The fair Torfrida sat in an upper room of her mother’s house in St. Omer, alternately looking out of the window and at a book of mechanics. In the garden outside, the wryneck (as is his fashion in May) was calling Pi-pi-pi among the gooseberry bushes, till the cobwalls rang again. In the book was a Latin recipe for drying the poor wryneck, and using him as a philtre which should compel the love of any person desired. Mechanics, it must be understood, in those days were considered as identical with mathematics, and those again with astrology and magic; so that the old chronicler, who says that Torfrida was skilled in “the mechanic art,” uses the word in the same sense as does the author of the “History of Ramsey,” who tells us how a certain holy bishop of St. Dunstan’s party, riding down to Corfe through the forest, saw the wicked queen-mother Elfrida (her who had St. Edward stabbed at Corfe Gate) exercising her “mechanic art,” under a great tree; in plain English, performing heathen incantations; and how, when she saw that she was discovered, she tempted him to deadly sin: but when she found him proof against allurement, she had him into her bower; and there the enchantress and her ladies slew him by thrusting red-hot bodkins under his arms, so that the blessed man was martyred without any sign of wound. Of all which let every man believe as much as he list.
Torfrida had had peculiar opportunities of learning mechanics. The fairest and richest damsel in St. Omer, she had been left early by her father an orphan, to the care of a superstitious mother and of a learned uncle, the Abbot of St. Bertin. Her mother was a Provençale, one of those Arlesiennes whose dark Greek beauty still shines, like diamonds set in jet, in the doorways of the quaint old city. Gay enough in her youth, she had, like a true Southern woman, taken to superstition in her old age; and spent her days in the churches, leaving Torfrida to do and learn what she would. Her nurse, moreover, was a Lapp woman, carried off in some pirating foray, and skilled in all the sorceries for which the Lapps were famed throughout the North. Her uncle, partly from good-nature, partly from a pious hope that she might “enter religion,” and leave her wealth to the Church, had made her his pupil, and taught her the mysteries of books; and she had proved to be a strangely apt scholar. Grammar, rhetoric, Latin prose and poetry, such as were taught in those days, she mastered ere she was grown up. Then she fell upon romance, and Charlemagne and his Paladins, the heroes of Troy, Alexander and his generals, peopled her imagination. She had heard, too, of the great necromancer Virgilius (for into such the middle age transformed the poet), and, her fancy already excited by her Lapp nurse’s occult science, she began eagerly to court forbidden lore.
Forbidden, indeed, magic was by the Church in public; but as a reality, not as an imposture. Those whose consciences were tough and their faith weak, had little scruple in applying to a witch, and asking help from the powers below, when the saints above were slack to hear them. Churchmen, even, were bold enough to learn the mysteries of nature, Algebra, Judicial Astrology, and the occult powers of herbs, stones, and animals, from the Mussulman doctors of Cordova and Seville; and, like Pope Gerbert, mingle science and magic, in a fashion excusable enough in days when true inductive science did not exist.
Nature had her miraculous powers,—how far good, how far evil, who could tell? The belief that God was the sole maker and ruler of the universe was confused and darkened by the cross-belief, that the material world had fallen under the dominion of Satan and his demons; that millions of spirits, good and evil in every degree, exercised continually powers over crops and cattle, mines and wells, storms and lightning, health and disease. Riches, honors, and royalties, too, were under the command of the powers of darkness. For that generation, which was but too apt to take its Bible in hand upside down, had somehow a firm faith in the word of the Devil, and believed devoutly his somewhat startling assertion, that the kingdoms of the world were his, and the glory of them; for to him they were delivered, and to whomsoever he would he gave them: while it had a proportionally weak faith in our Lord’s answer, that they were to worship and serve the Lord God alone. How far these powers extended, how far they might be counteracted, how far lawfully employed, were questions which exercised the minds of men and produced a voluminous literature for several centuries, till the search died out, for very weariness of failure, at the end of the seventeenth century.
The Abbot of St. Bertin, therefore, did not hesitate to keep in his private library more than one volume which he would not have willingly lent to the simple monks under his charge; nor to Torfrida either, had she not acquired so complete a command over the good old man, that he could deny her nothing.
So she read of Gerbert, Pope Silvester II., who had died only a generation back: how (to quote William of Malmesbury) “he learned at Seville till he surpassed Ptolemy with the astrolabe, Alcandrus in astronomy, and Julius Firmicus in judicial astrology; how he learned what the singing and flight of birds portended, and acquired the art of calling up spirits from hell; and, in short, whatever—hurtful or healthful—human curiosity had discovered, besides the lawful sciences of arithmetic and astronomy, music and geometry”; how he acquired from the Saracens the abacus (a counting table); how he escaped from the Moslem magician, his tutor, by making a compact with the foul fiend, and putting himself beyond the power of magic, by hanging himself under a wooden bridge so as to touch neither earth nor water; how he taught Robert, King of France, and Otto the Kaiser; how he made an hydraulic organ which played tunes by steam, which stood even then in the Cathedral of Rheims; how he discovered in the Campus Martius at Rome wondrous treasures, and a golden king and queen, golden courtiers and guards, all lighted by a single carbuncle, and guarded by a boy with a bent bow; who, when Gerbert’s servant stole a golden knife, shot an arrow at that carbuncle, and all was darkness, and yells of demons.
