In the Days of Chivalry | Page 4

bring it back to mind. Yet it is years since I have heard it spoke. Raymond, knowest thou where is this Basildene?"
"In England, I well believe," was the answer of the other brother. "Methinks it was the name of our mother's home. I seem to remember how she told us of it -- the old house over the sea, where she had lived. Perchance it was once her own in very sooth, and some turbulent baron or jealous kinsman drove her forth from it, even as we of the house of De Brocas have been ousted from the Castle of Saut. Brother, if that be so, Basildene is more our inheritance than yon gloomy fortress can be. We are our mother's only children, and when she joined our hands together she called us the twins of Basildene. I trow that we have an inheritance of our very own, Gaston, away over the blue water yonder."
Gaston's eyes flashed with sudden ardour and purpose.
Often of late had the twins talked together of the future that lay before them, of the doughty deeds they would accomplish; yet so far nothing of definite purpose had entered into their minds. Gaston's dreams had been all of the ancient fortress of Saut, now for long years passed into the hands of the hostile family, the terrible and redoubtable Sieur de Navailles, who was feared throughout the length and breadth of the country round about his house. Raymond had been dimly conscious of other thoughts and purposes, but memory was only gradually recalling to his mind the half-forgotten days of childhood, when the twin eaglets had stood at their mother's knee to talk with her in her own tongue of the land across the water where was her home -- the land to which their father had lately passed, upon some mission the children were too young to understand.
Now the faint dim memories had returned clear and strong. The long silence was broken. Eagerly the boys strove to recall the past, and bit by bit things pieced themselves together in their minds till they could not but marvel how they had so long forgotten. Yet it is often so in youth. Days pass by one after the other unnoticed and unmarked. Then all in a moment some new train of thought or purpose is awakened, a new element enters life, making it from that day something different; and by a single bound the child becomes a youth -- the youth a man.
Some such change as this was passing over the twin brothers at this time. A deep-seated dissatisfaction with their present surroundings had long been growing up in their hearts. They were happy in a fashion in the humble home at the mill, with good Jean the miller, and Margot his wife who had been their nurse and a second mother to them all their lives; but they knew that a great gulf divided them from the Gascon peasants amongst whom they lived -- a gulf recognized by all those with whom they came in contact, and in nowise bridged by the fact that the brothers shared in a measure the simple peasant life, and had known no other.
Their very name of De Brocas spoke of the race of nobles who had long held almost sovereign rights over a large tract of country watered by the Adour and its many tributary streams; and although at this time, the year of grace 1342, the name of De Brocas was no more heard, but that of the proud Sieur de Navailles who now reigned there instead, the old name was loved and revered amongst the people, and the boys were bred up in all the traditions of their race, till the eagle nature at last asserted itself, and they felt that life could no longer go on in its old accustomed groove. Had they not been taught from infancy that a great future lay before them? and what could that future be but the winning back of their old ancestral lands and rights?
Perhaps they would have spoken more of this deeply-seated hope had it not been so very chimerical -- so apparently impossible of present fulfilment. To wrest from the proud and haughty Sieur de Navailles the vast territory and strong castle that had been held by him in open defiance of many mandates from a powerful King, was a task that even the sanguine and ambitious boys knew to be a hundred times too hard for them. If they had dreamed of it in their hearts, they had scarce named the hope even to each other. But today the brooding silence had been broken. The twins had taken counsel one with the other; and now burning thoughts of this other fair inheritance were in the minds of both.