Read Ebook: The Knights of England France and Scotland by Herbert Henry William

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1251 lines and 135821 words, and 26 pages

On the eighteenth day after the defeat of Tosti and Hardrada, the Saxon army was encamped over against the fortified position of the invaders. On that same day, a monk, Sir Hugues Maigrot, came to find Harold, with proposals from the foe, offering him peace on one of three conditions--either that he should yield the kingdom presently--or leave it to the arbitration of the pope--or, finally, decide the matter by appeal to God in single combat.

To each and all of these proposals, the Saxon answered bluntly in the negative. "I will not yield my kingdom! I will not leave it to the pope! I will not meet the duke in single combat!"

Again the monk returned. "I come again," he said, "from William. 'Tell Harold,' said the duke, 'if he will hold him to his ancient compact, I yield him all the lands beyond the Humber; I give his brother Gurth all the demesnes his father, Godwin, held. If he refuse these my last proffers, tell him before his people, he is a perjured liar, accursed of the pope, and excommunicated--he, and all those that hold to him!'"

But no effect had the bold words of William on the stern spirits of the English. "Battle," they cried--"no peace with the Normans. Battle--immediate battle!" and with that answer did the priest return to his employer; and either host prepared for the appeal to that great arbiter, the sword.

Fairly the morning broke which was to look upon the slaughter of so many thousands; broad and bright rose the sun before whose setting one of those two magnificent and gallant armies must necessarily be involved in utter ruin. As the first rays were visible upon the eastern sky, Odo, the bishop of Bayeux, William's maternal brother, performed high mass before the marshalled troops, wearing his cope and rochet over his iron harness. The holy rites performed, he leaped upon his snow-white charger, and, with his truncheon in his hand, arrayed the cavalry, which he commanded.

It was a glorious spectacle, that mighty host, arrayed in three long columns of attack, marching with slow and orderly precision against the palisaded trenches of the Saxons. The men-at-arms of the great counts of Boulogne and Ponthieu composed the first; the second being formed by the auxiliar bands of Brittany, Poitou, and Maine; and in the third, commanded by the duke in person--mounted on a superb Andalusian charger, wearing about his neck the reliquary on which his rival had sworn falsely, and accompanied by a young noble, Tunstan the White, bearing the banner of the pope--were marshalled all the flower and strength of Normandy. Scattered along the front of the advance were multitudes of archers, lightly equipped in quilted jerkins, with long yew bows, and arrows of an ell in length, mingled with crossbow-men with arbalasts of steel, and square, steel-headed quarrels.

Steadily they advanced, and in good order; while, in their entrenched camp, guarded by palisades of oak morticed together in a long line of ponderous trellis-work, the Englishmen awaited their approach, drawn up around their standard, which--blazoned with the white dragon, long both the ensign and the war-cry of their race--was planted firmly in the earth, surrounded by the dense ranks of heavy infantry which formed the strength of their array.

Then out dashed from the lines the boldest of his vavasours, the Norman Taillefer, singing aloud the famous song--well known through every province of proud France--the song of Charlemagne and Rollo--tossing aloft the while his long, two-handed war-sword, and catching it adroitly as it fell; while at each close of that proud, spirit-stirring chant, each warrior of that vast array thundered the burden of the song--"God aid! God aid!"

Then, like a storm of hail, close, deadly, and incessant, went forth the volleyed showers from arbalast and long-bow; while infantry and horse charged in unbroken order against the gates and angles of the fort. But with a cool and stubborn hardihood the Saxon infantry stood firm. Protected by the massive palisades from the appalling volleys of the archery, they hurled their short and heavy javelins with certain aim and deadly execution over their stout defences; while their huge axes, wherever they came hand to hand, shivered the Norman spears like reeds, and cleft the heaviest mail, even at a single blow! Long, and with all the hot, enthusiastic valor of their race, did the assailants crowd around the ramparts; but it was all in vain--they could not scale them in the face of that indomitable infantry; they could not force one timber from its place; and they at length recoiled, weary and half-subdued, toward the reserve of William.

