Of course she would come with a great train, and the trouble and expense would be great. But the hospitality of those days, when money was scarce, and wine scarcer still, was unbounded, and a matter of course; and Alftruda was overjoyed. No doubt, Judith was the most unpopular person in England at that moment; called by all a traitress and a fiend. But she was an old acquaintance of Alftruda’s; she was the king’s niece; she was immensely rich, not only in manors of her own, but in manors, as Domesday-book testifies, about Lincolnshire and the counties round, which had belonged to her murdered husband,—which she had too probably received as the price of her treason. So Alftruda looked to her visit as to an honor which would enable her to hold her head high among the proud Norman dames, who despised her as the wife of an Englishman.
Hereward looked on the visit in a different light. He called Judith ugly names, not undeserved; and vowed that if she entered his house by the front door he would go out at the back. “Torfrida prophesied,” he said, “that she would betray her husband, and she had done it.”
“Torfrida prophesied? Did she prophesy that I should betray you likewise?” asked Alftruda, in a tone of bitter scorn.
“No, you handsome fiend: will you do it?”
“Yes; I am a handsome fiend, am I not?” and she bridled up her magnificent beauty, and stood over him as a snake stands over a mouse.
“Yes; you are handsome,—beautiful: I adore you.”
“And yet you will not do what I wish?”
“What you wish? What would I not do for you? what have I not done for you?”
“Then receive Judith. And now, go hunting, and bring me in game. I want deer, roe, fowls; anything and everything from the greatest to the smallest. Go and hunt.”
And Hereward trembled, and went.