For there was matured the plot which Ivo and others had long seen brewing. William had made himself hateful to all men by his cruelties and tyrannies; and indeed his government was growing more unrighteous day by day. Let them drive him out of England, and part the land between them. Two should be dukes, the third king paramount.
“Waltheof, I presume, plotted drunk, and repented sober, when too late. The wittol! He should have been a monk.”
“Repented he has, if ever he was guilty. For he fled to Archbishop Lanfranc, and confessed to him so much, that Lanfranc declares him innocent, and has sent him on to William in Normandy.”
“O kind priest! true priest! To send his sheep into the wolf’s mouth.”
“You forget, dear sire, that William is our king.”
“I can hardly forget that, with this pretty ring upon my ankle. But after my experience of how he has kept faith with me, what can I expect for Waltheof the wittol, save that which I have foretold many a time?”
“As for you, dear sire, the king has been misinformed concerning you. I have sent messengers to reason with him again and again; but as long as Taillebois, Warrenne, and Robert Malet had his ear, of what use were my poor words?”
“And what said they?”
“That there would be no peace in England if you were loose.”
“They lied. I am no boy, like Waltheof. I know when the game is played out. And it is played out now. The Frenchman is master, and I know it well. Were I loose to-morrow, and as great a fool as Waltheof, what could I do, with, it may be, some forty knights and a hundred men-at-arms, against all William’s armies? But how goes on this fool’s rebellion? If I had been loose I might have helped to crush it in the bud.”
“And you would have done that against Waltheof?”
“Why not against him? He is but bringing more misery on England. Tell that to William. Tell him that if he sets me free, I will be the first to attack Waltheof, or whom he will. There are no English left to fight against,” said he, bitterly, “for Waltheof is none now.”
“He shall know your words when he returns to England.”
“What, is he abroad, and all this evil going on?”
“In Normandy. But the English have risen for the King in Herefordshire, and beaten Earl Roger; and Odo of Bayeux and Bishop Mowbray are on their way to Cambridge, where they hope to give a good account of Earl Ralph; and that the English may help them there.”
“And they shall! They hate Ralph Guader as much as I do. Can you send a message for me?”
“Whither?”
“To Bourne in the Bruneswald; and say to Hereward’s men, wherever they are, Let them rise and arm, if they love Hereward, and down to Cambridge, to be the foremost at Bishop Odo’s side against Ralph Guader, or Waltheof himself. Send! send! O that I were free!”
“Would to Heaven thou wert free, my gallant sir!” said the good man.
From that day Hereward woke up somewhat. He was still a broken man, querulous, peevish; but the hope of freedom and the hope of battle woke him up. If he could but get to his men! But his melancholy returned. His men—some of them at least—went down to Odo at Cambridge, and did good service. Guader was utterly routed, and escaped to Norwich, and thence to Brittany,—his home. The bishops punished their prisoners, the rebel Normans, with horrible mutilations.
“The wolves are beginning to eat each other,” said Hereward to himself. But it was a sickening thought to him, that his men had been fighting and he not at their head.
After a while there came to Bedford Castle two witty knaves. One was a cook, who “came to buy milk,” says the chronicler; the other seemingly a gleeman. They told stories, jested, harped, sang, drank, and pleased much the garrison and Sir Robert, who let them hang about the place.
They asked next, whether it were true that the famous Hereward was there? If so, might a man have a look at him?
The jailer said that many men might have gone to see him, so easy was Sir Robert to him. But he would have no man; and none dare enter save Sir Robert and he, for fear of their lives. But he would ask him of Herepol.
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 passionate 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 passed 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 passed 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 Ranald 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.
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 passed 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.”
“So I told them, and threatened them too; for, not content with making him a martyr, they are making him a saint.”
“Impious! Who can do that, save the Holy Father?” said Thorold.
“You had best get your bishop to look to them, then, for they are carrying blind beggars and mad girls by the dozen to be cured at the man’s tomb, that is all. Their fellows in the cell at Spalding went about to take a girl that had fits off one of my manors, to cure her; but that I stopped with a good horse-whip.”
“And rightly.”
“And gave the monks a piece of my mind, and drove them clean out of their cell home to Crowland.”