After a short cessation, again the archery advanced; but, by the orders of the duke, their volleys were no longer sent point-blank, but shot at a great elevation, so that they fell in a thick, galling shower, striking the heads and wounding the unguarded faces of the bold defenders. Harold himself, who fought on foot beside his standard, lost his right eye at the first flight; but not for that did he desert his post, or play less valiantly the part of a determined soldier and wise leader. Again with that tremendous shout of "N?tre Dame--God aid! God aid!" which had, in every realm of Europe, sounded the harbinger of victory, the horse and foot rushed on to the attack; while from their rear that heavy and incessant sleet of bolt, and shaft, and bullet, fell fast and frequent into the dense ranks of the still-undaunted English. At no point did they force their way, however, even when fighting at this desperate advantage. At no point did a single Norman penetrate a gate, or overtop a palisade; while at one entrance so complete was the repulse of the attacking squadrons, that they recoiled, hard pressed by the defenders, to a ravine at some considerable distance from the trenches, deep, dangerous, and filled with underwood and brambles; these, as they fell back in confusion, their horses stumbling and unable to recover, were overthrown and slain pell-mell, and half defeated. One charge of cavalry, one shock of barbed horse, would have insured the total rout of the invaders; but--wo for England on that day!--cavalry she had none, nor barbed horse, to complete gloriously the work her sturdy footmen had commenced so gallantly. Still, great was the disorder, great was the disarray and peril, of the foreign soldiery. The cry went through the host that the great duke was slain; and, though he flung himself amid the flyers, with his head bare, that they might recognise his features--threatening, cursing, striking at friend and foe with undiscriminating violence--it was well nigh an hour before he could restore the semblance of any discipline or order. This, once accomplished, he advanced again; and yet a third time, though he exerted every nerve, was he repulsed at every point in terrible disorder, and with tremendous loss.

Evening was fast approaching; and well did William know that, if the following morning should find the Saxons firm in their unforced entrenchments, his hopes were vain and hopeless! The country, far and near, was rousing to the Saxon war-cry; and to the Normans, not to conquer, was to be conquered utterly; and to be conquered was to perish, one and all! Valor or open force, it was too evident, could effect nothing against men as valiant and as strong, posted with more advantage. Guile was his last resource; and guile, as usual, prevailed!

THE FAITH OF WOMAN.

"Two things there be on earth that ne'er forget-- A woman, and a dog--where once their love is set!"--OLD MS.

It was the morning after the exterminating fight at Hastings. The banner blessed of the Roman pontiff streamed on the tainted air, from the same hillock whence the dragon standard of the Saxons had shone unconquered to the sun of yester-even! Hard by was pitched the proud pavilion of the conqueror, who, after the tremendous strife and perilous labors of the preceding day, reposed himself in fearless and untroubled confidence upon the field of his renown; secure in the possession of the land, which he was destined to transmit to his posterity for many a hundred years, by the red title of the sword.

To the defeated Saxons, morning, however, brought but a renewal of those miseries which, having yesterday commenced with the first victory of their Norman lords, were never to conclude, or even to relax, until the complete amalgamation of the rival races should leave no Normans to torment, no Saxons to endure; all being merged at last into one general name of English, and by their union giving origin to the most powerful, and brave, and intellectual people, the world has ever looked upon since the extinction of Rome's freedom.

At the time of which we are now speaking, nothing was thought of by the victors save how to rivet most securely on the necks of the unhappy natives their yoke of iron; nothing by the poor, subjugated Saxons, but how to escape for the moment the unrelenting massacre which was urged far and wide by the remorseless conquerors throughout the devastated country. With the defeat of Harold's host, all national hope of freedom was at once lost to England. Though, to a man, the English population were brave and loyal, and devoted to their country's rights, the want of leaders--all having perished side by side on that disastrous field--of combination, without which myriads are but dust in the scale against the force of one united handful--rendered them quite unworthy of any serious fears, and even of consideration, to the bloodthirsty barons of the invading army. Over the whole expanse of level country which might be seen from the slight elevation whereon was pitched the camp of William, on every side might be descried small parties of the Norman horse, driving in with their bloody lances, as if they were mere cattle, the unhappy captives; a few of whom they now began to spare, not from the slightest sentiment of mercy, but literally that their arms were weary with the task of slaying, although their hearts were yet insatiate of blood.

