Henry William Herbert

“ But I am not a beast, Sir Knight; but though a serf, a man—a Saxon, not a Norman, it is true; but a man, yet, a man! There may be collar on my neck, and gyves on wrist and ankle, but my soul wears no shackles. It is as free as thine, and shall stand face to face with thine, one day, before the judgment seat. I am a man, I say, Sir Yvo de Taillebois; there sits old Bertha, surnamed the Good, a serf herself, mother of serfs, and grandmother; there lies my serf-brother's boy, himself a serf no longer; there sprawl unconscious on the hearth his baby brethren, serfs from the cradle to the grave ”

“ With his landlord and friend, he had fought to the last, not at Hastings only, but in every bloody ineffectual rising, until the last spark of Saxon liberty was trampled out under the iron hoofs of the Norman war-horse; but, less happy than Waltheof, he had survived to find himself a slave, and the father of slaves, tilling for a cruel foreign conqueror the land which had been his own and his father's, and his father's father's, but in which he and his heirs should have no heritage for evermore, beyond the six-foot measure which should be meted to them every one, for his long home. ”

“ It was the cry of caste, rejoicing at the elevation of a brother to the true station of a man. But there was one voice which swelled not the cry; one man, who turned sullenly away, unable to bear the sight of another's joy, turned away, muttering vengeance—Eadwulf the Red—the only soul so base, even among the fallen and degraded children of servitude and sorrow, as to refuse to be glad at the happiness which it was not granted him to share, though that happiness were a mother's and a brother's escape from misery and degradation. ”

“ I thought not that on earth there lived a man who might be free, and would not. Dost not love liberty, Kenric?"
"Ask the wild eagle in his place of pride! Ask the wild goat on Pennigant or Ingleborough's head; and when they come down to the cage and chain, believe, then, that I love it not. Freedom! freedom! To be free but five minutes, I would die fifty deaths of direst torture. And yet it can not be—it can not be! Peace, tempter, peace; you can not stir my soul. Slave I was born, slave I must die, and only in the grave shall be a slave no longer. Leave me, beausire ”

“ He knew Sir Foulke d'Oilly for a trained, experienced, and all-practiced soldier; not only brave at all times, and brave among the bravest—but a champion, such as there were few, and to be beaten only by a champion. He knew him also desperate, and fighting his last stake. He foresaw that, even for himself, the felon knight, unless the sense of guilt should paralyze his heart, or the visible judgment of God be interposed in the heat of battle—a thing in those days scarcely to be looked for—would prove no easy bargain in the lists ”

“ But, as she recognized the limbs, stately, though cold and still, and the features, still noble through gore and defilement, a swift horror smote her, that she shook like a leaf, and fell, with a wild, thrilling shriek, "O, Kenric, Kenric!" on the body of the wounded man.
"Ha! what is this?" cried Sir Philip, who now first saw or remembered what had passed. "How is this? Knaves, is there a man hurt here?"
"A Saxon churl, Beausire," replied one of the pages, flippantly, "who has gotten his brisket unseamed by his brother Saxon yonder!" and he pointed to the dead carcass of the stag. ”

“ The banner-man at once displayed the square banner of his lord, the trumpeter made the old ramparts ring with the old gathering blast of the house of De Taillebois, and, two and two, the glittering men-at-arms, defiled through the castle gate, and wound down the steep hill side, long to be traced from the battlements, now seen, now lost among the woods and coppices, a line of sinuous light, creeping, like a huge glow-worm, over the dark champaign.
Before they reached the lake shore, however, the moon rose, round and red, from behind the Yorkshire fells ”

“ If the man die, as it seems like enow, ye shall learn ere ye are one day older, what pleasant bed-rooms are the vaults of Waltheofstow, and how tastes the water of the moat."
Meantime the monk trotted up, and, after brief examination, announced that, though badly hurt, his life was in no immediate peril, and set himself at once to comfort and revive him.
"He is not slain; he will not die, my child," said Sir Yvo, softly, bending over the litter to his pale lily, who smiled faintly as she whispered in reply—
"Dear father, nor be a slave any longer?" ”

“ I will not love you, if you so much as breathe it to me again, Aradas!"
"That were a penalty," said the young man, half-sadly smiling; "but, can you help it, Guendolen?"
"Don't trust in that, sir," she said. "One can do any thing—every thing—by trying."
"Can one, pardie! I would you would show me, then, how to win these spurs of gold, by trying."
"I can. Be firm, be faithful, and, above all, be patient. Remember, without hope, without patience, there is no evidence of faith; without faith, there is, there can be, neither true chivalry nor true love. ”

