THE LADY AND THE SLAVE.
"Weep not for him that dieth,
For his struggling soul is free,
And the world from which it flieth
Is a world of misery;
But weep for him that weareth
The collar and the chain;
To the agony he beareth,
Death were but little pain."
CAROLINE NORTON.
"What mean you, Edith?" inquired the girl, raising herself from her
pillow, as her attention was called to the unusually subdued tones of
the Saxon maiden, who was, in her ordinary mood, so gay and joyous,
and who appeared to be the general favorite of all around her; "what
mean you, Edith?" she repeated; "you can not be speaking of yourself;
you, who are ever blithesome and light-hearted as the bee on the
blossom, or the bird on the bough. You can have no sorrows of the
heart, I think, so penetrating as to make all outward bodily pains
forgotten, and yet--you are pale, you are weeping? Tell me, girl--tell
me, dear Edith, and let me be your friend."
"Friend! lady," said the girl, looking at her wistfully, yet
doubtfully withal; "you _my_ friend, noble lady! That were indeed
impossible. I will not say, that to the poor, to the Saxon, to the
_slave_, there can be _no_ friend, under heaven; but that you--you,
a noble and a Norman! Alas! alas! that were indeed impossible!"
"Impossible!" cried Guendolen, eagerly, forgetting her ailments in her
fine and feeling excitement. "Wherefore, how should it be impossible?
One God made us both, Edith; and made us both out of one clay, with
one life here on earth, and one hereafter; both children of one fallen
race, and heirs of one promise; both daughters of one fair, free land;
both Englishwomen--then why not friends, Edith, and sisters?"
"Of one land, lady, it is true," said the girl, gently. "Yes!
daughters of one _fair_ land, for even to the slave England is
very beautiful and dear, even as to you she is _free_. But for
us, who were once her first-born and her favorites, that magic word
has passed away, that charm has ceased, forever. For us, in free
England's wide-rejoicing acres, there is no spot free, save the six
feet of earth that shall receive our bodies, when the soul shall be a
slave's no longer. Lady, lady, alas! noble lady, if one God made us
both of one clay, that shall go downward to mingle with the common
sod, and of one spirit that shall mount upward, when the weariness and
woe shall be at an end forever, man has set a great gulf between us,
that we can not pass over it at all, to come the one unto the other.
Our wants may be the same, while we are here below, and our hopes may
be the same heavenward; but there all sameness ends between us. My
joys can not be your joys, and God forbid that my sorrows should be
yours, either. Our hearts may not feel, our heads may not think, in
unison, even if our flesh be of one texture, and our souls of one
spirit. You are good, and gentle, and kind, lady, but you may never
understand what it is to be such as I."
She ceased, but she ceased weeping also, and seemed lost in deep
thought, and almost forgetful of herself and her surroundings, as she
remained on her knees by the bedside of Guendolen, with her head
drooping from her fair bended neck, and her embrowned but shapely
hands folded in her lap.
The lady looked at her silently for a few moments, partly in sympathy,
partly, it must be said, in wonder. New ideas were beginning to be
awakened in her mind, and a perception of something, which had never
before dawned upon her, became palpable and strong.
That which we behold, and have beheld daily perhaps for years,
naturally becomes so usual and customary in our eyes, that we cease to
regard it as any thing but as a fact, of which we have never seen and
scarcely can conceive any thing to the contrary--that we look at it as
a part of that system which we call nature, and of which we never
question the right or the wrong, the injustice or the justice, but,
knowing that it _is_, never think of inquiring wherefore it is,
and whether it ought to be.
Thus it was with Guendolen de Taillebois. She had been accustomed,
during all her life, to see Saxons as serfs, and rarely in any other
capacity; for the franklins and thanes who had retained their
independence, their freedom, and a portion of their ancestral acres,
were few in numbers, and held but little intercourse with their Norman
neighbors, being regarded by them as rude and semi-barbarous
inferiors, while they, in turn, regarded them as cruel and insolent
usurpers and oppressors.
She had seen these serfs, rudely attired indeed, and employed in
rugged, laborious, and menial occupations; but, then, it was clear
that their boorish demeanor, stolid expression, and apparent lack of
capacity or intelligence for any superior employment, seemed to
indicate them as persons filling the station in society for which
nature had adapted them. Well-clad, sufficiently clothed, warmly
lodged--in all outward things perhaps equal, if not superior, to the
peasantry of most European countries in the present day--never, except
in extreme and exceptional cases, cruelly or severely treated, since
it was ever the owner's interest to regard the well-doing of his
serfs, it had never occurred to her that the whole race was in itself,
from innate circumstances, and apart from extraordinary sorrows or
sufferings, hopeless, miserable, and conscious of unmerited but
irretrievable degradation.
