“I hardly know,” I said, without thinking.
“Ah! a too common ignorance nowadays!” sneered the Conqueror, turning to his laughing knights.
Whereon wrathfully I replied: “At least, my father never mistook, under cover of the night, a serving-wench for a Princess!”
The shaft took the soldier in a very tender spot, and his naturally sallow countenance blanched slowly to a hideous yellow as a smile went round the steel circle of his martial courtiers at my too telling answer. Yet even then I could not but do his iron will justice for the stern resolution with which the passion was restrained in that cold and cruel face, and when he turned and spoke in the ear of his marshal standing near there was no tremor of anger or compassion in the inflexible voice with which he ordered me to be taken outside and hanged “to the nearest tree that will bear him” in ten minutes.
“As for the Saxon wench——Here, Des Ormeux”—turning to a grim villain in steel harness at his side—“this girl has a good fief, they say: she and it are yours for the asking!”
“My mighty liege,” said the Norman, dropping on one knee, “never was a gift more generously given. I will hold the land to your eternal service, and make the maid free of my tent to-day, and to-morrow we will look up a priest for the easing of her conscience.”
Loudly the assembled soldiers laughed as Des Ormeux pounced upon the shrieking Editha and bore her out of one door, while, in spite of my fierce struggles to get at him, I was hustled into the open from another.
They dragged me into a green avenue between the huts of the invader’s camp while they went for a rope to hang me with. And as I stood thus loosely guarded and waiting among them, down the Norman ravisher came pacing toward us on his war-horse, bound toward his tent, with my white Saxon flower fast gripped in front of him.
Oh, but he was proud to think himself possessed of a slice of fair English soil so easily, and to have his courtship made so simple for him, and he looked this way and that, with an accursed grin upon his face, no more heeding the tears and struggles of his victim than the falcon cares for the stricken pigeon’s throes. When they came opposite to us Editha saw me and threw out her hands and shrieked to me, and, when I turned away my eyes and did not move, surely it seemed as though her heart would have broken.
Three more paces the war-horse made, and then, with the spring of a leopard thirsting for blood, I was alongside of him, another bound and I was on the crupper behind, and there, quicker than thought, quicker than the lightning strikes down the pine-tree, I had lifted the Norman’s steel shoulder-plate, and stabbed him with my long, keen dagger so fiercely in the back that the point came out under his mid-rib, and the red blood spurted to his horse’s ears. Quicker, too, than it takes to tell I had gripped the maiden from the spoiler’s dying hands, and, pushing his bloody body from the saddle, had thrown my own legs over the crescent peak, and before the gaping scullion soldiers comprehended my bold stroke for freedom I had turned the horse’s head and was thundering through the camp toward the free green woods beyond.