All this Torfrida had read; and read, too, how Gerbert’s brazen head had told him that he should be Pope, and not die till he had sung mass at Jerusalem; and how both had come true,—the latter in mockery; for he was stricken with deadly sickness in Rome, as he sang mass at the church called Jerusalem, and died horribly, tearing himself in pieces.
Which terrible warning had as little effect on Torfrida as other terrible warnings have on young folk, who are minded to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
So Torfrida beguiled her lonely life in that dull town, looking out over dreary flats and muddy dikes, by a whole dream-world of fantastic imaginations, and was ripe and ready for any wild deed which her wild brain might suggest.
Pure she was all the while, generous and noble-hearted, and with a deep and sincere longing—as one soul in ten thousand has—after knowledge for its own sake; but ambitious exceedingly, and that not of monastic sanctity. She laughed to scorn the notion of a nunnery; and laughed to scorn equally the notion of marrying any knight, however much of a prudhomme, whom she had yet seen. Her uncle and Marquis Baldwin could have between them compelled her, as an orphan heiress, to marry whom they liked. But Torfrida had as yet bullied the Abbot and coaxed the Count successfully. Lances had been splintered, helmets split, and more than one life lost in her honor; but she had only, as the best safeguard she could devise, given some hint of encouragement to one Ascelin, a tall knight of St. Valeri, the most renowned bully of those parts, by bestowing on him a scrap of ribbon, and bidding him keep it against all comers. By this means she insured the personal chastisement of all other youths who dared to lift their eyes to her, while she by no means bound herself to her spadassin of St. Valeri. It was all very brutal, but so was the time; and what better could a poor lady do in days when no man’s life or woman’s honor was safe, unless—as too many were forced to do—she retired into a cloister, and got from the Church that peace which this world certainly could not give, and, happily, dared not take away?
The arrival of Hereward and his men had of course stirred the great current of her life, and indeed that of St. Omer, usually as stagnant as that of the dikes round its wall. Who the unknown champion was,—for his name of “Naemansson” showed that he was concealing something at least,—whence he had come, and what had been his previous exploits, busied all the gossips of the town. Would he and his men rise and plunder the abbey? Was not the châtelain mad in leaving young Arnulf with him all day? Madder still, in taking him out to battle against the Count of Guisnes? He might be a spy,—the avant-courrier of some great invading force. He was come to spy out the nakedness of the land, and would shortly vanish, to return with Harold Hardraade of Norway, or Sweyn of Denmark, and all their hosts. Nay, was he not Harold Hardraade himself in disguise? And so forth. All which Torfrida heard, and thought within herself that, be he who he might, she should like to look on him again.
Then came the news how the very first day that he had gone out against the Count of Guisnes he had gallantly rescued a wounded man. A day or two after came fresh news of some doughty deed; and then another, and another. And when Hereward returned, after a week’s victorious fighting, all St. Omer was in the street to stare at him.
Then Torfrida heard enough, and, had it been possible, more than enough, of Hereward and his prowess.
And when they came riding in, the great Marquis at the head of them all, with Robert le Frison on one side of him, and on the other Hereward, looking “as fresh as flowers in May,” she looked down on him out of her little lattice in the gable, and loved him, once and for all, with all her heart and soul.
And Hereward looked up at her and her dark blue eyes and dark raven locks, and thought her the fairest thing that he had ever seen, and asked who she might be, and heard; and as he heard he forgot all about the Sultan’s daughter, and the Princess of Constantinople, and the Fairy of Brocheliaunde, and all the other pretty birds which were still in the bush about the wide world; and thought for many a day of naught but the pretty bird which he held—so conceited was he of his own powers of winning her—there safe in hand in St. Omer.
So he cast about to see her, and to win her love. And she cast about to see him, and win his love. But neither saw the other for a while; and it might have been better for one of them had they never seen the other again.
If Torfrida could have foreseen, and foreseen, and foreseen——why, if she were true woman, she would have done exactly what she did, and taken the bitter with the sweet, the unknown with the known, as we all must do in life, unless we wish to live and die alone.
It has been shown how the Count of Guisnes had been a thorn in the side of Baldwin of Lille, and how that thorn was drawn out by Hereward. But a far sharper thorn in his side, and one which had troubled many a Count before, and was destined to trouble others afterward, was those unruly Hollanders, or Frisians, who dwelt in Scaldmariland, “the land of the meres of the Scheldt.” Beyond the vast forests of Flanders, in morasses and alluvial islands whose names it is impossible now to verify, so much has the land changed, both by inundations and by embankments, by the brute forces of nature and the noble triumphs of art, dwelt a folk, poor, savage, living mostly, as in Caesar’s time, in huts raised above the sea on piles or mounds of earth; often without cattle or seedfield, half savage, half heathen, but free. Free, with the divine instinct of freedom, and all the self-help and energy which spring thereout.
They were a mongrel race; and, as most mongrel races are (when sprung from parents not too far apart in blood), a strong race; the remnant of those old Frisians and Batavians, who had defied, and all but successfully resisted, the power of Rome; mingled with fresh crosses of Teutonic blood from Frank, Sueve, Saxon, and the other German tribes, who, after the fall of the Roman Empire, had swept across the land.