What a piece of Ivo’s mind on this occasion might be, let Ingulf describe.
“Against our monastery and all the people of Crowland he was, by the instigation of the Devil, raised to such an extreme pitch of fury, that he would follow their animals in the marshes with his dogs, drive them to a great distance down in the lakes, mutilate some in the tails, others in the ears, while often, by breaking the backs and legs of the beasts of burden, he rendered them utterly useless. Against our cell also (at Spalding) and our brethren, his neighbors, the prior and monks, who dwelt all day within his presence, he rages with tyrannical and frantic fury, lamed their oxen and horses, daily impounded their sheep and poultry, striking down, killing, and slaying their swine and pigs; while at the same time the servants of the prior were oppressed in the Earl’s court with insupportable exactions, were often assaulted in the highways with swords and staves, and sometimes killed.”
“Well,” went on the injured Earl, “this Hereward gets news of me,—and news too, I don’t know whence, but true enough it is,—that I had sworn to drive Ulfketyl out of Crowland by writ from king and bishop, and lock him up as a minister at the other end of England.”
“You will do but right. I will send a knight off to the king this day, telling him all, and begging him to send us up a trusty Norman as abbot of Crowland, that we may have one more gentleman in the land fit for our company.”
“You must kill Hereward first. For, as I was going to say, he sent word to me ‘that the monks of Crowland were as the apple of his eye, and Abbot Ulfketyl to him as more than a father; and that if I dared to lay a finger on them or their property, he would cut my head off.’”
“He has promised to cut my head off likewise,” said Ascelin. “Earl, knights, and gentlemen, do you not think it wiser that we should lay our wits together once and for all, and cut off his.”
“But who will catch the Wake sleeping?” said Ivo, laughing.
“That will I. I have my plans, and my intelligencers.”
And so those wicked men took counsel together to slay Hereward.
In those days a messenger came riding post to Bourne. The Countess Judith wished to visit the tomb of her late husband, Earl Waltheof; and asked hospitality on her road of Hereward and Alftruda.
Of course she would come with a great train, and the trouble and expense would be great. But the hospitality of those days, when money was scarce, and wine scarcer still, was unbounded, and a matter of course; and Alftruda was overjoyed. No doubt, Judith was the most unpopular person in England at that moment; called by all a traitress and a fiend. But she was an old acquaintance of Alftruda’s; she was the king’s niece; she was immensely rich, not only in manors of her own, but in manors, as Domesday-book testifies, about Lincolnshire and the counties round, which had belonged to her murdered husband,—which she had too probably received as the price of her treason. So Alftruda looked to her visit as to an honor which would enable her to hold her head high among the proud Norman dames, who despised her as the wife of an Englishman.
Hereward looked on the visit in a different light. He called Judith ugly names, not undeserved; and vowed that if she entered his house by the front door he would go out at the back. “Torfrida prophesied,” he said, “that she would betray her husband, and she had done it.”
“Torfrida prophesied? Did she prophesy that I should betray you likewise?” asked Alftruda, in a tone of bitter scorn.
“No, you handsome fiend: will you do it?”
“Yes; I am a handsome fiend, am I not?” and she bridled up her magnificent beauty, and stood over him as a snake stands over a mouse.
“Yes; you are handsome,—beautiful: I adore you.”
“And yet you will not do what I wish?”
“What you wish? What would I not do for you? what have I not done for you?”
“Then receive Judith. And now, go hunting, and bring me in game. I want deer, roe, fowls; anything and everything from the greatest to the smallest. Go and hunt.”
And Hereward trembled, and went.
There are flowers whose scent is so luscious that silly children will plunge their heads among them, drinking in their odor, to the exclusion of all fresh air. On a sudden sometimes comes a revulsion of the nerves. The sweet odor changes in a moment to a horrible one; and the child cannot bear for years after the scent which has once disgusted it by over-sweetness.
And so had it happened to Hereward. He did not love Alftruda now: he loathed, hated, dreaded her. And yet he could not take his eyes for a moment off her beauty. He watched every movement of her hand, to press it, obey it. He would have preferred instead of hunting, simply to sit and watch her go about the house at her work. He was spell-bound to a thing which he regarded with horror.
