Hereward, the Last of the English Part 37

"I have chosen the better part, and it shall not be taken from me."

"Taken! taken! Hark to her! She means to mock me, the proud nun, with that same 'taken.'"

"G.o.d forbid, mother!"

"Then why say taken, to me from whom all is taken?--husband, sons, wealth, land, renown, power,--power which I loved, wretch that I was, as well as husband and as sons? Ah G.o.d! the girl is right. Better to rot in the convent, than writhe in the world. Better never to have had, than to have had and lost."

"Amen!" said Gunhilda. "'Blessed are the barren, and they that never gave suck,' saith the Lord."

"No! Not so!" cried Torfrida. "Better, Countess, to have had and lost, than never to have had at all. The glutton was right, swine as he was, when he said that not even Heaven could take from him the dinners he had eaten. How much more we, if we say, not even Heaven can take from us the love wherewith we have loved. Will not our souls be richer thereby, through all eternity?"

"In Purgatory?" asked Gunhilda.

"In Purgatory, or where else you will. I love my love; and though my love prove false, he has been true; though he trample me under foot, he has held me in his bosom; though he kill me, he has lived for me. What I have had will still be mine, when that which I have shall fail me."

"And you would buy short joy with lasting woe?"

"That would I, like a brave man's child. I say,--the present is mine, and I will enjoy it, as greedily as a child. Let the morrow take thought for the things of itself.--Countess, your bath is ready."

Nineteen years after, when the great conqueror lay, tossing with agony and remorse, upon his dying bed, haunted by the ghosts of his victims, the clerks of St. Saviour's in Bruges city were putting up a leaden tablet (which remains, they say, unto this very day) to the memory of one whose gentle soul had gently pa.s.sed away. "Charitable to the poor, kind and agreeable to her attendants, courteous to strangers, and only severe to herself," Gunhilda had lingered on in a world of war and crime; and had gone, it may be, to meet Torfrida beyond the grave, and there finish their doubtful argument.

The Countess was served with food in Torfrida's chamber. Hereward and his wife refused to sit, and waited on her standing.

"I wish to show these saucy Flemings," said he, "that an English princess is a princess still in the eyes of one more n.o.bly born than any of them."

But after she had eaten, she made Torfrida sit before her on the bed, and Hereward likewise; and began to talk; eagerly, as one who had not unburdened her mind for many weeks; and eloquently too, as became Sprakaleg's daughter and G.o.dwin's wife.

She told them how she had fled from the storm of Exeter, with a troop of women, who dreaded the brutalities of the Normans. [Footnote: To do William justice, he would not allow his men to enter the city while they were blood-hot; and so prevented, as far as he could, the excesses which Gyda had feared.] How they had wandered up through Devon, found fishers'

boats at Watchet in Somersets.h.i.+re, and gone off to the little desert island of the Flat-Holme, in hopes of there meeting with the Irish fleet, which her sons, Edmund and G.o.dwin, were bringing against the West of England. How the fleet had never come, and they had starved for many days; and how she had bribed a pa.s.sing merchantman to take her and her wretched train to the land of Baldwin the Debonnaire, who might have pity on her for the sake of his daughter Judith, and Tosti her husband who died in his sins.

And at his name, her tears began to flow afresh; fallen in his overweening pride,--like Sweyn, like Harold, like herself--

"The time was, when I would not weep. If I could, I would not. For a year, lady, after Senlac, I sat like a stone. I hardened my heart like a wall of bra.s.s, against G.o.d and man. Then, there upon the Flat-Holme, feeding on sh.e.l.l-fish, listening to the wail of the sea-fowl, looking outside the wan water for the sails which never came, my heart broke down in a moment.

And I heard a voice crying, 'There is no help in man, go thou to G.o.d.' And I answered, That were a beggar's trick, to go to G.o.d in need, when I went not to him in plenty. No. Without G.o.d I planned, and without Him I must fail. Without Him I went into the battle, and without Him I must bide the brunt. And at best, Can He give me back my sons? And I hardened my heart again like a stone, and shed no tear till I saw your fair face this day."

"And now!" she said, turning sharply on Hereward, "what do you do here? Do you not know that your nephews' lands are parted between grooms from Angers and scullions from Normandy?"

"So much the worse for both them and the grooms."

"Sir?"

"You forget, lady, that I am an outlaw."

"But do you not know that your mother's lands are seized likewise?"

"She will take refuge with her grandsons, who are, as I hear, again on good terms with their new master, showing thereby a most laudable and Christian spirit of forgiveness."