Their able modern historian has well likened the struggle between Civilis and the Romans to that between William the Silent and the Spaniard. It was, without doubt, the foreshadow of their whole history. They were distinguished, above most European races, for sturdy independence, and, what generally accompanies it, sturdy common sense. They could not understand why they should obey foreign Frank rulers, whether set over them by Dagobert or by Charlemagne. They could not understand why they were to pay tithes to foreign Frank priests, who had forced on them, at the sword’s point, a religion which they only half believed, and only half understood. Many a truly holy man preached to them to the best of his powers: but the cross of St. Boniface had too often to follow the sword of Charles Martel; and for every Frisian who was converted another was killed.
“Free Frisians,” nevertheless, they remained, at least in name and in their statute-book, “as long as the wind blows out of the clouds, and the world stands.” The feudal system never took root in their soil. [Footnote: Motley. “Rise of the Dutch Republic.”] If a Frank Count was to govern them, he must govern according to their own laws. Again and again they rebelled, even against that seemingly light rule. Again and again they brought down on themselves the wrath of their nominal sovereigns the Counts of Flanders; then of the Kaisers of Germany; and, in the thirteenth century, of the Inquisition itself. Then a crusade was preached against them as “Stadings,” heretics who paid no tithes, ill-used monks and nuns, and worshipped (or were said to worship) a black cat and the foul fiend among the meres and fens. Conrad of Marpurg, the brutal Director of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, burnt them at his wicked will, extirpating, it may be, heresy, but not the spirit of the race. That, crushed down and seemingly enslaved, during the middle age, under Count Dirk and his descendants, still lived; destined at last to conquer. They were a people who had determined to see for themselves and act for themselves in the universe in which they found themselves; and, moreover (a necessary corollary of such a resolution), to fight to the death against any one who interfered with them in so doing.
Again and again, therefore, the indomitable spirit rose, founding free towns with charters and guilds; embanking the streams, draining the meres, fighting each other and the neighboring princes; till, in their last great struggle against the Pope and Spain, they rose once and for all,
as the great Protestant Dutch Republic.
A noble errand it had been for such a man as Hereward to help those men toward freedom, instead of helping Frank Counts to enslave them;—men of his own blood, with laws and customs like those of his own Anglo-Danes, living in a land so exactly like his own that every mere and fen and wood reminded him of the scenes of his boyhood. The very names of the two lands were alike,—“Holland,” the hollow land,—the one of England, the other of Flanders.
But all this was hidden from Hereward. To do as he would be done by was a lesson which he had never been taught. If men had invaded his land, he would have cried, like the Frisians whom he was going to enslave, “I am free as long as the wind blows out of the clouds!” and died where he stood. But that was not the least reason why he should not invade any other man’s land, and try whether or not he, too, would die where he stood. To him these Frieslanders were simply savages, probably heathens, who would not obey their lawful lord, who was a gentleman and a Christian; besides, renown, and possibly a little plunder, might be got by beating them into obedience. He knew not what he did; and knew not, likewise, that as he had done to others, so would it be done to him.
Baldwin had at that time made over his troublesome Hollanders to his younger son Robert, the Viking whom little Arnulf longed to imitate.
Florent, Count of Holland, and vassal of the great Marquis, had just died, leaving a pretty young widow, to whom the Hollanders had no mind to pay one stiver more than they were forced. All the isles of Zeeland, and the counties of Eonham and Alost, were doing that which was right in the sight of their own eyes, and finding themselves none the worse therefor,—though the Countess Gertrude doubtless could buy fewer silks of Greece or gems of Italy. But to such a distressed lady a champion could not long be wanting; and Robert, after having been driven out of Spain by the Moors with fearful loss, and in a second attempt wrecked with all his fleet as soon as he got out of port, resolved to tempt the main no more, and leave the swan’s path for that of the fat oxen and black dray-horses of Holland.
So he rushed to avenge the wrongs of the Countess Gertrude; and his father, whose good-natured good sense foresaw that the fiery Robert would raise storms upon his path,—happily for his old age he did not foresee the worst,—let him go, with his blessing.
So Robert gathered to him valiant ruffians, as many as he could find; and when he heard of the Viking who had brought Eustace of Guisnes to reason, it seemed to him that he was a man who would do his work. So when the great Marquis came down to St. Omer to receive the homage of Count Eustace of Guisnes, Robert came thither too, and saw Hereward.
“You have done us good service, Harold Naemansson, as it pleases you to be called,” said Baldwin, smiling. “But some man’s son you are, if ever I saw a gallant knight earl-born by his looks as well as his deeds.”
Hereward bowed.
“And for me,” said Robert, “Naemansson or earl’s son, here is my Viking’s welcome to all Vikings like myself.” And he held out his hand.
Hereward took it.
“You failed in Galicia, beausire, only because your foes were a hundred to one. You will not fail where you are going, if (as I hear) they are but ten to one.”
Robert laughed, vain and gratified.
“Then you know where I have been, and where I am going?”
“Why not? As you know well, we Vikings are all brothers, and all know each other’s counsel, from ship to ship and port to port.”
Then the two young men looked each other in the face, and each saw that the other was a man who would suit him.
