As ye came from the holy land
Of blessed Walsinghame,
Oh met ye not with my true love,
As by the way ye came?
--Old Ballad.
In pursuance of the arrangement recorded in the twelfth chapter, the
baron, Robin, and Marian disguised themselves as pilgrims returned from
Palestine, and travelling from the sea-coast of Hampshire to their home
in Northumberland. By dint of staff and cockle-shell, sandal and scrip,
they proceeded in safety the greater part of the way (for Robin had many
sly inns and resting-places between Barnsdale and Sherwood), and were
already on the borders of Yorkshire, when, one evening, they passed
within view of a castle, where they saw a lady standing on a turret,
and surveying the whole extent of the valley through which they were
passing. A servant came running from the castle, and delivered to them
a message from his lady, who was sick with expectation of news from her
lord in the Holy Land, and entreated them to come to her, that she might
question them concerning him. This was an awkward occurrence: but there
was no presence for refusal, and they followed the servant into the
castle. The baron, who had been in Palestine in his youth, undertook to
be spokesman on the occasion, and to relate his own adventures to
the lady as having happened to the lord in question. This preparation
enabled him to be so minute and circumstantial in his detail, and so
coherent in his replies to her questions, that the lady fell implicitly
into the delusion, and was delighted to find that her lord was alive and
in health, and in high favour with the king, and performing prodigies
of valour in the name of his lady, whose miniature he always wore in his
bosom. The baron guessed at this circumstance from the customs of that
age, and happened to be in the right.
“This miniature,” added the baron, “I have had the felicity to see, and
should have known you by it among a million.” The baron was a little
embarrassed by some questions of the lady concerning her lord’s personal
appearance; but Robin came to his aid, observing a picture suspended
opposite to him on the wall, which he made a bold conjecture to be that
of the lord in question; and making a calculation of the influences of
time and war, which he weighed with a comparison of the lady’s age,
he gave a description of her lord sufficiently like the picture in its
groundwork to be a true resemblance, and sufficiently differing from
it in circumstances to be more an original than a copy. The lady was
completely deceived, and entreated them to partake her hospitality for
the night; but this they deemed it prudent to decline, and with many
humble thanks for her kindness, and representations of the necessity of
not delaying their homeward course, they proceeded on their way.
As they passed over the drawbridge, they met Sir Ralph Montfaucon and
his squire, who were wandering in quest of Marian, and were entering
to claim that hospitality which the pilgrims had declined. Their
countenances struck Sir Ralph with a kind of imperfect recognition,
which would never have been matured, but that the eyes of Marian, as
she passed him, encountered his, and the images of those stars of beauty
continued involuntarily twinkling in his sensorium to the exclusion of
all other ideas, till memory, love, and hope concurred with imagination
to furnish a probable reason for their haunting him so pertinaciously.
Those eyes, he thought, were certainly the eyes of Matilda Fitzwater;
and if the eyes were hers, it was extremely probable, if not logically
consecutive, that the rest of the body they belonged to was hers also.
Now, if it were really Matilda Fitzwater, who were her two companions?
The baron? Aye, and the elder pilgrim was something like him. And the
earl of Huntingdon? Very probably. The earl and the baron might be good
friends again, now that they were both in disgrace together. While he
was revolving these cogitations, he was introduced to the lady, and
after claiming and receiving the promise of hospitality, he inquired
what she knew of the pilgrims who had just departed? The lady told him
they were newly returned from Palestine, having been long in the Holy
Land. The knight expressed some scepticism on this point. The lady
replied, that they had given her so minute a detail of her lord’s
proceedings, and so accurate a description of his person, that she could
not be deceived in them. This staggered the knight’s confidence in
his own penetration; and if it had not been a heresy in knighthood to
suppose for a moment that there could be in rerum natura such another
pair of eyes as those of his mistress, he would have acquiesced
implicitly in the lady’s judgment. But while the lady and the knight
were conversing, the warder blew his bugle-horn, and presently entered
a confidential messenger from Palestine, who gave her to understand
that her lord was well; but entered into a detail of his adventures
most completely at variance with the baron’s narrative, to which not
the correspondence of a single incident gave the remotest colouring of
similarity. It now became manifest that the pilgrims were not true
men; and Sir Ralph Montfaucon sate down to supper with his head full
of cogitations, which we shall leave him to chew and digest with his
pheasant and canary.
Meanwhile our three pilgrims proceeded on their way. The evening set in
black and lowering, when Robin turned aside from the main track, to seek
an asylum for the night, along a narrow way that led between rocky and
woody hills. A peasant observed the pilgrims as they entered that narrow
pass, and called after them: “Whither go you, my masters? there are
rogues in that direction.”
“Can you show us a direction,” said Robin, “in which there are none? If
so we will take it in preference.” The peasant grinned, and walked away
whistling.
