When I come to look back upon that Saxon period, spent in the green
shades of my sweet franklin’s homestead, it seems, perhaps, that
never was there a time so peaceful before in the experience of this
passion-tossed existence! We hunted and we hawked, we feasted and we
lay abask in the sunshine of a jolly, idle life all these luxurious
months, drinking scorn and confusion amid our nightly flagons to remote
care and (as it seemed) remoter Normans.
But first to tell you how I won the right to lord it over these merry
Saxon churls and dissolute thanes. Editha had hardly come to her home
and dried, in a day or two, her weeping eyes, when all the noble
vagrants from yonder battle were up in arms to woo her. Never was maid
so sued! From morning till night there was no rest or peace. From the
uppermost bower looking over the fair English glades, down into the
thickets of nut and hazel, the air reeked of love and petitions. The
mighty Dane, like a sick bear, slept upon her curtained threshold
and growled amorousness into her timid ear before the sun was up.
The Welsh Prince wooed her all her breakfast-time, and his tawny
harper spent many a golden morning in outlining his noble patron’s
genealogy. In faith--ap Tudor, ap Griffith, ap Morgan, ap Huge, and I
know not how many others, it seemed all had a hand in the making of
that paragon--but Editha blushed and said she feared one Saxon girl
was all too few for so many. They besought her up and down, night and
morning, full and empty, to wed them. The English Princelings dogged
her footsteps when she went afield, and Torquil and Wulfhere, those
bandaged lovers, were ready for her with sighs and plaintive proposals
when she came flitting, frightened and fearful, home through the
bracken.
How could this end but in one way for the defenseless girl? She was
sued so much and sued so hot that one day she came creeping like a
hunted animal to the turret nook where I sat brooding over my fortunes,
and, timorous and shy, begged me to help her. I stood up and touched
her yellow disheveled hair, and told her there was but one way--and
Editha knew it as well as any one--and had made her choice and slipped
into my arms and was happy.
That was as noisy a wedding as ever had been in Voewood. Editha freed
a hundred serfs, and all day long the noise of files on their iron
collars echoed through her halls. She fed at the door every miscreant
or beggar who could crawl or hobble there, and remitted her taxes to a
score of poorer villains.
In the hall such noisy revelers as the rejected suitors surely never
were seen. They began that wedding feast in the morning, and it was
not finished by night. To me, who had so lately supped amid the costly
detail, the magnificent and cultivated license of a patrician Roman
table, these Saxon rioters seemed scrambling, hungry dogs. Where
Electra would taunt her haughty courtiers over loaded tables which the
art of three empires had furnished, firing her cruel, witty arrows of
spite and arrogance from her rose-strewn couches, these rough, uncivil
woodland Peers but wallowed in their ceaseless flow of muddy ale,
gorged themselves to sleep with the gross flesh of their acorn-fed
swine, and sang such songs and told such tales as made even me,
indifferent, to scowl upon them and wonder that their kinswoman and her
handmaids could sit and seem unwotting of their gross, obscene, and
noisy revels.
And late that night blood was nearly spilled upon the oaken floor of
Voewood. The thanes had fairly pocketed their disappointment, but now,
deep in drink and stuffed with food and courage, they began to eye me
and my thin-hid scorn askance, and then presently, like the mutter
of a quick-coming storm, came the whisper, “Why should she fall to
the stranger? Why? Why?” It flew round the tables like wildfire, and
half-emptied beakers were set down, and untasted food stopped on its
way to the mouth, and then--all on a sudden, the drunken chiefs were
on foot advancing to the upper table, where I sat by Editha’s right
hand, their daggers agleam in the torchlight shining upon their red and
angry faces as they came tumbling and shouting toward us, “Death to the
black-haired stranger! Voewood for a Saxon! Why should he win her?”
’Tis not my fashion to let the foeman come far to seek me, and I was up
in an instant--overturning the table with all its wines and meats--and,
whipping out my sword, I leaped into the middle of the rushy space
before them.
