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.
She broke in upon his reading, suddenly and irrelevantly.
“Will our lord return this night, think you, Master Bookesman?”
The dwarf, closing the manuscript, accepted grimly the moral of his own eloquence.
“Will a star shoot out of the east?” he said. “I’ll tell thee when the night hath come and gone.”
“Nay, say that you think he will—say it, say it!”
“The King loves the Earl, lady, and thou desirest him. Which passion shall pull the stronger?”
“Do not I love him, thou toad?”
“Well, then, pull, and in double harness; so, belike, the King, that holds to him, shall be drawn too.”
“I do not desire the King.”