“You will hardly get her.”
“Not get her?”
“Not without her mother’s consent. The lass cares for naught but her.”
“Pish! that sorceress? Send for the girl.”
Abbot Ulfketyl, forced in his own abbey, great and august lord though he was, to obey any upstart of a Norman priest who came backed by the King and Lanfranc, sent for the lass.
The young outlaw came in,—hawk on fist, and its hood off, for it was a pet,—short, sturdy, upright, brown-haired, blue-eyed, ill-dressed, with hard hands and sun-burnt face, but with the hawk-eye of her father and her mother, and the hawks among which she was bred. She looked the priest over from head to foot, till he was abashed.
“A Frenchman!” said she, and she said no more.
The priest looked at her eyes, and then at the hawk’s eyes. They were disagreeably like each other. He told his errand as courteously as he could, for he was not a bad-hearted man for a Norman priest.
The lass laughed him to scorn. The King’s commands? She never saw a king in the greenwood, and cared for none. There was no king in England now, since Sweyn Ulfsson sailed back to Denmark. Who was this Norman William, to sell a free English lass like a colt or a cow? The priest might go back to the slaves of Wessex, and command them if he could; but in the fens, men were free, and lasses too.
The priest was piously shocked and indignant; and began to argue.