, Edith, and sisters?"
"Of one land, lady, it is true," said the girl, gently. "Yes! daughters of onefairland, for even to the slave England is very beautiful and dear, even as to you she isfree. But for us, who were once her first-born and her favorites, that magic word has passed away, that charm has ceased, forever. For us, in free England's wide-rejoicing acres, there is no spot free, save the six feet of earth that shall receive our bodies, when the soul shall be a slave's no longer. Lady, lady, alas! noble lady, if one God made us both of one clay, that shall go downward to mingle with the common sod, and of one spirit that shall mount upward, when the weariness and woe shall be at an end forever, man has set a great gulf between us, that we can not pass over it at all, to come the one unto the other. Our wants may be the same, while we are here below, and our hopes may be the same heavenward; but there all sameness ends between us. My joys can not be your joys, and God forbid that my sorrows should be yours, either. Our hearts may not feel, our heads may not think, in unison, even if our flesh be of one texture, and our souls of one spirit. You are good, and gentle, and kind, lady, but you may never understand what it is to be such as I."
She ceased, but she ceased weeping also, and seemed lost in deep thought, and almost forgetful of herself and her surroundings, as she remained on her knees by the bedside of Guendolen, with her head drooping from her fair bended neck, and her embrowned but shapely hands folded in her lap.
The lady looked at her silently for a few moments, partly in sympathy, partly, it must be said, in wonder. New ideas were beginning to be awakened in her mind, and a perception of something, which had never before dawned upon her, became palpable and strong.
That which we behold, and have beheld daily perhaps for years, naturally becomes so usual and customary in our eyes, that we cease to regard it as any thing but as a fact, of which we have never seen and scarcely can conceive any thing to the contrary—that we look at it as a part of that system which we call nature, and of which we never question the right or the wrong, the injustice or the justice, but, knowing that itis, never think of inquiring wherefore it is, and whether it ought to be.
Thus it was with Guendolen de Taillebois. She had been accustomed, during all her life, to see Saxons as serfs, and rarely in any other capacity; for the franklins and thanes who had retained their independence, their freedom, and a portion of their ancestral acres, were few in numbers, and held but little intercourse with their Norman neighbors, being regarded by them as rude and semi-barbarous inferiors, while they, in turn, regarded them as cruel and insolent usurpers and oppressors.
She had seen these serfs, rudely attired indeed, and employed in rugged, laborious, and menial occupations; but, then, it was clear that their boorish demeanor, stolid expression, and apparent lack of capacity or intelligence for any superior employment, seemed to indicate them as persons filling the station in society for which nature had adapted them. Well-clad, sufficiently clothed, warmly lodged—in all outward things perhaps equal, if not superior, to the peasantry of most European countries in the present day—never, except in extreme and exceptional cases, cruelly or severely treated, since it was ever the owner's interest to regard the well-doing of his serfs, it had never occurred to her that the whole race was in itself, from innate circumstances, and apart from extraordinary sorrows or sufferings, hopeless, miserable, and conscious of unmerited but irretrievable degradation.
Had she considered the subject, she would of course have perceived and admitted that sick or in health, sorrowful or at ease, to be compelled to toil on, toil on, day after day, wearily, at the bidding and for the benefit of another, deriving no benefit from that toil beyond a mere subsistence, was an unhappy and forlorn condition. Yet, how many did she not see of her own conquering countrymen of the lower orders, small landholders in the country, small artisans and mechanics in the boroughs, reduced to the same labors, and nearly to the same necessity.
With the personal condition or habits of the serfs, the ladies and even the lords of the great Norman families had little acquaintance, little means even of becoming acquainted. The services of their fortalices, all but those menial and sordid offices of which those exalted persons had no cognizance, were discharged by domestics, higher or lower in grade, the highest being of gentle blood, and, in very noble houses, even of noble blood, of their own proud race; and the Saxons, whether bond-servants of the soil, or, what was of rare occurrence at that time, free tenants on man service, were employed in the fields or in the forest, under the bailiff or overseer, who ruled them at his own discretion, and punished them, if punishment were needed, with the stocks, the gyves, or the scourge, without consulting the lord, and of course without so much as the knowledge of the lady.