Had she considered the subject, she would of course have perceived and
admitted that sick or in health, sorrowful or at ease, to be compelled
to toil on, toil on, day after day, wearily, at the bidding and for
the benefit of another, deriving no benefit from that toil beyond a
mere subsistence, was an unhappy and forlorn condition. Yet, how many
did she not see of her own conquering countrymen of the lower orders,
small landholders in the country, small artisans and mechanics in the
boroughs, reduced to the same labors, and nearly to the same
necessity.
With the personal condition or habits of the serfs, the ladies and
even the lords of the great Norman families had little acquaintance,
little means even of becoming acquainted. The services of their
fortalices, all but those menial and sordid offices of which those
exalted persons had no cognizance, were discharged by domestics,
higher or lower in grade, the highest being of gentle blood, and, in
very noble houses, even of noble blood, of their own proud race; and
the Saxons, whether bond-servants of the soil, or, what was of rare
occurrence at that time, free tenants on man service, were employed in
the fields or in the forest, under the bailiff or overseer, who ruled
them at his own discretion, and punished them, if punishment were
needed, with the stocks, the gyves, or the scourge, without consulting
the lord, and of course without so much as the knowledge of the lady.
Even if, by hazard, it did reach the dainty ears of some fair
chatelaine, that Osrick or Edmund had undergone the lash for some
misdoing or short-coming, she heard of it much as a modern lady would
read of the committal of a pickpocket or drunkard to the treadmill, or
of a vagrant hussy to pick hemp; wondering why those low creatures
would do such wicked things, and sorrowfully musing why such
punishments should be necessary--never suspecting the injustice of the
law, or doubting the necessity of the punishment.
And eminently thus it was with Guendolen. While in her good aunt's
priory, she had ever seen the serfs of the church well looked after,
well doing, not overworked, not oppressed, cared for if sick,
comforted if sorrowing, well tended in age, a contented if not a happy
race, so far as externals only were regarded, and nothing hitherto had
led her to look farther than to externals. On her father's princely
barony she saw even less of them than she had been accustomed to do at
the priory, passing them casually only when in the fields at
hay-making or harvest work, or pausing perhaps to observe a
rosy-cheeked child in the Saxon quarter, or to notice a cherry-lipped
maiden by the village well. But here, too, so far as she did see, she
saw them neither squalid nor starved, neither miserable nor
maltreated. No acts of tyranny or cruelty reached her ears, perhaps
none happened which should reach them; and of the rigorous,
oppressive, insolent, and cruel laws which regulated their condition,
controlled their progress, prevented their rise in the social scale,
fettered and cramped their domestic relations, she knew nothing.
Since her sojourn at Waltheofstow, she had gained more personal
acquaintance with her down-trodden Saxon countrymen and countrywomen,
and more especially since her accident in the forest, than in all her
previous life.
For, in the first place, Sir Philip de Morville, being unmarried and
without female relations in his family, had no women of Norman blood
employed as attendants or domestics in the castle, the whole work of
which was performed by serf girls of various degrees, under the
superintendence of an emancipated Saxon dame, who presided over what
we should now call the housekeeper's department. Of these girls,
Edith, and one or two others, Elgythas, Berthas, and the like,
ministered to the Lady's Bower, and having perhaps contracted
something of unusual refinement and expression from a nearer
attendance on the more courtly race, and especially on the Norman
ladies who at times visited the castle, presented, it is certain,
unusually favorable specimens of the Saxon peasantry, and had
attracted the attention of Guendolen in a greater degree than any
Saxons she had previously encountered.
Up to that time, she had regarded them, certainly, on the whole, as a
slow, as a somewhat stolid, impassive, and unimpassioned race, less
mercurial than her own impetuous, impulsive kindred, and far less
liable to strong emotions or keen perceptions, whether of pain or
pleasure. The girlish liveliness and gentleness, and even the untaught
graces of Edith had, at the first, attracted her; and, as she was
thrown a good deal into contact with her, from the fact of her
constant attendance on the chambers she occupied, she had become much
interested in her, regarding her as one of the happiest, most artless,
and innocent little girls she had ever met--one, she imagined, on whom
no shadow of grief had ever fallen, and whose humble lot was one of
actual contentment, if not of positive enjoyment.
