And we reached them safely; a rascal or two let fly their cross-bows at us as we fled by, and I heard the bolts hum merrily past my ears, but they did no harm; and there was mounting and galloping and shouting, but the mailed Normans were wonderfully slow in their stirrups! I laughed to see them scrambling and struggling into their seats, two or three men to every warrior who got safely up, and we soon left them far behind. Down into the dip we rode, my good horse spurning in his stride the still fresh bodies of yesterday’s fighters, and spinning the empty helmets, and clattering through all the broken litter of the bitter contest, until we swept up the inland slopes into the stunted birch and hazels, and then—turning for a moment to shake my fist at the nearest of the distant Normans—I headed into the leafy shelter, and was speedily free from all chance of pursuit.
Then, and not before, was there time to take a glance at my beautiful prize, lying so gentle and light upon my breast. Alas! every tint of color had gone from her fair features, and she lay there in my arms, fainting and pulseless. I loosened her neckscarf. “So!” I said, “fair Saxon blossom, this is destiny, and you and I are henceforth to be joined together by the wondrous links of fate”—and, stooping down as we paced through the pleasant green and white flicker of the silent wood, I endorsed the immutable will of chance with a kiss upon her forehead.
Presently she recovered, and all that day we rode forward through the endless vistas of the southern woods by bridle tracks and swine paths, until at nightfall, far from other shelters, we halted among the rocks and hollows of a little eminence. No doubt my gentle comrade would have preferred a more peopled habitation, but there was none in all that mighty wilderness, so she, like a wise girl, submitted without complaint to that which she could not avoid.
There was naught much to tell you of this evening, but it lives forever in my memory for one particular which consorted strangely with the thoughts the flight with and rescue of Editha had aroused. I had found her a roomy hollow in the rocks, and there had cut with my dagger and made a bed of rushes, built a fire, and got her some roots to eat, and when darkness fell we talked for a time by the cheerful blaze.
Without surprise I heard that though true Saxon in name and face, there was some British blood in her veins—a fact, indeed, of which I had been certain without her assurance. Then she went on to tell, with tearful pauses, of the home and broad lands of which she was now lady paramount, as well as of the gallant kinsman lying out yonder dead in the night dew, and wept and sighed in gentle melancholy, yet without the wild, inconsolable grief latter times have taught to women, until presently those tearful blue eyes grew heavier and heavier, and the shapely chin dropped in grief and weariness upon her white breast, and Editha of Voewood slept in the hands of the stranger.
Then I went out and looked at the blackness of the night. Over the somber forest the shadowy pall of the evening was spread, and a thousand stars gleamed brightly on every hand. Very still and strange was that unbroken fastness after the red turmoil of yesterday, with nothing disturbing the silence but the cry of an owl to its mate across the coppices, the tinkle of a falling streamlet, and now and then the long, hungry howling of a wolf, or, nearer by, the sharp barking of the foxes. I fed my horse, then went in and pulled the fire together, and fell a-ruminating, my chin on my hands, upon a hundred episodes of happiness and fear.
“Oh, strange eternal powers who set the goings and comings of humanity, what is the meaning of this wild riddle you are reading me?” I said presently aloud to myself. “Oh! Hapi and Amenti, dark goddesses of the Egyptians—oh! Atropos, Lachesis, Clotho, fatal sisters whom the Romans dread—Mista, Skogula, Zernebock, of these dark Saxon shadows—why am I thus chosen for this uncertain immortality, when will this long drama, this changeful history of my being, end?”
As I muttered thus to myself I glanced at the white girl sleeping in the ruddy blaze, and saw her chest heave, and then—strange to tell, stranger to hear—with a sound like the whisper of a distant sea her lips parted, and there came unmistakably the word:
“Never!”
Perhaps she was but dreaming of that amorous Norman’s fierce proposals, and so again I mused.