Even if, by hazard, it did reach the dainty ears of some fair chatelaine, that Osrick or Edmund had undergone the lash for some misdoing or short-coming, she heard of it much as a modern lady would read of the committal of a pickpocket or drunkard to the treadmill, or of a vagrant hussy to pick hemp; wondering why those low creatures would do such wicked things, and sorrowfully musing why such punishments should be necessary—never suspecting the injustice of the law, or doubting the necessity of the punishment.
And eminently thus it was with Guendolen. While in her good aunt's priory, she had ever seen the serfs of the church well looked after, well doing, not overworked, not oppressed, cared for if sick, comforted if sorrowing, well tended in age, a contented if not a happy race, so far as externals only were regarded, and nothing hitherto had led her to look farther than to externals. On her father's princely barony she saw even less of them than she had been accustomed to do at the priory, passing them casually only when in the fields at hay-making or harvest work, or pausing perhaps to observe a rosy-cheeked child in the Saxon quarter, or to notice a cherry-lipped maiden by the village well. But here, too, so far as she did see, she saw them neither squalid nor starved, neither miserable nor maltreated. No acts of tyranny or cruelty reached her ears, perhaps none happened which should reach them; and of the rigorous, oppressive, insolent, and cruel laws which regulated their condition, controlled their progress, prevented their rise in the social scale, fettered and cramped their domestic relations, she knew nothing.
Since her sojourn at Waltheofstow, she had gained more personal acquaintance with her down-trodden Saxon countrymen and countrywomen, and more especially since her accident in the forest, than in all her previous life.
For, in the first place, Sir Philip de Morville, being unmarried and without female relations in his family, had no women of Norman blood employed as attendants or domestics in the castle, the whole work of which was performed by serf girls of various degrees, under the superintendence of an emancipated Saxon dame, who presided over what we should now call the housekeeper's department. Of these girls, Edith, and one or two others, Elgythas, Berthas, and the like, ministered to the Lady's Bower, and having perhaps contracted something of unusual refinement and expression from a nearer attendance on the more courtly race, and especially on the Norman ladies who at times visited the castle, presented, it is certain, unusually favorable specimens of the Saxon peasantry, and had attracted the attention of Guendolen in a greater degree than any Saxons she had previously encountered.
Up to that time, she had regarded them, certainly, on the whole, as a slow, as a somewhat stolid, impassive, and unimpassioned race, less mercurial than her own impetuous, impulsive kindred, and far less liable to strong emotions or keen perceptions, whether of pain or pleasure. The girlish liveliness and gentleness, and even the untaught graces of Edith had, at the first, attracted her; and, as she was thrown a good deal into contact with her, from the fact of her constant attendance on the chambers she occupied, she had become much interested in her, regarding her as one of the happiest, most artless, and innocent little girls she had ever met—one, she imagined, on whom no shadow of grief had ever fallen, and whose humble lot was one of actual contentment, if not of positive enjoyment.
Nor, hitherto, insomuch as actual realities were concerned, was Guendolen much in error. Sir Philip de Morville, as has been stated already, was, according to the times and their tenor, a good and considerate lord. His bailiff was a well-intentioned, strict man, intent on having his master's work done to the last straw, but beyond that neither an oppressor nor a tyrant. Kenric, her distant kinsman and betrothed, was confessedly the best man and most favored servant in the quarter; and his mother, who had grown old in the service of Sir Philip's father, whom she had nursed with simple skill through the effects of many a mimic battle in the lists, or real though scarce more dangerous fray, now superannuated, reigned as much the mistress of her son's hearth as though she had been a free woman, and the cot in which she dwelt her freehold.
Edith herself was the first bower-maiden of the castle, and, safe under the protecting wings of dame Ulrica, the housewife, defied the impertinence of forward pages, the importunate gallantry of esquires, and was cheerfully acknowledged as the best and prettiest lass of the lot, by the old gray-haired seneschal, in his black velvet suit and gold chain of office.
