There was nothing in the letter that he should not have read. She called him her best and dearest friend, twice the savior of her life. What could she do in return, but, at any risk to herself, try and save his life? The French were upon him. The posse comitatus of seven counties was raising. “Northampton, Cambridge, Lincoln, Holland, Leicester, Huntingdon, Warwick,” were coming to the Bruneswald to root him out.
“Lincoln?” thought Hereward. “That must be Gilbert of Ghent, and Oger the Breton. No! Gilbert is not coming, Sir Ascelin is coming for him. Holland? That is my friend Ivo Taillebois. Well, we shall have the chance of paying off old scores. Northampton? The earl thereof just now is the pious and loyal Waltheof, as he is of Huntingdon and Cambridge. Is he going to join young Fitz-Osbern from Warwick and Leicester, to root out the last Englishman? Why not? That would be a deed worthy of the man who married Judith, and believes in the powers that be, and eats dirt daily at William’s table.”
Then he read on.
Ascelin had been mentioned, he remarked, three or four times in the letter, which was long, as from one lingering over the paper, wishing to say more than she dared. At the end was a hint of the reason:—
“O, that having saved me twice, you could save me once more. Know you that Gospatrick has been driven from his earldom on charge of treason, and that Waltheof has Northumbria in his place, as well as the parts round you? And that Gospatrick is fled to Scotland again, with his sons,—my man among them? And now the report comes, that my man is slain in battle on the Border; and that I am to be given away,—as I have been given away twice before,—to Ascelin. This I know, as I know all, not only from him of Ghent, but from him of Peterborough, Ascelin’s uncle.”
Hereward laughed a laugh of cynical triumph,—pardonable enough in a broken man.
“Gospatrick! the wittol! the woodcock! looking at the springe, and then coolly putting his head therein. Throwing the hatchet after the helve! selling his soul and never getting the price of it! I foresaw it, foretold it, I believe to Alftruda herself,—foretold that he would not keep his bought earldom three years. What a people we are, we English, if Gospatrick is,—as he is,—the shrewdest man among us, with a dash of canny Scots blood too. ‘Among the one-eyed, the blind is king,’ says Torfrida, out of her wise ancients, and blind we are, if he is our best. No. There is one better man left I trust, one that will never be fool enough to put his head into the wolf’s mouth, and trust the Norman, and that is Hereward the outlaw.”
And Hereward boasted to himself, at Gospatrick’s expense, of his own superior wisdom, till his eye caught a line or two, which finished the letter.
“O that you would change your mind, much as I honor you for it. O that you would come in to the king, who loves and trusts you, having seen your constancy and faith, proved by so many years of affliction. Great things are open to you, and great joys;—I dare not tell you what: but I know them, if you would come in. You, to waste yourself in the forest, an outlaw and a savage! Opportunity once lost, never returns; time flies fast, Hereward, my friend, and we shall all grow old,—I think at times that I shall soon grow old. And the joys of life will be impossible, and nothing left but vain regrets.”
“Hey?” said Hereward, “a very clerkly letter. I did not think she was so good a scholar. Almost as good a one as Torfrida.”