The Serf Part 10

He dropped his banter at once. "Yes! yes!" he said eagerly.

"My lord goeth after a boar this afternoon with Sir Fulke, and my Lady Alice will be by the well in the orchard when they have gone."

"Good," said he, "there will I be also. Are Richard and Brian going hunting?"

"No; they will be hard at work with all the theows and men-at-arms fortifying the castle. Oh, Lewin, there is such a to-do! Last night as ever was, came a messenger to say Roger Bigot is coming to Hilgay to kill us all, and Christ help us! that is what I say."

A shrill note of alarm had come into her voice, for she had seen war before, and knew something of the unbridled cruelty that walked with conquerors. At that he put his arm round her waist and drew her close to him. They were a fine pair as they stood side by side in the wood. Lewin captured one pretty hand in his--a little, white, firm hand that curled up comfortably in his clasp. Then he kissed her on her soft cheeks.

"How beautiful you are," he said in a soft, dreamy voice, deep and rich.

He strained her to him. "Oh, how strange and beautiful you are, Gundruda. I would that for ever you were in my arms. There is nothing like you in the world, Gundruda. You are worth kingdoms. Oh, you beautiful girl!"

She abandoned herself to his caresses, with closed eyes and quick shuddering breaths of pleasure. Suddenly the mellow notes of a horn in all their proud sweetness came floating through the wood, and this amorous business came to a sudden end.

Geoffroi was starting out to the hunt.

The two people in the wood went back to the castle by devious ways. They found that Lord Geoffroi with a few attendants had already left the castle and entered the forest.

The castle-works were humming with activity. The weapon smiths were forging and fitting arrow heads, and making quarels and bolts. The carpenters were building h.o.a.rds, or wooden pent houses, which should be run out on the top of the curtains. The crenelets, which grinned between the roof and the machicolade at the top of Outfangthef, were cleared of all obstructions. A trebuchet for slinging stones--invented in Flanders, and very effective at short range--was being fitted together on the roof of the Barbican. Hammers were tapping, metal rang on metal, the saws groaned, and a great din of preparation pervaded everything.

In one corner of the bailey a man was cutting lead into strips so that it could be more easily made molten and poured upon besiegers. In another a group were hoisting pitch barrels on to the walls with a pulley and tackle.

In and out of the great gateway rough carts were rattling every moment, full of apples and wheat from the farmhouses round.

A row of patient oxen were stabled in a pen, hastily knocked up with beams of fir, in one corner of the bailey. In the field by the castle side, the swine shrieked horribly as a serf killed them relentlessly, and in the kitchens the women boiled, dried, and salted before glowing wood fires.

Long before dawn, scouts on swift horses had been posting along the Norwich road, and messages had been sent to all the villeins proper to fulfil their pledge of service.

Tongues wagged unceasing.

"Come ye here, cripples, and give a hand to this beam."

"Have you gotten your money safe, minter? The b.a.s.t.a.r.d son a letcheth after coined monies."

"Aye, and after more things than coined monies. Gundruda, beauty, Roger hath a fat Turkman privy to him, and going always in his train. He will marry you to the black man!"

"By the rood, then, I'd as soon wed him as you!"

"Roger taketh with him always a crucet hs, my son."

"And what is that, then, Father Anselm?"

"Know you not the crucet hs? fight l.u.s.tily, then, or you may know him too well. The crucet hs, that is a chest which is short and narrow and shallow. Roger putteth men therein, and putteth sharp stones upon him so that all his limbs be brake thereby. My Lord Bigot loveth it. Also he useth the 'Lao? and grim.' 'Tis a neck bond, my lad, of which two or three men had enough to bear one! It is so made that it is fastened to a beam. And Roger putteth a sharp iron round about the man's throat and his neck, so that he cannot in any direction sit or lie or sleep, but must bear all that iron."

"G.o.d's teeth! Father! you have a merry way of comfort."

"Truth is stern, Huber; fight then l.u.s.tily, and get you shriven to-morrow."

"That will I, Father."

"And you, John and Denys, and Robert, all you soldiers. Come you to me ere this fight, and pay Holy Church her due fee, and have safety for your souls. An if you die then you will be saved men, and among the merry angels and my Lords the Saints, as good as they in heaven. An you go not to battle with hearts purged of sin, the divell will have every mother's son of you. Alas, how miserable and rueful a time will be then!

And you who are whilom in s.h.i.+ning armour-mail, with wine to drink, and girls to court for your pleasure, will lie in a portion of fire but seven foot long."

Thus, Anselm, the hedge priest, pa.s.sing from group to group in beery exhortation.

Who knows how it affected them?

The heavenly sun still looks into the lowest valleys. The unclean hands of that false priest, unfaithful minister that he was, may have given the ma.s.s to a sick soul with great spiritual comfort. The b.e.s.t.i.a.l old man may have absolved dark men, penitent of their sins, because they themselves earnestly believed in his power.

As he sat in the chapel during that day, the mysterious powers conferred on him from Saint Peter himself, in unbroken succession, may, indeed, have flowed through him, giving grace.

Lewin lounged about the courtyard listening to his exhortations with amus.e.m.e.nt, yet not without wonder at the strange psychic force which moved the minds of these rough men. The crafty, sensual sentimentalist, of course, had no illusions about the abstract, yet the idea always fascinated him when it came. It was very grand and sonorous, he thought, this bondage to mystery, this ritual of the unseen. So lonely a man was he, immured in the impregnable fortress of his own brain, for there was no mental equal for him at Hilgay, that for mere mind-food he gave himself over to wild fancies. Our Lord upon the cross was more beautiful to him than to many devout believers, and he would have told you that he could hear the going of G.o.d in the wind. Sometimes he half-wondered if it were not true that Christ died.