Really, therefore, none of her own immediate family had known any actual wants, or suffered any material hardships or sorrows, through their condition, up to the period at which my tale commences. Their greatest care, perhaps, had arisen from the temper, surly, rude, insolent, and provocative, of Eadwulf the Red, Kenric's brother, who had already, by misconduct, and even actual crime, according to the Norman code, subjected himself to severe penalties, and been reduced, in default of harsher treatment, to the condition of a mere slave, a chattel, saleable like an ox or ass, at the pleasure of their lord.
This, both in its actual sense, as keeping them in constant apprehension of what further distress Eadwulf's future misconduct might bring upon them, and in its moral bearing, as holding them constantly reminded of their own servile condition, had been, thus far, their prime grief and cause of complaint, had they been persons given to complain.
Still, although well-nigh a century had elapsed since the Norman Conquest, and the heir of the Conqueror in the fourth generation was sitting on the throne which that great and politic prince won on the fatal day of Hastings, their condition had not become habitual or easy to those, at least, who had been reduced to slavery from freedom, by the consequences of that disastrous battle. And such was the condition of the family whence sprang Kenric and Edith. The Saxon thane, Waltheof, whose name and that of his abode had descended to the Norman fortalice which had arisen from the ashes of his less aspiring manor, had resisted the Norman invaders so long, with such inveterate and stubborn valor, and, through the devotion of his tenants and followers, with such cost of life, that when he fell in fight, and his possessions were granted to his slayer, all the dwellers on his lands were involved in the common ruin.
To the serfs of the soil, who had been serfs before the conquest, it mattered but little. The slave to the Saxon was but changed into the slave of the Norman, and did not perhaps find in him a crueller, though he might a haughtier and more overbearing master. But to the freeman, the doom which consigned him to the fetters of the Norman, which converted him from the owner into the serf of the soil, was second only, if second, to the bitterness of death. And such had been the doom of the grandfather of Kenric and Eadwulf.
Their mother herself had been born free, not far from the hovel in which she still dwelt a slave, though she was but an infant when the hurricane of war and ruin swept over the green oaks of Sherwood, and had no memory of the time when she was not the thrall of a foreign lord. Her father, Wulfred, was the largest tenant under Waltheof, himself a franklin, or small landholder, and of blood as noble, and station more elevated than that of one half the adventurers who had flocked to the banner of William the invader. With his landlord and friend, he had fought to the last, not at Hastings only, but in every bloody ineffectual rising, until the last spark of Saxon liberty was trampled out under the iron hoofs of the Norman war-horse; but, less happy than Waltheof, he had survived to find himself a slave, and the father of slaves, tilling for a cruel foreign conqueror the land which had been his own and his father's, and his father's father's, but in which he and his heirs should have no heritage for evermore, beyond the six-foot measure which should be meted to them every one, for his long home.
And the memory of these things had not yet passed away, nor the bitterness of the iron departed from the children, which had then entered into the soul of the parent.
An irrepressible desire came over the mind of Guendolen, to know and comprehend something more fully the sentiments and sorrows of the girl who had nursed and attended her so gently since her adventure with the stag; and perceiving intuitively that the slave girl, who, strange as it appeared to her, seemed to have a species of pride of her own, would not reveal her inward self in the presence of the vain and flippant Norman waiting girls, she hastened to dismiss them, without wounding their self-esteem, on a pretext of which they would be willing enough to avail themselves.
"Lilian and Marguerite," she said, "you must be weary my good girls, with watching me through this long night and my peevish temper must have made you yet more weary, for I feel that I am not myself, and that I have tried your patience. Go, therefore, now, and get some repose, that when I shall truly need your services again, you may be well at ease to serve me. I feel as if I could sleep now; and while I slumber, Edith, here, can watch beside me, and drive away the gnats with her fan, as well as a more experienced bower-woman."
