'Pardon, dear Emma! I feared lest thou shouldst need my service. I have not forgotten the day when I found thee senseless in thy chamber; and these news be so dire.'
'Faint heart!' cried Emma contemptuously, taking refuge in indignation. 'Dost thou then credit the wild stories of these runaways? How but by telling of slain leader and ruined cause could they excuse their own cowardice? The cousin of Harold Godwinsson should despise them for nodings!'
Her eyes blazed with the light of fierce determination, as she hissed out the word which in the ears of Saxon or Dane was the most degrading that could be applied to a warrior.
The mild-natured Eadgyth, whose courage was of the moral order, and with whom fortitude and fidelity were greater than high spirit, gazed wonderingly at her friend. She had seen Emma cry over a fawn the dogs had lacerated, or over the dead body of a pet bird, when her own eyes had been tearless, and this strange strength of Emma's made her shiver, for she fully believed that the earl was slain.
Emma looked in her startled face and laughed. 'Tend them, bonnibell, and ease the pain of their wounds; but credit them not. Let my lord deal with them when he comes back at the head of a victorious army.'
Eadgyth, like the knights, thought that the countess was going mad. Perhaps she was; but her madness saved the garrison.
Yet, to say truth, her high spirit quailed when she re-entered the spital. The draggled, blood-stained, dejected warriors who lay, and leaned, and stood around, with every variety of wound to be dressed, were no cheering sight. Nor, when she saw their pale, stern faces, grave with defeat and haggard from fatigue, did she stigmatise them in her heart, as she had stigmatised them in words, as cowards—nodings. Her woman's heart went out in sympathy to the suffering humanity around her. She did not pause to settle the question whether they had fled prematurely or stood by their leader—in whom was all her joy—to the last bitter gasp, as brave men should. She dared not investigate too closely, lest they should convince her that she had wronged them, and so daunt the hope that was her only comfort.
With tireless industry she busied herself in the manual labour of the leech, in such crude forms as the medical science of the day allowed. How rudimentary they were may be guessed from the story told us by old Robert of Gloucester, of the Duke of Austria in Cœur de Lion's time, some fifty years later, a patient who doubtless had at his command whatever skill the times afforded. The duke fell from his palfrey and hurt his foot, which mortified, and the doctors advised him that his only hope lay in having it taken off. Nobody, however, could be found bold enough to undertake the operation, and the poor duke at last held a keen axe with his own hands upon his ankle, and bade his chamberlain smite upon it with all his strength, the foot being severed at the third blow.
Such being the best surgical aid that a royal duke could obtain, it may be imagined that little could be done to ease the pangs of humbler men.
A stream of fugitives came straggling in before the day was done, and, alas! all told the same tale. They were mostly Bretons or Normans, for the Saxons and Anglo-Danes who had followed the earl sought refuge, not in the Norman stronghold, but in the forest retreats where their countrymen had already found shelter, and in the fastnesses of wold and fen, which were familiar to their steps.