“Skall to the Viking!” cried Robert, aping, as was his fancy, the Norse rovers’ slang. “Will you come with me to Holland?”
“You must ask my young lord there,” and he pointed to Arnulf. “I am his man now, by all laws of honor.”
A flush of jealousy passed over Robert’s face. He, haplessly for himself, thought that he had a grievance.
The rights of primogeniture—droits d’ainesse—were not respected in the family of the Baldwins as they should have been, had prudence and common sense had their way.
No sacred or divine right is conferred by the fact of a man’s being the first-born son. If Scripture be Scripture, the “Lord’s anointed” was usually rather a younger son of talent and virtue; one born, not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit, like David and Solomon. And so it was in other realms besides Flanders during the middle age. The father handed on the work—for ruling was hard work in those days—to the son most able to do it. Therefore we can believe Lambert of Aschaffenbourg when he says, that in Count Baldwin’s family for many ages he who pleased his father most took his father’s name, and was hereditary prince of all Flanders; while the other brothers led an inglorious life of vassalage to him.
But we can conceive, likewise, that such a method would give rise to intrigues, envyings, calumnies, murders, fratracidal civil wars, and all the train of miseries which for some years after this history made infamous the house of Baldwin, as they did many another noble house, till they were stopped by the gradual adoption of the rational rule of primogeniture.
So Robert, who might have been a daring and useful friend to his brother, had he been forced to take for granted from birth that he was nobody, and his brother everybody,—as do all younger sons of English noblemen, to their infinite benefit,—held himself to be an injured man for life, because his father called his first-born Baldwin, and promised him the succession,—which indeed he had worthily deserved, according to the laws of Mammon and this world, by bringing into the family such an heiress as Richilda and such a dowry as Mons.
But Robert, who thought himself as good as his brother,—though he was not such, save in valor,—nursed black envy in his heart. Hard it was to him to hear his elder brother called Baldwin of Mons, when he himself had not a foot of land of his own. Harder still to hear him called Baldwin the Good, when he felt in himself no title whatsoever to that epithet. Hardest of all to see a beautiful boy grow up, as heir both of Flanders and of Hainault.
Had he foreseen whither that envy would have led him; had he foreseen the hideous and fratracidal day of February 22d, 1071, and that fair boy’s golden locks rolling in dust and blood,—the wild Viking would have crushed the growing snake within his bosom; for he was a knight and a gentleman. But it was hidden from his eyes. He had to “dree his weird,”—to commit great sins, do great deeds, and die in his bed, mighty and honored, having children to his heart’s desire, and leaving the rest of his substance to his babes. Heaven help him, and the like of him!
But he turned to young Arnulf.
“Give me your man, boy!”
Arnulf pouted. He wanted to keep his Viking for himself, and said so.
“He is to teach me to go ‘leding,’ as the Norsemen call it, like you.”
Robert laughed. A hint at his piratical attempts pleased his vanity, all the more because they had been signal failures.
“Lend him me, then, my pretty nephew, for a month or two, till he has conquered these Friesland frogs for me; and then, if thou wilt go leding with him—”
“I hope you may never come back,” thought Robert to himself; but he did not say it,
“Let the knight go,” quoth Baldwin.
“Let me go with him, then.”
“No, by all saints! I cannot have thee poked through with a Friesland pike, or rotted with a Friesland ague.”
Arnulf pouted still.
“Abbot, what hast thou been at with the boy? He thinks of naught but blood and wounds, instead of books and prayers.”
“He is gone mad after this—this knight.”
“The Abbot,” said Hereward, “knows by hearing of his ears that I bid him bide at home, and try to govern lands in peace like his father and you, Sir Marquis.”
“Eh?”
The Abbot told honestly what had passed between Hereward and the lad, as they rode to St. Bertin.
Baldwin was silent, thinking, and smiling jollily, as was the wont of the Debonair.
“You are a man of sense, beausire. Come with me,” said he at last.
And he, Hereward, and Robert went into an inner room.
“Sit down on the settle by me.”
“It is too great an honor.”
“Nonsense, man! If I be who I am, I know enough of men to know that I need not be ashamed of having you as bench-fellow. Sit down.”
Hereward obeyed of course.
“Tell me who you are.”
Hereward looked out of the corner of his eyes, smiling and perplexed.
“Tell me and Robert who you are, man; and be done with it. I believe I know already. I have asked far and wide of chapmen, and merchants, and wandering knights, and pirate rascals,—like yourself.”
“And you found that I was a pirate rascal?”
“I found a pirate rascal who met you in Ireland, three years since, and will swear that if you have one gray eye and one blue—”
“As he has,” quoth Robert.
“That I am a wolf’s head, and a robber of priests, and an Esau on the face of the earth; every man’s hand against me, and mine—for I never take but what I give—against every man.”
“That you are the son of my old friend Leofric of Chester: and the hottest-hearted, shrewdest-headed, hardest-handed Berserker in the North Seas. You killed Gilbert of Ghent’s bear, Siward Digre’s cousin. Don’t deny it.”
“Don’t hang me, or send me to the Westminster miracle-worker to be hanged, and I will confess.”
“I? Every man is welcome who comes hither with a bold hand and a strong heart. ‘The Refuge for the Destitute,’ they call Flanders; I suppose because I am too good-natured to turn rogues out. So do no harm to mine, and mine shall do no harm to you.”