Whether the girls suspected or not that their mistress desired to be rid of them, they were not sorry to be dismissed from attendance on her couch; and whether they proposed to devote the opportunity to repose, or to gay flirtation with the pages of their own lord's or of Sir Philip's household, they withdrew at once, leaving the lady gazing fixedly on the motionless and hardly conscious figure of the slave girl.
By a sudden impulse she passed her small white hand caressingly over the soft and abundant tresses of Edith's fair hair; and so unusual was the sensation to the daughter of the downfallen race, that she started, as if a blow had been dealt her, and blushed crimson, between surprise and wonder, as she raised her great blue eyes wide open to the face of the young lady.
"And is it so hard?" she asked, in reference more to what she understood Edith to mean, than to any thing she had spoken, or even hinted—"is it so hard, my poor child? I had thought that your lot sat as lightly on you as the dew-drop in the chalice of the bluebell. I had fancied you as happy as any one of us here below. Will you not tell me what is this sorrow which weighs on you so heavily? It may be I can do something to relieve it."
"Lady, I am, as you know, a Saxon, and a slave, the daughter of a slave, and, should it ever be my lot to wed, the wife, to be, of a serf, a bondman of the soil, and the mother of things doomed, or ere they see the blessed light of Heaven, to the collar and the chain from the cradle to the grave. Think you a woman, with such thoughts as these at her heart, can be very gay or joyous?"
"And yet, you were both gay and joyous yesterday, Edith; and all last week, since I have been at the castle, I have heard no sounds so gay or so pleasant to my ear as your merry ballads. And you are no more a serf this morn than you were yestrene, and the good God alone knows what any of us all may be on the morrow, Edith. Something, I know, must have happened, girl, to make you wear a face so altered on this beautiful summer day, and carry so sad a heart, when all the world is so happy."
"All the world, lady!" replied Edith; "all the world happy! Alas! not one tenth of it, unless you mean the beasts and the birds, which, knowing nothing, are blithe in their happy innocence. Of the human world around us, lady, one half knows not, and more by far than one half cares not, how miserable or how hopeless are their fellows—nor, if all knew and cared for all, could they either comprehend or console, much less relieve, the miserable."
"But if I be one of those, Edith, who know not, I am at least not one of those who care not. Therefore, I come back to the place whence I started. Something has happened, which makes you dwell so much more dolefully to-day, upon that which weighed not on you, yestrene, heavier than a feather."
"Somethinghashappened, lady. But it is all one; for it resolves itself in all but into this; I am a slave—a slave, until life is over."
"This is strange," said Guendolen, thoughtfully. "I do not understand—maynot understand this. It does not seem to me that your duties are so very hard, your life so very painful, or your rule so very strict, that you should suddenly thus give way to utter gloom and despondency, for no cause but what you have known for years, and found endurable until this moment."
"But henceforth unendurable. Oh! talk not, lady, talk not. You may console the dying, for to him there is a hope, a present hope of a quick-coming future. But comfort not the slave; for to him the bitterest and most cruel past is happier than the hopeless present, if only for that it is past; and the present, hopeless as it is, is yet less desperate than the future; for to the slave, in the future, every thing except happiness is possible. I may seem to speak enigmas to you, lady, and I am sure that you do not understand me—how should you? None but a slave can know or imagine what it is to be a slave; none can conceive what a slave feels, thinks, suffers. And yet a slave is a man, after all; and a lord is no more than a man, while living—and yet, what a gulf between them!"
"And you will not tell me, Edith," persisted the Lady Guendolen, "you will not tell me what it is that has happened to you of late, which makes you grieve so despondently, thus on a sudden, over your late-endured condition? Then you must let me divine it. You have learned your own heart of late. You have discovered that you love, Edith."
