The Rival Heirs; being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune by A. D. Crake (leveled readers TXT) 📗

They ate dried meats, as a rule, with their cakes of bread, and washed them down with thin wine or mead, much diluted, and then the forest was generally the rendezvous.

On winter evenings, or when the weather was very bad, the chaplain was expected to teach them a little reading or writing in Latin or Norman French--never in English; and this was almost all the learning they acquired, in the modern sense of the word.

But they knew a hundred things modern boys know nothing at all about, and every muscle and nerve was braced to be steady and true, whether for fight or sport. Our young pages could find their way in the deep woods by observing the moss on the trees, or the sides on which the oaks or elms threw their branches the most freely; and when benighted they could sleep with patience on a couch of withered leaves, and not suffer with a cold in the head the next day. They feared neither wolf nor bear, nor, for that matter, anything save disgrace.

The imputation of cowardice, or of any mean vice, such as lying, was only to be avenged by bloodshed. No gentleman could bear it and retain his claim to the name. But there were higher duties inculcated wheresoever the obligations of chivalry were fully carried out: the duty of succouring the distressed, or redressing wrong--of devotion to God and His Church, and hatred of the devil and his works.

Alas! how often one aspect of chivalry alone, and that the worst, was found to exist; the ideal was too high for fallen nature. Our youthful readers will be able to judge which aspect was uppermost at Aescendune under its first Norman lords.

Nought was changed in the outward aspect of the scene, save that a stern Norman castle, with its dungeons and towers, was rising in the place of the old hall, doomed to destruction because it was ill adapted for defensive warfare.

Such defect had hardly been appreciated in the days of the old English thane, for England had enjoyed half a century of comparative peace, and her people had begun to build like those who sat at peace beneath their own "vine and fig tree," ere the Normans brought the stern realities of war into the unhappy land, or rather of serfdom, oppression, and slavery, only varied by convulsive struggles for liberty--always, alas! destined to be made in vain.

The four pages were one day wandering in the outskirts of the forest, clothed in light hunting dresses--tunics, confined by broad belts and edged with fur; while leggings protected the feet and ankles from thorns. They each had hunting spears and bows, which were borne by young thralls, with sheaves of arrows strung to their backs, while they held dogs by leashes of leather.

He who bore the air of the leader of the party was tall and dark, of slender build, but with all those characteristics which denoted the conquering race; the fearless eye, the haughty air of those born to command. A second, our readers would have recognised as a typical English boy; his nut-brown hair and blue eyes contrasted strongly with the features of his companions, so marked then were those differences which have long since vanished--vanished, or at least have become so shared amongst the English people, that none can say which is of Anglo-Saxon, which of Norman blood, by the cast of the face.

And this English lad, whose dress in no wise distinguished him from his companions, was evidently ill at ease amongst them; from time to time he reddened as Etienne, Pierre, or Louis called the unhappy thralls "English swine," "young porkers," or the like, and bestowed upon them far more kicks than coins.

"You forget, Etienne, that I am English."

"Nay, my brother Wilfred, thou wilt not allow me to do that, but of course in thy case 'noblesse oblige.'"

These last words were uttered with a most evident sneer, and the other lads laughed aloud; whereupon the English lad reddened, then his fists clenched, and a looker-on would have expected an immediate outbreak, when suddenly a change passed over his features, as if he were making a violent effort at self composure.

"Thou hast dropped an arrow, thou young porker," cried Etienne, the while he struck a violent blow with his switch across the face and eyes of one of his attendants; "dost thou think there are so few of thy fellow swine to shoot, that arrows are useless in these woods! Ah! look at that sight there, and take timely warning."

The sight in question was a gallows, from which rotted, pendant, the corpse of an unhappy Englishman, hanged for killing a deer.

"If every oak in Aescendune woods bore such acorns, civilised folk might soon be happy."

Wilfred uttered a deep malediction, which he could not suppress, and, leaving the party, disappeared from sight in the woods.

One of the Norman lads looked after him with some little appearance of sympathy, and when he had gone, said:

"Is it like gentlemen to torment each other thus?"

"Not each other, certainly!"

"He is your brother in a way, the son of your stepmother, the lady of Aescendune."

"He is in a way, but some brothers would be better out of the way than in it, besides--why does he not show fight? A Norman would with half the provocation."

"You could not fight with him," said Louis de Marmontier, who was the youngest of the pages who were learning "chivalry" at the castle of Aescendune, in company with Etienne and Wilfred, under the fostering care of the baron.

"I don't know," said the fierce young Norman, and, breaking off the conversation, switched savagely at the head of a thistle close at hand, which he neatly beheaded.

The others quite understood the action and the bitterness with which he spoke, for they knew that he considered himself defrauded of the lands of Aescendune by the arrangements Bishop Geoffrey had effected in favour of Wilfred.

Meanwhile, plunging into a thicket, and crossing a brook, Wilfred arrived by a shorter route first at the hall, and made his way to his mother's bower, situated in a portion of the ancient building not yet destroyed, although doomed to make way for Norman improvements.