But he was told to go and hunt; and he went, with all his men, and sent home large supplies for the larder. And as he hunted, the free, fresh air of the forest comforted him, the free forest life came back to him, and he longed to be an outlaw once more, and hunt on forever. He would not go back yet, at least to face that Judith. So he sent back the greater part of his men with a story. He was ill; he was laid up at a farm-house far away in the forest, and begged the countess to excuse his absence. He had sent fresh supplies of game, and a goodly company of his men, knights and housecarles, who would escort her royally to Crowland.
Judith cared little for his absence; he was but an English barbarian. Alftruda was half glad to have him out of the way, lest his now sullen and uncertain temper should break out; and bowed herself to the earth before Judith, who patronized her to her heart’s content, and offered her slyly insolent condolences on being married to a barbarian. She herself could sympathize,—who more?
Alftruda might have answered with scorn that she was an Adeliza, and of better English blood than Judith’s Norman blood; but she had her ends to gain, and gained them.
For Judith was pleased to be so delighted with her that she kissed her lovingly, and said with much emotion that she required a friend who would support her through her coming trial; and who better than one who herself had suffered so much? Would she accompany her to Crowland?
Alftruda was overjoyed, and away they went.
And to Crowland they came; and to the tomb in the minster, whereof men said already that the sacred corpse within worked miracles of healing.
And Judith, habited in widow’s weeds, approached the tomb, and laid on it, as a peace-offering to the manes of the dead, a splendid pall of silk and gold.
A fierce blast came howling off the fen, screeched through the minster towers, swept along the dark aisles; and then, so say the chroniclers, caught up the pall from off the tomb, and hurled it far away into a corner.
“A miracle!” cried all the monks at once; and honestly enough, like true Englishmen as they were.
“The Holy heart refuses the gift, Countess,” said old Ulfketyl in a voice of awe.
Judith covered her face with her hands, and turned away trembling, and walked out, while all looked upon her as a thing accursed.
Of her subsequent life, her folly, her wantonness, her disgrace, her poverty, her wanderings, her wretched death, let others tell.
But these Normans believed that the curse of Heaven was upon her from that day. And the best of them believed likewise that Waltheof’s murder was the reason that William, her uncle, prospered no more in life.
“Ah, saucy sir,” said Alftruda to Ulfketyl, as she went out, “there is one waiting at Peterborough now who will teach thee manners,—Ingulf of Fontenelle, Abbot, in thy room.”
“Does Hereward know that?” asked Ulfketyl, looking keenly at her.
“What is that to thee?” said she, fiercely, and flung out of the minster. But Hereward did not know. There were many things abroad of which she told him nothing.
They went back and were landed at Deeping town, and making their way along the King Street, or old Roman road, to Bourne. Thereon a man met them, running. They had best stay where they were. The Frenchmen were out, and there was fighting up in Bourne.
Alftruda’s knights wanted to push on, to see after the Bourne folk; Judith’s knights wanted to push on to help the French; and the two parties were ready to fight each other. There was a great tumult. The ladies had much ado to still it.
Alftruda said that it might be but a countryman’s rumor; that, at least, it was shame to quarrel with their guests. At last it was agreed that two knights should gallop on into Bourne, and bring back news.
But those knights never came back. So the whole body moved on Bourne, and there they found out the news for themselves.
Hereward had gone home as soon as they had departed, and sat down to eat and drink. His manner was sad and strange. He drank much at the midday meal, and then lay down to sleep, setting guards as usual.
After a while he leapt up with a shriek and a shudder.
They ran to him, asking whether he was ill.
“Ill? No. Yes. Ill at heart. I have had a dream,—an ugly dream. I thought that all the men I ever slew on earth came to me with their wounds all gaping, and cried at me, ‘Our luck then, thy luck now.’ Chaplain! is there not a verse somewhere,—Uncle Brand said it to me on his deathbed,—‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed’?”
“Surely the master is fey,” whispered Gwenoch in fear to the chaplain. “Answer him out of Scripture.”