"And if it were so, lady," replied the girl, darkly, "were not that enough to make a woman, who is at once a Christian and a slave, both despond and despair? First to love a slave—for to love other than a slave, being herself a slave were the same, as for a mortal to be enamored of a star in heaven—and then, even if license were granted to wed him she loved, which is not certain or even of usual occurrence, to be the mother of babes, to whom but one reality is secured, beyond a peradventure, the reality that they too must be slaves and wretched. But you are wrong, lady. I have not learned my own heart of late—I have known it long. I have not discovered but now that I love, nor has he whom I love. We have been betrothed this year and better."
"What then? what then?" cried Guendolen, eagerly. "Will not Sir Philip consent? If that be all, dry your tears, Edith; so small a boon as that I can command by a single word."
"Sir Philip heeds not such matters, lady. His bailiffhasconsented, if that were all."
"What is it, then? This scruple about babes," said Guendolen, thoughtfully. "It is sad—it is sad, indeed. Yet if you lovehim, as you say, and your life in its actual reality be not so bitter——"
"No, lady, no; it is not even that. If I had scruples on that head, they have vanished; Kenric has convinced me——"
"Kenric!" exclaimed Guendolen, starting erect into a sitting attitude, forgetful of her pains and bruises. "What, the brave man who saved me from the stag at the risk of his own life, who was half slain in serving me—is he—is heyourKenric?"
"The same," answered Edith, with the quiet accent of fixed sorrow. "And the same for whom you procured the priceless boon of liberty."
An idea flashed, like the electric fluid, across the mind of Guendolen, who up to that moment had suspected nothing of the connection between her preserver and the beautiful girl before her, and who knew nothing of his grand refusal to accept even liberty itself, most inestimable of all gifts, which could not be shared by those whom he loved beyond liberty or life; and she imagined that she read the secret, and had pierced the maiden's mystery.
"Can it be?" she said, sorrowfully, and seeming rather to be communing with herself, than inquiring of her companion. "Can it be that one so brave, so generous, and seemingly so noble, should be so base and abject? Oh! but these men, these men, if tale and history speak true, they are the same all and ever—false, selfish, and deceivers!"
"Kenric, lady?"
"And because he is free—the freeman but of the hour—he has despised thee, Edith, the slave girl? But hold thy head high, sweet one, and thy heart higher. Thou shalt be free to-morrow, girl, and the mate of his betters; it shall be thou, to-morrow, who shall repay scorn with scorn, and——"
"No, lady, no," cried the girl, who had been hitherto silenced and overpowered by the impulsive vehemence of Guendolen. "You misapprehend me altogether. It is not I whom he rejected, for thathewas free; but liberty that he cast from him, as a toy not worth the having, because I might not be free with him—I, and his aged mother, of whom he is, alone, the only stay and comfort."
"Noble! noble!" cried the Norman girl, joyously clapping her hands together. "Noble and glorious, gentle and great! This, this, indeed, is true nobility! Why do we Normans boast ourselves, as if we alone could think great thoughts, or do great deeds? and here we are outdone, beyond all question or comparison, in the true gentleness of perfect chivalry; and that, by a Saxon slave. But be of good cheer, Edith, my sister and my friend; be of good cheer. The sun shall not go down looking upon you still a slave, nor upon your Kenric, nor yet upon his mother. You shall be free, all free, free as the blessed winds of heaven, before the sun set in the sea. And you shall be the wife of no serf, but of a freeman, and a freeholder, in my own manor lands of Kendal upon Kent; and you shall be, God willing, the mother of free Englishmen, to do their lady as leal service as their stout father did before them. Fear nothing, and doubt nothing, Edith; for this shall be, so surely as I am Guendolen of Taillebois. So small a thing as this I can right readily do with my good father, and he as readily with our true friend, noble Sir Philip de Morville. But hark! I hear their horses' hoofs and the whimpering of their hounds in the court-yard. To the bartizan, girl, to the bartizan! Is it they—is it the chase returning?"
"It is they, dear lady—your noble sire and Sir Philip, and all the knights who rode forth this morning—all laughing in high merriment and glee! and now they mount the steps—they have entered."
"No better moment, then, to press a boon. Fly, girl, be your wishes wings to your speech. I would see my father straightway!"