It was with grave and somewhat downcast brows, and nothing of haughtiness or pride of port or demeanor, that the lord and his friend entered under the lowly roof, invested for the moment with a majesty which was not its own, by the strange sacredness of grief and death.
There never probably, in the whole history of the world, has been a race of men, which entertained in their own persons a more boundless contempt of death, or assigned less value to the mere quality of life, than the warlike Normans. Not a man of them, while in the heyday of life and manhood, would have hesitated for a moment in choosing a death under shield, a death of violence and anguish, winning renown and conferring deathless honor, to the gentlest decay, the most peaceful dissolution. Not a man would have shed a tear, or shown a sign of sorrow, had he seen his favorite son, his most familiar friend, his noblest brother in arms, felled from his saddle in the mêlée, and trampled out of the very form of humanity beneath the hoofs of the charging cavalry. Not a man but would have ridden over a battlefield, gorged with carcasses and drunk with gore, without expressing a thought of terror, a sentiment beyond the victory, the glory, and the gain. But such is the sovereignty of death, in the silence and solitude of its natural gloom, stripped of the pomp and paraphernalia of funereal honors, and unadorned by the empty braveries of human praise and glory—such is the empire of humble, simple, overruling sorrow, that, as they entered the low-roofed, undecorated chamber, where lay the corpse of the neglected, despised serf—the being, while in life, scarce equal to the animals of the chase—with his nearest of kin, serfs likewise, abject, ignorant, down-trodden, and debased—in so far as man can debase God's creations—mourning in Christian sorrow over him, the nobles felt, for a moment, that their nobility was nothing in the presence of the awful dead; and that they, too, for all their pride of antique blood, for all their strength of limb and heaven-daring valor, for all their lands and lordships, must be brought down one day to the dust, like the poor slave, and go forth, as they entered this world, bearing nothing out, before one common Lord and Master, who must in the end sit in universal judgment.
Such meditations are not, perhaps, very common to the great, the powerful, and the fortunate of men, in any time or place, so long as the light of this world shine about, and their ways are ways of pleasantness; but if rare always, and under all ordinary circumstances, with the chivalrous, high-hearted, and hot-headed knights of the twelfth century, they were assuredly of the rarest.
Yet now so powerfully did they come over the strong minds of the two grave nobles, that they paused a moment on the threshold before entering; and Yvo de Taillebois, who was the elder man, and of deeper thoughts and higher imagination than his friend, raised his plumed bonnet from his brow, and bowed his head in silence.
It was a strange and moving scene on which they looked. The room, which was the ordinary dwelling-place of the family, was rather a large, dark parallelogram, lighted only through the door and a couple of narrow latticed windows, which, if closed, would have admitted few half-intercepted rays, but which now stood wide open, to admit the fresh and balmy air, so that from one, at the western end of the cottage, a clear ruddy beam of the declining sun shot in a long pencil of light, bringing out certain objects in strong relief against the surrounding gloom.
The door, at which the two knights stood, chanced to be so placed under the shadow of one of the great trees which overhung the house, that there was little light for them to intercept. Hence, those who were within, occupied by their own sad and bitter thoughts, did not at first so much as observe their presence. Facing the entrance, a large fire-place, with great projecting jambs, inclosing on each side a long oaken settle, occupied one half the length of the room; and on one of these, propped up with some spare bedding and clothing, lay the wounded man, Kenric, to whom the Baron de Taillebois owed his beloved child's life, half recumbent, pale from the loss of blood, yet chafing with annoyance, that he should be thus bedridden, when his strength might have been of avail to others, feebler and less able to exert themselves almost than he, bruised though he was, and gored from the rude encounter.
A little fire was burning low on the hearth, with a pot simmering over it—for, in their bitterest times of anguish and desolation, the very poor must bestir themselves, at least, to house service—and from the logs, which had fallen forward on the hearth, volumes of smoke were rolling up and hanging thick about the dingy rafters, and the few hams and flitches which, with strings of oat-cakes garnished the roof, its only ornament.
But, wholly unconscious of the ill-odored reek, though it streamed up close under his very eyes, and seeing nothing of the chevaliers, who were watching not six paces from him, Kenric lay helpless, straining his nerveless eyes toward the spot where the ruddy western sunlight fell, like a glory, on the pale, quiet features of the dead child, and on the cold, gray, impassive head of the aged mourner, aged far beyond the ordinary course of mortal life, who bent over the rude bier; and, strange contrast, on the sunny flaxen curls, and embrowned ruddy features of two or three younger children, clustered around the grandam's knee, silent through awe rather than sorrow, for they were too young as yet to know what death meant, or to comprehend what was that awful gloom which had fallen upon hearth and home.
Every thing in that humble and poor apartment was scrupulously clean and tidy; a white cloth was on the table, with two or three platters and porringers of coarse earthenware, as if the evening meal had been prepared when death had entered in, and interposed his awful veto—some implements of rustic husbandry, an ax or two, several specimens of the old English bill and Sheffield whittle; and one short javelin, with a heavy head, hung on the walls, with all the iron work brightly polished and in good order; fresh rushes were strewn on the floor, a broken pitcher, full of newly-gathered field-flowers, adorned the window-sill; and what was strange indeed at that age, and in such a place, two or three old, much tattered, dingy manuscripts graced a bare shelf above the chimney corner.
The aged woman had ceased from the wild outbreak of grief with which she had bewailed the first sign of death on the sick boy's faded brow, and was now rocking herself to and fro above the body, with a dull, monotonous murmur, half articulate, combining fragments of some old Saxon hymn with fondling epithets and words of unmeaning sorrow, while the tears slowly trickled down her wan cheeks, and fell into her lap unheeded. Kenric was silent, for he had no consolation to offer, even if consolation could have been availing, in that