It must be taken now into consideration by those who listen with dismay and wonder to the accounts of pitiless barbarity--of ruthless, indiscriminating slaughter on the part of men whom they have hitherto been taught to look upon as brave indeed as lions in the field, but not partaking of the lion's nature after the field was won--not only that the seeds of enmity had long been sown between those rival people, but that the deadly crop of hatred had grown up, watered abundantly by the tears and blood of either; and, lastly, that the fierce fanaticism of religious persecution was added to the natural rancor of a war waged for the ends of conquest or extermination. The Saxon nation, from the king downward to the meanest serf who fought beneath his banner, or buckled on the arms of liberty, were all involved under the common ban of the pope's interdict. They were accursed of God, and handed over by his holy church to the kind mercies of the secular arm; and therefore, though but yesterday they were a powerful and united nation, to-day they were but a vile horde of scattered outlaws, whom any man might slay wherever he should find them, whether in arms or otherwise--amenable for blood neither to any mortal jurisdiction, nor even to the ultimate tribunal to which all must submit hereafter, unless deprived of their appeal like these poor fugitives, by excommunication from the pale of Christianity. For thirty miles around the Norman camp, pillars of smoke by day, continually streaming upward to the polluted heaven, and the red glare of nightly conflagration, told fatally the doom of many a happy home! Neither the castle nor the cottage might preserve their male inhabitants from the sword's edge, their females from more barbarous persecution. Neither the sacred hearth of hospitality nor the more sacred altars of God's churches might protect the miserable fugitives; neither the mail-shirt of the man-at-arms nor the monk's frock of serge availed against the thrust of the fierce Norman spear. All was dismay and havoc, such as the land wherein those horrors were enacted has never witnessed since, through many a following age.

High noon approached, and in the conqueror's tent a gorgeous feast was spread. The red wine flowed profusely, and song and minstrelsy arose with their heart-soothing tones, to which the feeble groans of dying wretches bore a dread burden from the plain whereon they still lay struggling in their great agonies, too sorely maimed to live, too strong as yet to die. But, ever and anon, their wail waxed feebler and less frequent; for many a plunderer was on foot, licensed to ply his odious calling in the full light of day--reaping his first if not his richest booty from the dead bodies of their slaughtered foemen. Ill fared the wretches who lay there, untended by the hand of love or mercy, "scorched by the death-thirst, and writhing in vain;" but worse fared they who showed a sign of life to the relentless robbers of the dead, for then the dagger--falsely called that of mercy--was the dispenser of immediate immortality. The conqueror sat at his triumphant board, and barons drank his health: "First English monarch, of the pure blood of Normandy!"--"King by the right of the sword's edge!"--"Great, glorious, and sublime!" Yet was not his heart softened, nor was his bitter hate toward the unhappy prince who had so often ridden by his side in war, and feasted at the same board with him in peace, relinquished or abated. Even while the feast was at the highest, while every heart was jocund and sublime, a trembling messenger approached, craving on bended knee permission to address the conqueror and king--for so he was already schooled by brief but hard experience to style the devastator of his country.

"Speak out, Dog Saxon!" cried the ferocious prince; "but since thou must speak, see that thy speech be brief, an' thou wouldst keep thy tongue uncropped thereafter!"

"Great duke and mighty," replied the trembling envoy, "I bear you greeting from Elgitha, herewhile the noble wife of Godwin, the queenly mother of our late monarch--now, as she bade me style her, the humblest of your suppliants and slaves. Of your great nobleness and mercy, mighty king, she sues you, that you will grant her the poor leave to search amid the heaps of those our Saxon dead, that her three sons may at least lie in consecrated earth--so may God send you peace and glory here, and everlasting happiness hereafter!"

"Hear to the Saxon slave!" William exclaimed, turning as if in wonder toward his nobles; "hear to the Saxon slave, that dares to speak of consecrated earth, and of interment for the accursed body of that most perjured, excommunicated liar! Hence! tell the mother of the dead dog, whom you have dared to style your king, that for the interdicted and accursed dead the sands of the seashore are but too good a sepulchre!"

"She bade me proffer humbly to your acceptance the weight of Harold's body in pure gold," faintly gasped forth the terrified and cringing messenger, "so you would grant her that permission."