The pass widened as they advanced, and the woods grew thicker and darker
around them. Their path wound along the slope of a woody declivity,
which rose high above them in a thick rampart of foliage, and descended
almost precipitously to the bed of a small river, which they heard
dashing in its rocky channel, and saw its white foam gleaming at
intervals in the last faint glimmerings of twilight. In a short time all
was dark, and the rising voice of the wind foretold a coming storm. They
turned a point of the valley, and saw a light below them in the depth
of the hollow, shining through a cottage-casement and dancing in its
reflection on the restless stream. Robin blew his horn, which was
answered from below. The cottage door opened: a boy came forth with a
torch, ascended the steep, showed tokens of great delight at meeting
with Robin, and lighted them down a flight of steps rudely cut in the
rock, and over a series of rugged stepping-stones, that crossed
the channel of the river. They entered the cottage, which exhibited
neatness, comfort, and plenty, being amply enriched with pots, pans,
and pipkins, and adorned with flitches of bacon and sundry similar
ornaments, that gave goodly promise in the firelight that gleamed upon
the rafters. A woman, who seemed just old enough to be the boy’s mother,
had thrown down her spinning wheel in her joy at the sound of Robin’s
horn, and was bustling with singular alacrity to set forth her festal
ware and prepare an abundant supper. Her features, though not beautiful,
were agreeable and expressive, and were now lighted up with such
manifest joy at the sight of Robin, that Marian could not help feeling a
momentary touch of jealousy, and a half-formed suspicion that Robin had
broken his forest law, and had occasionally gone out of bounds, as other
great men have done upon occasion, in order to reconcile the breach
of the spirit, with the preservation of the letter, of their own
legislation. However, this suspicion, if it could be said to exist in a
mind so generous as Marian’s, was very soon dissipated by the entrance
of the woman’s husband, who testified as much joy as his wife had done
at the sight of Robin; and in a short time the whole of the party were
amicably seated round a smoking supper of river-fish and wild wood fowl,
on which the baron fell with as much alacrity as if he had been a true
pilgrim from Palestine.
The husband produced some recondite flasks of wine, which were laid by
in a binn consecrated to Robin, whose occasional visits to them in his
wanderings were the festal days of these warm-hearted cottagers, whose
manners showed that they had not been born to this low estate. Their
story had no mystery, and Marian easily collected it from the tenour of
their conversation. The young man had been, like Robin, the victim of an
usurious abbot, and had been outlawed for debt, and his nut-brown maid
had accompanied him to the depths of Sherwood, where they lived an
unholy and illegitimate life, killing the king’s deer, and never hearing
mass. In this state, Robin, then earl of Huntingdon, discovered them
in one of his huntings, and gave them aid and protection. When Robin
himself became an outlaw, the necessary qualification or gift of
continency was too hard a law for our lovers to subscribe to; and
as they were thus disqualified for foresters, Robin had found them a
retreat in this romantic and secluded spot. He had done similar service
to other lovers similarly circumstanced, and had disposed them in
various wild scenes which he and his men had discovered in their
flittings from place to place, supplying them with all necessaries and
comforts from the reluctant disgorgings of fat abbots and usurers. The
benefit was in some measure mutual; for these cottages served him as
resting-places in his removals, and enabled him to travel untraced and
unmolested; and in the delight with which he was always received he
found himself even more welcome than he would have been at an inn;
and this is saying very much for gratitude and affection together.
The smiles which surrounded him were of his own creation, and he
participated in the happiness he had bestowed.
The casements began to rattle in the wind, and the rain to beat upon
the windows. The wind swelled to a hurricane, and the rain dashed like
a flood against the glass. The boy retired to his little bed, the wife
trimmed the lamp, the husband heaped logs upon the fire: Robin broached
another flask; and Marian filled the baron’s cup, and sweetened Robin’s
by touching its edge with her lips.
“Well,” said the baron, “give me a roof over my head, be it never so
humble. Your greenwood canopy is pretty and pleasant in sunshine; but if
I were doomed to live under it, I should wish it were water-tight.”
“But,” said Robin, “we have tents and caves for foul weather, good store
of wine and venison, and fuel in abundance.”
“Ay, but,” said the baron, “I like to pull off my boots of a night,
which you foresters seldom do, and to ensconce myself thereafter in
a comfortable bed. Your beech-root is over-hard for a couch, and your
mossy stump is somewhat rough for a bolster.”
“Had you not dry leaves,” said Robin, “with a bishop’s surplice over
them? What would you have softer? And had you not an abbot’s travelling
cloak for a coverlet? What would you have warmer?”
“Very true,” said the baron, “but that was an indulgence to a guest, and
I dreamed all night of the sheriff of Nottingham. I like to feel myself
safe,” he added, stretching out his legs to the fire, and throwing
himself back in his chair with the air of a man determined to be
comfortable. “I like to feel myself safe,” said the baron.
At that moment the woman caught her husband’s arm, and all the party
following the direction of her eyes, looked simultaneously to the
window, where they had just time to catch a glimpse of an apparition of
an armed head, with its plumage tossing in the storm, on which the light
shone from within, and which disappeared immediately.