"On good terms? Do you not know, then, that they are fighting again, outlaws, and desperate at the Frenchman's treachery? Do you not know that they have been driven out of York, after defending the city street by street, house by house? Do you not know that there is not an old man or a child in arms left in York; and that your nephews, and the few fighting men who were left, went down the Humber in boats, and north to Scotland, to Gospatrick and Waltheof? Do you not know that your mother is left alone--at Bourne, or G.o.d knows where--to endure at the hands of Norman ruffians what thousands more endure?"

Hereward made no answer, but played with his dagger.

"And do you not know that England is ready to burst into a blaze, if there be one man wise enough to put the live coal into the right place? That Sweyn Ulffson, his kinsman, or Osbern, his brother, will surely land there within the year with a mighty host? And that if there be one man in England of wit enough, and knowledge enough of war, to lead the armies of England, the Frenchman may be driven into the sea--Is there any here who understands English?"

"None but ourselves."

"And Canute's nephew sit on Canute's throne?"

Hereward still played with his dagger.

"Not the sons of Harold, then?" asked he, after a while.

"Never! I promise you that--I, Countess Gyda, their grandmother."

"Why promise me, of all men, O great lady?"

"Because--I will tell you after. But this I say, my curse on the grandson of mine who shall try to seize that fatal crown, which cost the life of my fairest, my n.o.blest, my wisest, my bravest!"

Hereward bowed his head, as if consenting to the praise of Harold. But he knew who spoke; and he was thinking within himself: "Her curse may be on him who shall seize, and yet not on him to whom it is given."

"All that they, young and unskilful lads, have a right to ask is, their father's earldoms and their father's lands. Edwin and Morcar would keep their earldoms as of right. It is a pity that there is no lady of the house of G.o.dwin, whom we could honor by offering her to one of your nephews, in return for their n.o.bleness in giving Aldytha to my Harold. But this foolish girl here refuses to wed--"

"And is past forty," thought Hereward to himself.

"However, some plan to join the families more closely together might be thought of. One of the young earls might marry Judith here. [Footnote: Tosti's widow, daughter of Baldwin of Flanders] Waltheof would have Northumbria, in right of his father, and ought to be well content,--for although she is somewhat older than he, she is peerlessly beautiful,--to marry your niece Aldytha." [Footnote: Harold's widow.]

"And Gospatrick?"

"Gospatrick," she said, with a half-sneer, "will be as sure, as he is able, to get something worth having for himself out of any medley. Let him have Scotch Northumbria, if he claim it. He is a Dane, and our work will be to make a Danish England once and forever."

"But what of Sweyn's gallant holders and housecarles, who are to help to do this mighty deed?"

"Senlac left gaps enough among the n.o.blemen of the South, which they can fill up, in the place of the French sc.u.m who now riot over Wess.e.x. And if that should not suffice, what higher honor for me, or for my daughter the Queen-Dowager, than to devote our lands to the heroes who have won them back for us?"

Hereward hoped inwardly that Gyda would be as good as her word; for her greedy grasp had gathered to itself, before the Battle of Hastings, no less than six-and-thirty thousand acres of good English soil.

"I have always heard," said he, bowing, "that if the Lady Gyda had been born a man, England would have had another all-seeing and all-daring statesman, and Earl G.o.dwin a rival, instead of a helpmate. Now I believe what I have heard."

But Torfrida looked sadly at the Countess. There was something pitiable in the sight of a woman ruined, bereaved, seemingly hopeless, portioning out the very land from which she was a fugitive; unable to restrain the pa.s.sion for intrigue, which had been the toil and the bane of her sad and splendid life.

"And now," she went on, "surely some kind saint brought me, even on my first landing, to you of all living men."

"Doubtless the blessed St. Bertin, beneath whose shadow we repose here in peace," said Hereward, somewhat dryly.

"I will go barefoot to his altar to-morrow, and offer my last jewel," said Gunhilda.

"You," said Gyda, without noticing her daughter, "are, above all men, the man who is needed." And she began praising Hereward's valor, his fame, his eloquence, his skill as a general and engineer; and when he suggested, smiling, that he was an exile and an outlaw, she insisted that he was all the fitter from that very fact. He had no enemies among the n.o.bles. He had been mixed up in none of the civil wars and blood feuds of the last fifteen years. He was known only as that which he was, the ablest captain of his day,--the only man who could cope with William, the only man whom all parties in England would alike obey.

And so, with flattery as well as with truth, she persuaded, if not Hereward, at least Torfrida, that he was the man destined to free England once more; and that an earldom--anything which he chose to ask--would be the sure reward of his a.s.sistance.