"Well! well and nobly!" answered they, one and all. "The land is ours, and all that therein is: their dwellings, their demesnes, their wealth, whether of gold, or silver, or of cattle--yea, they themselves are ours! themselves, their sons, their daughters, and their wives--our portion and inheritance, to be our slaves for ever!"

"Begone! you have our answer," exclaimed the duke, spurning him with his foot; "and hark ye, arbalast-men and archers, if any Saxon more approach us on like errand, see if his coat of skin be proof against the quarrel of the shaft!"

The second day dawned on the place of horror, and not a Saxon had presumed, since the intolerant message of the duke, to come to look upon his dead. But now the ground was needed whereon to lay the first stone of the abbey William had vowed to God. The ground was needed; and, moreover, the foul steam from the human shambles was pestilential on the winds of heaven. And now, by trumpet-sound, and proclamation through the land, the Saxons were called forth, on pain of death, to come and seek their dead, lest the health of the conquerors should suffer from the pollution they themselves had wrought. Scarce had the blast sounded, and the glad tidings been announced once only, ere from their miserable shelters, where they had herded with the wild beasts of the forest--from wood, morass, and cavern, happy if there they might escape the Norman spear--forth crept the relics of that persecuted race. Old men and matrons, with hoary heads, and steps that tottered no less from the effect of terror than of age--maidens, and youths, and infants--too happy to obtain permission to search amid those festering heaps, dabbling their hands in the corrupt and pestilential gore which filled each nook and hollow of the dinted soil, so they might bear away, and water with their tears, and yield to consecrated ground, the relics of those brave ones, once loved so fondly, and now so bitterly lamented. It was toward the afternoon of that same day, when a long train was seen approaching, with crucifix, and cross, and censer--the monks of Waltham abbey, coming to offer homage for themselves, and for their tenantry and vassals, to him whom they acknowledged as their king; expressing their submission to the high will of the Norman pontiff--justified, as they said, and proved by the assertion of God's judgment upon the hill of Hastings. Highly delighted by this absolute submission, the first he had received from any English tongue, the conqueror received the monks with courtesy and favor, granting them high immunities, and promising them free protection, and the unquestioned tenor of their broad demesnes for ever. Nay, after he had answered their address, he detained two of their number--men of intelligence, as with his wonted quickness of perception he instantly discovered--from whom to derive information as to the nature of his newly-acquired country and newly-conquered subjects. Osgad and Ailric, the deputed messengers from the respected principal of their community, had yet a further and higher object than to tender their submission to the conqueror. Their orders were, at all and every risk, to gain permission to consign the corpse of their late king and founder to the earth previously denied to him. And soon, emboldened by the courtesy and kindness of the much-dreaded Norman, they took courage to approach the subject, knowing it interdicted, even on pain of death; and, to their wonder and delight, it was unhesitatingly granted.

Throughout the whole of the third day succeeding that unparalleled defeat and slaughter, those old men might be seen toiling among the naked carcasses, disfigured, maimed, and festering in the sun, toiling to find the object of their devoted veneration. But vain were all their labors--vain was their search, even when they called in the aid of his most intimate attendants, ay, of the mother that had borne him! The corpses of his brethren, Leofwyn and Gurth, were soon discovered; but not one eye, even of those who had most dearly loved him, could now distinguish the maimed features of the king.

At last, when hope itself was now almost extinct, some one named Edith--Edith the Swan-necked! She had been the mistress--years ere he had been, or dreamed of being, king--to the brave son of Godwin. She had beloved him in her youth with that one, single-minded, constant, never-ending love, which but few, even of her devoted sex, can feel, and they but once, and for one cherished object. Deserted and dishonored when he she loved was elevated to the throne, she had not ceased from her true adoration; but, quitting her now-joyless home, had shared her heart between her memories and her God, in the sequestered cloisters of the nunnery of Croyland. More days elapsed ere she could reach the fatal spot, and the increased corruption denied the smallest hope of his discovery: yet, from the moment when the mission was named to her, she expressed her full and confident conviction that she could recognise that loved one so long as but one hair remained on that head she had once so cherished! It was night when she arrived on the fatal field, and by the light of torches once more they set out on their awful duty. "Show me the spot," she said, "where the last warrior fell;" and she was led to the place where had been found the corpses of his gallant brethren: and, with an instinct that nothing could deceive, she went straight to the corpse of Harold! It had been turned already to and fro many times by those who sought it; his mother had looked on it, and pronounced it not her son's: but that devoted heart knew it at once--and broke! Whom rank, and wealth, and honors had divided, defeat and death made one!--and the same grave contained the cold remains of Edith the Swan-necked and the last scion of the Saxon kings of England.

