Hereward, the Last of the English. Charles Kingsley
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 us, and so bring us down; and would have done it, too, had it not been for my Uncle Brand, the only man that I care for in this wide world. Do you think I have not owed you a grudge ever since that day, monk? And do you think I will not pay it? Do you think I would not have burned Peterborough minster over your head before now, had it not been for Uncle Brand’s sake? See that I do not do it yet. See that when there is another Prior in Borough you do not find Hereward the Berserker smoking you out some dark night, as he would smoke a wasps’ nest. And I will, by—”
“Hereward, Hereward!” cried his mother, “godless, god-forgotten boy, what words are these? Silence, before you burden your soul with an oath which the devils in hell will accept, and force you to keep!” and she sprung up, and, seizing his arm, laid her hand upon his mouth.
Hereward looked at her majestic face, once lovely, now careworn, and trembled for a moment. Had there been any tenderness in it, his history might have been a very different one; but alas! there was none. Not that she was in herself untender; but that her great piety (call it not superstition, for it was then the only form known or possible to pure and devout souls) was so outraged by this, or even by the slightest insult to that clergy whose willing slave she had become, that the only method of reclaiming the sinner had been long forgotten, in genuine horror at his sin. “Is it not enough,” she went on, sternly, “that you should have become the bully and the ruffian of all the fens?—that Hereward the leaper, Hereward the wrestler, Hereward the thrower of the hammer—sports, after all, only fit for the sons of slaves—should be also Hereward the drunkard, Hereward the common fighter, Hereward the breaker of houses, Hereward the leader of mobs of boon companions which bring back to us, in shame and sorrow, the days when our heathen forefathers ravaged this land with fire and sword? Is it not enough for me that my son should be a common stabber—?”
“Whoever called me stabber to you, lies. If I have killed men, or had them killed, I have done it in fair fight.”
But she went on unheeding,—“Is it not enough, that, after having squandered on your fellows all the money that you could wring from my bounty, or win at your brutal sports, you should have robbed your own father, collected his rents behind his back, taken money and goods from his tenants by threats and blows; but that, after outraging them, you must add to all this a worse sin likewise,—outraging God, and driving me—me who have borne with you, me who have concealed all for your sake—to tell your father that of which the very telling will turn my hair to gray?”
“So you will tell my father?” said Hereward, coolly.
“And if I should not, this monk himself is bound to do so, or his superior, your Uncle Brand.”
“My Uncle Brand will not, and your monk dare not.”
“Then I must. I have loved you long and well; but there is one thing which I must love better than you: and that is, my conscience and my Maker.”
“Those are two things, my lady mother, and not one; so you had better not confound them. As for the latter, do you not think that He who made the world is well able to defend his own property,—if the lands and houses and cattle and money which these men wheedle and threaten and forge out of you and my father are really His property, and not merely their plunder? As for your conscience, my lady mother, really you have done so many good deeds in your life, that it might be beneficial to you to do a bad one once in a way, so as to keep your soul in a wholesome state of humility.”
The monk groaned aloud. Lady Godiva groaned; but it was inwardly. There was silence for a moment. Both were abashed by the lad’s utter shamelessness.
“And you will tell my father?” said he again. “He is at the old miracle-worker’s court at Westminster. He will tell the miracle-worker, and I shall be outlawed.”
“And if you be, wretched boy, whom have you to blame but yourself? Can you expect that the king, sainted even as he is before his death, dare pass over such an atrocity towards Holy Church?”
“Blame? I shall blame no one. Pass over? I hope he will not pass over it, I only want an excuse like that for turning kempery-man—knight-errant, as those Norman puppies call it,—like Regnar Lodbrog, or Frithiof, or Harold Hardraade; and try what man can do for himself in the world with nothing to help him in heaven and earth, with neither saint nor angel, friend or counsellor, to see to him, save his wits and his good sword. So send off the messenger, good mother mine: and I will promise you I will not have him ham-strung on the way, as some of my housecarles would do for me if I but held up my hand; and let the miracle-monger fill up the measure of his folly, by making an enemy of one more bold fellow in the world.”
And he swaggered out of the room.
And when he was gone, the Lady Godiva bowed her head into her lap and wept long and bitterly. Neither her maidens nor the priest dare speak to her for nigh an hour; but at the end of that time she lifted up her head, and settled her face again, till it was like that of a marble saint over a minster door; and called for ink and paper, and wrote her letter; and then asked for a trusty messenger who should carry it up to Westminster.
“None so swift or sure,” said the house steward, “as Martin Lightfoot.”
Lady Godiva shook her head. “I mistrust that man,” she said. “He is too fond of my poor—of the Lord Hereward.”
“He is a strange one, my lady, and no one knows whence he came, and, I sometimes fancy, whither he may go either; but ever since my lord threatened to hang him for talking with my young master, he has never spoken to him, nor scarcely, indeed, to living soul. And one thing there is makes him or any man sure, as long as he is well paid; and that is, that he cares for nothing in heaven or earth save himself and what he can get.”
So Martin Lightfoot was sent for. He came in straight into the lady’s bedchamber, after the simple fashion of those days. He was a tall, lean, bony man, as was to be expected from his nickname, with a long hooked nose, a scanty brown beard, and a high conical head. His only garment was a shabby gray woollen tunic, which served him both as coat and kilt, and laced brogues of untanned hide. He might have been any age from twenty to forty; but his face was disfigured with deep scars and long exposure to the weather. He dropped on one knee, holding his greasy cap in his hand, and looked, not at his lady’s face, but at her feet, with a stupid and frightened expression. She knew very little of him, save that her husband had picked him up upon the road as a wanderer some five years since; and that he had been employed as a doer of odd jobs and runner of messages, and that he was supposed, from his taciturnity and strangeness, to have something uncanny about him.
“Martin,” said the lady, “they tell me that you are a silent and a prudent man.”
“That am I. ‘Tongue speaketh bane,
Though she herself hath nane.’”
“I shall try you: do you know your way to London?”
“Yes.”
“To your lord’s lodgings in Westminster?”
“Yes.”
“How long shall you be going there with this letter?”
“A day and a half.”
“When shall you be back hither?”
“On the fourth day.”
“And you will go to my lord and deliver this letter safely?”
“Yes, your Majesty.”
“Why do you call me Majesty? The King is Majesty.”
“You are my Queen.”
“What do you mean, man?”
“You can hang me.”
“I hang thee, poor soul! Who did I ever hang, or hurt for a moment, if I could help it?”
“But the Earl may.”
“He will neither hang nor hurt thee if thou wilt take this letter