Baldwin’s words were true. He found house-room for everybody, helped everybody against everybody else (as will be seen), and yet quarrelled with nobody—at least in his old age—by the mere virtue of good nature,—which blessed is the man who possesseth.
So Hereward went off to exterminate the wicked Hollanders, and avenge the wrongs of the Countess Gertrude.
Torfrida had special opportunities of hearing about Hereward; for young Arnulf was to her a pet and almost a foster-brother, and gladly escaped from the convent to tell her the news.
He had now had his first taste of the royal game of war. He had seen Hereward fight by day, and heard him tell stories over the camp-fire by night. Hereward’s beauty, Hereward’s prowess, Hereward’s songs, Hereward’s strange adventures and wanderings, were forever in the young boy’s mouth; and he spent hours in helping Torfrida to guess who the great unknown might be; and then went back to Hereward, and artlessly told him of his beautiful friend, and how they had talked of him, and of nothing else; and in a week or two Hereward knew all about Torfrida; and Torfrida knew—what filled her heart with joy—that Hereward was bound to no lady-love, and owned (so he had told Arnulf) no mistress save the sword on his thigh.
Whereby there had grown up in the hearts of both the man and the maid a curiosity, which easily became the parent of love.
But when Baldwin the great Marquis came to St. Omer, to receive the homage of Eustace of Guisnes, young Arnulf had run into Torfrida’s chamber in great anxiety. “Would his grandfather approve of what he had done? Would he allow his new friendship with the unknown?”
“What care I?” said Torfrida. “But if your friend wishes to have the Marquis’s favor, he would be wise to trust him, at least so far as to tell his name.”
“I have told him so. I have told him that you would tell him so.”
“I? Have you been talking to him about me?”
“Why not?”
“That is not well done, Arnulf, to talk of ladies to men whom they do not know.”
Arnulf looked up, puzzled and pained; for she spoke haughtily.
“I know naught of your new friend. He may be a low-born man, for anything that I can tell.”
“He is not! He is as noble as I am. Everything he says and does—every look—shows it.”
“You are young,—as you have shown by talking of me to him. But I have given you my advice”; and she moved languidly away. “Let him tell your grandfather who he is, or remain suspected.”
The boy went away sadly.
Early the next morning he burst into Torfrida’s room as she was dressing her hair.
“How now? Are these manners for the heir of Flanders?”
“He has told all!”
“He has!” and she started and dropt her comb.
“Pick up that comb, girl. You need not go away. I have no secrets with young gentlemen.”
“I thought you would be glad to hear.”
“I? What can I want in the matter, save that your grandfather should be satisfied that you are entertaining a man worthy to be your guest?”
“And he is worthy: he has told my grandfather who he is.”
“But not you?”
“No. They say I must not know yet. But this I know, that they welcomed him, when he told them, as if he had been an earl’s son; and that he is going with my Uncle Robert against the Frieslanders.”
“And if he be an earl’s son, how comes he here, wandering with rough seamen, and hiding his honest name? He must have done something of which he is ashamed.”
“I shall tell you nothing,” said Arnulf, pouting.
“What care I? I can find out by art magic if I like.”
“I don’t believe all that. Can you find out, for instance, what he has on his throat?”
“A beard.”
“But what is under that beard?”
“A gôitre.”
“You are laughing at me.”
“Of course I am, as I shall at any one who challenges me to find out anything so silly, and so unfit.”
“I shall go.”
“Go then.” For she knew very well that he would come back again.
“Nurse,” said Torfrida to the old Lapp woman, when they were alone, “find out for me what is the name of this strange champion, and what he has beneath his beard.”
“Beneath his beard?”
“Some scar, I suppose, or secret mark. I must know. You will find out for your Torfrida, will you not, nurse?”
“I will make a charm that will bring him to you, were all the icebergs of Quenland between you and him: and then you can see for yourself.”
“No, no, no! not yet, nurse!” and Torfrida smiled. “Only find me out that one thing: that I must know.”
And yet why she wanted to know, she could not tell herself.
The old woman came back to her, ere she went to bed.
“I have found it out all, and more. I know where to get scarlet toadstools, and I put the juice in his men’s ale: they are laughing and roaring now, merry-mad every one of them.”
“But not he?”
“No, no. He is with the Marquis. But in madness comes out truth; and that long hook-nosed body-varlet of his has told us all.”
And she told Torfrida who Hereward was, and the secret mark.
“There is a cross upon his throat, beneath his chin, pricked in after their English fashion.”
Torfrida started.
“Then,—then the spell will not work upon him; the Holy Cross will turn it off.”
“It must be a great Cross and a holy one that will turn off my charms,” said the old hag, with a sneer, “whatever it may do against yours. But on the back of his hand,—that will be a mark to know him by,—there is pricked a bear,—a white bear that he slew.” And she told the story of the fairy bear; which Torfrida duly stored up in her heart.
“So he has the Cross on his throat,” thought Torfrida to herself. “Well, if it keep off my charm, it will keep off others, that is one comfort; and one knows not what fairies or witches or evil creatures he may meet with in the forests and the fens.”
