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."