“Why?” I shouted. “Why? you drunken, Norman-beaten dogs! Why? Because,
by Thor and Odin! by all the bones of Hengist and his brother! I can
throw a straighter javelin, and whirl a heavier sword, and sit a
fiercer steed than any of you. Why? Because my heart is stronger than
any that ever beat under your dirty scullion doublets. Why? Because I
scorn, and spit upon, and deride you!”
It was braggart boasting, but I noticed the Saxons liked their talk
of that complexion. And in this case it was successful. The Princes
stood hesitating and staring as I towered before them, fiery and
disdainful, in the red gleaming banquet lights; until presently the
youngest there burst into a merry laugh to see them all thus at bay,
chewing the hilts of their angry daggers, and each one waiting for his
neighbor to prove himself the braver, by dying first upon my weapon.
That laugh had hardly reached the ruddy oaken rafters overhead when
it was joined by a score of others, and in a moment those wilful
Saxon lordlings were all laughing and jerking back their steels, and
scrambling into their supper-places as if they had not broken their
fast since morning, and I were their mother’s son.
[Illustration: The Princes stood hesitating as I towered before them]
Deep were their flagons that night, after the women had stolen away,
and Idwal ap Howell filled the hall with wild Welsh harping that
stirred my soul like a battle-call; for it was in my dear British
tongue, and full of the color, light, and the life that had illuminated
the first page of my long pilgrimage. And the Saxon gleemen, not to be
outdone, each sang the song that pleased him best; and the Welshman
strove to drown them with his harping; and the thanes sang, all at
once, whatever songs were noisiest and most licentious. Mighty was the
fire that roared up the open hearthplace; deep was the breathing of
vanquished warriors from under the tables; red was the spilled wine
upon the floor--when presently they put me upon a tressel, and, bearing
me round the hall in discordant triumph, finally bore me away to the
inner corridors, and left me at a portal where I never yet had entered!
There is but little to say of that quiet Saxon rest that befell me in
pleasant Voewood. Between each line I pen you must suppose an episode
of pleasure. In the springtime, when the woods were shot with a carpet
of blue and yellow flowers, we lay a-basking in the sunny angles or
rode out to count our swine and fallow deer. In the summer, when all
Editha’s mighty woodlands were like fair endless colonnades, we basked
amid the flickering shadows and watched the sunny sheen upon the
treetops, to the orchestra of little birds. And autumn, that touched
the vassals’ corn-clearings with yellow, saw my proud Norman charger
grow fat and gross with new grain. September rains and mists rusted my
silent weapon into its sheath; even winter, that heard the woodman’s
axe upon the forest trees, and saw bird and beast and men and kine
draw in to the gentle bounty of my white-handed lady, was but a long,
inglorious holiday of another sort.
Many and many a time, in those merry months, did this Phœnician
laugh to his mirror to see how fitly he could wear upon his
Eastern-British-Roman body the Danish-Saxon-English tunic! It was all
of fine linen the franklin’s own fair fingers had spun, and pointed
and tasseled and parti-color, and his legs were cross-gartered to his
knees, and his little luncheon-dagger hung by his jeweled belt, and
a fillet of pure English gold bound down the long black locks that
fell upon his shoulders. Every morning Editha combed them out with her
silver comb, and double-peaked his beard, kissing and saying it was the
best in all Voewood. He had more servants than necessities in those
times, and almost his only grievance was a lack of wants.
The Normans for long had left us wholly alone, partly through the
usurper cunning which prompted our new tyrant to deal gently with those
who had stood in arms against him, but principally in our case since
the strong tide of invasion had swept northward beyond us, and Voewood
slept unharmed, unnoticed among its green solitudes--a Saxon homestead
as it had been since Hengist’s white horse first flaunted upon an
English breeze and the seven kingdoms sprang from the ashes of old
Roman Britain.
So we lived light-hearted from day to day, forgetting all about the
battle by Senlac, and drinking, as I have said, in our evening wassails
confusion and scorn of the invaders who seemed so distant. It was a
good time, and I have little to note of it. Many were the big boars
which died upon my eager spear down in the morasses to the southward,
and I came to love my casts of tiercelets and my hounds as though I had
been born to a woodman’s cape and had watched the fens for hernshaws
and followed the slot of wounded deers from my youth upward.
