CHAPTER I.
'Twas a bright day in the autumn; the brown leaves were still upon the trees, the moss was springing up rich and green round the old roots and upon the sloping banks, and the sun, peeping in wherever the hand of Time had cast down their green garmenture from the earlier shrubs, checkered the ground every here and there with bright glances of yellow light, which, while the wind moved the branches gently above, waved slowly backward and forward, as if well pleased at the velvety cushion on which it rested. The scene was as still and solitary as it was possible to conceive; for those were days in which civil wars and angry strife had diminished by one half the population of merry England. No forester took his way through the wood; no guard of the king's chase or baron's huntsman watched to see whether some churl or yeoman was not aiming the shaft at the royal deer, or entangling the roebuck in a concealed snare. Stephen, pressed on all sides, had been forced to abandon rights for the sake of popularity; and many a wide track, deserted by its lord, and destitute of inhabitants, remained open to any one that chose to hunt within its precincts.
A low wind sighed through the tops of the trees, and made the dry leaves whisper as if telling each other some solemn tale. The sun shone, as I have said; but with great silence and in the midst of solitude, there is something solemn even in sunshine. At length a woodpecker came down upon the green moss, ran up a neighbouring tree, knocked it with its bill where it seemed hollow, and then either came down again upon the ground, or flew on again to another tree, with the wild, melancholy sort of laugh to which that bird gives utterance while upon the wing.
He had gone on this way for nearly an hour, confining his excursions to the limits of a few hundred yards, when suddenly he started up from a green cushion of moss on which he had settled for a moment, and flew away from the open spot, where the trees stood far apart, into the depths of the thicker wood beyond.
What was it started the wild bird from the moss! It was a step that fell lightly, and scarcely left a print behind it; but it was quick and hurried, and the small foot that made it was somewhat weary with the length of way it had come.
In a moment after, in the midst of the tall trees where the woodpecker had been disporting himself, there stood the form of a girl of some nineteen or twenty years of age. Over her other clothes she wore a dark brown cloak, such as in those days was very commonly worn by women of the lower orders, and the hood, which formed the principal part of the garment, was brought far over the head. This mantle, rough and rude in itself, seemed also somewhat too large for the person that wore it; but, nevertheless, it could not conceal entirely the grace of the form it covered, nor the movement of each well-turned limb.
The young lady--for no one who saw her could doubt that she was so--paused as she came up to the spot we have mentioned, and gazed round about her somewhat inquiringly, as if she expected to find there something she did not behold.
"It is strange," she said at length, speaking low, in a sweet, melodious voice, like the musical murmuring of a stream, "it is very strange that the old woman is not here. Perhaps I am before the time. I will wait and see," and, seating herself on the mossy bank in the sunshine, she bent down her head upon her hand, and soon fell into a deep fit of meditation. The expression of her countenance grew something more than thoughtful--it grew even melancholy; and so busy did she become with her own thoughts, that her tongue betrayed, from time to time, the ideas that were passing within. "It is very long," she said, "very long since I heard from him. Old Maude has forgotten such feelings, or she would not keep me so long from the letter. I wonder if I shall ever forget them? Oh, I hope not!" And again she fell into silent thought, with her eyes fixed upon the rich green stems of the moss which carpeted the ground beneath her feet. A minute or two after, however, borne upon the light wind came the sound of a distant bell, and, looking up and listening with a smile, she again murmured, "I was too soon! There is the bell of the convent sounding the Angelus."
Scarcely had the last tone died away when another sound met her ear--the sound of a full, clear voice singing a gay country ditty; one of the many for which old England has been famous at all times. The words were In the old Saxon tongue, but they may very nearly be rendered as follows in the English of our own day.