Historical vignettes, 2nd series

BY Bernard Capes
LONDON Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd. ( First issued in 1912)
Ten of the following sketches are reprints from a volume, Historical Vignettes , published by Mr. Fisher Unwin in 1910. The remaining twelve here appear in book-form for the first time. The author’s renewed thanks, for permission to reprint this fresh matter, are due to the Editor of Truth .
Elfrida, wife of Athelwold, the King’s favourite, and daughter and heiress to Olgar Earl of Devonshire, was a beauty of the true Helena complexion. To see her, for most men, was to covet; to possess her, for the one, was to wear a crown of exquisite thorns. The orchard needs most watching when the fruit is ripe, and Elfrida hung at perpetual ripeness, maddening to parched lips without. The keeper of this garden of sweet things might hardly enjoy it for his fear of robbers. And the worst of it was that, to maintain so ravishing a possession in its perfection, no warning as to its own irresistible witchery must be so much as hinted to it, lest the blue innocence of two of the most lovely wondering eyes in the world should be impaired thereby, and self-consciousness usurp in them the place of naïveté . Gazing into those artless depths, if one had the privilege, one presently recognised in their little floating motes and shadows the souls of the many who had drowned themselves therein. Was Elfrida conscious of the tragic secrets hidden away under those azure waters? Her husband at least thought her the most loving, the most unsophisticated, the most trustworthy of wives; and if the wish was very particularly the father to the thought, the thought was none the less for that sincere.
One noon the young wife sat, yawning and a little ennuyée , in her bower of the Thanage house by Harewood Forest in Hampshire. Athelwold was with the Court at Winchester, and time hung heavy on her hands. She leaned back in her seat, listlessly conning the crumpled figure of Daukin, the Earl’s clerk or bookesman, as he squatted on his stool monotonously mouthing the Canons of Eusebius from an illuminated manuscript—the light literature of England when Dunstan was Primate. Like many ethereal women, Elfrida found a fascination in the deformed and grotesque. She petted little harsh Daukin; and he, while he took his full sardonic change of the licence allowed him, for ever in spirit kissed the beautiful feet that trampled on his soul. So, he thought, must feel the writhing, adoring, hopeless serpent under Mary’s feet in the chapel.