The lady of Aescendune sat lonely in her bower; her features were pale, and she seemed all too sad for one so highly born, and so good a friend to the suffering and the poor; her gaze was like that of one whose thoughts are far away--perhaps they had strayed into Paradise in search of him whose loss was daily making earth more like a desert to her.

Wilfred came and stood beside her, and her hand played with his flowing hair until she felt that he was sobbing by her side.

"What is the matter, my dear boy?"

"Matter! I cannot bear it any longer. I must break the promise thou hast forced me to give."

"Break thy promise, Wilfred? What would thy sainted father say, did he hear thee? And how dost thou know that he does not hear?"

"If he were here he would exact no such promise, I am sure; he would not at least make me appear as a coward in outlandish eyes, and cringe before these proud Frenchmen."

Wilfred used the word Frenchmen with the greatest scorn. He knew that the Normans scorned the name as much as they did the name Englishmen, of which their descendants lived to be so proud.

What was this promise which bound the poor lad as in a chain of iron?

Not on any account to let himself be drawn into a quarrel with Etienne.

"Thy father would feel as I do, dear son, were he in our place. Dost thou not see that we poor English only hold our own by sufferance, and that any pretext upon which they could seize would be used ruthlessly against us? Yes, thy death might be the result of any ill-timed quarrel, and thou mightest leave thy mother alone. Nay, dear, dear son, at least while thy mother lives."

"Oh, how can I?"

"Bear as a Christian, then, if thou canst not as an Englishman. The time will not be long that I shall live to implore thee."

"Nay, dear mother, surely thou art not ailing."

"Sick unto death, Wilfred, I fear; nay, but for thee I should say, I hope; for shall I not then rejoin thy dear father in a land where war and violence are unknown? But for thy sake, dear son, I would fain live."

Poor Wilfred was sobbing by her side, overcome by the blank vision thus opening before him. What would the world be to him, left alone amidst fierce and hateful foreigners, who had slain his father, and would willingly slay him?

"Mother, I cannot live without you. If you die--" and he could say no more, for it shamed his manhood to weep, as he would have said, "like a girl."

Poor lad, we must excuse him.

"Now, my dear Wilfred, wilt thou not renew thy promise, and pray God for help to keep it?"

"Yes, by God's help, at least while you live; but dost thou think thou art so ill, dear mother?--it is but fancy."

"Nay, I feel I am daily, hourly, drawing nearer my end, as if the lamp of life were burning more and more dimly. Morning after morning I rise weaker from my bed, and mortal strength seems slowly and surely forsaking me. But it will be but a short parting; thou must pray that we may live for ever together. God will grant it for His dear Son's sake."

And the mother and son knelt down to pray.

It was too true, the English lady of Aescendune was slowly declining--passing away, drawing nearer daily to the bright land where her lost Edmund had gone before.

It was a complaint which no one understood, although a Jewish physician, whom her husband in his anxiety consulted, prescribed a medicine which he said would ensure her recovery in a few weeks. This medicine the baron--for to such rank had Hugo de Malville been raised, on his accession to the lands of Aescendune--this medicine he would always administer with his own hand. Sometimes Wilfred was standing by, and noticed that, dropped in water, it diffused at first a sapphire hue, but that upon exposure to the air, that of the ruby succeeded.

Oh, those days of anxiety and grief--those days when the loved patient was so manifestly loosing her hold upon life, although sometimes there would come a tantalising change for the better, and bring back hopes never to be realised.

The boyish reader will easily imagine what Wilfred had to bear all this time from his Norman companions, from whose society there was no escape--with whom he had to share not only the very few hours allotted to study, but those of recreation also. Study, indeed, meant chiefly the use and practice of warlike weapons, the learning of the technical terms of chivalry, and the acquirement, it may be, of sufficient letters to spell through a challenge.

So thoroughly was war the Norman instinct, that every occupation of life was more or less connected with it; and the only recreation which varied the hours of fencing, jousting, tilting, etc., was the kindred excitement of the chase, pursued with the greatest avidity amongst the wooded hills around Aescendune.

Wilfred was not backward either in mimic war or in love of the chase; but he was growing taciturn and sullen, scarcely ever speaking, save when spoken to, and even in the latter case he generally replied with brief and curt words.

Hence it may be easily guessed that he was not popular.

For this he cared little; all his leisure was spent by the bedside of his dying mother, whom he felt he was so soon about to lose, and when with her and his sister Edith he felt that home--the home of his happy childhood--was not yet a mere remembrance of the vanished past.

But the sad day, so long foreseen, at length arrived.

She was in her chamber, with her son and daughter--the three were together for the last time on earth. They had been talking of the happy days when the husband and father was yet alive, before the fatal day of Senlac. Alone with her children, she felt far more at peace than usual; it seemed, she said, like the dear old times.

But this evening the presentiment of the coming end seemed strong upon her, and she spoke to her darling boy of the duties which would devolve upon him when she was gone, bidding him be obedient and loyal to his Norman stepfather, that he might have the more power to protect the poor oppressed people of Aescendune, and to shield his dear sister from harm in a world of wrong and violence. She bade him look forward to a better world, where parents and children, separated by death, would meet together never to part, and to live as a Christian man should, that