The discovery of Hereward’s rank did not, doubtless, lessen Torfrida’s fancy for him. She was ambitious enough, and proud enough of her own lineage, to be full glad that her heart had strayed away—as it must needs stray somewhere—to the son of the third greatest man in England. As for his being an outlaw, that mattered little. He might be inlawed, and rich and powerful, any day in those uncertain, topsy-turvy times; and, for the present, his being a wolf’s head only made him the more interesting to her. Women like to pity their lovers. Sometimes—may all good beings reward them for it—they love merely because they pity. And Torfrida found it pleasant to pity the insolent young coxcomb, who certainly never dreamed of pitying himself.
When Hereward went home that night, he found the Abbey of St. Bertin in horrible confusion. His men were grouped outside the gate, chattering like monkeys; the porter and the monks, from inside, entreating them, vainly, to come in and go to bed quietly.
But they would not. They vowed and swore that a great gulf had opened all down the road, and that one step more would tumble them in headlong. They manifested the most affectionate solicitude for the monks, warning them, on their lives, not to step across the threshold, or they would be swallowed (as Martin, who was the maddest of the lot, phrased it) with Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. In vain Hereward stormed; assured them that the supposed abyss was nothing but the gutter; proved the fact by kicking Martin over it. The men determined to believe their own eyes, and after a while fell asleep, in heaps, in the roadside, and lay there till morning, when they woke, declaring, as did the monks, that they had been all bewitched. They knew not—and happily the lower orders, both in England and on the Continent, do not yet know—the potent virtues of that strange fungus, with which Lapps and Samoiedes have, it is said, practised wonders for centuries past.
The worst of the matter was, that Martin Lightfoot, who had drank most of the poison, and had always been dreamy and uncanny, in spite of his shrewdness and humor, had, from that day forward, something very like a bee in his bonnet.
But before Count Robert and Hereward could collect sufficient troops for the invasion of Holland, another chance of being slain in fight arose, too tempting to be overlooked; namely, the annual tournament at Pont de l’Arche above Rouen, where all the noblest knights of Normandy would assemble, to win their honor and ladies’ love by hewing at each other’s sinful bodies. Thither, too, the best knights of Flanders must needs go, and with them Hereward. Though no knight, he was allowed in Flanders, as he had been in Scotland, to take his place among that honorable company. For, though he still refused the honor of knighthood, on the ground that he had, as yet, done no deed deserving thereof, he was held to have deserved it again and again, and all the more from his modesty in declining it.
So away they all went to Pont de l’Arche, a right gallant meinie: and Torfrida watched them go from the lattice window.
And when they had passed down the street, tramping and jingling and caracoling, young Arnulf ran into the house with eyes full of tears, because he was not allowed to go likewise; and with a message for Torfrida, from no other than Hereward.
“I was to tell you this and no more: that if he meets your favor in the field, he that wears it will have hard work to keep it.”
Torfrida turned pale as ashes; first with wild delight, and then with wild fear.
“Ha?—does he know who—Sir Ascelin?”
“He knows well enough. Why not? Every one knows. Are you afraid that he is not a match for that great bullock?”
“Afraid? Who said I was afraid? Sir Ascelin is no bullock either; but a courteous and gallant knight.”
“You are as pale as death, and so—”
“Never mind what I am,” said she, putting her hands over his eyes, and kissing him again and again, as a vent for her joy.
The next few days seemed years for length: but she could wait. She was sure of him now. She needed no charms. “Perhaps,” thought she, as she looked in the glass, “I was my own charm.” And, indeed, she had every fair right to say so.
At last news came.
She was sitting over her books; her mother, as usual, was praying in the churches; when the old Lapp nurse came in. A knight was at the door. His name, he said, was Siward the White, and he came from Hereward.
From Hereward! He was at least alive: he might be wounded, though; and she rushed out of the chamber into the hall, looking never more beautiful; her color heightened by the quick beating of her heart; her dark hair, worn loose and long, after the fashion of those days, streaming around her and behind her.
A handsome young man stood in the door-way, armed from head to foot.
“You are Siward, Hereward’s nephew?”
He bowed assent. She took him by the hands, and, after the fashion of those days, kissed him on the small space on either cheek, which was left bare between the nose-piece and the chain-mail.
“You are welcome. Hereward is—is alive?”
“Alive and gay, and all the more gay at being able to send to the Lady Torfrida by me something which was once hers, and now is hers once more.”
And he drew from his bosom the ribbon of the knight of St. Valeri.
She almost snatched it from his hand, in her delight at recovering her favor.
“How—where—did he get this?”
“He saw it, in the thick of the tournament, on the helm of a knight who, he knew, had vowed to maim him or take his life; and, wishing to give him a chance of fulfilling his vow, rode him down, horse and man. The knight’s Norman friends attacked us in force; and we Flemings, with Hereward at our head, beat them off, and overthrew so many, that we are almost all horsed at the Norman’s expense. Three more knights, with their horses, fell before Hereward’s lance.”
“And what of this favor?”
“He sends it to its owner. Let her say what shall be done with it.”
Torfrida was on the point of saying, “He has won it; let him wear it for my sake.” But she paused. She longed to see Hereward face to face; to speak to him, if but one word. If she allowed him to wear the favor, she must at least have the pleasure of giving it with her own hands. And she paused.
