CEDRIC IN TROUBLE.
For several weeks life passed at the villa with little change or incident.
But the Count, though he kept a cheerful face, and talked gaily of the
future to his daughter and Carna, felt more acutely every day how full his
position was of anxieties and difficulties. First came, as it always does
come first, the question of money. It had never been a very easy matter to
provide for the expenses of the fleet. Again and again the Count had drawn
on his private means, which were happily very large. But these had lately
been crippled by the troubled condition of the provinces in which his
estates were situated, and even if they had been untouched the burden that
now threatened to fall upon them would have been too great for them to
bear. Some of the seaport towns would, he hoped, continue to pay their
contributions. He was personally popular, and his influence would do
something. Then, again, he could still give at least some return for the
money. The sea-coast must be protected from the enemy, and no one could
protect it so cheaply and so effectually as he. From the inland towns,
which had always grumbled at having to pay an impost from which they saw
no visible advantage, nothing was to be hoped. And any expectation of
money from the authorities at home was quite out of the question.
One thing was quite certain: the establishment must be reduced within much
narrower limits. He must diminish the fleet, and lessen also the range of
shore which he professed to defend. He could not henceforth pretend to go
north of the mouth of the Thamesis. For the coast southward and westward
he might be able to provide more or less effectually. More he could not
do.
One of the first necessities of the changed position in which he found
himself was that he must give up the villa on the east coast. It would be
a matter for after consideration whether the island of Vectis was not too
much out of the way. But till that point could be settled, it would have
to be his head-quarters. To carry out these new arrangements, and to wind
up affairs in the region which he was preparing to relinquish, a voyage
became necessary. On this voyage the Count started early in April. He
arranged for disposing of that part of the fleet which he could not hope
to keep in his own pay. Some of the oldest galleys were broken up; others
were handed over to the authorities of the coast-towns, on the
understanding that they were to man and pay them themselves. A few picked
men were taken from the crews by the Count; the rest, excepting such as
were re-engaged by the local authorities, were discharged. When this had
been done, and the villa had been dismantled, the Count prepared to return
to the island.
Here, meanwhile, there had been trouble. The Saxon had quietly returned to
his work at the forge, and would have been perfectly content, as far as
could be judged from his demeanour, if only he had been left alone, and
permitted to pay as before his distant worship to Carna. But to some
members of the villa household he was an object of dislike. They were
jealous of the favour in which the Count and the Count’s family held him.
They were naturally not at all pleased at what they could not but
acknowledge his great superiority in strength, and as Christians, though
not particularly zealous in their performance of most of their duties,
they felt themselves to be unquestionably zealous and sincere in their
hatred and contempt for a pagan. The Saxon, on the other hand, heartily
despised those by whom he was surrounded. They were slaves, or little
better than slaves, and he was a freeman and a chief, though the gods had
made him a prisoner. He went to and fro among them with a scorn which was
not the less evident because it was not expressed in words.
For a time this enforced silence helped to keep the peace; Cedric knew
nothing of the British tongue, or of the mongrel Latin which sometimes
took its place, and the other inhabitants of the villa nothing of Saxon.
There were angry and contemptuous looks on both sides, but there was
nothing more; or if there were words, these were harmless, because they
were not understood. But by degrees this was changed. Cedric had
intelligence of no common kind—indeed he was something of a poet among his
own people—he had many motives for learning the language of those among
whom he dwelt, his adoration for Carna being one of the most powerful, and
he had, too, opportunities for learning. The peddler taught him much, and
Carna, who never forgot her zealous desire for his conversion, taught him
more. The end was that he picked up much of the British language with
extraordinary rapidity, and, in little more than six months after his
capture, could express himself with some ease and fluency.
This was very well in its way, but it had the unfortunate result that he
began to understand and be understood. Every day the relations between him
and the domestics and artizans employed about the villa became worse and
worse, and it was not long before matters came to a crisis.
Cedric had repeatedly noticed that the tools which he used in the forge
had been hidden or mischievously damaged. He was too proud to complain,
and indeed his temper was curiously patient in any matter where he did not
conceive his honour to be involved. He said nothing about the matter,
searched for his missing tools, and if he could not find them, continued
to do without them, and repaired the injuries as best he could. The
offender, of course, grew bolder with impunity, and at last the limits of
Cedric’s endurance were reached and passed. Coming into the forge at an
unusually early hour one morning, he caught the doer of the mischief in
the very commission of a more serious piece of mischief than he had yet
ventured, namely, cutting a hole in the bellows. He lifted the offender by
the skin of the neck—he was a lad of about sixteen, and son of the chief
bailiff of the farm attached to the villa—shook him, as a dog shakes a
rat, yet without forgetting that he was but a boy, dipped him head
foremost in the bath of the forge, and then let him go, more dead than
alive from the fear that he felt at finding himself in the hands of the
great giant.