“Text? None such that I know of,” quoth Priest Ailward, a graceless fellow who had taken Leofric’s place. “If that were the law, it would be but few honest men that would die in their beds. Let us drink, and drive girls’ fancies out of our heads.”
So they drank again; and Hereward fell asleep once more.
“It is thy turn to watch, Priest,” said Gwenoch to Ailward. “So keep the door well, for I am worn out with hunting,” and so fell asleep.
Ailward shuffled into his harness, and went to the door. The wine was heady; the sun was hot. In a few minutes he was asleep likewise.
Hereward slept, who can tell how long? But at last there was a bustle, a heavy fall; and waking with a start, he sprang up. He saw Ailward lying dead across the gate, and above him a crowd of fierce faces, some of which he knew too well. He saw Ivo Taillebois; he saw Oger; he saw his fellow-Breton, Sir Raoul de Dol; he saw Sir Ascelin; he saw Sir Aswa, Thorold’s man; he saw Sir Hugh of Evermue, his own son-in-law; and with them he saw, or seemed to see, the Ogre of Cornwall, and O’Brodar of Ivark, and Dirk Hammerhand of Walcheren, and many another old foe long underground; and in his ear rang the text,—“Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” And Hereward knew that his end was come.
There was no time to put on mail or helmet. He saw the old sword and shield hang on a perch, and tore them down. As he girded the sword on Winter sprang to his side.
“I have three lances,—two for me and one for you, and we can hold the door against twenty.”
“Till they fire the house over our heads. Shall Hereward die like a wolf in a cave? Forward, all Hereward’s men!”
And he rushed out upon his fate. No man followed him, save Winter. The rest, disperst, unarmed, were running hither and thither helplessly.
“Brothers in arms, and brothers in Valhalla!” shouted Winter as he rushed after him.
A knight was running to and fro in the Court, shouting Hereward’s name. “Where is the villain? Wake! We have caught thee asleep at last.”
“I am out,” quoth Hereward, as the man almost stumbled against him; “and this is in.”
And through shield, hauberk, and body, as says Gaima, went Hereward’s javelin, while all drew back, confounded for the moment at that mighty stroke.
“Felons!” shouted Hereward, “your king has given me his truce; and do you dare break my house, and kill my folk? Is that your Norman law? And is this your Norman honor?—To take a man unawares over his meat? Come on, traitors all, and get what you can of a naked man; [Footnote: i. e. without armor.] you will buy it dear—Guard my back, Winter!”
And he ran right at the press of knights; and the fight began.
says Gaimar.
And as he hewed on silently, with grinding teeth and hard, glittering eyes, of whom did he think? Of Alftruda?
Not so. But of that pale ghost, with great black hollow eyes, who sat in Crowland, with thin bare feet, and sackcloth on her tender limbs, watching, praying, longing, loving, uncomplaining. That ghost had been for many a month the background of all his thoughts and dreams. It was so clear before his mind’s eye now, that, unawares to himself, he shouted “Torfrida!” as he struck, and struck the harder at the sound of his old battle-cry.
And now he is all wounded and be-bled; and Winter, who has fought back to back with him, has fallen on his face; and Hereward stands alone, turning from side to side, as he sweeps his sword right and left till the forest rings with the blows, but staggering as he turns. Within a ring of eleven corpses he stands. Who will go in and make the twelfth?
A knight rushes in, to fall headlong down, cloven through the helm: but Hereward’s blade snaps short, and he hurls it away as his foes rush in with a shout of joy. He tears his shield from his left arm, and with it, says Gaimar, brains two more.
But the end is come. Taillebois and Evermue are behind him now; four lances are through his back, and bear him down to his knees.
“Cut off his head, Breton!” shouted Ivo. Raoul de Dol rushed forward, sword in hand. At that cry Hereward lifted up his dying head. One stroke more ere it was all done forever.
And with a shout of “Torfrida!” which made the Bruneswald ring, he hurled the shield full in the Breton’s face, and fell forward dead.
The knights drew their lances from that terrible corpse slowly and with caution, as men who have felled a bear, yet dare not step within reach of the seemingly lifeless paw.
“The dog died hard,” said Ivo. “Lucky for us that Sir Ascelin had news of his knights being gone to Crowland. If he had had them to back him, we had not done this deed to-day.”