“ He has never known the collar or the gyves—has never felt how bitter and how hard a thing it is to be the slave of the best earthly master! His dream—his fever-dream of life is over; he is free from yoke and chain; he has awoken out of human servitude, to be the slave of the everlasting God, whose strictest slavery is perfect liberty and perfect love. ”

“ None but a slave can know or imagine what it is to be a slave; none can conceive what a slave feels, thinks, suffers. And yet a slave is a man, after all; and a lord is no more than a man, while living—and yet, what a gulf between them!"
"And you will not tell me, Edith," persisted the Lady Guendolen, "you will not tell me what it is that has happened to you of late, which makes you grieve so despondently, thus on a sudden, over your late-endured condition? ”

“ Edith, on the contrary, young yet, and unusually handsome, who had been the pet of her own people, and the favorite of her princely masters, who had never undergone any severe labor, nor suffered any poignant sorrow, who knew nothing of the physical hardships of slavery, more than she did of the real and tangible blessings of liberty, had ever been as happy and playful as a kitten, and as tuneful as a bird among the branches. ”

“ What seek you?" asked Kenric, whose hand was on the bar.
"To me, Foulke d'Oilly. I seek my fugitive villeyn, Eadwulf the Red. We have traced him hither. Open, on your peril, or take the consequence."
"The man is not here; natheless, I open," replied Kenric; and, with the word, he threw open the door; and the men-at-arms rushed in, brandishing their axes, as if they expected resistance. But the Saxon stood firm, tranquil, and impassive, on his hearthstone, and gave no pretext for violence. ”

“ Now, it was the suit of Guendolen and Aradas, that Sir Yvo should appoint his young esquire his champion to do battle for the judgment of God—for they were irrevocably convinced—what, between their real faith in the justice of this cause, and the zealous trust, of those who love, in the superiority of the beloved, and the generous confidence of youth in its own glowing and impulsive valor—that Aradas would surely beat the traitor down, and win the spurs of gold, to which he so passionately aspired. ”

“ Pale as death, the gallant girl yet retained her courage and her faculties; she pulled so sharply on her left rein, striking the palfrey on the shoulder with her riding-rod, that he wheeled short on his haunches, and presented his right flank to the infuriated deer, protecting his fair rider by the interposition of his body.
No help was nigh, though the Norman nobles saw her peril, and spurred madly to the rescue; though Kenric started from his lair with a portentous whoop, and, poising his boar spear, rushed down, in the hope to turn the onset to himself. ”

“ Not a poet himself, so far as the weaving the mysterious chains of rhythm, he was a genuine poet of the heart. Not a blush, not a smile, not a tear, not a frown on the lovely face of nature, but awakened a response in his large and sympathetic soul; not an emotion of the human heart, from the best to the basest, but struck within him some chord of deep and hidden feeling; to read an act of self-devoted courage, of charity, of generosity, of self-denial, would make his flesh quiver, his hair rise, his cheek burn. To hear of great deeds would stir him as with the blast of a war trumpet. ”

“ In the midst rode Sir Yvo de Taillebois, all armed save his head, which was covered with a velvet mortier with a long drooping feather, and wearing a splendid surcoat; and, by his side, on a fleet Andalusian jennet, in a rich purple habit, furred at the cape and cuffs, and round the waist, with snow-white swansdown, the fair and gentle Guendolen, followed by three or four gay girls of Norman birth, and, happier and fairer than the happiest and fairest, the charming Saxon beauty, pure-minded and honest Edith. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In no respect did it strike him as one of the noblest and most generous deeds of self-abandonment of which the human soul is capable; though, had the self-same offer been spurned, as the slave spurned it, and in the very words which he had found in the rude eloquence of indignation, by belted knight or crowned king, he had unhesitatingly styled it an action of the highest glory, and worthy of immortal record in herald's tale or minstrel's story. Such is the weight of circumstance upon the noblest minds of men. ”

“ When she burst from girlhood into womanhood—when her father, returned from the honors and the toils of foreign service, introduced her into the grand scenes of gorgeous chivalry and royal courtesy, preparatory to placing her at the head of his house—though she mingled with the paladins and peers of Normandy and Norman England, she saw not one who could compare in wisdom, in eloquence, in all that is highest and most heaven-reaching in the human mind, with the old Saxon, Father Basil. ”