He went into his mint, deserted now, and sat him down upon a bench in his little room. The suns.h.i.+ne cut its living way through the dust of the silent empty place. A whip lay upon the floor, where it had been thrown by an overseer of the theows who worked in the mint. There were flies upon it. He kicked the thing aside with disgust; it was a reminder of the stern terrible age in which he lived, and in which he felt so out of place. Depression began to flow over him in silent waves, until he remembered that he was to meet Lady Alice in the afternoon. That turned the current of his idle, discontented thoughts towards a more palpable thing. His secret wooing of the Norman lady who was so proud and stately was very dear to him, and the romance of it pleased him even more than the mere material joys he hoped some day to gain from it.

Proud as she was, womanlike she at least deigned to listen to him, and his crafty brain schemed darkly to take opportunity as it came, and make her his own by treachery. He went out again among the busy workmen, and began to direct some smiths who were rivetting a suit of bra.s.s armour, engraved with a curious pattern of beetles and snakes in arabesque, which required delicate handling.

The weapon smiths were grumbling because they were short of hands for the heavier parts of their labour. Five or six of the most reliable serfs could not be found anywhere. Some one had seen them going into the forest, and it was supposed that they were acting as beaters for Geoffroi. Every one grumbled at the Baron. It was thought that this was no time for amus.e.m.e.nts. A boar would keep, herons would last till the world's end, deer would get them young every year till the world stopped. Every hour Roger Bigot came slowly nearer, and the men of Hilgay wanted the comfort of a master mind to direct and rea.s.sure them at a time like this.

The two squires fussed and raved, and stormed till the sweat stood in great drops upon them, but they could not get half the work out of the men that Geoffroi, or even Fulke, were able to. They had no personality and were ineffective, lacking that most potent and most powerful of human things. But every one did his best, nevertheless, and by "noon-meat" work had distinctly advanced, and already the castle began to wear something of an aspect of war.

It is extraordinary how a building or a place can be transformed in our minds by a few outward touches, combined with an att.i.tude of expectation. If one has waited for a wedding in an almost empty church, the coming ceremony has an actual power of destroying the somewhat funereal aspect of the place. A single vase of flowers upon the altar seems swollen to a whole tree of bloom, the footsteps of a melancholy old man unlocking the rusty door, or spreading the priest's robes for him, is magnified into the beating of many feet. A crowd is created, expectant of a bride.

In a country lane on a hot summer afternoon, on Sunday, we say that a "Sabbath peace" is over all the land. The wind in the trees seems whispering litanies, and the soft voices of the wood-pigeons sound like psalms, the woods are at orisons, and the fields at prayer. As evening comes gently on, the feeling becomes intensified, though there is nothing but the chance lin-lan-lone of a distant bell to help it. The evening is not really more peaceful and gracious on the day of rest. The rooks wing home with mellow voices indeed, and the plover calls sweetly down the wind for his mate, but these are ordinary sounds. You may hear them on week days. The peace is in our own hearts, subjective and holy, informed by our own thoughts.

In the very air of the castle there was a tremulous expectation of war.

Lady Alice, in her chamber, far away from the tumult, knew it. Little Gertrude, in the orchard, felt in her blood that the day was not ordinary; the very dogs sought wistfully to understand the excitement that pervaded everything.

At noon-meat, the jongleur, who had remained in the castle, blear-eyed and silent, got very drunk indeed. A madness of excitement got hold of him, and he sang war songs in a strident unnatural voice. The stern choruses rang out in the suns.h.i.+ne, with a pitiful whining of the crowth.

All the afternoon the men hummed fierce catches as they went about their work. The day was cloudless and very hot. About five o'clock, when the sun's rays began to strike the ground slantingly, and the world was full of the curious relative sadness that comes with evening, the toilers knocked off for a rest. The pantler brought out horns of Welsh ale, and they sat round the well discussing the great impending event, the strength of the defences, the number of the enemy, the chances of the fight. The jongleur was lying insensible by the well-side, and a merry fool was bedabbling his shameless old face with pitch from a bucket, when the attention of every one in the castle was suddenly arrested by the distant but quite unmistakable sound of a horn.

A deep silence fell upon them all. Then they heard it again, no hunting mot or tuneful call of peace, but a long, keen, threatening note of alarm!

The thundering of a horse's feet growing ever nearer and nearer throbbed in the air. The sound seemed a great way off. Some one shouted some quick orders. The pins were pulled from the portcullis chains, so that upon releasing a handle it would fall at once. That was all they could do for the moment. They heard that the horseman was coming on at a most furious gallop. The sound came from the great main drive of the forest.

Quick conjectures flew about among them all.

"G.o.dis head! surely Roger is ten days away."

"So the scouts have said. He moveth very slowly. Oswald saw it with his own eyen."

"We shall know before one should tell to twenty, listen!"

The news-bringer, whoever he might be, was now close at hand, and with startling effect he sent before him another keen vibratory note of his invisible horn. It seemed to come right up to the very castle gate, and to break in metallic sound at the feet of those standing near.

In a moment more they saw him turn out from among the interlacing forest trees, and come furiously down the turf towards them.

"It's Kenulf, the forester," shouted two or three voices at once.

"Surely some one rides after him."

The rider was now close upon them, and vainly trying to pull in his horse. The animal was maddened by the goring of his spurs--long single spikes in the fas.h.i.+on of that time--and would not stop. So, with a shrill shout of warning and an incredible echoing and thunder of noise, he galloped over the drawbridge, under the vaulted archway of the gate tower, and only pulled up when he was in the bailey itself, and confronted with the great rock of the keep.