“I will make sure,” said Ascelin, as he struck off the once fair and golden head.
“Ho, Breton,” cried Ivo, “the villain is dead. Get up, man, and see for yourself. What ails him?”
But when they lifted up Raoul de Dol his brains were running down his face; and all men stood astonished at that last mighty stroke.
“That blow,” said Ascelin, “will be sung hereafter by minstrel and maiden as the last blow of the last Englishman. Knights, we have slain a better knight than ourselves. If there had been three more such men in this realm, they would have driven us and King William back again into the sea.”
So said Ascelin; those words of his, too, were sung by many a jongleur, Norman as well as English, in the times that were to come.
“Likely enough,” said Ivo; “but that is the more reason why we should set that head of his up over the hall-door, as a warning to these English churls that their last man is dead, and their last stake thrown and lost.”
So perished “the last of the English.”
It was the third day. The Normans were drinking in the hall of Bourne, casting lots among themselves who should espouse the fair Alftruda, who sat weeping within over the headless corpse; when in the afternoon a servant came in, and told them how a barge full of monks had come to the shore, and that they seemed to be monks from Crowland. Ivo Taillebois bade drive them back again into the barge with whips. But Hugh of Evermue spoke up.
“I am lord and master in Bourne this day, and if Ivo have a quarrel against St. Guthlac, I have none. This Ingulf of Fontenelle, the new abbot who has come thither since old Ulfketyl was sent to prison, is a loyal man, and a friend of King William’s, and my friend he shall be till he behaves himself as my foe. Let them come up in peace.”
Taillebois growled and cursed: but the monks came up, and into the hall; and at their head Ingulf himself, to receive whom all men rose, save Taillebois.
“I come,” said Ingulf, in most courtly French, “noble knights, to ask a boon and in the name of the Most Merciful, on behalf of a noble and unhappy lady. Let it be enough to have avenged yourself on the living. Gentlemen and Christians war not against the dead.”
“No, no, Master Abbot!” shouted Taillebois; “Waltheof is enough to keep Crowland in miracles for the present. You shall not make a martyr of another Saxon churl. He wants the barbarian’s body, knights, and you will be fools if you let him have it.”
“Churl? barbarian?” said a haughty voice; and a nun stepped forward who had stood just behind Ingulf. She was clothed entirely in black. Her bare feet were bleeding from the stones; her hand, as she lifted it, was as thin as a skeleton’s.
She threw back her veil, and showed to the knights what had been once the famous beauty of Torfrida.
But the beauty was long past away. Her hair was white as snow; her cheeks were fallen in. Her hawk-like features were all sharp and hard. Only in their hollow sockets burned still the great black eyes, so fiercely that all men turned uneasily from her gaze.
“Churl? barbarian?” she said, slowly and quietly, but with an intensity which was more terrible than rage. “Who gives such names to one who was as much better born and better bred than those who now sit here, as he was braver and more terrible than they? The base wood-cutter’s son? The upstart who would have been honored had he taken service as yon dead man’s groom?”
“Talk to me so, and my stirrup leathers shall make acquaintance with your sides,” said Taillebois.
“Keep them for your wife. Churl? Barbarian? There is not a man within this hall who is not a barbarian compared with him. Which of you touched the harp like him? Which of you, like him, could move all hearts with song? Which of you knows all tongues from Lapland to Provence? Which of you has been the joy of ladies’ bowers, the counsellor of earls and heroes, the rival of a mighty king? Which of you will compare yourself with him,—whom you dared not even strike, you and your robber crew, fairly in front, but, skulked round him till he fell pecked to death by you, as Lapland Skratlings peck to death the bear. Ten years ago he swept this hall of such as you, and hung their heads upon yon gable outside; and were he alive but one five minutes again, this hall would be right cleanly swept again! Give me his body,—or bear forever the name of cowards, and Torfrida’s curse.”
And she fixed her terrible eyes first on one, and then on another, calling them by name.
“Ivo Taillebois,—basest of all—”
“Take the witch’s accursed eyes off me!” and he covered his face with his hands. “I shall be overlooked,—planet struck. Hew the witch down! Take her away!”