All these things led me into many a wild adventure and many a desperate
strait; but one of them stands out from the rest upon the crowded
pages of my memory. I had, one day when Editha was with me, mounted
as she would be upon her palfrey, slipped the dogs upon a stag an
arrow of mine had wounded in the foreleg, and, excited by the chase
and reluctant as ever to turn back from an unaccomplished purpose, we
followed far into the unknown distances, and all beyond our reckonings.
I had let fly that shaft at midday, and at sundown the stag was still
afoot, the dogs close behind him, and I, indomitable, muddy, and torn
from head to foot, but with all the hunter instinct hot within me, was
pressing on by my Saxon’s bridle rein. Endless, rough, and tangled
miles had we run and scrambled in that lengthy chase, and neither of us
had noticed the way, or how angry the sun was setting in the west.
Thus it came about that when the noble hart at length stood at bay in
the lichened coverts under a bushy crag, there was hardly breath in me
to cheer the weary dogs upon him, and hardly light enough to aim the
swift thrust of my subduing javelin which laid him dead and bleeding
at our feet. Yes, and before I could cut a hunter’s supper from that
glossy haunch the dome of the sky closed down from east to west, and
the first heavy drops of the evening rain came pattering upon the
leaves overhead. Thor! how black it grew as the wind began to whistle
through the branches and the murky clouds to fly across the face of the
somber heaven, while neither east nor west could any limit be seen to
the interminable vastnesses of the endless woodlands! In vain was it we
struggled for a time back upon our footsteps, and then even those were
lost; and, as the sky in the east burned an angry yellow for a moment
before the remorseless night set in, it gave us just light to see we
were hopelessly mazed in the labyrinths of the huge and lonely forest.
It was thus we turned to take such shelter as might offer, and that
gleam shone for a moment pallid, yellow, and ghastly upon a cluster
of gray stones standing on a grassy mound a quarter of a mile away.
Thither we struggled through the black mazes of the storm, the headlong
rain whistling through the misty thickets like flights of innumerable
arrows, the angry wind lashing the treetops into bitter complaining,
and waving abroad (in the sodden dismal twilight) all the long beards
of goblin lichens hanging in ghostly tapestry across our path that
dreary October evening.
Reeling and plunging to the shelter through a black world of tangled
witnesses, with that mocking gleam behind shining like a window of the
nether world, and overhead a gaunt, hurrying array of cloudy forms, we
were presently upon the coppice outskirt, and there I stopped as though
I had grown to the ground.
I stopped before that great, gaunt amphitheater of gray stones and
stared and stared before me as though I were bereft of sense. I rubbed
my eyes and pointed with trembling, silent finger, and looked again and
again, while the Saxon girl crouched to my side, and my hounds whined
and shivered at my feet, for there, incredible! monstrous!--yellow and
shining in the pallid derision of the twilight, stern, hoary, ruinous,
mocking--overthrown and piled one upon another, clasped and knotted
about their feet by the knotted fingers of the woodland growth, swathed
in the rocking mists which gave a horrid life to their cruel, infernal
deadness, were the stones, the very stones of that Druid altar-place
upon which I was sacrificed nearly a thousand years before!
Here was a pretty welcome! Here was a cheerful harborage! What man
ever born of a woman who would not have been dazed and dumfounded
at this sudden confronting--this extraordinary reminiscence of the
long-forgotten? It overwhelmed for the moment even me--me, Phra the
Phœnician, to whom the red harvest-fields of war are pleasant places,
who have dallied with the infinite, and have been a melancholy
coadjutor of Time itself. Even me, who never sought to live, yet live
endlessly by my very negligence--who have received from the gods that
gift of existence that others ask for unanswered.
I might have stood there as stolid and grim as any one of those ancient
monoliths all through the storm but for the dear one by my side.
Her nestling presence roused me, and, gulping down the last of my
astonishment, and seeing no respite in the yellow eye of the night over
my shoulder, I took the hand that lay in mine with such gentle trust
and, with a strange feeling of awe, led her into the magic circle of
the old religion.