THE ERRING ARROW.

"'Tis merry, 'tis merry, in good green-wood, When the navis and merle are singing, When the deer sweeps by, and the hounds are in cry, And the hunter's horn is ringing."--LADY OF THE LAKE.

As beautiful a summer's morning as ever chased the stars from heaven, was dawning over that wide tract of waste and woodland, which still, though many a century has now mossed over the ancestral oaks which then were in their lusty prime, retains the name by which it was at that day styled appropriately--the "New Forest." Few years had then elapsed since the first Norman lord of England had quenched the fires that burned in thirty hamlets; had desecrated God's own altars, making the roofless aisles of many a parish church the haunt of the grim wolf or antlered red-deer; turning fair fields and cultured vales to barren and desolate wastes--to gratify his furious passion for that sport which has so justly been entitled the mimicry of warfare. Few years had then elapsed, yet not a symptom of their old fertility could now be traced in the wild plains waving with fern, and overrun with copsewood, broom, and brambles; unless it might be found in the profuse luxuriance with which this thriftless crop had overspread the champaign once smiling like a goodly garden with every meet production for the sustenance of man.

It was, as has been said, as beautiful a summer's morning as ever eye of man beheld. The sun, which had just raised the verge of his great orb above the low horizon, was checkering the mossy greensward with long, fantastic lines of light and shadow, and tinging the gnarled limbs of the huge oaks with ruddy gold; the dew, which lay abundantly on every blade of grass and every bending wild-flower, had not yet felt his power, nor raised a single mist-wreath to veil the brightness of the firmament; nor was the landscape, that lay there steeped in the lustre of the glowing skies, less lovely than the dawn that waked above it: long sylvan avenues sweeping for miles through every variation of the wildest forest-scenery--here traversing in easy curves wide undulations clothed with the purple heather; here sinking downward to the brink of sheets of limpid water; now running straight through lines of mighty trees, and now completely overbowered as they dived through brakes and dingles, where the birch and holly grew so thickly mingled with the prickly furze and creeping eglantine as to make twilight of the hottest noontide. Such were the leading features of the country which had most deeply felt, and has borne down to later days most evident memorials of, the Norman's tyranny.

Deeply embosomed in these delicious solitudes--surrounded by its flanking walls, and moat brimmed from a neighboring streamlet, with barbican and ballium, and all the elaborate defences that marked the architecture of the conquering race--stood Malwood keep, the favorite residence of Rufus, no less than it had been of his more famous sire. Here, early as was the hour, all was already full of life, full of the joyous and inspiriting confusion that still characterizes, though in a less degree than in those days of feudal pomp, the preparations for the chase. Tall yeomen hurried to and fro--some leading powerful and blooded chargers, which reared, and pawed the earth, and neighed till every turret echoed to the din; some struggling to restrain the mighty bloodhounds which bayed and strove indignantly against the leash; while others, lying in scattered groups upon the esplanade of level turf, furbished their cloth-yard shafts, or strung the six-foot bows, which, for the first time, had drawn blood in England upon the fatal field of Hastings.

A long, keen bugle-blast rang from the keep, and in an instant a hundred bows were strung, a hundred ready feet were in the stirrup. Again if rang, longer and keener than before, and every forester was in his saddle; while from the low-browed arch, bending their stately heads quite to their saddle-bows, over the echoing drawbridge a dozen knights rode forth, the followers and comrades of their king.