Nor, hitherto, insomuch as actual realities were concerned, was
Guendolen much in error. Sir Philip de Morville, as has been stated
already, was, according to the times and their tenor, a good and
considerate lord. His bailiff was a well-intentioned, strict man,
intent on having his master's work done to the last straw, but beyond
that neither an oppressor nor a tyrant. Kenric, her distant kinsman
and betrothed, was confessedly the best man and most favored servant
in the quarter; and his mother, who had grown old in the service of
Sir Philip's father, whom she had nursed with simple skill through the
effects of many a mimic battle in the lists, or real though scarce
more dangerous fray, now superannuated, reigned as much the mistress
of her son's hearth as though she had been a free woman, and the cot
in which she dwelt her freehold.
Edith herself was the first bower-maiden of the castle, and, safe
under the protecting wings of dame Ulrica, the housewife, defied the
impertinence of forward pages, the importunate gallantry of esquires,
and was cheerfully acknowledged as the best and prettiest lass of the
lot, by the old gray-haired seneschal, in his black velvet suit and
gold chain of office.
Really, therefore, none of her own immediate family had known any
actual wants, or suffered any material hardships or sorrows, through
their condition, up to the period at which my tale commences. Their
greatest care, perhaps, had arisen from the temper, surly, rude,
insolent, and provocative, of Eadwulf the Red, Kenric's brother, who
had already, by misconduct, and even actual crime, according to the
Norman code, subjected himself to severe penalties, and been reduced,
in default of harsher treatment, to the condition of a mere slave, a
chattel, saleable like an ox or ass, at the pleasure of their lord.
This, both in its actual sense, as keeping them in constant
apprehension of what further distress Eadwulf's future misconduct
might bring upon them, and in its moral bearing, as holding them
constantly reminded of their own servile condition, had been, thus
far, their prime grief and cause of complaint, had they been persons
given to complain.
Still, although well-nigh a century had elapsed since the Norman
Conquest, and the heir of the Conqueror in the fourth generation was
sitting on the throne which that great and politic prince won on the
fatal day of Hastings, their condition had not become habitual or easy
to those, at least, who had been reduced to slavery from freedom, by
the consequences of that disastrous battle. And such was the condition
of the family whence sprang Kenric and Edith. The Saxon thane,
Waltheof, whose name and that of his abode had descended to the Norman
fortalice which had arisen from the ashes of his less aspiring manor,
had resisted the Norman invaders so long, with such inveterate and
stubborn valor, and, through the devotion of his tenants and
followers, with such cost of life, that when he fell in fight, and his
possessions were granted to his slayer, all the dwellers on his lands
were involved in the common ruin.
To the serfs of the soil, who had been serfs before the conquest, it
mattered but little. The slave to the Saxon was but changed into the
slave of the Norman, and did not perhaps find in him a crueller,
though he might a haughtier and more overbearing master. But to the
freeman, the doom which consigned him to the fetters of the Norman,
which converted him from the owner into the serf of the soil, was
second only, if second, to the bitterness of death. And such had been
the doom of the grandfather of Kenric and Eadwulf.
Their mother herself had been born free, not far from the hovel in
which she still dwelt a slave, though she was but an infant when the
hurricane of war and ruin swept over the green oaks of Sherwood, and
had no memory of the time when she was not the thrall of a foreign
lord. Her father, Wulfred, was the largest tenant under Waltheof,
himself a franklin, or small landholder, and of blood as noble, and
station more elevated than that of one half the adventurers who had
flocked to the banner of William the invader. With his landlord and
friend, he had fought to the last, not at Hastings only, but in every
bloody ineffectual rising, until the last spark of Saxon liberty was
trampled out under the iron hoofs of the Norman war-horse; but, less
happy than Waltheof, he had survived to find himself a slave, and the
father of slaves, tilling for a cruel foreign conqueror the land which
had been his own and his father's, and his father's father's, but in
which he and his heirs should have no heritage for evermore, beyond
the six-foot measure which should be meted to them every one, for his
long home.
And the memory of these things had not yet passed away, nor the
bitterness of the iron departed from the children, which had then
entered into the soul of the parent.
An irrepressible desire came over the mind of Guendolen, to know and
comprehend something more fully the sentiments and sorrows of the girl
who had nursed and attended her so gently since her adventure with the
stag; and perceiving intuitively that the slave girl, who, strange as
it appeared to her, seemed to have a species of pride of her own,
would not reveal her inward self in the presence of the vain and
flippant Norman waiting girls, she hastened to dismiss them, without
wounding their self-esteem, on a pretext of which they would be
willing enough to avail themselves.
