Book: Harold, Book 12.

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BOOK XII.


THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS


CHAPTER I.




In the heart of the forest land in which Hilda's abode was situated, a
gloomy pool reflected upon its stagnant waters the still shadows of
the autumnal foliage. As is common in ancient forests in the
neighbourhood of men's wants, the trees were dwarfed in height by
repeated loppings, and the boughs sprang from the hollow, gnarled
boles of pollard oaks and beeches; the trunks, vast in girth, and
covered with mosses and whitening canker-stains, or wreaths of ivy,
spoke of the most remote antiquity: but the boughs which their
lingering and mutilated life put forth, were either thin and feeble
with innumerable branchlets, or were centred on some solitary
distorted limb which the woodman's axe had spared. The trees thus
assumed all manner of crooked, deformed, fantastic shapes--all
betokening age, and all decay--all, in despite of the noiseless
solitude around, proclaiming the waste and ravages of man.

The time was that of the first watches of night, when the autumnal
moon was brightest and broadest. You might see, on the opposite side
of the pool, the antlers of the deer every now and then, moving
restlessly above the fern in which they had made their couch; and,
through the nearer glades, the hares and conies stealing forth to
sport or to feed; or the bat wheeling low, in chase of the forest
moth. From the thickest part of the copse came a slow human foot, and
Hilda, emerging, paused by the waters of the pool. That serene and
stony calm habitual to her features was gone; sorrow and passion had
seized the soul of the Vala, in the midst of its fancied security from
the troubles it presumed to foresee for others. The lines of the face
were deep and care-worn--age had come on with rapid strides--and the
light of the eye was vague and unsettled, as if the lofty reason
shook, terrified in its pride, at last.

"Alone, alone!" she murmured, half aloud: "yea, evermore alone! And
the grandchild I had reared to be the mother of kings--whose fate,
from the cradle, seemed linked with royalty and love--in whom,
watching and hoping for, in whom, loving and heeding, methought I
lived again the sweet human life--hath gone from my hearth--forsaken,
broken-hearted--withering down to the grave under the shade of the
barren cloister! Is mine heart, then, all a lie? Are the gods who
led Odin from the Scythian East but the juggling fiends whom the
craven Christian abhors? Lo! the Wine Month has come; a few nights
more, and the sun which all prophecy foretold should go down on the
union of the icing and the maid, shall bring round the appointed day:
yet Aldyth still lives, and Edith still withers; and War stands side
by side with the Church, between the betrothed and the altar. Verily,
verily, my spirit hath lost its power, and leaves me bowed, in the awe
of night, a feeble, aged, hopeless, childless woman!"

Tears of human weakness rolled down the Vala's cheeks. At that
moment, a laugh came from a thing that had seemed like the fallen
trunk of a tree, or a trough in which the herdsman waters his cattle,
so still, and shapeless, and undefined it had lain amongst the rank
weeds and night-shade and trailing creepers on the marge of the pool,
The laugh was low yet fearful to hear.

Slowly, the thing moved, and rose, and took the outline of a human
form; and the Prophetess beheld the witch whose sleep she had
disturbed by the Saxon's grave.

"Where is the banner?" said the witch, laying her hand on Hilda's arm,
and looking into her face with bleared and rheumy eyes, "where is the
banner thy handmaids were weaving for Harold the Earl? Why didst thou
lay aside that labour of love for Harold the King? Hie thee home, and
bid thy maidens ply all night at the work; make it potent with rune
and with spell, and with gums of the seid. Take the banner to Harold
the King as a marriage-gift; for the day of his birth shall be still
the day of his nuptials with Edith the Fair!"

Hilda gazed on the hideous form before her; and so had her soul fallen
from its arrogant pride of place, that instead of the scorn with which
so foul a pretender to the Great Art had before inspired the King-born
Prophetess, her veins tingled with credulous awe.

"Art thou a mortal like myself," she said after a pause, "or one of
those beings often seen by the shepherd in mist and rain, driving
before them their shadowy flocks? one of those of whom no man knoweth
whether they are of earth or of Helheim? whether they have ever known
the lot and conditions of flesh, or are but some dismal race between
body and spirit, hateful alike to gods and to men?"

The dreadful hag shook her head, as if refusing to answer the
question, and said:

"Sit we down, sit we down by the dead dull pool, and if thou wouldst
be wise as I am, wake up all thy wrongs, fill thyself with hate, and
let thy thoughts be curses. Nothing is strong on earth but the Will;
and hate to the will is as the iron in the hands of the war-man."