“And he is killed?”
“Who? Hereward?”
“Sir Ascelin.”
“Only bruised; but he shall be killed, if you will.”
“God forbid!”
“Then,” said Siward, mistaking her meaning, “all I have to tell Hereward is, it seems, that he has wasted his blow. He will return, therefore, to the Knight of St. Valeri his horse, and, if the Lady Torfrida chooses, the favor which he has taken by mistake from its rightful owner.” And he set his teeth, and could not prevent stamping on the ground, in evident passion. There was a tone, too, of deep disappointment in his voice, which made Torfrida look keenly at him. Why should Hereward’s nephew feel so deeply about that favor? And as she looked,—could that man be the youth Siward? Young he was, but surely thirty years old at least. His face could hardly be seen, hidden by helmet and nose-piece above, and mailed up to the mouth below. But his long mustache was that of a grown man; his vast breadth of shoulder, his hard hand, his sturdy limbs,—these surely belonged not to the slim youth whom she had seen from her lattice riding at Hereward’s side. And, as she looked, she saw upon his hand the bear of which her nurse had told her.
“You are deceiving me!” and she turned first deadly pale, and then crimson. “You—you are Hereward himself!”
“I? Pardon me, my lady. Ten minutes ago I should have been glad enough to have been Hereward. Now, I am thankful enough that I am only Siward; and not Hereward, who wins for himself contempt by overthrowing a knight more fortunate than he.” And he bowed, and turned away to go.
“Hereward! Hereward!” and, in her passion, she seized him by both his hands. “I know you! I know that device upon your hand. At last! at last my hero,—my idol! How I have longed for this moment! How I have toiled for it, and not in vain! Good heavens! what am I saying?” And she tried, in her turn, to escape from Hereward’s mailed arms.
“Then you do not care for that man?”
“For him? Here! take my favor, wear it before all the world, and guard it as you only can; and let them all know that Torfrida is your love.”
And with hands trembling with passion, she bound the ribbon round his helm.
“Yes! I am Hereward,” he almost shouted; “the Berserker, the brain-hewer, the land-thief, the sea-thief, the feeder of wolf and raven,—Aoi! Ere my beard was grown, I was a match for giants. How much more now, that I am a man whom ladies love? Many a champion has quailed before my very glance. How much more, now that I wear Torfrida’s gift? Aoi!”
Torfrida had often heard that wild battle-cry of Aoi! of which the early minstrels were so fond,—with which the great poet who wrote the “Song of Roland” ends every paragraph; which has now fallen (displaced by our modern Hurrah), to be merely a sailor’s call or hunter’s cry. But she shuddered as she heard it close to her ears, and saw, from the flashing eye and dilated nostril, the temper of the man on whom she had thrown herself so utterly. She laid her hand upon his lips.
“Silence! silence for pity’s sake. Remember that you are in a maiden’s house; and think of her good fame.”
Hereward collected himself instantly, and then holding her at arm’s length, gazed upon her. “I was mad a moment. But is it not enough to make me mad to look at you?”
“Do not look at me so, I cannot bear it,” said she, hanging down her head. “You forget that I am a poor weak girl.”
“Ah! we are rough wooers, we sea-rovers. We cannot pay glozing French compliments like your knights here, who fawn on a damsel with soft words in the hall, and will kiss the dust off their queen’s feet, and die for a hair of their goddess’s eyebrow; and then if they catch her in the forest, show themselves as very ruffians as if they were Paynim Moors. We are rough, lady, we English: but those who trust us, find us true.”
“And I can trust you?” she asked, still trembling.
“On God’s cross there round your neck,” and he took her crucifix and kissed it. “You only I love, you only I will love, and you will I love in all honesty, before the angels of heaven, till we be wedded man and wife. Who but a fool would soil the flower which he means to wear before all the world?”
“I knew Hereward was noble! I knew I had not trusted him in vain!”
“I kept faith and honor with the Princess of Cornwall, when I had her at my will, and shall I not keep faith and honor with you?”
“The Princess of Cornwall?” asked Torfrida.
“Do not be jealous, fair queen. I brought her safe to her betrothed; and wedded she is, long ago. I will tell you that story some day. And now—I must go.”
“Not yet! not yet! I have something to—to show you.”
She motioned him to go up the narrow stairs, or rather ladder, which led to the upper floor, and then led him into her chamber.
A lady’s chamber was then, in days when privacy was little cared for, her usual reception room; and the bed, which stood in an alcove, was the common seat of her and her guests. But Torfrida did not ask him to sit down. She led the way onward towards a door beyond.
Hereward followed, glancing with awe at the books, parchments, and strange instruments which lay on the table and the floor.
The old Lapp nurse sat in the window, sewing busily. She looked up, and smiled meaningly. But as she saw Torfrida unlock the further door with one of the keys which hung at her girdle, she croaked out,—
“Too fast! Too fast! Trust lightly, and repent heavily.”
“Trust once and for all, or never trust at all,” said Torfrida, as she opened the door.
Hereward saw within rich dresses hung on perches round the wall, and chests barred and padlocked.