“Hugh of Evermue,—the dead man’s daughter is yours, and the dead man’s lands. Are not these remembrances enough of him? Are you so fond of his memory that you need his corpse likewise?”
“Give it her! Give it her!” said he, hanging down his head like a rated cur.
“Ascelin of Lincoln, once Ascelin of Ghent,—there was a time when you would have done—what would you not?—for one glance of Torfrida’s eyes.—Stay. Do not deceive yourself, fair sir, Torfrida means to ask no favor of you, or of living man. But she commands you. Do the thing she bids, or with one glance of her eye she sends you childless to your grave.”
“Madam! Lady Torfrida! What is there I would not do for you? What have I done now, save avenge your great wrong?”
Torfrida made no answer, but fixed steadily on him eyes which widened every moment.
“But, madam,”—and he turned shrinking from the fancied spell,—“what would you have? The—the corpse? It is in the keeping of—of another lady.”
“So?” said Torfrida, quietly. “Leave her to me”; and she swept past them all, and flung open the bower door at their backs, discovering Alftruda sitting by the dead.
The ruffians were so utterly appalled, not only by the false powers of magic, but by veritable powers of majesty and eloquence, that they let her do what she would.
“Out!” cried she, using a short and terrible epithet. “Out, siren, with fairy’s face and tail of fiend, and leave the husband with his wife!”
Alftruda looked up, shrieked; and then, with the sudden passion of a weak nature, drew a little knife, and sprang up.
Ivo made a coarse jest. The Abbot sprang in: “For the sake of all holy things, let there be no more murder here!”
Torfrida smiled, and fixed her snake’s eye upon her wretched rival.
“Out! woman, and choose thee a new husband among these French gallants, ere I blast thee from head to foot with the leprosy of Naaman the Syrian.”
Alftruda shuddered, and fled shrieking into an inner room.
“Now, knights, give me—that which hangs outside.”
Ascelin hurried out, glad to escape. In a minute he returned.
The head was already taken down. A tall lay brother, the moment he had seen it, had climbed the gable, snatched it away, and now sat in a corner of the yard, holding it on his knees, talking to it, chiding it, as if it had been alive. When men had offered to take it, he had drawn a battle-axe from under his frock, and threatened to brain all comers. And the monks had warned off Ascelin, saying that the man was mad, and had Berserk fits of superhuman strength and rage.
“He will give it me!” said Torfrida, and went out.
“Look at that gable, foolish head,” said the madman. “Ten years agone, you and I took down from thence another head. O foolish head, to get yourself at last up into that same place! Why would you not be ruled by her, you foolish golden head?”
“Martin!” said Torfrida.
“Take it and comb it, mistress, as you used to do. Comb out the golden locks again, fit to shine across the battle-field. She has let them get all tangled into elf-knots, that lazy slut within.”
Torfrida took it from his hands, dry-eyed, and went in.
Then the monks silently took up the bier, and all went forth, and down the hill toward the fen. They laid the corpse within the barge, and slowly rowed away.
So Torfrida took the corpse home to Crowland, and buried it in the choir, near the blessed martyr St. Waltheof; after which she did not die, but lived on many years, [Footnote: If Ingulf can be trusted, Torfrida died about A.D. 1085.] spending all day in nursing and feeding the Countess Godiva, and lying all night on Hereward’s tomb, and praying that he might find grace and mercy in that day.
And at last Godiva died; and they took her away and buried her with great pomp in her own minster church of Coventry.
And after that Torfrida died likewise; because she had nothing left for which to live. And they laid her in Hereward’s grave, and their dust is mingled to this day.
And Leofric the priest lived on to a good old age, and above all things he remembered the deeds and the sins of his master, and wrote them in a book, and this is what remains thereof.
But when Martin Lightfoot died, no man has said; for no man in those days took account of such poor churls and running serving-men.
And Hereward’s comrades were all scattered abroad, some maimed, some blinded, some with tongues cut out, to beg by the wayside, or crawl into convents, and then die; while their sisters and daughters, ladies born and bred, were the slaves of grooms and scullions from beyond the sea.
And so, as sang Thorkel Skallason,—