“ Up! up! higher and higher! Neither victorious yet, neither vanquished. Now! now! the falcons are on a level with him, and again rings the clanging shriek of the wild water-bird, and he redoubles his last effort. He rises, he out-tops the hawks, and all vanish in an instant from the eyes of the pursuers, swallowed up in the depths of the great golden cloud.
Still the harsh clanking cry is heard; and now, as they and the cloud still drift northward, they reappear, now all descending, above the little esplanade before the cottage-door where Edith stands watching. ”

“ Kenric, thou art free; free of all charge against thee; free to walk boldly and uprightly before God; and, so far as you do no wrong, to turn aside for fear of no man. Go, and thank God, therefore, that you are born on English soil, where every man is held free, till he is proved a slave; and where no man can be delivered into bondage, save on the verdict of a jury of his countrymen. This is the law of England. God save the King. Amen!"
Then, turning to Sir Yvo de Taillebois, "You brought that fellow off with flying colors! ”

“ It was not in this direction, however, nor up the road toward the remote castle, nor down across the bridge over the silver Idle, that the watchers turned their eager eyes, expecting the more eagerly, as, at times, the distant woods before them—lying beyond a long stretch of native savanna, made probably by the beaver, while that industrious animal yet figured in the British fauna—seemed to mourn and labor with a deep, indefinite murmuring sound, half musical, half solemn, but liker to an echo than to any known utterance of any living human being. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But, hold! here is Kenric's home—the best cabin in the quarter, as the owner is the best man. Let us go in."
"And carry him a welcome cure for his aching bones," said Sir Yvo, as they entered the little gate of a pretty garden, which stretched from the door down to a reach of the winding stream, overshadowed by several large and handsome willows. "By my faith! he must needs be a good man," resumed the speaker—"why, it is as neat as a thane's manor, and neater, too, than many I have seen." ”

“ It is not that the capitalist is richer, and the operative poorer—though this is true to the letter—than was the prince, than was the serf of those days. It is not only that the aristocrat of capital, the noble by the grace of gold, is ten times more arrogant, more insulting, more soulless, cold-hearted, and calmly cruel, than the aristocrat of the sword, the noble by the grace of God ”

“ All the inner country, among those glorious peaks, those deep glens, encumbered with old unshorn woods, those blue waters, undisturbed by the presence of a foreigner, since the eagles of the ubiquitous Roman glittered above his camps on the stern hill-sides, over that most unprofitable of his conquests, was virgin ground, uninhabited, save by fugitive serfs, criminal refugees from justice, and some wild families of liberty-loving Saxons, who had fled to the mountains, living by the strong hand and the bended bow, and content to sacrifice all else for the priceless boon of freedom. ”

“ The Saxons may be, as I have heard tell, but have not seen that they are, sordid, degraded, brutal, devoid of chivalry and courtesy and love of fame; but I would wager my life there is not a free Saxon man—no, not the poorest Franklin, who would not rate the life of his coarse-featured, sun-burned daughter at something higher than the value of a heifer. But it is very well. I am rebuked. I will trouble you no farther, valiant Sir Yvo de Taillebois. ”

“ Edith, to whom he had told all that he had extorted from Eadwulf, and who, like himself, clearly foresaw difficulty and danger at hand, arising from the conduct and flight of the ill-conditioned and ill-starred brother, went about her household work, most unusual for her, with a melancholy and despondent heart.
She, who while a serf had been constantly, almost recklessly gay, as one who had no sorrow for which to care, wore a grave brow, and carried a heavy heart. For liberty, if it give independence to the body and its true expansion to the soul, brings responsibility also, and care. ”

“ They little know the spirit of the age of chivalry, who imagine that, because in the tilt, the tournament, the joust, the carrousel, all was pomp and splendor, music and minstrelsy, and military glory, largesse of heralds and love of ladies, los on earth and fame immortal after death, there was any such illusion or enchantment in the dreadful spectacle of an appeal to the judgment of God by wager of battle. ”

“ Just as he was within fifty yards, however, of the desired covert's edge, Sir Philip de Morville—for he it was who rode the foremost—raised his bugle to his lips, and sounded it long and shrill, in a most peculiar strain, to which a whoop responded, almost from the point for which the stag was making, and, at the same time, a second brace of alans—one a jet black, and the other a deep-brindled fawn color—darted out, and flew down the gentle slope, right at the head of the yet unwearied quarry. ”