“These are treasures,” said she, “which many a knight and nobleman has coveted. By cunning, by flattery, by threats of force even, have they tried to win what lies here,—and Torfrida herself, too, for the sake of her wealth. But thanks to the Abbot my uncle, Torfrida is still her own mistress, and mistress of the wealth which her forefathers won by sea and land far away in the East. All here is mine,—and if you be but true to me, all mine is yours. Lift the lid for me, it is too heavy for my arms.”
Hereward did so; and saw within golden cups and bracelets, horns of ivory and silver, bags of coin, and among them a mail shirt and helmet, on which he fixed at once silent and greedy eyes.
She looked at his face askance, and smiled. “Yes, these are more to Hereward’s taste than gold and jewels. And he shall have them. He shall have them as a proof that if Torfrida has set her love upon a worthy knight, she is at least worthy of him; and does not demand, without being able to give in return.”
And she took out the armor, and held it up to him.
“This is the work of dwarfs or enchanters! This was not forged by mortal man! It must have come out of some old cavern, or dragon’s hoard!” said Hereward, in astonishment at the extreme delicacy and slightness of the mail-rings, and the richness of the gold and silver with which both hauberk and helm were inlaid.
“Enchanted it is, they say; but its maker, who can tell? My ancestor won it, and by the side of Charles Martel. Listen, and I will tell you how.
“You have heard of fair Provence, where I spent my youth; the land of the sunny south; the land of the fig and the olive, the mulberry and the rose, the tulip and the anemone, and all rich fruits and fair flowers,—the land where every city is piled with temples and theatres and towers as high as heaven, which the old Romans built with their enchantments, and tormented the blessed martyrs therein.”
“Heavens, how beautiful you are!” cried Hereward, as her voice shaped itself into a song, and her eyes flashed, at the remembrance of her southern home.
Torfrida was not altogether angry at finding that he was thinking of her, and not of her words.
“Peace, and listen. You know how the Paynim held that land,—the Saracens, to whom Mahound taught all the wisdom of Solomon,—as they teach us in turn,” she added in a lower voice.
“And how Charles and his Paladins,” [Charles Martel and Charlemagne were perpetually confounded in the legends of the time] “drove them out, and conquered the country again for God and his mother.”
“I have heard—” but he did not take his eyes off her face.
“They were in the theatre at Arles, the Saracens, where the blessed martyr St. Trophimus had died in torments; they had set up there their idol of Mahound, and turned the place into a fortress. Charles burnt it over their heads: you see—I have seen—the blackened walls, the blood-stained marbles, to this day. Then they fled into the plain, and there they turned and fought. Under Montmajeur, by the hermit’s cell, they fought a summer’s day, till they were all slain. There was an Emir among them, black as a raven, clad in magic armor. All lances turned from it, all swords shivered on it. He rode through the press without a wound, while every stroke of his scymitar shore off a head of horse or man. Charles himself rode at him, and smote him with his hammer. They heard the blow in Avignon, full thirty miles away. The flame flashed out from the magic armor a fathom’s length, blinding all around; and when they recovered their sight, the enchanter was far away in the battle, killing as he went.
“Then Charles cried, ‘Who will stop that devil, whom no steel can wound? Help us, O blessed martyr St. Trophimus, and save the soldiers of the Cross from shame!’
“Then cried Torfrid, my forefather, ‘What use in crying to St. Trophimus? He could not help himself, when the Paynim burnt him: and how can he help us? A tough arm is worth a score of martyrs here.’
“And he rode at that Emir, and gript him in his arms. They both fell, and rolled together on the ground; but Torfrid never loosed his hold till he had crushed out his unbaptized soul and sent it to join Mahound in hell.
“Then he took his armor, and brought it home in triumph. But after a while he fell sick of a fever; and the blessed St. Trophimus appeared to him, and told him that it was a punishment for his blasphemy in the battle. So he repented, and vowed to serve the saint all his life. On which he was healed instantly, and fell to religion, and went back to Montmajeur; and there he was a hermit in the cave under the rock, and tended the graves hewn in the living stone, where his old comrades, the Paladins who were slain, sleep side by side round the church of the Holy Cross. But the armor he left here; and he laid a curse upon it, that whosoever of his descendants should lose that armor in fight, should die childless, without a son to wield a sword. And therefore it is that none of his ancestors, valiant as they have been, have dared to put this harness on their backs.”
And so ended a story, which Torfrida believed utterly, and Hereward likewise.
“And now, Hereward mine, dare you wear that magic armor, and face old Torfrid’s curse?”
“What dare I not?”
“Think. If you lose it, in you your race must end.”
“Let it end. I accept the curse.”
And he put the armor on.
But he trembled as he did it. Atheism and superstition go too often hand in hand; and godless as he was, sceptical of Providence itself, and much more of the help of saint or angel, still the curse of the old warrior, like the malice of a witch or a demon, was to him a thing possible, probable, and formidable.
She looked at him in pride and exultation.
“It is yours,—the invulnerable harness! Wear it in the forefront of the battle! And if weapon wound you through it, may I, as punishment for my lie, suffer the same upon my tender body,—a wound for every wound of yours, my knight!” [Footnote: “Volo enim in meo tale quid nunc perpeti corpore semel, quicquid eas ferrei vel e metallo excederet.”]
And after that they sat side by side, and talked of love with all honor and honesty, never heeding the old hag, who crooned to herself in her barbarian tongue,—