‘T is true, no lover has that power
To enforce a desperate amour
As he that has two strings to his bow
And burns for love and money too.--BUTLER.
The friar had often had experience of the baron’s testy humour; but
it had always before confined itself to words, in which the habit of
testiness often mingled more expression of displeasure than the internal
feeling prompted. He knew the baron to be hot and choleric, but at the
same time hospitable and generous; passionately fond of his daughter,
often thwarting her in seeming, but always yielding to her in fact. The
early attachment between Matilda and the Earl of Huntingdon had given
the baron no serious reason to interfere with her habits and
pursuits, which were so congenial to those of her lover; and not being
over-burdened with orthodoxy, that is to say, not being seasoned with
more of the salt of the spirit than was necessary to preserve him from
excommunication, confiscation, and philotheoparoptesism, [1] he was not
sorry to encourage his daughter’s choice of her confessor in brother
Michael, who had more jollity and less hypocrisy than any of his
fraternity, and was very little anxious to disguise his love of the good
things of this world under the semblance of a sanctified exterior. The
friar and Matilda had often sung duets together, and had been accustomed
to the baron’s chiming in with a stormy capriccio, which was usually
charmed into silence by some sudden turn in the witching melodies of
Matilda. They had therefore naturally calculated, as far as their wild
spirits calculated at all, on the same effects from the same causes. But
the circumstances of the preceding day had made an essential alteration
in the case. The baron knew well, from the intelligence he had received,
that the earl’s offence was past remission: which would have been of
less moment but for the awful fact of his castle being in the possession
of the king’s forces, and in those days possession was considerably more
than eleven points of the law. The baron was therefore convinced
that the earl’s outlawry was infallible, and that Matilda must either
renounce her lover, or become with him an outlaw and a fugitive. In
proportion, therefore, to the baron’s knowledge of the strength and
duration of her attachment, was his fear of the difficulty of its ever
being overcome: her love of the forest and the chase, which he had never
before discouraged, now presented itself to him as matter of serious
alarm; and if her cheerfulness gave him hope on the one hand by
indicating a spirit superior to all disappointments, it was suspicious
to him on the other, as arising from some latent certainty of being soon
united to the earl. All these circumstances concurred to render
their songs of the vanished deer and greenwood archery and Yoicks and
Harkaway, extremely mal-a-propos, and to make his anger boil and bubble
in the cauldron of his spirit, till its more than ordinary excitement
burst forth with sudden impulse into active manifestation.
But as it sometimes happens, from the might
Of rage in minds that can no farther go,
As high as they have mounted in despite
In their remission do they sink as low,
To our bold baron did it happen so. [2]
For his discobolic exploit proved the climax of his rage, and was
succeeded by an immediate sense that he had passed the bounds of
legitimate passion; and he sunk immediately from the very pinnacle of
opposition to the level of implicit acquiescence. The friar’s spirits
were not to be marred by such a little incident. He was half-inclined,
at first, to return the baron’s compliment; but his love of Matilda
checked him; and when the baron held out his hand, the friar seized it
cordially, and they drowned all recollection of the affair by pledging
each other in a cup of canary.
The friar, having stayed long enough to see every thing replaced on a
friendly footing, rose, and moved to take his leave. Matilda told him
he must come again on the morrow, for she had a very long confession
to make to him. This the friar promised to do, and departed with the
knight.
Sir Ralph, on reaching the abbey, drew his followers together, and
led them to Locksley Castle, which he found in the possession of his
lieutenant; whom he again left there with a sufficient force to hold it
in safe keeping in the king’s name, and proceeded to London to report
the results of his enterprise.
Now Henry our royal king was very wroth at the earl’s evasion, and swore
by Saint Thomas-a-Becket (whom he had himself translated into a saint by
having him knocked on the head), that he would give the castle and lands
of Locksley to the man who should bring in the earl. Hereupon ensued
a process of thought in the mind of the knight. The eyes of the fair
huntress of Arlingford had left a wound in his heart which only she who
gave could heal. He had seen that the baron was no longer very partial
to the outlawed earl, but that he still retained his old affection for
the lands and castle of Locksley. Now the lands and castle were very
fair things in themselves, and would be pretty appurtenances to an
adventurous knight; but they would be doubly valuable as certain
passports to the father’s favour, which was one step towards that of the
daughter, or at least towards obtaining possession of her either quietly
or perforce; for the knight was not so nice in his love as to consider
the lady’s free grace a sine qua non: and to think of being, by any
means whatever, the lord of Locksley and Arlingford, and the husband
of the bewitching Matilda, was to cut in the shades of futurity a vista
very tempting to a soldier of fortune. He set out in high spirits with
a chosen band of followers, and beat up all the country far and wide
around both the Ouse and the Trent; but fortune did not seem disposed
to second his diligence, for no vestige whatever could he trace of the
earl. His followers, who were only paid with the wages of hope, began to
murmur and fall off; for, as those unenlightened days were ignorant of
the happy invention of paper machinery, by which one promise to pay is
satisfactorily paid with another promise to pay, and that again with
another in infinite series, they would not, as their wiser posterity has
done, take those tenders for true pay which were not sterling; so that,
one fine morning, the knight found himself sitting on a pleasant bank of
the Trent, with only a solitary squire, who still clung to the shadow
of preferment, because he did not see at the moment any better chance of
the substance.
