"No better moment, then, to press a boon. Fly, girl, be your wishes wings to your speech. I would see my father straightway!"
CHAPTER XI.
THE LADY'S GAME.
"And if she will, she will! you may depend on't."
Old Saying.
It did not prove, in truth, a matter altogether so easy of accomplishment as Guendolen, in her warm enthusiasm and sympathy, had boasted, to effect that small thing, as she had termed it in her thoughtless eagerness, the liberation of three human beings, and the posterity of two, through countless generations, from the curse and degradation of hereditary bondage.
The value, in the first place, of the unhappy beings, to each of whom, as to a beast of burden, or to a piece of furniture, a regular money-price was attached, although they could not be sold away from the land to which they appertained, unless by their own consent, was by no means inconsiderable even to one so rich as Sir Yvo de Taillebois; for in those days the wealth even of the greatest landed proprietors lay rather in the sources of revenue, than in revenue itself; and men, whose estates extended over many parishes, exceeding far the limits of a modern German principality, whose forests contained herds of deer to be numbered by the thousand head, whose cattle pastured over leagues of hill and valley, who could raise armies, at the lifting of their banners, larger than many a sovereign prince of the nineteenth century, were often hard set to find the smallest sums of ready money on emergency, unless by levying tax or scutage on their vassals, or by applying to the Jews and Lombards.
In the second place, the scruples of Kenric, which justly appeared so generous and noble to the fine, unsophisticated intellect of the young girl, by no means appeared in the same light to the proud barons, accustomed to regard the Saxon, and more especially the serf, as a being so palpably and manifestly inferior, that he was scarcely deemed to possess rights, much less sentiments or feelings, other than those of the lower animals.
To them, therefore, the Saxon's refusal to consent to his own sale as a step necessary to manumission, appeared an act of insolent outrecuidance, or at the best a bold and impudent piece of chicanery, whereby to extort from his generous patrons a recompense three times greater than they had thought of conferring on him, in the first instance.
It was with scorn, therefore, and almost with anger, that Sir Yvo listened to the first solicitations of Guendolen in behalf of her clients; and he laughed at her high-flown sentiments of admiration and wonder at the self-devotion, the generosity, the immovable constancy, of the noble Saxon.
"The noble Saxon! By the glory of Heaven!" he exclaimed, "these women would talk one out of all sense of reason, with their sympathetic jargon! Why, here's a sturdy knave, who has done what, to win all this mighty gratitude? Just stuck his whittle into a wild stag's weasard, and saved a lady's life, more by good luck than by good service—as any man, or boy, of Norman blood, would have done in a trice, and thought no more of it; and then, when his freedom's tendered him as a reward for doing that for which ten-pence had well paid him, and for failing to do which he had deserved to be scourged till his bones lay bare, he is too mighty to accept it—marry! he names conditions, he makes terms, on which he will consent to oblige his lords by becoming free; and you—you plead for him. The noble Saxon! by the great gods, I marvel at you, Guendolen."