Hereward, the Last of the English Part 87

The good knight of Herepol said, "Let the rogues go in; they may amuse the poor man."

So they went in, and as soon as they went, he knew them. One was Martin Lightfoot, the other Leofric the Unlucky.

"Who sent you?" asked he surlily, turning his face away.

"She."

"Who?"

"We know but one she, and she is at Crowland."

"She sent you? and wherefore?"

"That we might sing to you, and make you merry."

Hereward answered them with a terrible word, and turned his face to the wall, groaning, and then bade them sternly to go.

So they went, for the time.

The jailer told this to Sir Robert, who saw all, being a kind-hearted man.

"From his poor first wife, eh? Well, there can be no harm in that. Nor if they came from this Lady Alftruda either, for that matter; let them go in and out when they will."

"But they may be spies and traitors."

"Then we can but hang them."

Robert of Herepol, it would appear from the chronicle, did not much care whether they were spies or not.

So the men went to and fro, and often sat with Hereward. But he forbade them sternly to mention Torfrida's name.

Alftruda sent to him meanwhile, again and again, messages of pa.s.sionate love and sorrow, and he listened to them as sullenly as he did to his two servants, and sent no answer back. And so sat more weary months, in the very prison, it may be in the very room, in which John Bunyan sat nigh six hundred years after: but in a very different frame of mind.

One day Sir Robert was going up the stairs with another knight, and met the two coming down. He was talking to that knight earnestly, indignantly: and somehow, as he pa.s.sed Leofric and Martin he thought fit to raise his voice, as if in a great wrath.

"Shame to all honor and chivalry! good saints in heaven, what a thing is human fortune! That this man, who had once a gallant army at his back, should be at this moment going like a sheep to the slaughter, to Buckingham Castle, at the mercy of his worst enemy, Ivo Taillebois, of all men in the world. If there were a dozen knights left of all those whom he used to heap with wealth and honor, worthy the name of knights, they would catch us between here and Stratford, and make a free man of their lord."

So spake--or words to that effect, according to the Latin chronicler, who must have got them from Leofric himself--the good knight of Herepol.

"Hillo, knaves!" said he, seeing the two, "are you here eavesdropping? out of the castle this instant, on your lives."

Which hint those two witty knaves took on the spot.

A few days after, Hereward was travelling toward Buckingham, chained upon a horse, with Sir Robert and his men, and a goodly company of knights belonging to Ivo. Ivo, as the story runs, seems to have arranged with Ralph Pagnel at Buckingham to put him into the keeping of a creature of his own. And how easy it was to put out a man's eyes, or starve him to death, in a Norman keep, none knew better than Hereward.

But he was past fear or sorrow. A dull heavy cloud of despair had settled down upon his soul. Black with sin, his heart could not pray. He had hardened himself against all heaven and earth, and thought, when he thought at all, only of his wrongs: but never of his sins.

They pa.s.sed through a forest, seemingly somewhere near what is Newport Pagnel, named after Ralph, his would-be jailer.

Suddenly from the trees dashed out a body of knights, and at their head the white-bear banner, in Ra.n.a.ld of Ramsey's hand.

"Halt!" shouted Sir Robert; "we are past the half-way stone. Earl Ivo's and Earl Ralph's men are answerable now for the prisoner."

"Treason!" shouted Ivo's men, and one would have struck Hereward through with his lance; but Winter was too quick for him, and bore him from his saddle; and then dragged Hereward out of the fight.

The Normans, surprised while their helmets were hanging at their saddles, and their arms not ready for battle, were scattered at once. But they returned to the attack, confident in their own numbers.

They were over confident. Hereward's fetters were knocked off; and he was horsed and armed, and, mad with freedom and battle, fighting like himself once more.

Only as he rode to and fro, thrusting and hewing, he shouted to his men to spare Sir Robert, and all his meinie, crying that he was the savior of his life; and when the fight was over, and all Ivo's and Ralph's men who were not slain had ridden for their lives into Stratford, he shook hands with that venerable knight, giving him innumerable thanks and courtesies for his honorable keeping; and begged him to speak well of him to the king.

And so these two parted in peace, and Hereward was a free man.

CHAPTER XLI.

HOW EARL WALTHEOF WAS MADE A SAINT.

A few months after, there sat in Abbot Thorold's lodgings in Peterborough a select company of Normans, talking over affairs of state after their supper.

"Well, earls and gentlemen," said the Abbot, as he sipped his wine, "the cause of our good king, which is happily the cause of Holy Church, goes well, I think. We have much to be thankful for when we review the events of the past year. We have finished the rebels; Roger de Breteuil is safe in prison, Ralph Guader unsafe in Brittany, and Waltheof more than unsafe in--the place to which traitors descend. We have not a manor left which is not in loyal Norman hands; we have not an English monk left who has not been scourged and starved into holy obedience; not an English saint for whom any man cares a jot, since Guerin de Lire preached down St. Adhelm, the admirable primate disposed of St. Alphege's martyrdom, and some other wise man--I am ashamed to say that I forget who--proved that St. Edmund of Suffolk was merely a barbarian knight, who was killed fighting with Danes only a little more heathen than himself. We have had great labors and great sufferings since we landed in this barbarous isle upon our holy errand ten years since; but, under the shadow of the gonfalon of St.

Peter, we have conquered, and may sing 'Dominus illuminatio mea' with humble and thankful hearts."

"I don't know that," said Ascelin, "my Lord Uncle; I shall never sing 'Dominus Illuminatio' till I see your coffers illuminated once more by those thirty thousand marks."

"Or I," said Oger le Breton, "till I see myself safe in that bit of land which Hereward holds wrongfully of me in Locton."

"Or I," said Ivo Taillebois, "till I see Hereward's head on Bourne gable, where he stuck up those Norman's heads seven years ago. But what the Lord Abbot means by saying that we have done with English saints I do not see, for the villains of Crowland have just made a new one for themselves."

"A new one?"

"I tell you truth and fact; I will tell you all, Lord Abbot; and you shall judge whether it is not enough to drive an honest man mad to see such things going on under his nose. Men say of me that I am rough, and swear and blaspheme. I put it to you, Lord Abbot, if Job would not have cursed if he had been Lord of Spalding? You know that the king let these Crowland monks have Waltheof's body?"

"Yes, I thought it an unwise act of grace. It would have been wiser to leave him, as he desired, out on the down, in ground unconsecrate."

"Of course, of course; for what has happened?"

"That old traitor, Ulfketyl, and his monks bring the body to Crowland, and bury it as if it had been the Pope's. In a week they begin to spread their lies,--that Waltheof was innocent; that Archbishop Lanfranc himself said so."

"That was the only act of human weakness which I have ever known the venerable prelate commit," said Thorold.

"That these Normans at Winchester were so in the traitor's favor, that the king had to have him out and cut off his head in the gray of the morning, ere folks were up and about; that the fellow was so holy that he past all his time in prison in weeping and praying, and said over the whole Psalter every day, because his mother had taught it him,--I wish she had taught him to be an honest man;--and that when his head was on the block he said all the Paternoster, as far as 'Lead us not into temptation,' and then off went his head; whereon, his head being off, finished the prayer with--you know best what comes next, Abbot?"

"Deliver us from evil, Amen! What a manifest lie! The traitor was not permitted, it is plain, to ask for that which could never be granted to him; but his soul, unworthy to be delivered from evil, entered instead into evil, and howls forever in the pit."

"But all the rest may be true," said Oger; "and yet that be no reason why these monks should say it."