Hereward, The Last of the English | Page 9

ground."
"Throw you to the ground?" shuddered the Lady Godiva.
"In much mire, madam. After which he took my palfrey, saying that
heaven's gate was too lowly for men on horseback to get in thereat; and
then my marten's fur gloves and cape which your gracious self
bestowed on me, alleging that the rules of my order allowed only one
garment, and no furs save catskins and such like. And lastly--I tremble
while I relate, thinking not of the loss of my poor money, but the loss
of an immortal soul--took from me a purse with sixteen silver pennies,
which I had collected from our tenants for the use of the monastery,
and said, blasphemously, that I and mine had swindled your ladyship,
and therefore him, your son, out of many a fair manor ere now; and it
was but fair that he should tithe the rents thereof, as he should never get
the lands out of our claws again; with more of the like, which I blush to
repeat,--and so left me to trudge hither in the mire."
"Wretched boy!" said the Lady Godiva, and hid her face in her hands;
"and more wretched I, to have brought such a son into the world!"
The monk had hardly finished his doleful story, when there was a
pattering of heavy feet, a noise of men shouting and laughing outside,
and a voice, above all, calling for the monk by name, which made that
good man crouch behind the curtain of Lady Godiva's bed. The next
moment the door of the bower was thrown violently open, and in
walked, or rather reeled, a noble lad eighteen years old. His face was of
extraordinary beauty, save that the lower jaw was too long and heavy,

and that his eyes wore a strange and almost sinister expression, from
the fact that the one of them was gray and the other blue. He was short,
but of immense breadth of chest and strength of limb; while his delicate
hands and feet and long locks of golden hair marked him of most noble,
and even, as he really was, of ancient royal race. He was dressed in a
gaudy costume, resembling on the whole that of a Highland chieftain.
His knees, wrists, and throat were tattoed in bright blue patterns; and he
carried sword and dagger, a gold ring round his neck, and gold rings on
his wrists. He was a lad to have gladdened the eyes of any mother: but
there was no gladness in the Lady Godiva's eyes as she received him;
nor had there been for many a year. She looked on him with
sternness,--with all but horror; and he, his face flushed with wine,
which he had tossed off as he passed through the hall to steady his
nerves for the coming storm, looked at her with smiling defiance, the
result of long estrangement between mother and son.
"Well, my lady," said he, ere she could speak, "I heard that this good
fellow was here, and came home as fast as I could, to see that he told
you as few lies as possible."
"He has told me," said she, "that you have robbed the Church of God."
"Robbed him, it may be, an old hoody crow, against whom I have a
grudge of ten years' standing."
"Wretched, wretched boy! What wickedness next? Know you not, that
he who robs the Church robs God himself?"
"And he who harms God's people," put in the monk from behind the
chair, "harms his Maker."
"His Maker?" said the lad, with concentrated bitterness. "It would be a
gay world, if the Maker thereof were in any way like unto you, who
call yourselves his people. Do you remember who told them to set the
peat-stack on fire under me ten years ago? Ah, ha, Sir Monk, you forget
that I have been behind the screen,--that I have been a monk myself, or
should have been one, if my pious lady mother here had had her will of
me, as she may if she likes of that doll there at her knee. Do you forget

why I left Peterborough Abbey, when Winter and I turned all your
priest's books upside down in the choir, and they would have flogged
us,--me, the Earl's son,--me, the Viking's son,--me, the champion, as I
will be yet, and make all lands ring with the fame of my deeds, as they
rung with the fame of my forefathers, before they became the slaves of
monks; and how when Winter and I got hold of the kitchen spits, and
up to the top of the peat-stack, and held you all at bay there, a whole
abbeyful of cowards there, against two seven years' children? It was
you bade set the peat-stack alight under