"Lilian and Marguerite," she said, "you must be weary my good girls,
with watching me through this long night and my peevish temper must
have made you yet more weary, for I feel that I am not myself, and
that I have tried your patience. Go, therefore, now, and get some
repose, that when I shall truly need your services again, you may be
well at ease to serve me. I feel as if I could sleep now; and while I
slumber, Edith, here, can watch beside me, and drive away the gnats
with her fan, as well as a more experienced bower-woman."
Whether the girls suspected or not that their mistress desired to be
rid of them, they were not sorry to be dismissed from attendance on
her couch; and whether they proposed to devote the opportunity to
repose, or to gay flirtation with the pages of their own lord's or of
Sir Philip's household, they withdrew at once, leaving the lady gazing
fixedly on the motionless and hardly conscious figure of the slave
girl.
By a sudden impulse she passed her small white hand caressingly over
the soft and abundant tresses of Edith's fair hair; and so unusual was
the sensation to the daughter of the downfallen race, that she
started, as if a blow had been dealt her, and blushed crimson, between
surprise and wonder, as she raised her great blue eyes wide open to
the face of the young lady.
"And is it so hard?" she asked, in reference more to what she
understood Edith to mean, than to any thing she had spoken, or even
hinted--"is it so hard, my poor child? I had thought that your lot sat
as lightly on you as the dew-drop in the chalice of the bluebell. I
had fancied you as happy as any one of us here below. Will you not
tell me what is this sorrow which weighs on you so heavily? It may be
I can do something to relieve it."
"Lady, I am, as you know, a Saxon, and a slave, the daughter of a
slave, and, should it ever be my lot to wed, the wife, to be, of a
serf, a bondman of the soil, and the mother of things doomed, or ere
they see the blessed light of Heaven, to the collar and the chain from
the cradle to the grave. Think you a woman, with such thoughts as
these at her heart, can be very gay or joyous?"
"And yet, you were both gay and joyous yesterday, Edith; and all last
week, since I have been at the castle, I have heard no sounds so gay
or so pleasant to my ear as your merry ballads. And you are no more a
serf this morn than you were yestrene, and the good God alone knows
what any of us all may be on the morrow, Edith. Something, I know,
must have happened, girl, to make you wear a face so altered on this
beautiful summer day, and carry so sad a heart, when all the world is
so happy."
"All the world, lady!" replied Edith; "all the world happy! Alas! not
one tenth of it, unless you mean the beasts and the birds, which,
knowing nothing, are blithe in their happy innocence. Of the human
world around us, lady, one half knows not, and more by far than one
half cares not, how miserable or how hopeless are their fellows--nor,
if all knew and cared for all, could they either comprehend or
console, much less relieve, the miserable."
"But if I be one of those, Edith, who know not, I am at least not one
of those who care not. Therefore, I come back to the place whence I
started. Something has happened, which makes you dwell so much more
dolefully to-day, upon that which weighed not on you, yestrene,
heavier than a feather."
"Something _has_ happened, lady. But it is all one; for it resolves
itself in all but into this; I am a slave--a slave, until life is
over."
"This is strange," said Guendolen, thoughtfully. "I do not
understand--_may_ not understand this. It does not seem to me
that your duties are so very hard, your life so very painful, or your
rule so very strict, that you should suddenly thus give way to utter
gloom and despondency, for no cause but what you have known for years,
and found endurable until this moment."
"But henceforth unendurable. Oh! talk not, lady, talk not. You may
console the dying, for to him there is a hope, a present hope of a
quick-coming future. But comfort not the slave; for to him the
bitterest and most cruel past is happier than the hopeless present, if
only for that it is past; and the present, hopeless as it is, is yet
less desperate than the future; for to the slave, in the future, every
thing except happiness is possible. I may seem to speak enigmas to
you, lady, and I am sure that you do not understand me--how should
you? None but a slave can know or imagine what it is to be a slave;
none can conceive what a slave feels, thinks, suffers. And yet a slave
is a man, after all; and a lord is no more than a man, while
living--and yet, what a gulf between them!"
"And you will not tell me, Edith," persisted the Lady Guendolen, "you
will not tell me what it is that has happened to you of late, which
makes you grieve so despondently, thus on a sudden, over your
late-endured condition? Then you must let me divine it. You have
learned your own heart of late. You have discovered that you love,
Edith."