The knight did not despair because of the desertion of his followers: he
was well aware that he could easily raise recruits if he could once find
trace of his game; he, therefore, rode about indefatigably over hill
and dale, to the great sharpening of his own appetite and that of his
squire, living gallantly from inn to inn when his purse was full, and
quartering himself in the king’s name on the nearest ghostly brotherhood
when it happened to be empty. An autumn and a winter had passed away,
when the course of his perlustations brought him one evening into a
beautiful sylvan valley, where he found a number of young women weaving
garlands of flowers, and singing over their pleasant occupation. He
approached them, and courteously inquired the way to the nearest town.
“There is no town within several miles,” was the answer.
“A village, then, if it be but large enough to furnish an inn?”
“There is Gamwell just by, but there is no inn nearer than the nearest
town.”
“An abbey, then?”
“There is no abbey nearer than the nearest inn.”
“A house then, or a cottage, where I may obtain hospitality for the
night?”
“Hospitality!” said one of the young women; “you have not far to
seek for that. Do you not know that you are in the neighbourhood of
Gamwell-Hall?”
“So far from it,” said the knight, “that I never heard the name of
Gamwell-Hall before.”
“Never heard of Gamwell-Hall?” exclaimed all the young women together,
who could as soon have dreamed of his never having heard of the sky.
“Indeed, no,” said Sir Ralph; “but I shall be very happy to get rid of
my ignorance.”
“And so shall I,” said his squire; “for it seems that in this case
knowledge will for once be a cure for hunger, wherewith I am grievously
afflicted.”
“And why are you so busy, my pretty damsels, weaving these garlands?”
said the knight.
“Why, do you not know, sir,” said one of the young women, “that
to-morrow is Gamwell feast?”
The knight was again obliged, with all humility, to confess his
ignorance.
“Oh! sir,” said his informant, “then you will have something to see,
that I can tell you; for we shall choose a Queen of the May, and we
shall crown her with flowers, and place her in a chariot of flowers,
and draw it with lines of flowers, and we shall hang all the trees with
flowers, and we shall strew all the ground with flowers, and we shall
dance with flowers, and in flowers, and on flowers, and we shall be all
flowers.”
“That you will,” said the knight; “and the sweetest and brightest of
all the flowers of the May, my pretty damsels.” On which all the pretty
damsels smiled at him and each other.
“And there will be all sorts of May-games, and there will be prizes for
archery, and there will be the knight’s ale, and the foresters’ venison,
and there will be Kit Scrapesqueak with his fiddle, and little Tom
Whistlerap with his fife and tabor, and Sam Trumtwang with his harp,
and Peter Muggledrone with his bagpipe, and how I shall dance with
Will Whitethorn!” added the girl, clapping her hands as she spoke, and
bounding from the ground with the pleasure of the anticipation.
A tall athletic young man approached, to whom the rustic maidens
courtesied with great respect; and one of them informed Sir Ralph that
it was young Master William Gamwell. The young gentleman invited and
conducted the knight to the hall, where he introduced him to the old
knight his father, and to the old lady his mother, and to the young lady
his sister, and to a number of bold yeomen, who were laying siege to
beef, brawn, and plum pie around a ponderous table, and taking copious
draughts of old October. A motto was inscribed over the interior door,--
EAT, DRINK, AND BE MERRY:
an injunction which Sir Ralph and his squire showed remarkable alacrity
in obeying. Old Sir Guy of Gamwell gave Sir Ralph a very cordial
welcome, and entertained him during supper with several of his best
stories, enforced with an occasional slap on the back, and pointed with
a peg in the ribs; a species of vivacious eloquence in which the old
gentleman excelled, and which is supposed by many of that pleasant
variety of the human spectes, known by the name of choice fellows and
comical dogs, to be the genuine tangible shape of the cream of a good
joke.