HOW A FAIR LADY EXERCISED THE MECHANICAL ART TO WIN HEREWARD’S LOVE.
The fair Torfrida sat in an upper room of her mother’s house in St.
Omer, alternately looking out of the window and at a book of mechanics.
In the garden outside, the wryneck (as is his fashion in May) was
calling Pi-pi-pi among the gooseberry bushes, till the cobwalls rang
again. In the book was a Latin recipe for drying the poor wryneck,
and using him as a philtre which should compel the love of any person
desired. Mechanics, it must be understood, in those days were considered
as identical with mathematics, and those again with astrology and magic;
so that the old chronicler, who says that Torfrida was skilled in “the
mechanic art,” uses the word in the same sense as does the author of
the “History of Ramsey,” who tells us how a certain holy bishop of St.
Dunstan’s party, riding down to Corfe through the forest, saw the wicked
queen-mother Elfrida (her who had St. Edward stabbed at Corfe Gate)
exercising her “mechanic art,” under a great tree; in plain English,
performing heathen incantations; and how, when she saw that she was
discovered, she tempted him to deadly sin: but when she found him
proof against allurement, she had him into her bower; and there the
enchantress and her ladies slew him by thrusting red-hot bodkins under
his arms, so that the blessed man was martyred without any sign of
wound. Of all which let every man believe as much as he list.
Torfrida had had peculiar opportunities of learning mechanics. The
fairest and richest damsel in St. Omer, she had been left early by her
father an orphan, to the care of a superstitious mother and of a learned
uncle, the Abbot of St. Bertin. Her mother was a Provençale, one of
those Arlesiennes whose dark Greek beauty still shines, like diamonds
set in jet, in the doorways of the quaint old city. Gay enough in her
youth, she had, like a true Southern woman, taken to superstition in her
old age; and spent her days in the churches, leaving Torfrida to do and
learn what she would. Her nurse, moreover, was a Lapp woman, carried off
in some pirating foray, and skilled in all the sorceries for which
the Lapps were famed throughout the North. Her uncle, partly from
good-nature, partly from a pious hope that she might “enter religion,”
and leave her wealth to the Church, had made her his pupil, and taught
her the mysteries of books; and she had proved to be a strangely apt
scholar. Grammar, rhetoric, Latin prose and poetry, such as were taught
in those days, she mastered ere she was grown up. Then she fell upon
romance, and Charlemagne and his Paladins, the heroes of Troy, Alexander
and his generals, peopled her imagination. She had heard, too, of the
great necromancer Virgilius (for into such the middle age transformed
the poet), and, her fancy already excited by her Lapp nurse’s occult
science, she began eagerly to court forbidden lore.
Forbidden, indeed, magic was by the Church in public; but as a reality,
not as an imposture. Those whose consciences were tough and their faith
weak, had little scruple in applying to a witch, and asking help
from the powers below, when the saints above were slack to hear them.
Churchmen, even, were bold enough to learn the mysteries of nature,
Algebra, Judicial Astrology, and the occult powers of herbs, stones, and
animals, from the Mussulman doctors of Cordova and Seville; and, like
Pope Gerbert, mingle science and magic, in a fashion excusable enough in
days when true inductive science did not exist.
Nature had her miraculous powers,--how far good, how far evil, who could
tell? The belief that God was the sole maker and ruler of the universe
was confused and darkened by the cross-belief, that the material world
had fallen under the dominion of Satan and his demons; that millions
of spirits, good and evil in every degree, exercised continually powers
over crops and cattle, mines and wells, storms and lightning, health and
disease. Riches, honors, and royalties, too, were under the command of
the powers of darkness. For that generation, which was but too apt to
take its Bible in hand upside down, had somehow a firm faith in the word
of the Devil, and believed devoutly his somewhat startling assertion,
that the kingdoms of the world were his, and the glory of them; for to
him they were delivered, and to whomsoever he would he gave them: while
it had a proportionally weak faith in our Lord’s answer, that they were
to worship and serve the Lord God alone. How far these powers extended,
how far they might be counteracted, how far lawfully employed, were
questions which exercised the minds of men and produced a voluminous
literature for several centuries, till the search died out, for very
weariness of failure, at the end of the seventeenth century.
The Abbot of St. Bertin, therefore, did not hesitate to keep in his
private library more than one volume which he would not have willingly
lent to the simple monks under his charge; nor to Torfrida either, had
she not acquired so complete a command over the good old man, that he
could deny her nothing.