"And if it were so, lady," replied the girl, darkly, "were not that
enough to make a woman, who is at once a Christian and a slave, both
despond and despair? First to love a slave--for to love other than a
slave, being herself a slave were the same, as for a mortal to be
enamored of a star in heaven--and then, even if license were granted
to wed him she loved, which is not certain or even of usual
occurrence, to be the mother of babes, to whom but one reality is
secured, beyond a peradventure, the reality that they too must be
slaves and wretched. But you are wrong, lady. I have not learned my
own heart of late--I have known it long. I have not discovered but now
that I love, nor has he whom I love. We have been betrothed this year
and better."
"What then? what then?" cried Guendolen, eagerly. "Will not Sir Philip
consent? If that be all, dry your tears, Edith; so small a boon as
that I can command by a single word."
"Sir Philip heeds not such matters, lady. His bailiff _has_ consented,
if that were all."
"What is it, then? This scruple about babes," said Guendolen,
thoughtfully. "It is sad--it is sad, indeed. Yet if you love
_him_, as you say, and your life in its actual reality be not so
bitter----"
"No, lady, no; it is not even that. If I had scruples on that head,
they have vanished; Kenric has convinced me----"
"Kenric!" exclaimed Guendolen, starting erect into a sitting attitude,
forgetful of her pains and bruises. "What, the brave man who saved me
from the stag at the risk of his own life, who was half slain in
serving me--is he--is he _your_ Kenric?"
"The same," answered Edith, with the quiet accent of fixed sorrow.
"And the same for whom you procured the priceless boon of liberty."
An idea flashed, like the electric fluid, across the mind of
Guendolen, who up to that moment had suspected nothing of the
connection between her preserver and the beautiful girl before her,
and who knew nothing of his grand refusal to accept even liberty
itself, most inestimable of all gifts, which could not be shared by
those whom he loved beyond liberty or life; and she imagined that she
read the secret, and had pierced the maiden's mystery.
"Can it be?" she said, sorrowfully, and seeming rather to be communing
with herself, than inquiring of her companion. "Can it be that one so
brave, so generous, and seemingly so noble, should be so base and
abject? Oh! but these men, these men, if tale and history speak true,
they are the same all and ever--false, selfish, and deceivers!"
"Kenric, lady?"
"And because he is free--the freeman but of the hour--he has despised
thee, Edith, the slave girl? But hold thy head high, sweet one, and
thy heart higher. Thou shalt be free to-morrow, girl, and the mate of
his betters; it shall be thou, to-morrow, who shall repay scorn with
scorn, and----"
"No, lady, no," cried the girl, who had been hitherto silenced and
overpowered by the impulsive vehemence of Guendolen. "You misapprehend
me altogether. It is not I whom he rejected, for that _he_ was free;
but liberty that he cast from him, as a toy not worth the having,
because I might not be free with him--I, and his aged mother, of whom
he is, alone, the only stay and comfort."
"Noble! noble!" cried the Norman girl, joyously clapping her hands
together. "Noble and glorious, gentle and great! This, this, indeed,
is true nobility! Why do we Normans boast ourselves, as if we alone
could think great thoughts, or do great deeds? and here we are
outdone, beyond all question or comparison, in the true gentleness of
perfect chivalry; and that, by a Saxon slave. But be of good cheer,
Edith, my sister and my friend; be of good cheer. The sun shall not go
down looking upon you still a slave, nor upon your Kenric, nor yet
upon his mother. You shall be free, all free, free as the blessed
winds of heaven, before the sun set in the sea. And you shall be the
wife of no serf, but of a freeman, and a freeholder, in my own manor
lands of Kendal upon Kent; and you shall be, God willing, the mother
of free Englishmen, to do their lady as leal service as their stout
father did before them. Fear nothing, and doubt nothing, Edith; for
this shall be, so surely as I am Guendolen of Taillebois. So small a
thing as this I can right readily do with my good father, and he as
readily with our true friend, noble Sir Philip de Morville. But hark!
I hear their horses' hoofs and the whimpering of their hounds in the
court-yard. To the bartizan, girl, to the bartizan! Is it they--is it
the chase returning?"
"It is they, dear lady--your noble sire and Sir Philip, and all the
knights who rode forth this morning--all laughing in high merriment
and glee! and now they mount the steps--they have entered."
"No better moment, then, to press a boon. Fly, girl, be your wishes
wings to your speech. I would see my father straightway!"