The very altar of my despatch was still there in the center, but
time and forest creatures had worn out from under that mighty slab a
little chamber, roofed with that vast flagstone and sided by its three
supports--a space perhaps no bigger than the cabin of my first trading
felucca, yet into this we crept, with the reluctant hounds behind us,
while the tempest thundered round, and, loth to lose us, sought here
and there, piping in strange keys among those time-worn relics of
cruelty, and singing uncouth choruses down every crevice of our wild
retreat.
Pleasure and Pain are sisters, and the little needs of life must be
fulfilled in every hour. I comforted my comrade, piling for her a rough
couch of the broken litter upon the floor, stuffing up the crannies
as well as might be with damp sods, and then making her a fire. This
latter I effected with some charcoal and burned ends of wood that lay
upon an old shepherd’s hearth in the center of the chamber, and we kept
it going with a little store of wood which the same absent wanderer had
gathered in one corner but had failed to use. More; not only did we
mend our circumstances by a ruddy blaze that danced fantastically upon
our rugged walls and set our reeking clothes steaming in its flicker,
but I rolled a stone to the opposite side of the hearth for Editha, and
found another for myself, and soon those venison steaks were hissing
most invitingly upon the glowing embers, and filling every nook and
corner of the Druid slaughter-place with the suggestive fragrance of
our supper.
Manners were rude and ready in that time. We supped as well and
conveniently that night, carving the meat with the little weapons at
our girdles, and eating with our fingers, as though we sat in state at
the high thane’s table of distant Voewood and looked down the great
rushy hall upon three hundred feeding serfs and bondsmen. And Editha
laughed and chattered--secure in my protection--and I echoed her
merriment, while now and then my thoughts would wander, and I heard
again in the tempest’s whistling the scream of the hungry kites who
had seen me die, and in the lashing of the branches the clamor and the
beating of the British tribesmen who many a long lifetime before had
shouted around this very place to drown my dying yells.
The good food and the warmth and a long day’s work soon brought my
fair mistress’s head upon her hand, and presently she was lying upon
the withered leaves in the corner, a fair white flower shut up for the
night-time. So I finished the steak and divided the remnants between
the dogs, and lay back very well contented. But here only commences the
strangest part of that evening!
I had warmed my cross-gartered, buskined Saxon legs by the blaze for
the best part of an hour, thinking over all the strange episodes of
my coming to these ancient isles, and seeing again, on the blank
hither wall, this very circle all aglow with the splendid color of
its barbarous purpose, the mighty concourse of the Britons set in the
greenery of their reverent oaks--the onset of the Romans, the flash and
glitter of their close-packed ranks, and the gallant Sempronius--alas!
that so good a youth should be reduced to dust--and thus, I suppose, I
dozed.
And then it seemed all on a sudden a mighty gust of wind swept down
upon the flat roof overhead, shaking even that ponderous stone--those
fierce and brawny hounds of mine howled most fearfully--crouching
behind with bristling hair and shaking limbs--and, looking up,
there--strange, incredible as you will pronounce it--seated beyond
the fire on the stone the Saxon had so lately left, drawing her wild,
rain-wet British tresses through her supple fingers--calm, indifferent,
happy--gazing upon me with the gentle wonder I had seen before, was
Blodwen, once again herself!
Need it be said how wild and wonderful that winsome apparition seemed
in that uncouth place, how the hot flush of wonder burned upon my swart
and weathered cheeks as I sat there and glared through the leaping
flame at that pallid outline? Absently she went on with her rhythmical
combing, bewitching me with her unearthly grace and the tender
substance of her immaterial outline, and as I glowered with never a
ready syllable upon my idle tongue, or any emotion but wonder in the
heart beating tumultuously under my hunter tunic, the dogs lay moaning
behind me, and the wild fantastic uproar of the tempest outside forced
through the clefts of our retreat the rain-streaks that sparkled and
hissed in the fire-heap.
That time I did not fear, and presently the Princess looked up and
said, in a faint, distant voice, that was like the sound of the breeze
among seashore pine-trees:
“Well done, my Phœnician! Your courage gives me strength.” And as she
spoke the words seemed gradually clearer and stronger, until presently
they came sweeter to me than the murmur of a sunny river--gentler than
the whispers of the ripe corn and the south wind.
“Shade!” I said. “Wonderful, immaterial, immortal, whence came you?”
