Edwin Lester Arnold

“ Strange, indeed, was it for me to walk among the glittering throng, all prattling that merry medley they called their native English, and to remember all I could remember, to recall Briton, Roman, Norseman, Norman, Saxon, and to know each and all of those varied peoples were gone—gone forever—gone beyond a hope or chance of finding—and yet, again, to know that each and every one of those nations, whose strong life in turn had given color to my life, was here—here before me, consummated in this people—oh, ’twas strange, and almost past belief! ”

“ Looking gently in the dead girl’s face, was Blodwen—Blodwen—my thousand-years-dead wife
Standing there serene and lovely, with that strange lavender glow about her, was that wonderful and dreadful shade—holding the dead girl’s hand and looking at her closely with a face that spoke of neither resentment nor sorrow. I stood and stared at them, every wit within me numb and cold by the suddenness of it, and then the apparition slowly lifted her eyes to mine, and I—the wildest sensations of the strong old love and brand-new fear possessed me. What! do you tell me that affection dies? ”

“ On again, to piles and racks of weapons of every age and time: all these I knew, and poised the javelin some Saxon hand had borne in war, and shook, like a dry reed, the long Norman spear, and whirled a rusty pirate scimitar above my head until it hummed again an old forgotten tune of blood and lust and pillage, and, with a stifled shriek, the frightened girl cowered from me.
Oh! a very curious treasure-house indeed! And here the scholar had laid up skins and furs of animals, and there horns and hoofs and talons. ”

“ Never in all my experience had I known a knight extend the palm of friendship to another so demure and downcast. “Truth!” I thought to myself, “this friend of Isobel’s is, in fact, as she said, the most modest-mannered soldier who ever took a place in the rough game of war!” But I was pledged to like him, and therefore, in the most hearty manner possible, as we came up knee to knee, I slapped my heavy hand into his extended fingers and welcomed him loudly as a long-looked-for comrade. ”

“ Already thirty thousand Frenchmen were slain, and the long swathes lay all across the swelling ground like the black rims of weed when the sea goes back. Only here and there the battle still went on, where groups and knots of men were fighting, and I, with my good comrade Flamaucœur, now, at sunset, was in such a mêlée on the right. All through the day he had been like a shadow to me—and shame that I have said so little of it! Where I went there he was, flitting in his close gray armor close behind me; quick, watchful, faithful, all through the turmoil and dusty war-mist ”

“ When I turned to the little heap of spoil the ravishers of the dead had gathered and laid out on a cloth upon the stones, at once my mood softened. There in that curious pile of trinkets were things so ancient and yet so fresh that I heaved a sigh as I bent over them, and a whiff of the old time came back—the jolly wild days when the world was young rose before me as I turned them tenderly one by one. There lay the bronze nobs from a British shield, and there, corroded and thin, the long, flat blade that my rugged comrades once could use so well. ”

“ There, in that very minute, it seemed—there, in that merry, careless place in sight of me, but a gaudy gallant a little more thoughtful-looking, perhaps, than those she often saw, yet, all the same, naught but a stranger gallant, unknown and nameless to her—moved by some affinity within us, just as the alchemist’s magic touch converts between two breaths one elixir in his crucibles to another, so, before my eyes, I saw in that fair girl’s pallid face love flush through her veins and light her heart and eyes with a responding blush. ”

“ At times I sat and stared into the yellow tapers, living the brief spell of my last life again—all the episode and change, all the hurry and glitter, and unrest that was forever my portion—and then, in spite of resolution, I would doze to other visions, outlined more brightly on the black background of oblivion; and then I started up, my will all at war with tired Nature’s sweet insistence, and paced in weary round our canvas cell, solitary but for those teeming thoughts and my own black shadow, which stalked, sullen and slow, ever beside me.
But who can deride the great mother for long? ”

“ Resplendent in weight and strength, he came sliding down from off the platform of his cradle, and amid the crash of struts and stays, amid flying splinters and the dust of transit, rolled out majestic into the red furnace light; where, trembling in every fiber, and gently swaying like a young giant feeling his strength for the first time, with the strong breath within murmuring, and the great steel heart pulsating audibly, our iron toy was born and launched, and came forth magnificent, huge, overpowering—then, checked by its anchor-chains, swerving round to face the farther end, and halted. ”

“ Truth! they have told me I was fair and tall, with a complexion that ridiculed the water-lilies on the moat, and hair, one said, was like ripe corn with a harvest sun upon it (it makes me blush”—I heard her whisper to herself—“to apprise myself like this) , and yet you stand there averse and sullen, with eyes turned from me, and deaf ears! Am I a sight so dreadful to you?”
“Maid!” I cried, shutting out her suppliant beauty from my heart—overfull, as I thought it, of that other one, her sister—“no man could look at you and not be moved. ”

“ We saw a mighty mass of foreign cavalry creeping round the shoulder of the hill, like the shadow of a raincloud upon a sunny landscape: we saw the thousand gonfalons of the spoilers fluttering in the wind: we saw the glitter on the great throng of northern chivalry that crowded after the black charger of William of Normandy and the sacred flag—accursed ensign—that Toustain held aloft: we saw their sweeping charge, and then when it was passed, the battle was gone and done, the Saxon power was a hundred little groups dying bravely in different corners of the field. ”

“ I had no money to buy a horse—the bangles taken from the crypt-thieves would not stand against the value of the boniest palfrey that ever ambled between a tinker’s legs—and last night’s infernal wetting had made me into the sorriest, most moldy-looking herald that ever did a kingly bidding. Surely, I thought, as I glanced at my borrowed clay-stained rustic cloak, my cracked and rotten leather doublet, my tarnished hose all frayed and colorless, my shoon, that only held together, methought, by their patching of gray sea-slime and mud, surely no one will lend or loan me anything like this ”

“ Ay, if you have a spark of generous comprehension, if one drop of the milk of kindness still bides within you, you shall people this place we go to find with such teeming, sprightly fancies, such moving mockeries of frail human kind new risen from their ashes at your feet, that you shall wring your hands out of pure rue for them that were, and pluck your beard in dumb chagrin, and beat upon your heart, even to watch all that which once was ruddy valor and hot love, and white beauty go adrifting so upon the dusty evening wind! ”

“ Of the loyalty of the few men with me I had little fear. They were brave and stubborn, all their pay was on Electra’s mules, and the British hated them without compunction. There were in our little company that black evening, seven wild Welshmen, under a shaggy-haired, blue-eyed princeling: Gwallon of the Bow, he called himself—fifteen swarthy Iberians, all teeth and scimitar—a handful of Belgic mercenaries, with great double-headed axes—but never a Roman among them all in this last stand of Roman power in Britain! ”