So she read of Gerbert, Pope Silvester II., who had died only a
generation back: how (to quote William of Malmesbury) “he learned at
Seville till he surpassed Ptolemy with the astrolabe, Alcandrus in
astronomy, and Julius Firmicus in judicial astrology; how he learned
what the singing and flight of birds portended, and acquired the art
of calling up spirits from hell; and, in short, whatever--hurtful or
healthful--human curiosity had discovered, besides the lawful sciences
of arithmetic and astronomy, music and geometry”; how he acquired from
the Saracens the abacus (a counting table); how he escaped from the
Moslem magician, his tutor, by making a compact with the foul fiend, and
putting himself beyond the power of magic, by hanging himself under
a wooden bridge so as to touch neither earth nor water; how he taught
Robert, King of France, and Otto the Kaiser; how he made an hydraulic
organ which played tunes by steam, which stood even then in the
Cathedral of Rheims; how he discovered in the Campus Martius at Rome
wondrous treasures, and a golden king and queen, golden courtiers and
guards, all lighted by a single carbuncle, and guarded by a boy with
a bent bow; who, when Gerbert’s servant stole a golden knife, shot an
arrow at that carbuncle, and all was darkness, and yells of demons.
All this Torfrida had read; and read, too, how Gerbert’s brazen head had
told him that he should be Pope, and not die till he had sung mass at
Jerusalem; and how both had come true,--the latter in mockery; for he
was stricken with deadly sickness in Rome, as he sang mass at the church
called Jerusalem, and died horribly, tearing himself in pieces.
Which terrible warning had as little effect on Torfrida as other
terrible warnings have on young folk, who are minded to eat of the fruit
of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
So Torfrida beguiled her lonely life in that dull town, looking out
over dreary flats and muddy dikes, by a whole dream-world of fantastic
imaginations, and was ripe and ready for any wild deed which her wild
brain might suggest.
Pure she was all the while, generous and noble-hearted, and with a deep
and sincere longing--as one soul in ten thousand has--after knowledge
for its own sake; but ambitious exceedingly, and that not of monastic
sanctity. She laughed to scorn the notion of a nunnery; and laughed
to scorn equally the notion of marrying any knight, however much of a
prudhomme, whom she had yet seen. Her uncle and Marquis Baldwin could
have between them compelled her, as an orphan heiress, to marry whom
they liked. But Torfrida had as yet bullied the Abbot and coaxed the
Count successfully. Lances had been splintered, helmets split, and more
than one life lost in her honor; but she had only, as the best safeguard
she could devise, given some hint of encouragement to one Ascelin, a
tall knight of St. Valeri, the most renowned bully of those parts, by
bestowing on him a scrap of ribbon, and bidding him keep it against all
comers. By this means she insured the personal chastisement of all other
youths who dared to lift their eyes to her, while she by no means bound
herself to her spadassin of St. Valeri. It was all very brutal, but so
was the time; and what better could a poor lady do in days when no
man’s life or woman’s honor was safe, unless--as too many were forced
to do--she retired into a cloister, and got from the Church that peace
which this world certainly could not give, and, happily, dared not take
away?
The arrival of Hereward and his men had of course stirred the great
current of her life, and indeed that of St. Omer, usually as stagnant as
that of the dikes round its wall. Who the unknown champion was,--for
his name of “Naemansson” showed that he was concealing something at
least,--whence he had come, and what had been his previous exploits,
busied all the gossips of the town. Would he and his men rise and
plunder the abbey? Was not the châtelain mad in leaving young Arnulf
with him all day? Madder still, in taking him out to battle against the
Count of Guisnes? He might be a spy,--the _avant-courrier_ of some great
invading force. He was come to spy out the nakedness of the land, and
would shortly vanish, to return with Harold Hardraade of Norway, or
Sweyn of Denmark, and all their hosts. Nay, was he not Harold Hardraade
himself in disguise? And so forth. All which Torfrida heard, and thought
within herself that, be he who he might, she should like to look on him
again.
Then came the news how the very first day that he had gone out against
the Count of Guisnes he had gallantly rescued a wounded man. A day or
two after came fresh news of some doughty deed; and then another, and
another. And when Hereward returned, after a week’s victorious fighting,
all St. Omer was in the street to stare at him.
Then Torfrida heard enough, and, had it been possible, more than enough,
of Hereward and his prowess.
And when they came riding in, the great Marquis at the head of them all,
with Robert le Frison on one side of him, and on the other Hereward,
looking “as fresh as flowers in May,” she looked down on him out of her
little lattice in the gable, and loved him, once and for all, with all
her heart and soul.
And Hereward looked up at her and her dark blue eyes and dark raven
locks, and thought her the fairest thing that he had ever seen, and
asked who she might be, and heard; and as he heard he forgot all about
the Sultan’s daughter, and the Princess of Constantinople, and the Fairy
of Brocheliaunde, and all the other pretty birds which were still in the
bush about the wide world; and thought for many a day of naught but
the pretty bird which he held--so conceited was he of his own powers of
winning her--there safe in hand in St. Omer.
So he cast about to see her, and to win her love. And she cast about to
see him, and win his love. But neither saw the other for a while; and
it might have been better for one of them had they never seen the other
again.
If Torfrida could have foreseen, and foreseen, and foreseen----why, if
she were true woman, she would have done exactly what she did, and taken
the bitter with the sweet, the unknown with the known, as we all must do
in life, unless we wish to live and die alone.