“Whence did I come?” she answered, with the pretty reflection of a
smile upon her face. “Out of the storm, O son of Anak!--out of the
wild, wet night-wind!”
“And why, and why--to stir me to my inmost soul, and then to leave me?”
“Phœnician,” she said, “I have not left you since we parted. I have
been the unseen companion of your goings--I have been the shadowless
watcher by your sleep. Mine was the unfelt hand that bore your chin up
when you swam with the Christian slave-girl--mine was the arm that has
turned, invisibly, a hundred javelins from you--and to-night I am come,
by leave of circumstance, thus to see you.”
“I should have thought,” I said, becoming now better at my ease, “that
one like you might come or go in scorn of circumstances.”
“Wherein, my dear master, you argue with more simplicity than
knowledge. There are needs and necessities to the very verge of the
spheres.”
But when I questioned what these were, asking the secret of her wayward
visits, she looked at the sleeping Editha, and said I could not
understand.
“Yes, by Wodin’s self! but I think I can. Yon fair-cheeked girl helps
you. There are a hundred turns and touches in your ways and manners
that speak of her, and show whence you got that borrowed life.”
“You are astute, my Saxon thane, and I will not utterly refute you.”
“Then, if you can do this, how was it, Blodwen, you never came when I
was Roman?”
“In truth, I often tried,” she said, with something like a sigh,
“but Numidea was not good to fit my subtle needs, and the other one,
Electra, was all beyond me.” And here that versatile shadow threw
herself into an attitude, and there before me was the Roman lady, so
sweet, so enticing, that my heart yearned for her--ah! for the queenly
Electra!--all in a moment. But before I could stretch out my arms the
airy form had whisked her ethereal draperies toga-wise across her
breast, and had risen, and there, towering to the low roof, flashing
down scorn and hatred on me, quaking at her feet, shone the very
semblance of Electra as I saw her last in the queenly glamour of her
vengeance.
“Yes,” said Blodwen, resuming her own form with perfect calmness before
I, astounded, could catch my breath, and stroking out the tangles of
her long red hair, “there was no doing anything with her, and so,
Phœnician, I could not get translated to your material eyes.”
All this was very wonderful, yet presently we were chatting as though
there were naught to marvel at. Many were the things we spoke of, many
were the wonders that she hinted at, and as she went my curiosity
blazed up apace.
“And, fair Princess,” I said presently, “turner of javelins, favorer of
mortals, is it then within the power of such as yourself to rule the
destiny of us material ones?”
“Not so; else, Phœnician, you were not here!”
This made me a little uncomfortable, but, nothing daunted, I looked the
strangest visitor that ever paid a midnight visit full in the face, and
persisted: “Tell me, then, you bright reflection of her I loved, how
seems this tinsel show of life upon its over side? Is it destiny or man
that is master? How looks the flow of circumstances to you?--to us, you
will remember, it is vague, inexplicable.”
“You ask me more than I can say,” she answered, “but so far I will
go--you, material, live substantially, and before you lies unchecked
the illimitable spaces of existence. Of all these you are certain heir.”
“Speak on!” I cried, for now and then her voice and attention flagged.
“And is there any rule or sequence in this life of ours--is it for you
to guide or mend our happenings?”
“No, Phœnician! You are yourselves the true forgers of the chains that
bind you, and that initial ’prenticeship you serve there on your world
is ruled by the aggregate of your actions. I tell you, Tyrian,” she
exclaimed, with something as much like warmth as could come from such
a hazy air-stirred body--“I tell you nothing was ever said or done but
was quite immortal; all your little goings and comings, all your deeds
and misdeeds, all the myriad leaves of spoken things that have ever
come upon the forests of speech, all the rain-drops of action that have
gone to make the boundless ocean of human history, are on record. You
shake your head, and cannot understand? Perhaps I should not wonder at
it.”
“And have all these things left a record upon the great books of life,
and is it given to the beings of the air to refer to them, even as
yonder hermit finds secreted on his yellow vellums the things of long
ago?”
“It is so in some kind. The actions of that life of yours leave
spirit-prints behind them from the most infinitesimal to the largest.
