“Ah! so she thinks it. Such a tender, shy and modest maid there is not in the boast of the county. While the elder will hear you out, arms crossed on pulseless bosom, cold, disdainful eyes fixed with haughty stare to yours, the other will not stop to listen—no, not so much as to the first inkling of your passion! Breathe so little as half a sigh, or tint your speech with a rosy glint of dawning love, and she is away, lighter than thistledown on the upland breeze. I know of but two men—loose, worldly fellows both of them—who cornered her, and they came from her presence looking so crestfallen, so abashed at their hopes, so melancholy to think on their gross manliness as it had appeared against the white celibacy of that maid, that even some previous suitors sorrowed for them. This is, I think, the safer venture, but even the least hopeful.”
“Is the maid all fallow like that? Has she no human faults to set against so much sterile virtue?”
“Of her faults I cannot speak, but you must not hold her altogether insipid and shallow. She is less approachable than her sister, and contemns and fears our kind, yet she is straight and tall in person, and, I have heard from a foster-brother of hers, can sit a fiery charger, new from stall, like a groom or horse boy, she is the best shot with a crossbow of any on the castle green, and in the women’s hall as merry a romp, as ready for fun or mischief, as any village girl that ever kept a twilight tryst on a Saturday evening.”
“Gads! a most pleasant description. I will keep tryst with this one for a certainty, not only Saturdays, but six other days out of the week. The black jade may wait for her princeling for a hundred years as far as I am concerned. How far is it to the castle?—I am hot impatience itself!”
“Nor need your patience cool! Look!” said Delafosse, and as he spoke we turned a bend in the woodland road, and there, a mile before us, flashing back the level sun from towers and walls that seemed of burnished copper, was the noble pile we sought.
Certes! when we came up to it, it was a fine place indeed, cunningly built with fosses round about, long barbican walls within them, turreted and towered, and below these again were other walls so shrewd designed for defense as to move any soldier heart with wonder and delight. But if the walls did pleasure me, the great keep within, towering high into the sky with endless buttresses, and towers, and casements, grim, massive, and stately, rearing its proud circumference, embattled and serrated far beyond the reach of rude assault or desperate onset, filled me with pride and awe. I scarce could take my eyes from those red walls shining so molten in the setting sun, yet round about the country lay very fair to look at. All beyond that noble pile the land dropped away—on two sides by sheer cliffs to the shining river underneath—and on the others in gentle, grassy undulations, dotted with great trees, whereunder lay, encamped by tent and watchfire, the rear of King Edward’s army, and then on again into the pleasant distance that lay stretched away in hill and valley toward the yellow west.
All over that wide campaign were scattered the villages of serfs and vassals who grew corn for the lordly owner in peace-time, and followed his banner in battle. And in that knightly stronghold up above there were, I found when I came to know it better, many kinsmen and women who sheltered under my Lord’s liberality. Dowagers dwelt in the wings, and young squires of good name—a jolly, noisy, unruly crew—harbored down in the great vaulted chambers by the sally-port. There were kinsmen of the left-hand degree in the warder’s lodge by the gates, and poor wearers of the same noble escutcheon up among the jackdaws and breezes of the highest battlements. And so generous was the Knight’s bounty, so ample the sweep of his castellated walls and labyrinthine the mazes of the palace keep they encircled, so abundant the income of his tithes and tenure, dues and fees, that all these folk found living and harborage with him; and not only did it not irk that Lord, but only to his steward and hall porter was it known how many guests there were, or when a man came or went, or how many hundred horses stood in the stalls, or how many score of vassals fed in the great kitchen.
On Sundays, after mass, the smooth green in the center of the castle would be thronged with men and maids in all their finery; while the quintains spun merrily under the mock onsets of the young knights, and dame and gallant trode the stony battlements, and down among the wide shadow of the cedar-trees on the slope (’twas a Crusader who brought the saplings from Palestine) vassal and yeoman idled and made love or frolicked with their merry little ones. Over all that gallant show my Lord’s great blazon snapped and flaunted in the wind upon the highest donjon; and in the halls beneath the lords and ladies sat in the deep-seated windows, and laughed and sang and jested in the mullion-tinted sunshine with all the courtly extravagance of their brilliant day.
Ah! by old Isis! at that time the world, it seemed to me, was less complex, and the rules of life were simpler. Kingcraft had found its mold and fashion in the courageous Edward, and the first duty of a noble was then nobility: the Knights swore by their untarnished chivalry, and the vassals by their loyalty. Yes! and it was priestly then to fear God and hell, and every woman was, or would be, lovely! So ran the simple creed of those who sang or taught, while nearly every one believed them.
But you who live in a time when there is no belief but that of Incredulence, when the creative skill and forethought of the great primeval Cause is open to the criticism and cavil of every base human atom it has brought about—you know better—you know how vain their dream was, how foolish their fidelity, how simple their simplicity, how contemptible their courage, and how mean by the side of your love of mediocrity their worship of ideals and heroes! By the bright Theban flames to which my fathers swore! by the grim shadow of Osiris which dogged the track of my old Phœnician bark! I was soon more English than any of them.