Scarcely above the middle size, but moulded in most exquisite proportion, thin-flanked, deep-chested, muscular, and lithe, and agile, there was not one of all his train, noble, or squire, or yeoman, who could display a form so fitted for the union of activity with strength, of beauty with endurance, as could the second William. His hair, from which he had derived his famous soubriquet, was not of that marked and uncomely hue which we should now term red, but rather of a bright and yellowish brown, curled closely to a classical and bust-like head; his eye was quick and piercing; his features, severally, were well formed and handsome; yet had the eye a wavering, and restless, and at times even downcast expression; and the whole aspect of the face told many a tale of pride, and jealousy, and passion--suspicion that might be roused to cruelty, and wilfulness that surely would be lashed by any opposition to violent and reckless fury. But now the furrows on the brow were all relaxed, the harsh lines of the mouth smoothed into temporary blandness. "Forward, messires!" he cried, in Norman-French; "the morning finds us sluggards. What, ho! Sir Walter Tyrrel, shall we two company to-day, and gage our luck against these gay gallants?"

"Right jovially, my liege," returned the knight whom he addressed. A tall, dark-featured soldier rode beside his bridle-rein, bearing a bow which not an archer in the train could bend. "Right jovially will we--an' they dare cope with us! What sayest thou, De Beauchamp--darest thou wager thy black boar-hound against a cast of merlins--thyself and Vermandois against his grace and me?"

"Nay, thou shouldst gage him odds, my Walter," Rufus interposed; "thy shaft flies ever truest, nor yield I to any bow save thine!"

"To his, my liege?" cried Beauchamp, "thou yield to his! Never drew Walter Tyrrel so true a string as thou; he lacks the sleight, I trow, so ekes it out with strength! Tyrrel must hold him pleased if he rate second i' the field."

"How now, Sir Walter?" shouted the king; "hearest thou this bold De Beauchamp, and wilt thou yield the bucklers?--not thou, I warrant me, though it be to thy king!"

"So please your highness," Tyrrel answered; "'tis but a sleight to 'scape our wager--'scaping the shame beside of yielding! He deems us over-strong for him, and so would part us!"

"Nay, by my halydom," Rufus replied with a gay smile, "but we will have it so. We two will ride in company, each shooting his own shaft for his own hand. I dare uphold my arrow for twenty marks of gold, and my white Alan, against thy Barbary bay. Darest thou, Sir Walter?"

"Shoot as thou wilt, so stands it!"

"Amen!" cried Tyrrel, "and I doubt not to hear your grace confess Tyrrel hath struck the lordlier quarry."

"Away, then, all! away!" and, setting spurs to his curveting horse, the monarch led the way at a hard gallop, followed by all his train--a long and bright procession, their gay plumes and many-colored garments offering a lively contrast to the deep, leafy verdure of July, and their clear weapons glancing lifelike to the sunshine.

They had careered along, with merriment and music, perhaps three miles into the forest, when the deep baying of a hound was heard, at some short distance to the right, from a thick verge of coppice. Instantly the king curbed in his fiery horse, and raised his hand on high, waving a silent halt. "Ha! have we outlaws here?" he whispered close in the ear of Tyrrel. "'Fore God, but they shall rue it!"

Scarcely had he spoken, when a buck burst from a thicket, and, ere it made three bounds, leaped high into the air and fell, its heart pierced through and through by the unerring shaft of an outlying ranger, who the next instant stepped out of his covert, and, catching sight of the gay cavalcade confronting him--the sounds of whose approach he must have overlooked entirely in the excitement of his sport--turned hastily as if to fly. But it was all too late: a dozen of the king's retainers had dashed their rowels into their horses' flanks the instant he appeared, and scarcely had he discovered their advance before he was their prisoner.

Unroofed and doorless, in different stages of decay, a score or two of cottages, once hospitable, happy homes of a free peasantry, stood here and there amid the brushwood which had encroached upon the precincts; while in the midst the desecrated church of Lyme reared its gray tower, now overgrown with ivy, and crumbling in silent ruin. Upon the cross which crowned the lowly tower, there sat, as they approached, a solitary raven--nor, though the whoop and horn rang close below his perch, did he show any sign of wildness or of fear; but, rising slowly on his wing, flapped round and round in two or three slow circles, and then with a hoarse croak resumed his station. The raven was a favorite bird with the old hunters; and when the deer was slain he had his portion, thence named "the raven's bone." Indeed, so usual was the practice, that this bird, the wildest by its nature of all the things that fly, would rarely shun a company which its sagacity descried to be pursuers of the sylvan game.

