“You have been officious,” said Torfrida, coldly. “‘Tis addressed to your master. Take it to him. Go.”
Martin Lightfoot whistled and obeyed, while Torfrida walked away proudly and silently with a beating heart.
Again Godiva’s words came over her. Should she end in the convent of Crowland? And suspecting, fearing, imagining all sorts of baseless phantoms, she hardened her heart into a great hardness.
Martin had gone with the letter, and Torfrida never heard any more of it.
So Hereward had secrets which he would not tell to her. At last!
That, at least, was a misery which she would not confide to Lady Godiva, or to any soul on earth.
But a misery it was. Such a misery as none can delineate, save those who have endured it themselves, or had it confided to them by another. And happy are they to whom neither has befallen.
She wandered on and into the wild-wood, and sat down by a spring. She looked in it—her only mirror—at her wan, coarse face, with wild black elf-locks hanging round it, and wondered whether Alftruda, in her luxury and prosperity, was still so very beautiful. Ah, that that fountain were the fountain of Jouvence, the spring of perpetual youth, which all believed in those days to exist somewhere,—how would she plunge into it, and be young and fair once more!
No! she would not! She had lived her life, and lived it well, gallantly, lovingly, heroically. She had given that man her youth, her beauty, her wealth, her wit. He should not have them a second time. He had had his will of her. If he chose to throw her away when he had done with her, to prove himself base at last, unworthy of all her care, her counsels, her training,—dreadful thought! To have lived to keep that man for her own, and just when her work seemed done, to lose him! No, there was worse than that. To have lived that she might make that man a perfect knight, and just when her work seemed done, to see him lose himself!
And she wept till she could weep no more. Then she washed away her tears in that well. Had it been in Greece of old, that well would have become a sacred well thenceforth, and Torfrida’s tears have changed into forget-me-nots, and fringed its marge with azure evermore.