“A Saxon, by my soul,” cried Rufus, with a savage scowl, “taken red-hand, and in the fact! Out with thy wood-knife, Damian! By the most holy Virgin, we will first mar his archery, and then present him with such a taste of venison as shall, I warrant me, appease his hankering for one while. Off with his thumb and finger! off with them speedily, I say, an’ thou wouldst ’scape his doom! Ha! grinnest thou, villain?” he continued, as a contortion writhed the bold visage of his victim, who, certain of his fate, and hopeless of resistance or of rescue, yielded with stubborn resolution to his torturers—“an’ this doth make thee smile, thou shalt laugh outright shortly! Hence with him, now, Damian and Hugonet; and thou, Raoul, away with thee—set toils enow, uncouple half a score of brachs and slowhounds, and see thou take me a right stag of ten ere vespers!—Barebacked shalt thou ride on him to the forest, thou unhanged Saxon thief, and see how his horned kinsmen will entreat thee! See that the dog escape ye not, or ye shall swing for it. Bind him, and drag him hence to the old church of Lyme; hold him there, on your lives, till sunset! And ye—lead thither his wild charger: we will sup there upon the greensward, as we return to Malwood, and thou shalt make us merry with thy untutored horsemanship. Now for our wager, Walter! Forward—hurrah!” and on again they dashed, until they reached the choicest hunting-ground of all that spacious woodland—the desolate and desert spot where once had stood the fairest village of the land.
Unroofed and doorless, in different stages of decay, a score or two of cottages, once hospitable, happy homes of a free peasantry, stood here and there amid the brushwood which had encroached upon the precincts; while in the midst the desecrated church of Lyme reared its gray tower, now overgrown with ivy, and crumbling in silent ruin. Upon the cross which crowned the lowly tower, there sat, as they approached, a solitary raven—nor, though the whoop and horn rang close below his perch, did he show any sign of wildness or of fear; but, rising slowly on his wing, flapped round and round in two or three slow circles, and then with a hoarse croak resumed his station. The raven was a favorite bird with the old hunters; and when the deer was slain he had his portion, thence named “the raven’s bone.” Indeed, so usual was the practice, that this bird, the wildest by its nature of all the things that fly, would rarely shun a company which its sagacity descried to be pursuers of the sylvan game.
“What! sittest thou there, old black-frock, in our presence?” shouted the king, bending his bow; “but we will teach thee manners!” Still, the bird moved not, but again sent forth his ominous and sullen croak above the jocund throng. The bow was raised—the cord was drawn back to the monarch’s ear: it twanged, and the next moment the hermit-bird came fluttering down, transfixed by the long shaft, with painful and discordant cries, and fell close at the feet of Rufus’s charger.
There was a murmur in the crowd; and one, a page who waited on the king, whispered with a pale face and agitated voice into his fellow’s ear: “I have heard say—
‘Whose shaft ’gainst raven’s life is set,
Shaft’s feather his heart-blood shall wet!’”
The red king caught the whisper, and turning with an inflamed countenance and flashing eye on the unwitting wakener of his wrath—“Dastard and fool!” he shouted; and, clinching his gloved hand, he dealt the boy so fierce a blow upon the chest, that he fell to the earth like a lifeless body, plunging so heavily upon the sod head-foremost, that the blood gushed from nose, ears, mouth, and he lay senseless and inanimate as the surrounding clay. With a low, sneering laugh, the tyrant once more spurred his charger forward, amid the smothered execrations of his Norman followers, boiling with indignation for that one of their noble and victorious race should have endured the foul wrong of a blow, though it were dealt him by a monarch’s hand. And there were scowling brows, and teeth set hard, among the very noblest of his train; and, as the glittering band swept on, the father of the injured boy—a dark-browed, aged veteran, who had couched lance at Hastings to win the throne of earth’s most lovely island for that base tyrant’s sire—reined in his horse, and, leaping to the earth, upraised the body from the gory turf, and wiped away the crimson stream from the pale features, and dashed pure water, brought from a neighboring brooklet in a comrade’s bacinet, upon the fair young brow—but it was all in vain! The dying child rolled upward his faint eyes; they rested on the anxious lineaments of that war-beaten sire, who, stern and fiery to all else, had ever to that motherless boy been soft and tender as a woman. “Father,” he gasped, while a brief, painful smile illuminated with a transient gleam his ashy lips—“mercy, kind mother Mary! Father—father”—the words died in the utterance; the dim eyes wavered—closed; the head fell back upon the stalwart arm that had supported it, and, with one long and quivering convulsion, the innocent soul departed!
Some three or four—inferior barons of the train, yet each a gentleman of lineage and prowess in the field, each one in his own estimate a prince’s peer—had paused around the desolate father and his murdered child; and now, as the old man gazed hopelessly upon the features of his first-born and his only, the sympathy which had moistened their hard eyes and relaxed their iron features was swallowed up in a fierce glare of indignation, irradiating their scarred and war-seamed visages with that sublime expression, from which, when glowing on the face of a resolute and fearless man, the wildest savage of the forest will shrink in mute dismay. The father, after a long and fearful struggle with his more tender feelings—wringing his hard hands till the blood-drops started redly from beneath every nail—lifted his face, more pale and ashy in its hues than that of the inanimate form which he had loved so tenderly; and as he lifted it he caught the fierce glow mantling on the front of each well-tried companion, and his own features lightened with the self-same blaze: his hand sank downward to the hilt of the long poniard at his girdle, and the fingers worked with a convulsive tremor as they griped the well-known pommel, and an exulting smile curled his mustached lip, prophetic of revenge. Once more he bowed above the dead; he laid his broad hand on the pulseless heart, and printed a long kiss on the forehead; then lifting, with as much tenderness as though they still had sense and feeling, the relics of the only thing he loved on earth, he bore them from the roadside into the shelter of a tangled coppice; unbuckled his long military mantle, and spreading it above them, secured it at each corner by heavy stones, a temporary shelter from insult or intrusion. This done, in total silence he rejoined his friends, who had foreborne to offer aid where they perceived it would be held superfluous. Without one word, he grasped the bridle of his charger, tightened his girths, and then, setting no foot to stirrup, vaulted almost without an effort into the steel-bound demipique. Raising his arm aloft, he pointed into the long aisles of the forest, wherein the followers of Rufus had long since disappeared.
“Our thoughts are one!” he hissed, in accents scarcely articulate, between his grinded teeth; “what need of words? Are not we soldiers, gentlemen, and Normans, and shall not deeds speak for us?”
Truly he said, their thoughts were one!—for each had severally steeled his heart as by a common impulse: and now, without a word, or sign, or any interchange of sentiments, feeling that each understood the other, they wheeled their horses on the tyrant’s track, and at a hard trot rode away, resolved on instant vengeance.
Meanwhile, the hunters had arrived at their appointed ground. The slowhounds were uncoupled and cast loose; varlets with hunting-poles, and mounted grooms, pressed through the underwood; while, in each open glade and riding of the forest, yeomen were stationed with relays of tall and stately gazehounds, to slip upon the hart the instant he should break from the thick covert. The knights and nobles galloped off, each with his long-bow strung, and cloth-yard arrow notched and ready, to posts assigned to them—some singly, some in pairs; all was replete with animation and with fiery joy.