Unluckily at the very moment when the young rascal was being dismissed in
a paroxysm of howling with a contemptuous kick, his father entered the
yard. No one about the place was more prejudiced against the Saxon, or
more jealous of the favour in which he stood with the Count and his
family. He had too, in its very worst form, the ungovernable Celtic
temper, and now, when he saw his son, a spoilt boy whom everybody else
disliked, ill-treated as he thought by the prisoner, he was fairly carried
out of himself.
“Pagan dog!” he cried, “do you dare to touch with your beast’s foot a
Christian boy?” and he struck at the Saxon with a long cart whip which he
had in his hand.
The end of the lash caught the Saxon’s cheek, on which it raised an
ugly-looking wheal. Even in the height of his passion the Briton stood
aghast at the change which came in a moment over the form and features of
the Saxon. One or two of the bystanders had seen him face to face with an
enemy, and had wondered how strangely calm he had seemed to be, showing no
sign of excitement, except a certain glitter in his eyes. He had a very
different look now. “The form of his visage was changed,” as it was in the
Babylonian king(47) when he found himself, for the first time in his life,
confronted by a point-blank refusal to obey. A consuming anger, like the
Berseker rage of his kinsmen of after times, the Vikings, seemed to
possess and transform him. His features worked, as if caught by some
strange malady, his eyes literally blazed with fury, his whole figure
seemed to dilate. The luckless bailiff was seized round the middle, lifted
from the ground as easily as if he had been a child in arms, and hurled
with a crash, like a bolt from a catapult, against the wall. He lay there
bleeding from nose and mouth, while the horror-stricken Britons stood
helpless and afraid to move.
[Illustration: Cedric’s Fury.]
“Dogs of slaves,” cried Cedric, “do you dare to growl at your master;” and
he swept through the terrified crowd, laying them low on either side.
Happily at the moment he had no weapon in his hand, but he seized a bar of
iron from the anvil of the forge, and swinging it round his head,
prepared, it seemed, to deal about him an indiscriminate destruction. What
would have followed it is impossible to say. In his fury and in his
absolute mastery over that shrinking crowd, he was like a tiger in the
midst of a flock of sheep. But at the critical moment, before his hand had
dealt a single blow, the apparition of Carna interposed between him and
his victims. The uproar in the court had reached her in her chamber, and
brought her ready to play her accustomed part of peacemaker. Now she
stood, her figure framed like a picture, in the door which opened on the
court from the part of the villa which she occupied. She wore a simple
dress of white, fastened with a blue girdle; her long chestnut hair fell
in loose waves to her waist, for she had not had time to arrange it in
more orderly fashion. Her face was pale and troubled, her eyes wide open
with a sad surprise. It was indeed another Cedric that she saw from the
one whom she had known. Was this terrible savage, who looked more like
some dreadful spirit from the abyss than a human creature, the gentle
giant in whose mute homage she had felt such an innocent pleasure, the
hopeful pupil whom she was teaching, as she hoped, to put away savage ways
for the mild and peaceful behaviour of a Christian. As for Cedric, he
seemed paralyzed at the vision that presented itself to him. The sight of
the girl always moved him strangely; now she reminded him of the time when
he had first seen her by the bedside of his dying brother; and the
remembrance completed, if anything was needed to complete, the impression.
The fury that had transfigured him seemed to pass away; his hand loosed
its hold on the weapon which he held. His adversaries did not fail to use
the opportunity. They had been too genuinely frightened to let it slip
when it came. Indeed they may be excused for feeling that this most
formidable enemy had to be secured against doing any more damage. The
moment they saw him unarmed they sprang with one movement on him and
overpowered him. Even then, if he had offered resistance, they might have
had no small trouble, perhaps might have failed in securing him. But he
stood passive, and allowed his hands to be bound without a struggle, and
followed without difficulty when he was led to the room where offenders
were commonly confined. Some of the meaner spirits in the household were
disposed to visit their feelings of annoyance and humiliation on his head,
now that he seemed to be in their power. But others felt a salutary dread
of rousing the sleeping lion whose rage they had seen could be so
terrible. Carna too did not abandon her _protegé_. He was chained, indeed,
to a staple in the wall of the room which served as his prison. This
seemed nothing more than a necessary precaution. But the girl let it be
distinctly understood that no cruelty must be used to him, and she took
care herself that his supply of food should be plentiful and good.