"Ha!" answered Hilda, "then thou art indeed one of the loathsome brood
whose magic is born, not of the aspiring soul, but the fiendlike
heart. And between us there is no union. I am of the race of those
whom priests and kings reverenced and honoured as the oracles of
heaven; and rather let my lore be dimmed and weakened, in admitting
the humanities of hope and love, than be lightened by the glare of the
wrath that Lok and Rana bear the children of men."

"What, art thou so base and so doting," said the hag, with fierce
contempt, "as to know that another has supplanted thine Edith, that
all the schemes of thy life are undone, and yet feel no hate for the
man who hath wronged her and thee?--the man who had never been king if
thou hadst not breathed into him the ambition of rule? Think, and
curse!"

"My curse would wither the heart that is entwined within his,"
answered Hilda; "and," she added abruptly, as if eager to escape from
her own impulses, "didst thou not tell me, even now, that the wrong
would be redressed, and his betrothed yet be his bride on the
appointed day?"

"Ha! home, then!--home! and weave the charmed woof of the banner,
broider it with zimmes and with gold worthy the standard of a king;
for I tell thee, that where that banner is planted, shall Edith clasp
with bridal arms her adored. And the hwata thou hast read by the
bautastein, and in the temple of the Briton's revengeful gods, shall
be fulfilled."

"Dark daughter of Hela," said the Prophetess, "whether demon or god
hath inspired thee, I hear in my spirit a voice that tells me thou
hast pierced to a truth that my lore could not reach. Thou art
houseless and poor; I will give wealth to thine age if thou wilt stand
with me by the altar of Thor, and let thy galdra unriddle the secrets
that have baffled mine own. All foreshown to me hath ever come to
pass, but in a sense other than that in which my soul read the rune
and the dream, the leaf and the fount, the star and the Scin-laeca.
My husband slain in his youth; my daughter maddened with woe; her lord
murdered on his hearthstone; Sweyn, whom I loved as my child,"--the
Vala paused, contending against her own emotions,--"I loved them all,"
she faltered, clasping her hands, "for them I tasked the future. The
future promised fair; I lured them to their doom, and when the doom
came, lo! the promise was kept! but how?--and now, Edith, the last of
my race; Harold, the pride of my pride!--speak, thing of Horror and
Night, canst thou disentangle the web in which my soul struggles, weak
as the fly in the spider's mesh?"

"On the third night from this, will I stand with thee by the altar of
Thor, and unriddle the rede of my masters, unknown and unguessed, whom
thou hadst duteously served. And ere the sun rise, the greatest
mystery earth knows shall be bare to thy soul!"

As the witch spoke, a cloud passed over the moon; and before the light
broke forth again, the hag had vanished. There was only seen in the
dull pool, the water-rat swimming through the rank sedges; only in the
forest, the grey wings of the owl, fluttering heavily across the
glades; only in the grass, the red eyes of the bloated toad.

Then Hilda went slowly home, and the maids worked all night at the
charmed banner. All that night, too, the watch-dogs howled in the
yard, through the ruined peristyle--howled in rage and in fear. And
under the lattice of the room in which the maids broidered the banner,
and the Prophetess muttered her charm, there couched, muttering also,
a dark, shapeless thing, at which those dogs howled in rage and in
fear.




CHAPTER II.


All within the palace of Westminster showed the confusion and dismay
of the awful time;--all, at least, save the council-chamber, in which
Harold, who had arrived the night before, conferred with his thegns.
It was evening: the courtyards and the halls were filled with armed
men, and almost with every hour came rider and bode from the Sussex
shores. In the corridors the Churchmen grouped and whispered, as they
had whispered and grouped in the day of King Edward's death. Stigand
passed among them, pale and thoughtful. The serge gowns came rustling
round the archprelate for counsel or courage.

"Shall we go forth with the King's army?" asked a young monk, bolder
than the rest, "to animate the host with prayer and hymn?"

"Fool!" said the miserly prelate, "fool! if we do so, and the Norman
conquer, what become of our abbacies and convent lands? The Duke wars
against Harold, not England. If he slay Harold----"

"What then?"

"The Atheling is left us yet. Stay we here and guard the last prince
of the House of Cerdic," whispered Stigand, and he swept on.

In the chamber in which Edward had breathed his last, his widowed
Queen, with Aldyth, her successor, and Githa and some other ladies,
waited the decision of the council. By one of the windows stood,
clasping each other by the hand, the fair young bride of Gurth and the
betrothed of the gay Leofwine. Githa sate alone, bowing her face over
her hands--desolate; mourning for the fate of her traitor son; and the
wounds, that the recent and holier death of Thyra had inflicted, bled
afresh. And the holy lady of Edward attempted in vain, by pious
adjurations, to comfort Aldyth, who, scarcely heeding her, started
ever and anon with impatient terror, muttering to herself, "Shall I
lose this crown too?"

In the council-hall debate waxed warm,--which was the wiser, to meet
William at once in the battle-field, or to delay till all the forces
Harold might expect (and which he had ordered to be levied, in his
rapid march from York) could swell his host?

"If we retire before the enemy," said Gurth, "leaving him in a strange
land, winter approaching, his forage will fail. He will scarce dare
to march upon London: if he does, we shall be better prepared to
encounter him. My voice is against resting all on a single battle."

"Is that thy choice?" said Vebba, indignantly. "Not so, I am sure,
would have chosen thy father; not so think the Saxons of Kent. The
Norman is laying waste all the lands of thy subjects, Lord Harold;
living on plunder, as a robber, in the realm of King Alfred. Dost
thou think that men will get better heart to fight for their country
by hearing that their King shrinks from the danger?"

"Thou speakest well and wisely," said Haco; and all eyes turned to the
young son of Sweyn, as to one who best knew the character of the
hostile army and the skill of its chief. "We have now with us a force
flushed with conquest over a foe hitherto deemed invincible. Men who
have conquered the Norwegian will not shrink from the Norman. Victory
depends upon ardour more than numbers. Every hour of delay damps the
ardour. Are we sure that it will swell the numbers? What I dread
most is not the sword of the Norman Duke, it is his craft. Rely upon
it, that if we meet him not soon, he will march straight to London.
He will proclaim by the way that he comes not to seize the throne, but
to punish Harold, and abide by the Witan, or, perchance, by the word
of the Roman pontiff. The terror of his armament, unresisted, will
spread like a panic through the land. Many will be decoyed by his
false pretexts, many awed by a force that the King dare not meet. If
he come in sight of the city, think you that merchants and cheapmen
will not be daunted by the thought of pillage and sack? They will be
the first to capitulate at the first house which is fired. The city
is weak to guard against siege; its walls long neglected; and in
sieges the Normans are famous. Are we so united (the King's rule thus
fresh) but what no cabals, no dissensions will break out amongst
ourselves? If the Duke come, as come he will, in the name of the
Church, may not the Churchmen set up some new pretender to the crown--
perchance the child Edgar? And, divided against ourselves, how
ingloriously should we fall! Besides, this land, though never before
have the links between province and province been drawn so close, hath
yet demarcations that make the people selfish. The Northumbrians, I
fear, will not stir to aid London, and Mercia will hold aloof from our
peril. Grant that William once seize London, all England is broken up
and dispirited; each shire, nay, each town, looking only to itself.
Talk of delay as wearing out the strength of the foe! No, it would
wear out our own. Little eno', I fear, is yet left in our treasury.
If William seize London, that treasury is his, with all the wealth of
our burgesses. How should we maintain an army, except by preying on
the people, and thus discontenting them? Where guard that army?
Where are our forts? where our mountains? The war of delay suits only
a land of rock and defile, or of castle and breast-work. Thegns and
warriors, ye have no castles but your breasts of mail. Abandon these,
and you are lost."

A general murmur of applause closed this speech of Haco, which, while
wise in arguments our historians have overlooked, came home to that
noblest reason of brave men, which urges prompt resistance to foul
invasion.

Up, then, rose King Harold.

"I thank you, fellow-Englishmen, for that applause with which ye have
greeted mine own thoughts on the lips of Haco. Shall it be said that
your King rushed to chase his own brother from the soil of outraged
England, yet shrunk from the sword of the Norman stranger? Well
indeed might my brave subjects desert my banner if it floated idly
over these palace walls while the armed invader pitched his camp in
the heart of England. By delay, William's force, whatever it might
be, cannot grow less; his cause grows more strong in our craven fears.
What his armament may be we rightly know not; the report varies with
every messenger, swelling and lessening with the rumours of every
hour. Have we not around us now our most stalwart veterans--the
flower of our armies--the most eager spirits--the vanquishers of
Hardrada? Thou sayest, Gurth, that all should not be perilled on a
single battle. True. Harold should be perilled, but wherefore
England? Grant that we win the day; the quicker our despatch, the
greater our fame, the more lasting that peace at home and abroad which
rests ever its best foundation on the sense of the power which wrong
cannot provoke unchastised. Grant that we lose; a loss can be made
gain by a king's brave death. Why should not our example rouse and
unite all who survive us? Which the nobler example--the one best
fitted to protect our country--the recreant backs of living chiefs, or
the glorious dead with their fronts to the foe? Come what may, life
or death, at least we will thin the Norman numbers, and heap the
barriers of our corpses on the Norman march. At least, we can show to
the rest of England how men should defend their native land! And if,
as I believe and pray, in every English breast beats a heart like
Harold's, what matters though a king should fall?--Freedom is
immortal."

He spoke; and forth from his baldric he drew his sword. Every blade,
at that signal, leapt from the sheath: and, in that council-hall at
least, in every breast beat the heart of Harold.




CHAPTER III.


The chiefs dispersed to array their troops for the morrow's march; but
Harold and his kinsmen entered the chamber where the women waited the
decision of the council, for that, in truth, was to them the parting
interview. The King had resolved, after completing all his martial
preparations, to pass the night in the Abbey of Waltham; and his
brothers lodged, with the troops they commanded, in the city or its
suburbs. Haco alone remained with that portion of the army quartered
in and around the palace.

They entered the chamber, and in a moment each heart had sought its
mate; in the mixed assembly each only conscious of the other. There,
Gurth bowed his noble head over the weeping face of the young bride
that for the last time nestled to his bosom. There, with a smiling
lip, but tremulous voice, the gay Leofwine soothed and chided in a
breath the maiden he had wooed as the partner for a life that his
mirthful spirit made one holiday; snatching kisses from a cheek no
longer coy.

But cold was the kiss which Harold pressed on the brow of Aldyth; and
with something of disdain, and of bitter remembrance of a nobler love,
he comforted a terror which sprang from the thought of self.

"Oh, Harold!" sobbed Aldyth, "be not rashly brave: guard thy life for
my sake. Without thee, what am I? Is it even safe for me to rest
here? Were it not better to fly to York, or seek refuge with Malcolm
the Scot?"

"Within three days at the farthest," answered Harold, "thy brothers
will be in London. Abide by their counsel; act as they advise at the
news of my victory or my fall."

He paused abruptly, for he heard close beside him the broken voice of
Gurth's bride, in answer to her lord. "Think not of me, beloved; thy
whole heart now be England's. And if--if"--her voice failed a moment,
but resumed proudly, "why even then thy wife is safe, for she survives
not her lord and her land!"

The King left his wife's side, and kissed his brother's bride.

"Noble heart!" he said; "with women like thee for our wives and
mothers, England could survive the slaughter of thousand kings."

He turned, and knelt to Githa. She threw her arms over his broad
breast, and wept bitterly.

"Say--say, Harold, that I have not reproached thee for Tostig's death.
I have obeyed the last commands of Godwin my lord. I have deemed thee
ever right and just; now let me not lose thee, too. They go with
thee, all my surviving sons, save the exile Wolnoth,--him whom now I
shall never behold again. Oh, Harold!--let not mine old age be
childless!"

"Mother,--dear, dear mother, with these arms round my neck I take new
life and new heart. No! never hast thou reproached me for my
brother's death--never for aught which man's first duty enjoined.
Murmur not that that duty commands us still. We are the sons, through
thee, of royal heroes; through my father, of Saxon freemen. Rejoice
that thou hast three sons left, whose arms thou mayest pray God and
his saints to prosper, and over whose graves, if they fall, thou shalt
shed no tears of shame!"

Then the widow of King Edward, who (the crucifix clasped in her hands)
had listened to Harold with lips apart and marble cheeks, could keep
down no longer her human woman's heart; she rushed to Harold as he
still knelt to Githa--knelt by his side, and clasped him in her arms
with despairing fondness:

"O brother, brother, whom I have so dearly loved when all other love
seemed forbidden me;--when he who gave me a throne refused me his
heart; when, looking at thy fair promise, listening to thy tender
comfort,--when, remembering the days of old, in which thou wert my
docile pupil, and we dreamed bright dreams together of happiness and
fame to come,--when, loving thee methought too well, too much as weak
mothers may love a mortal son, I prayed God to detach my heart from
earth!--Oh, Harold! now forgive me all my coldness. I shudder at thy
resolve. I dread that thou should meet this man, whom an oath hath
bound thee to obey. Nay, frown not--I bow to thy will, my brother and
my King. I know that thou hast chosen as thy conscience sanctions, as
thy duty ordains. But come back--Oh, come back--thou who, like me,"
(her voice whispered,) "hast sacrificed the household hearth to thy
country's altars,--and I will never pray to Heaven to love thee less--
my brother, O my brother!"

In all the room were then heard but the low sounds of sobs and broken
exclamations. All clustered to one spot-Leofwine and his betrothed--
Gurth and his bride--even the selfish Aldyth, ennobled by the
contagion of the sublime emotion,--all clustered round Githa the
mother of the three guardians of the fated land, and all knelt before
her, by the side of Harold. Suddenly, the widowed Queen, the virgin
wife of the last heir of Cerdic, rose, and holding on high the sacred
rood over those bended heads, said, with devout passion:

"O Lord of Hosts--We Children of Doubt and Time, trembling in the
dark, dare not take to ourselves to question thine unerring will.
Sorrow and death, as joy and life, are at the breath of a mercy
divine, and a wisdom all-seeing: and out of the hours of evil thou
drawest, in mystic circle, the eternity of Good. 'Thy will be done on
earth, as it is in heaven.' If, O Disposer of events, our human
prayers are not adverse to thy pre-judged decrees, protect these
lives, the bulwarks of our homes and altars, sons whom the land offers
as a sacrifice. May thine angel turn aside the blade--as of old from
the heart of Isaac! But if, O Ruler of Nations, in whose sight the
ages are as moments, and generations but as sands in the sea, these
lives are doomed, may the death expiate their sins, and, shrived on
the battle-field, absolve and receive the souls!"




CHAPTER IV.


By the altar of the Abbey Church of Waltham, that night, knelt Edith
in prayer for Harold.

She had taken up her abode in a small convent of nuns that adjoined
the more famous monastery of Waltham; but she had promised Hilda not
to enter on the novitiate, until the birthday of Harold had passed.
She herself had no longer faith in the omens and prophecies that had
deceived her youth and darkened her life; and, in the more congenial
air of our Holy Church, the spirit, ever so chastened, grew calm and
resigned. But the tidings of the Norman's coming, and the King's
victorious return to his capital, had reached even that still retreat;
and love, which had blent itself with religion, led her steps to that
lonely altar. And suddenly, as she there knelt, only lighted by the
moon through the high casements, she was startled by the sound of
approaching feet and murmuring voices. She rose in alarm--the door of
the church was thrown open--torches advanced--and amongst the monks,
between Osgood and Ailred, came the King. He had come, that last
night before his march, to invoke the prayers of that pious
brotherhood; and by the altar he had founded, to pray, himself, that
his one sin of faith forfeited and oath abjured, might not palsy his
arm and weigh on his soul in the hour of his country's need.

Edith stifled the cry that rose to her lips, as the torches fell on
the pale and hushed and melancholy face of Harold; and she crept away
under the arch of the vast Saxon columns, and into the shade of
abutting walls. The monks and the King, intent on their holy office,
beheld not that solitary and shrinking form. They approached the
altar; and there the King knelt down lowlily, and none heard the
prayer. But as Osgood held the sacred rood over the bended head of
the royal suppliant, the Image on the crucifix (which had been a gift
from Alred the prelate, and was supposed to have belonged of old to
Augustine, the first founder of the Saxon Church--so that, by the
superstition of the age, it was invested with miraculous virtues)
bowed itself visibly. Visibly, the pale and ghastly image of the
suffering God bowed over the head of the kneeling man; whether the
fastenings of the rood were loosened, or from what cause soever,--in
the eyes of all the brotherhood, the Image bowed. [254]

A thrill of terror froze every heart, save Edith's, too remote to
perceive the portent, and save the King's, whom the omen seemed to
doom, for his face was buried in his clasped hands. Heavy was his
heart, nor needed it other warnings than its own gloom.

Long and silently prayed the King; and when at last he rose, and the
monks, though with altered and tremulous voices, began their closing
hymn, Edith passed noislessly along the wall, and, stealing through
one of the smaller doors which communicated to the nunnery annexed,
gained the solitude of her own chamber. There she stood, benumbed
with the strength of her emotions at the sight of Harold thus abruptly
presented. How had the fond human heart leapt to meet him! Twice,
thus, in the august ceremonials of Religion, secret, shrinking,
unwitnessed, had she, his betrothed, she, the partner of his soul,
stood aloof to behold him. She had seen him in the hour of his pomp,
the crown upon his brow,--seen him in the hour of his peril and agony,
that anointed head bowed to the earth. And in the pomp that she could
not share, she had exulted; but, oh, now--now,--oh now that she could
have knelt beside that humbled form, and prayed with that voiceless
prayer!

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