How could this end but in one way for the defenseless girl? She was sued so much and sued so hot that one day she came creeping like a hunted animal to the turret nook where I sat brooding over my fortunes, and, timorous and shy, begged me to help her. I stood up and touched her yellow disheveled hair, and told her there was but one way—and Editha knew it as well as any one—and had made her choice and slipped into my arms and was happy.
That was as noisy a wedding as ever had been in Voewood. Editha freed a hundred serfs, and all day long the noise of files on their iron collars echoed through her halls. She fed at the door every miscreant or beggar who could crawl or hobble there, and remitted her taxes to a score of poorer villains.
In the hall such noisy revelers as the rejected suitors surely never were seen. They began that wedding feast in the morning, and it was not finished by night. To me, who had so lately supped amid the costly detail, the magnificent and cultivated license of a patrician Roman table, these Saxon rioters seemed scrambling, hungry dogs. Where Electra would taunt her haughty courtiers over loaded tables which the art of three empires had furnished, firing her cruel, witty arrows of spite and arrogance from her rose-strewn couches, these rough, uncivil woodland Peers but wallowed in their ceaseless flow of muddy ale, gorged themselves to sleep with the gross flesh of their acorn-fed swine, and sang such songs and told such tales as made even me, indifferent, to scowl upon them and wonder that their kinswoman and her handmaids could sit and seem unwotting of their gross, obscene, and noisy revels.
And late that night blood was nearly spilled upon the oaken floor of Voewood. The thanes had fairly pocketed their disappointment, but now, deep in drink and stuffed with food and courage, they began to eye me and my thin-hid scorn askance, and then presently, like the mutter of a quick-coming storm, came the whisper, “Why should she fall to the stranger? Why? Why?” It flew round the tables like wildfire, and half-emptied beakers were set down, and untasted food stopped on its way to the mouth, and then—all on a sudden, the drunken chiefs were on foot advancing to the upper table, where I sat by Editha’s right hand, their daggers agleam in the torchlight shining upon their red and angry faces as they came tumbling and shouting toward us, “Death to the black-haired stranger! Voewood for a Saxon! Why should he win her?”
’Tis not my fashion to let the foeman come far to seek me, and I was up in an instant—overturning the table with all its wines and meats—and, whipping out my sword, I leaped into the middle of the rushy space before them.
“Why?” I shouted. “Why? you drunken, Norman-beaten dogs! Why? Because, by Thor and Odin! by all the bones of Hengist and his brother! I can throw a straighter javelin, and whirl a heavier sword, and sit a fiercer steed than any of you. Why? Because my heart is stronger than any that ever beat under your dirty scullion doublets. Why? Because I scorn, and spit upon, and deride you!”
It was braggart boasting, but I noticed the Saxons liked their talk of that complexion. And in this case it was successful. The Princes stood hesitating and staring as I towered before them, fiery and disdainful, in the red gleaming banquet lights; until presently the youngest there burst into a merry laugh to see them all thus at bay, chewing the hilts of their angry daggers, and each one waiting for his neighbor to prove himself the braver, by dying first upon my weapon. That laugh had hardly reached the ruddy oaken rafters overhead when it was joined by a score of others, and in a moment those wilful Saxon lordlings were all laughing and jerking back their steels, and scrambling into their supper-places as if they had not broken their fast since morning, and I were their mother’s son.
The Princes stood hesitating as I towered before them
Deep were their flagons that night, after the women had stolen away, and Idwal ap Howell filled the hall with wild Welsh harping that stirred my soul like a battle-call; for it was in my dear British tongue, and full of the color, light, and the life that had illuminated the first page of my long pilgrimage. And the Saxon gleemen, not to be outdone, each sang the song that pleased him best; and the Welshman strove to drown them with his harping; and the thanes sang, all at once, whatever songs were noisiest and most licentious. Mighty was the fire that roared up the open hearthplace; deep was the breathing of vanquished warriors from under the tables; red was the spilled wine upon the floor—when presently they put me upon a tressel, and, bearing me round the hall in discordant triumph, finally bore me away to the inner corridors, and left me at a portal where I never yet had entered!