"No, lady, no; it is not even that. If I had scruples on that head, they have vanished; Kenric has convinced me——"
"Kenric!" exclaimed Guendolen, starting erect into a sitting attitude, forgetful of her pains and bruises. "What, the brave man who saved me from the stag at the risk of his own life, who was half slain in serving me—is he—is he your Kenric?"
"The same," answered Edith, with the quiet accent of fixed sorrow. "And the same for whom you procured the priceless boon of liberty."
An idea flashed, like the electric fluid, across the mind of Guendolen, who up to that moment had suspected nothing of the connection between her preserver and the beautiful girl before her, and who knew nothing of his grand refusal to accept even liberty itself, most inestimable of all gifts, which could not be shared by those whom he loved beyond liberty or life; and she imagined that she read the secret, and had pierced the maiden's mystery.
"Can it be?" she said, sorrowfully, and seeming rather to be communing with herself, than inquiring of her companion. "Can it be that one so brave, so generous, and seemingly so noble, should be so base and abject? Oh! but these men, these men, if tale and history speak true, they are the same all and ever—false, selfish, and deceivers!"
"Kenric, lady?"
"And because he is free—the freeman but of the hour—he has despised thee, Edith, the slave girl? But hold thy head high, sweet one, and thy heart higher. Thou shalt be free to-morrow, girl, and the mate of his betters; it shall be thou, to-morrow, who shall repay scorn with scorn, and——"
"No, lady, no," cried the girl, who had been hitherto silenced and overpowered by the impulsive vehemence of Guendolen. "You misapprehend me altogether. It is not I whom he rejected, for that he was free; but liberty that he cast from him, as a toy not worth the having, because I might not be free with him—I, and his aged mother, of whom he is, alone, the only stay and comfort."
"Noble! noble!" cried the Norman girl, joyously clapping her hands together. "Noble and glorious, gentle and great! This, this, indeed, is true nobility! Why do we Normans boast ourselves, as if we alone could think great thoughts, or do great deeds? and here we are outdone, beyond all question or comparison, in the true gentleness of perfect chivalry; and that, by a Saxon slave. But be of good cheer, Edith, my sister and my friend; be of good cheer. The sun shall not go down looking upon you still a slave, nor upon your Kenric, nor yet upon his mother. You shall be free, all free, free as the blessed winds of heaven, before the sun set in the sea. And you shall be the wife of no serf, but of a freeman, and a freeholder, in my own manor lands of Kendal upon Kent; and you shall be, God willing, the mother of free Englishmen, to do their lady as leal service as their stout father did before them. Fear nothing, and doubt nothing, Edith; for this shall be, so surely as I am Guendolen of Taillebois. So small a thing as this I can right readily do with my good father, and he as readily with our true friend, noble Sir Philip de Morville. But hark! I hear their horses' hoofs and the whimpering of their hounds in the court-yard. To the bartizan, girl, to the bartizan! Is it they—is it the chase returning?"
"It is they, dear lady—your noble sire and Sir Philip, and all the knights who rode forth this morning—all laughing in high merriment and glee! and now they mount the steps—they have entered."