"What! sittest thou there, old black-frock, in our presence?" shouted the king, bending his bow; "but we will teach thee manners!" Still, the bird moved not, but again sent forth his ominous and sullen croak above the jocund throng. The bow was raised--the cord was drawn back to the monarch's ear: it twanged, and the next moment the hermit-bird came fluttering down, transfixed by the long shaft, with painful and discordant cries, and fell close at the feet of Rufus's charger.

There was a murmur in the crowd; and one, a page who waited on the king, whispered with a pale face and agitated voice into his fellow's ear: "I have heard say--

'Whose shaft 'gainst raven's life is set, Shaft's feather his heart-blood shall wet!'"

The red king caught the whisper, and turning with an inflamed countenance and flashing eye on the unwitting wakener of his wrath--"Dastard and fool!" he shouted; and, clinching his gloved hand, he dealt the boy so fierce a blow upon the chest, that he fell to the earth like a lifeless body, plunging so heavily upon the sod head-foremost, that the blood gushed from nose, ears, mouth, and he lay senseless and inanimate as the surrounding clay. With a low, sneering laugh, the tyrant once more spurred his charger forward, amid the smothered execrations of his Norman followers, boiling with indignation for that one of their noble and victorious race should have endured the foul wrong of a blow, though it were dealt him by a monarch's hand. And there were scowling brows, and teeth set hard, among the very noblest of his train; and, as the glittering band swept on, the father of the injured boy--a dark-browed, aged veteran, who had couched lance at Hastings to win the throne of earth's most lovely island for that base tyrant's sire--reined in his horse, and, leaping to the earth, upraised the body from the gory turf, and wiped away the crimson stream from the pale features, and dashed pure water, brought from a neighboring brooklet in a comrade's bacinet, upon the fair young brow--but it was all in vain! The dying child rolled upward his faint eyes; they rested on the anxious lineaments of that war-beaten sire, who, stern and fiery to all else, had ever to that motherless boy been soft and tender as a woman. "Father," he gasped, while a brief, painful smile illuminated with a transient gleam his ashy lips--"mercy, kind mother Mary! Father--father"--the words died in the utterance; the dim eyes wavered--closed; the head fell back upon the stalwart arm that had supported it, and, with one long and quivering convulsion, the innocent soul departed!

Some three or four--inferior barons of the train, yet each a gentleman of lineage and prowess in the field, each one in his own estimate a prince's peer--had paused around the desolate father and his murdered child; and now, as the old man gazed hopelessly upon the features of his first-born and his only, the sympathy which had moistened their hard eyes and relaxed their iron features was swallowed up in a fierce glare of indignation, irradiating their scarred and war-seamed visages with that sublime expression, from which, when glowing on the face of a resolute and fearless man, the wildest savage of the forest will shrink in mute dismay. The father, after a long and fearful struggle with his more tender feelings--wringing his hard hands till the blood-drops started redly from beneath every nail--lifted his face, more pale and ashy in its hues than that of the inanimate form which he had loved so tenderly; and as he lifted it he caught the fierce glow mantling on the front of each well-tried companion, and his own features lightened with the self-same blaze: his hand sank downward to the hilt of the long poniard at his girdle, and the fingers worked with a convulsive tremor as they griped the well-known pommel, and an exulting smile curled his mustached lip, prophetic of revenge. Once more he bowed above the dead; he laid his broad hand on the pulseless heart, and printed a long kiss on the forehead; then lifting, with as much tenderness as though they still had sense and feeling, the relics of the only thing he loved on earth, he bore them from the roadside into the shelter of a tangled coppice; unbuckled his long military mantle, and spreading it above them, secured it at each corner by heavy stones, a temporary shelter from insult or intrusion. This done, in total silence he rejoined his friends, who had foreborne to offer aid where they perceived it would be held superfluous. Without one word, he grasped the bridle of his charger, tightened his girths, and then, setting no foot to stirrup, vaulted almost without an effort into the steel-bound demipique. Raising his arm aloft, he pointed into the long aisles of the forest, wherein the followers of Rufus had long since disappeared.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet