Book: Harold, Book 6.
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Edward Bulwer Lytton >> Harold, Book 6.
The Earl gained his feet in an instant, and that haste was needed to
save his life; for while he rose ten swords flashed around him. The
Welchmen had sprung from their palfreys as Harold's horse fell.
Fortunately for him, only two of the party bore javelins, (a weapon
which the Welch wielded with deadly skill,) and those already wasted,
they drew their short swords, which were probably imitated from the
Romans, and rushed upon him in simultaneous onset. Versed in all the
weapons of the time, with his right hand seeking by his spear to keep
off the rush, with the ateghar in his left parrying the strokes aimed
at him, the brave Earl transfixed the first assailant, and sore
wounded the next; but his tunic was dyed red with three gashes, and
his sole chance of life was in the power yet left him to force his way
through the ring. Dropping his spear, shifting his ateghar into the
right hand, wrapping round his left arm his gonna as a shield, he
sprang fiercely on the onslaught, and on the flashing swords. Pierced
to the heart fell one of his foes--dashed to the earth another--from
the hand of a third (dropping his own ateghar) he wrenched the sword.
Loud rose Harold's cry for aid, and swiftly he strode towards the
hillock, turning back, and striking as he turned; and again fell a
foe, and again new blood oozed through his own garb. At that moment
his cry was echoed by a shriek so sharp and so piercing that it
startled the assailants, it arrested the assault; and, ere the unequal
strife could be resumed, a woman was in the midst of the fray; a woman
stood dauntless between the Earl and his foes.
"Back! Edith. Oh, God! Back, back!" cried the Earl, recovering all
his strength in the sole fear which that strife had yet stricken into
his bold heart; and drawing Edith aside with his strong arm, he again
confronted the assailants.
"Die!" cried, in the Cymrian tongue, the fiercest of the foes, whose
sword had already twice drawn the Earl's blood; "Die, that Cymry may
be free!"
Meredydd sprang, with him sprang the survivors of his band; and, by a
sudden movement, Edith had thrown herself on Harold's breast, leaving
his right arm free, but sheltering his form with her own.
At that sight every sword rested still in air. These Cymrians,
hesitating not at the murder of the man whose death seemed to their
false virtue a sacrifice due to their hopes of freedom, were still the
descendants of Heroes, and the children of noble Song, and their
swords were harmless against a woman. The same pause which saved the
life of Harold, saved that of Meredydd; for the Cymrian's lifted sword
had left his breast defenceless, and Harold, despite his wrath, and
his fears for Edith, touched by that sudden forbearance, forbore
himself the blow.
"Why seek ye my life?" said he. "Whom in broad England hath Harold
wronged?"
That speech broke the charm, revived the suspense of vengeance. With
a sudden aim, Meredydd smote at the head which Edith's embrace left
unprotected. The sword shivered on the steel of that which parried
the stroke, and the next moment, pierced to the heart, Meredydd fell
to the earth, bathed in his gore. Even as he fell, aid was at hand.
The ceorls in the Roman house had caught the alarm, and were hurrying
down the knoll, with arms snatched in haste, while a loud whoop broke
from the forest land hard by; and a troop of horse, headed by Vebba,
rushed through the bushes and brakes. Those of the Welch still
surviving, no longer animated by their fiery chief, turned on the
instant, and fled with that wonderful speed of foot which
characterised their active race; calling, as they fled, to their Welch
pigmy steeds, which, snorting loud, and lashing out, came at once to
the call. Seizing the nearest at hand, the fugitives sprang to selle,
while the animals unchosen paused by the corpses of their former
riders, neighing piteously, and shaking their long manes. And then,
after wheeling round and round the coming horsemen, with many a
plunge, and lash, and savage cry, they darted after their companions,
and disappeared amongst the bushwood. Some of the Kentish men gave
chase to the fugitives, but in vain; for the nature of the ground
favoured flight. Vebba, and the rest, now joined by Hilda's lithsmen,
gained the spot where Harold, bleeding fast, yet strove to keep his
footing, and, forgetful of his own wounds, was joyfully assuring
himself of Edith's safety. Vebba dismounted, and recognising the
Earl, exclaimed:
"Saints in heaven! are we in tine? You bleed--you faint!--Speak, Lord
Harold. How fares it?"
"Blood enow yet left here for our merrie England!" said Harold, with a
smile. But as he spoke, his head drooped, and he was borne senseless
into the house of Hilda.
CHAPTER II.
The Vala met them at the threshold, and testified so little surprise
at the sight of the bleeding and unconscious Earl, that Vebba, who had
heard strange tales of Hilda's unlawful arts, half-suspected that
those wild-looking foes, with their uncanny diminutive horses, were
imps conjured by her to punish a wooer to her grandchild--who had been
perhaps too successful in the wooing. And fears so reasonable were
not a little increased when Hilda, after leading the way up the steep
ladder to the chamber in which Harold had dreamed his fearful dream,
bade them all depart, and leave the wounded man to her care.
"Not so," said Vebba, bluffly. "A life like this is not to be left in
the hands of woman, or wicca. I shall go back to the great town, and
summon the Earl's own leach. And I beg thee to heed, meanwhile, that
every head in this house shall answer for Harold's."
The great Vala, and highborn Hleafdian, little accustomed to be
accosted thus, turned round abruptly, with so stern an eye and so
imperious a mien, that even the stout Kent man felt abashed. She
pointed to the door opening on the ladder, and said, briefly:
"Depart! Thy lord's life hath been saved already, and by woman.
Depart!"
"Depart, and fear not for the Earl, brave and true friend in need,"
said Edith, looking up from Harold's pale lips, over which she bent;
and her sweet voice so touched the good thegn, that, murmuring a
blessing on her fair face, he turned and departed.
Hilda then proceeded, with a light and skilful hand, to examine the
wounds of her patient. She opened the tunic, and washed away the
blood from four gaping orifices on the breast and shoulders. And as
she did so, Edith uttered a faint cry, and falling on her knees, bowed
her head over the drooping hand, and kissed it with stifling emotions,
of which perhaps grateful joy was the strongest; for over the heart of
Harold was punctured, after the fashion of the Saxons, a device--and
that device was the knot of betrothal, and in the centre of the knot
was graven the word "Edith."
CHAPTER III.
Whether, owing to Hilda's runes, or to the merely human arts which
accompanied them, the Earl's recovery was rapid, though the great loss
of blood he had sustained left him awhile weak and exhausted. But,
perhaps, he blessed the excuse which detained him still in the house
of Hilda, and under the eyes of Edith.
He dismissed the leach sent to him by Vebba, and confided, not without
reason, to the Vala's skill. And how happily went his hours beneath
the old Roman roof!
It was not without a superstition, more characterised, however, by
tenderness than awe, that Harold learned that Edith had been
undefinably impressed with a foreboding of danger to her betrothed,
and all that morning she had watched his coming from the old legendary
hill. Was it not in that watch that his good Fylgia had saved his
life? Indeed, there seemed a strange truth in Hilda's assertions,
that in the form of his betrothed, his tutelary spirit lived and
guarded. For smooth every step, and bright every day, in his career,
since their troth had been plighted. And gradually the sweet
superstition had mingled with human passion to hallow and refine it.
There was a purity and a depth in the love of these two, which, if not
uncommon in women, is most rare in men.
Harold, in sober truth, had learned to look on Edith as on his better
angel; and, calming his strong manly heart in the hour of temptation,
would have recoiled, as a sacrilege, from aught that could have
sullied that image of celestial love. With a noble and sublime
patience, of which perhaps only a character so thoroughly English in
its habits of self-control and steadfast endurance could have been
capable, he saw the months and the years glide away, and still
contented himself with hope;--hope, the sole godlike joy that belongs
to men!
As the opinion of an age influences even those who affect to despise
it, so, perhaps, this holy and unselfish passion was preserved and
guarded by that peculiar veneration for purity which formed the
characteristic fanaticism of the last days of the Anglo-Saxons,--when
still, as Aldhelm had previously sung in Latin less barbarous than
perhaps any priest in the reign of Edward could command:
"Virginitas castam servans sine crimine carnem
Caetera virtutem vincit praeconia laudi--
Spiritus altithroni templum sibi vindicat almus;" [149]
when, amidst a great dissoluteness of manners, alike common to Church
and laity, the opposite virtues were, as is invariable in such epochs
of society, carried by the few purer natures into heroic extremes.
"And as gold, the adorner of the world, springs from the sordid bosom
of earth, so chastity, the image of gold, rose bright and unsullied
from the clay of human desire." [150]
And Edith, though yet in the tenderest flush of beautiful youth, had,
under the influence of that sanctifying and scarce earthly affection,
perfected her full nature as woman. She had learned so to live in
Harold's life, that--less, it seemed, by study than intuition--a
knowledge graver than that which belonged to her sex and her time,
seemed to fall upon her soul--fall as the sunlight falls on the
blossoms, expanding their petals, and brightening the glory of their
hues.
Hitherto, living under the shade of Hilda's dreary creed, Edith, as we
have seen, had been rather Christian by name and instinct than
acquainted with the doctrines of the Gospel, or penetrated by its
faith. But the soul of Harold lifted her own out of the Valley of the
Shadow up to the Heavenly Hill. For the character of their love was
so pre-eminently Christian, so, by the circumstances that surrounded
it--so by hope and self-denial, elevated out of the empire, not only
of the senses, but even of that sentiment which springs from them, and
which made the sole refined and poetic element of the heathen's love,
that but for Christianity it would have withered and died. It
required all the aliment of prayer; it needed that patient endurance
which comes from the soul's consciousness of immortality; it could not
have resisted earth, but from the forts and armies it won from heaven.
Thus from Harold might Edith be said to have taken her very soul. And
with the soul, and through the soul, woke the mind from the mists of
childhood.
In the intense desire to be worthy the love of the foremost man of her
land; to be the companion of his mind, as well as the mistress of his
heart, she had acquired, she knew not how, strange stores of thought,
and intelligence, and pure, gentle wisdom. In opening to her
confidence his own high aims and projects, he himself was scarcely
conscious how often he confided but to consult--how often and how
insensibly she coloured his reflections and shaped his designs.
Whatever was highest and purest, that, Edith ever, as by instinct,
beheld as the wisest. She grew to him like a second conscience,
diviner than his own. Each, therefore, reflected virtue on the other,
as planet illumines planet.
All these years of probation then, which might have soured a love less
holy, changed into weariness a love less intense, had only served to
wed them more intimately soul to soul; and in that spotless union what
happiness there was! what rapture in word and glance, and the slight,
restrained caress of innocence, beyond all the transports love only
human can bestow!
CHAPTER IV.
It was a bright still summer noon, when Harold sate with Edith amidst
the columns of the Druid temple, and in the shade which those vast and
mournful relics of a faith departed cast along the sward. And there,
conversing over the past, and planning the future, they had sate long,
when Hilda approached from the house, and entering the circle, leant
her arm upon the altar of the war-god, and gazing on Harold with a
calm triumph in her aspect, said:
"Did I not smile, son of Godwin, when, with thy short-sighted wisdom,
thou didst think to guard thy land and secure thy love, by urging the
monk-king to send over the seas for the Atheling? Did I not tell
thee, 'Thou dost right, for in obeying thy judgment thou art but the
instrument of fate; and the coming of the Atheling shall speed thee
nearer to the ends of thy life, but not from the Atheling shalt thou
take the crown of thy love, and not by the Atheling shall the throne
of Athelstan be filled'?"
"Alas," said Harold, rising in agitation, "let me not hear of
mischance to that noble prince. He seemed sick and feeble when I
parted from him; but joy is a great restorer, and the air of the
native land gives quick health to the exile."
"Hark!" said Hilda, "you hear the passing bell for the soul of the son
of Ironsides!"
The mournful knell, as she spoke, came dull from the roofs of the city
afar, borne to their ears by the exceeding stillness of the
atmosphere. Edith crossed herself, and murmured a prayer according to
the custom of the age; then raising her eyes to Harold, she murmured,
as she clasped her hands:
"Be not saddened, Harold; hope still."
"Hope!" repeated Hilda, rising proudly from her recumbent position,
"Hope! in that knell from St. Paul's, dull indeed is thine ear, O
Harold, if thou hearest not the joy-bells that inaugurate a future
king!"
The Earl started; his eyes shot fire; his breast heaved.
"Leave us, Edith," said Hilda, in a low voice; and after watching her
grandchild's slow reluctant steps descend the knoll, she turned to
Harold, and leading him towards the gravestone of the Saxon chief,
said:
"Rememberest thou the spectre that rose from this mound?--rememberest
thou the dream that followed it?"
"The spectre, or deceit of mine eye, I remember well," answered the
Earl; "the dream, not;--or only in confused and jarring fragments."
"I told thee then, that I could not unriddle the dream by the light of
the moment; and that the dead who slept below never appeared to men,
save for some portent of doom to the house of Cerdic. The portent is
fulfilled; the Heir of Cerdic is no more. To whom appeared the great
Scin-laeca, but to him who shall lead a new race of kings to the Saxon
throne!"
Harold breathed hard, and the colour mounted bright and glowing to his
cheek and brow.
"I cannot gainsay thee, Vala. Unless, despite all conjecture, Edward
should be spared to earth till the Atheling's infant son acquires the
age when bearded men will acknowledge a chief [151], I look round in
England for the coming king, and all England reflects but mine own
image."
His head rose erect as he spoke, and already the brow seemed august,
as if circled by the diadem of the Basileus. "And if it be so," he
added, "I accept that solemn trust, and England shall grow greater in
my greatness."
"The flame breaks at last from the smouldering fuel!" cried the Vala,
"and the hour I so long foretold to thee hath come!"
Harold answered not, for high and kindling emotions deafened him to
all but the voice of a grand ambition, and the awakening joy of a
noble heart.
"And then--and then," he exclaimed, "I shall need no mediator between
nature and monkcraft;--then, O Edith, the life thou hast saved will
indeed be thine!" He paused, and it was a sign of the change that an
ambition long repressed, but now rushing into the vent legitimately
open to it, had already begun to work in the character hitherto so
self-reliant, when he said in a low voice, "But that dream which hath
so long lain locked, not lost, in my mind; that dream of which I
recall only vague remembrances of danger yet defiance, trouble yet
triumph,--canst thou unriddle it, O Vala, into auguries of success?"
"Harold," answered Hilda, "thou didst hear at the close of thy dream,
the music of the hymns that are chaunted at the crowning of a king,--
and a crowned king shalt thou be; yet fearful foes shall assail thee--
foreshown in the shapes of a lion and raven, that came in menace over
the bloodred sea. The two stars in the heaven betoken that the day of
thy birth was also the birthday of a foe, whose star is fatal to
thine; and they warn thee against a battle-field, fought on the day
when those stars shall meet. Farther than this the mystery of thy
dream escapes from my lore;--wouldst thou learn thyself, from the
phantom that sent the dream;--stand by my side at the grave of the
Saxon hero, and I will summon the Scin-laeca to counsel the living.
For what to the Vala the dead may deny, the soul of the brave on the
brave may bestow!"
Harold listened with a serious and musing attention which his pride or
his reason had never before accorded to the warnings of Hilda. But
his sense was not yet fascinated by the voice of the charmer, and he
answered with his wonted smile, so sweet yet so haughty:
"A hand outstretched to a crown should be armed for the foe; and the
eye that would guard the living should not be dimmed by the vapours
that encircle the dead."
CHAPTER V.
But from that date changes, slight, yet noticeable and important, were
at work both in the conduct and character of the great Earl.
Hitherto he had advanced on his career without calculation; and
nature, not policy, had achieved his power. But henceforth he began
thoughtfully to cement the foundations of his House, to extend the
area, to strengthen the props. Policy now mingled with the justice
that had made him esteemed, and the generosity that had won him love.
Before, though by temper conciliatory, yet, through honesty,
indifferent to the enmities he provoked, in his adherence to what his
conscience approved, he now laid himself out to propitiate all ancient
feuds, soothe all jealousies, and convert foes into friends. He
opened constant and friendly communication with his uncle Sweyn, King
of Denmark; he availed himself sedulously of all the influence over
the Anglo-Danes which his mother's birth made so facile. He strove
also, and wisely, to conciliate the animosities which the Church had
cherished against Godwin's house: he concealed his disdain of the
monks and monkridden: he showed himself the Church's patron and
friend; he endowed largely the convents, and especially one at
Waltham, which had fallen into decay, though favourably known for the
piety of its brotherhood. But if in this he played a part not natural
to his opinions, Harold could not, even in simulation, administer to
evil. The monasteries he favoured were those distinguished for purity
of life, for benevolence to the poor, for bold denunciation of the
excesses of the great. He had not, like the Norman, the grand design
of creating in the priesthood a college of learning, a school of arts;
such notions were unfamiliar in homely, unlettered England. And
Harold, though for his time and his land no mean scholar, would have
recoiled from favouring a learning always made subservient to Rome;
always at once haughty and scheming, and aspiring to complete
domination over both the souls of men and the thrones of kings. But
his aim was, out of the elements he found in the natural kindliness
existing between Saxon priest and Saxon flock, to rear a modest,
virtuous, homely clergy, not above tender sympathy with an ignorant
population. He selected as examples for his monastery at Waltham, two
low-born humble brothers, Osgood and Ailred; the one known for the
courage with which he had gone through the land, preaching to abbot
and thegn the emancipation of the theowes, as the most meritorious act
the safety of the soul could impose; the other, who, originally a
clerk, had, according to the common custom of the Saxon clergy,
contracted the bonds of marriage, and with some eloquence had
vindicated that custom against the canons of Rome, and refused the
offer of large endowments and thegn's rank to put away his wife. But
on the death of that spouse he had adopted the cowl, and while still
persisting in the lawfulness of marriage to the unmonastic clerks, had
become famous for denouncing the open concubinage which desecrated the
holy office, and violated the solemn vows, of many a proud prelate and
abbot.
To these two men (both of whom refused the abbacy of Waltham) Harold
committed the charge of selecting the new brotherhood established
there. And the monks of Waltham were honoured as saints throughout
the neighbouring district, and cited as examples to all the Church.
But though in themselves the new politic arts of Harold seemed
blameless enough, arts they were, and as such they corrupted the
genuine simplicity of his earlier nature. He had conceived for the
first time an ambition apart from that of service to his country. It
was no longer only to serve the land, it was to serve it as its ruler,
that animated his heart and coloured his thoughts. Expediencies began
to dim to his conscience the healthful loveliness of Truth. And now,
too, gradually, that empire which Hilda had gained over his brother
Sweyn began to sway this man, heretofore so strong in his sturdy
sense. The future became to him a dazzling mystery, into which his
conjectures plunged themselves more and more. He had not yet stood in
the Runic circle and invoked the dead; but the spells were around his
heart, and in his own soul had grown up the familiar demon.
Still Edith reigned alone, if not in his thoughts at least in his
affections; and perhaps it was the hope of conquering all obstacles to
his marriage that mainly induced him to propitiate the Church, through
whose agency the object he sought must be attained; and still that
hope gave the brightest lustre to the distant crown. But he who
admits Ambition to the companionship of Love, admits a giant that
outstrides the gentler footsteps of its comrade.
Harold's brow lost its benign calm. He became thoughtful and
abstracted. He consulted Edith less, Hilda more. Edith seemed to him
now not wise enough to counsel. The smile of his Fylgia, like the
light of the star upon a stream, lit the surface, but could not pierce
to the deep.
Meanwhile, however, the policy of Harold throve and prospered. He had
already arrived at that height, that the least effort to make power
popular redoubled its extent. Gradually all voices swelled the chorus
in his praise; gradually men became familiar to the question, "If
Edward dies before Edgar, the grandson of Ironsides, is of age to
succeed, where can we find a king like Harold?"
In the midst of this quiet but deepening sunshine of his fate, there
burst a storm, which seemed destined either to darken his day or to
disperse every cloud from the horizon. Algar, the only possible rival
to his power--the only opponent no arts could soften--Algar, whose
hereditary name endeared him to the Saxon laity, whose father's most
powerful legacy was the love of the Saxon Church, whose martial and
turbulent spirit had only the more elevated him in the esteem of the
warlike Danes in East Anglia (the earldom in which he had succeeded
Harold), by his father's death, lord of the great principality of
Mercia--availed himself of that new power to break out again into
rebellion. Again he was outlawed, again he leagued with the fiery
Gryffyth. All Wales was in revolt; the Marches were invaded and laid
waste. Rolf, the feeble Earl of Hereford, died at this critical
juncture, and the Normans and hirelings under him mutinied against
other leaders; a fleet of vikings from Norway ravaged the western
coasts, and sailing up the Menai, joined the ships of Gryffyth, and
the whole empire seemed menaced with dissolution, when Edward issued
his Herr-bane, and Harold at the head of the royal armies marched on
the foe.
Dread and dangerous were those defiles of Wales; amidst them had been
foiled or slaughtered all the warriors under Rolf the Norman; no Saxon
armies had won laurels in the Cymrian's own mountain home within the
memory of man; nor had any Saxon ships borne the palm from the
terrible vikings of Norway. Fail, Harold, and farewell the crown!--
succeed, and thou hast on thy side the ultimam rationem regum (the
last argument of kings), the heart of the army over which thou art
chief.
CHAPTER VI.
It was one day in the height of summer that two horsemen rode slowly,
and conversing with each other in friendly wise, notwithstanding an
evident difference of rank and of nation, through the lovely country
which formed the Marches of Wales. The younger of these men was
unmistakably a Norman; his cap only partially covered the head, which
was shaven from the crown to the nape of the neck [152], while in
front the hair, closely cropped, curled short and thick round a
haughty but intelligent brow. His dress fitted close to his shape,
and was worn without mantle; his leggings were curiously crossed in
the fashion of a tartan, and on his heels were spurs of gold. He was
wholly unarmed; but behind him and his companion, at a little
distance, his war-horse, completely caparisoned, was led by a single
squire, mounted on a good Norman steed; while six Saxon theowes,
themselves on foot, conducted three sumpter-mules, somewhat heavily
laden, not only with the armour of the Norman knight, but panniers
containing rich robes, wines, and provender. At a few paces farther
behind, marched a troop, light-armed, in tough hides, curiously
tanned, with axes swung over their shoulders, and bows in their hands.