Now, see! I have but to wish, and there again is all the moving
pantomime around you of that unhappy day when you well-nigh died upon
this spot,” and the chieftainess leaped to her feet and swept her arm
around and looked into the void and smiled and nodded as though all the
wild spectacle she spoke of were enacting under her very eyes. “Surely,
you see it! Look at the priests and the people, and there the running
foreigners and that tall youth at their head--why, O trader in oils and
dyes! it is not the remembrance of the thing, it is, I swear it, the
thing itself----”
But never a line or color could I perceive, only the curling smoke
overhead looped and hung like tapestries upon the gray lichened walls,
and the black night-time through the crevices. And, discovering this,
Blodwen suddenly stopped and looked upon me with vexed compassion. “I
am sorry, I am no good teacher to so outrun my pupil. Ask me henceforth
what simple questions you will, and they shall be answered to the best
I can.”
And so presently I went on: “If those things which have been are thus
to you--and it does not seem impossible--how is it with those other
things of to-day, or still unborn of the future? How far can you more
favored ones foresee or guide those things to which we, unhappy, but
submit?”
“The strong tide of circumstance, Phœnician, is not to be turned by
such hands as these”--and she held her pallid wrists toward the blaze,
until I saw the ruddy gleam flash back from the rough gold bosses of
her ancient bracelets. “There are laws outside your comprehension which
are not framed for your narrow understanding. We obey these as much
as you, but we perceive with infinitely clearer vision the inevitable
logic of fate, the true sequence of events, and thus it is sometimes
within our power to amend and guide the details of that brief episode
which you call your life.”
“Do you say that priceless span, my comrades, yonder sleeping girl, and
all the others set so high a value on is but ‘an episode’?”
“Yes--a halting step upon a wondrous journey, half a gradation upon the
mighty spirals of existence!”
“And time?” I asked, full of a wonder that scarce found leisure to
comprehend one word of hers before it asked another question. “Is there
time with you? Even I, reflective now and then upon this long journey
of mine, have thought that time must be a myth, an impossibility to
larger experience.”
“Of what do you speak, my merchant? I do not remember the word.”
“Oh, yes; but you must. Is there period and change yonder? Is
Time--Time, the great braggart and bully of life, also potent with you?”
“Ah! now I do recall your meaning; but, my Tyrian, we left our
hour-glasses and our calendars behind us when we came away! There is,
perhaps, time yonder to some extent, but no mortal eyes, not mine even,
can tell the teaching of that prodigious dial that records the hours of
universes and of spaces.”
I bent my head and thought, for I dimly perceived in all this a meaning
appearing through its incomprehensibleness. Much else did we talk
through the live-long night, whereof all I may not tell, and something
might but weary you. At one time I asked her of the little one I had
never seen, and then she, reflective, questioned whether I would wish
to see him. “As gladly,” was my reply, “as one looks for the sun in
springtime.” At this the comely chieftainess seemed to fall a-musing,
and even while she did so an eddy in the curling smoke of the low red
fire swung gently into consistency there by her bare shoulder, and
brightened and grew into mortal likeness, and in a moment, by the
summons of his mother’s will, from where I knew not, and how I could
not guess, a fair, young, ruddy boy was fashioned and stood there
leaning upon the gentle breast that had so often rocked him, and gazing
upon me with a quiet wonder that seemed to say, “How came you here?”
But the little one had not the substance of the other, and after a
moment, during which I felt somehow that no slight effort was being
made to maintain him, he paled, and then the same waft of air that had
conspired to his creation shredded him out again into the fine thin
webs of disappearing haze.
Comely shadow! Dear British mistress! Great was thy condescension,
passing strange thy conversation, wonderful thy knowledge, perplexing,
mysterious thy professed ignorance! And then, when the morning was
nigh, she bade me speak a word of comfort to the restless-sleeping
Editha, and when I had done so I turned again--and the cave was empty!
I ran out into the open air and whispered “Blodwen!” and then louder
“Blodwen!” and all those gray, uncouth, sinful old monoliths, standing
there in the half-light up to their waists in white mist, took up
my word and muttered out of their time-worn hollows one to another,
“Blodwen, Blodwen!” but never again for many a long year did she answer
to that call.