University of Virginia Library

9. CHAPTER IX.
GUENDOLEN.

A sister of Guendolen's departed mother, Abbess of St.
Hilda, a woman of unusual intellect, and judgment, character
and feelings, in no degree inferior to her talents, had taken
charge of her orphan niece immediately after the mother's
death, and had brought her up, a flower literally untouched
by the sun as by the storms of the world, in the serene and
tranquil life of the cloister, when the cloister was indeed the
seat of piety, and purity, and peace; in some cases the only
refuge from the violence and savage lusts of those rugged
days; never then the abode, at least in England, of morose
bigotry or fierce fanaticism, but the home of quiet contemplation,
of meek virtue, and peaceful cheerfulness.

The monasteries and priories of those days were not the sullen
gaols of the soul, the hives of drones, or the schools of
ignorance and bitter sectarian persecution which they have
become in these latter days, nor were their inmates then
immured as the tenants of the dungeon cell.

The abbey lands were ever the best tilled; the abbey

tenants ever the happiest, the best clad, the richest, and the
freest of the peasantry of England. The monks, those of
Saxon race especially, were the country curates of the twelfth
century; it was they who fed the hungry, who medicined the
sick, who consoled the sad at heart, who supported the
widow and the fatherless, who supported the oppressed, and
smoothed the passage through the dark portals to the dying
Christian. There were no poor laws in those days, nor almshouses;
the open gates and liberal doles of the old English
abbeys bestowed unstinted and ungrudging charity on all who
claimed it. The abbot on his soft-paced palfrey, or the prioress
on her well-trained jennet, as they made their progresses
through the green fields and humble hamlets of their dependants,
were hailed ever with deferential joy and affectionate
reverence; and the serf, who would lout sullenly before the
haughty brow of his military chief, and scowl savagely with
hand on the dudgeon hilt after he had ridden past, would run a
mile to remove a fallen trunk from the path of the jolly prior,
or three, to guide the jennet of the mild-eyed lady abbess
through the difficult ford, or over the bad bit of the road,
and think himself richly paid by a benediction.

In such a tranquil tenor had been passed the early years
of the beautiful young Guendolen; and while she learned
every accomplishment of the day—for in those days the nunneries
were the schools of all that was delicate, and refined,
and gentle, the schools of the softer arts, especially of music
and illumination, as were the monasteries the shrines which
alone kept alive the fire of science, and nursed the lamp of
letters, undying through those dark and dreary ages—she
learned also to be humble-minded, no less than holy-hearted,

to be compassionate, and kind, and sentient of others' sorrows;
she learned, above all things, that meekness and
modesty, and a gentle bearing toward the lowliest of her fellow-beings,
were the choicest ornaments to a maiden of the
loftiest birth.

Herself a Norman of the purest Norman strain, descended
from those of whom, if not kings themselves, kings were descended,
who claimed to be the peers of the monarchs to
whom their own good swords gave royalty, she had never imbibed
one idea of scorn for the conquered, the debased, the
downfallen Saxon.

The kindest, the gentlest, the sagest, and at the same time
the most refined and polished of all her preceptors, her
spiritual pastor also, and confessor, was an old Saxon monk,
originally from the convent of Burton on the Trent, who had
migrated northward, and pitched the tent of his declining
years in a hermitage situate in the glade of a deep Northumbrian
wood, not far removed from the priory over which her
aunt presided with so much dignity and grace.

He had been a pilgrim, a prisoner in the Holy Land, had
visited the wild monasteries of Lebanon and Athos; he had
seen the pyramids “piercing the deep Egyptian sky,” had
mused under the broken arches of the Coliseum, and listened,
like the great historian of Rome, to the bare-footed friars
chanting their hymns among the ruins of Jupiter Capitoline.

Like Ulysses, he had seen the lands, he had studied the
manners, and learned to speak the tongues, of many men and
nations; nor, while he had learned in the east strange mysteries
of science, though he had solved the secrets of chemistry,
and learned, long before the birth of “starry Galileo,”

to know the stars with their uprisings and their settings;
though he knew the nature, the properties, the secret virtues,
and the name of every floweret of the forest, of every ore of
the swart mine, he had not neglected the gentler culture,
which wreathes so graciously the wrinkled brow of wisdom.
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. He was
one, in fact, of those gifted beings who could discern
and as he felt himself, so had he taught her to feel; and of
what he knew himself, much he had taught her to know
likewise.

Seeing, hearing, knowing him to be what he was, and, as
is the wont ever with young and ingenuous minds, imagining
him to be something far wiser, greater, and better than he
really was, she was content at first, while other men were yet
unknown to her, to hold him something almost supernaturally,
ineffably beneficent and wise; and this incomparable being she
knew also to be a Saxon. She saw her aunt, who, gentle as
she was, and gracious, had yet a touch of the old Norse pride

of blood, untutored by the teachings of religion, and untamed
by the discipline of the church, bow submissively to his advice,
defer respectfully to his opinion, hang persuaded on his
eloquence—and yet he was a Saxon.

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.

How then could she look upon the race from which he
sprang as inferior—as low and degraded by the hand of nature—when
not the sagest statesman, the most royal prince,
the proudest chevalier, the gentlest troubadour, could vie with
him in one point of intellect or of refinement—with him, the
Saxon priest, son himself, as he himself had told her, of a
Saxon serf.

These were the antecedents, this the character of the beautiful
girl, who, on the morning following her adventure in the
forest, lay, supported by a pile of cushions, on one of the broad
couches in the Lady's Bower of Waltheofstow, inhaling the
fresh perfumed breath of the western air, as it swept in, over
the shrubs and flowers in the bartizan, through the window
of the turret chamber. She was beautiful as ever, but very
pale, and still suffering, as it would seem, from the effects of
her fall and the injuries she had received in the struggle with
the terrible wild beast; for, whenever she attempted to move

or to turn her body, an expression of pain passed for a moment
across the pure, fair face, and once a slight murmur escaped
from her closed lips.

One or two waiting-maids, of Norman race, attended by the
side of her couch, one of them cooling her brow with a fan
of peacock's feathers, the other sprinkling perfumes through
the chamber, and now and again striving to amuse her by
reading aloud from a ponderous illuminated tome, larger than
a modern cyclopedia, the interminable adventures and sufferings
of that true love, whose “course never did run smooth,”
and feats of knightly prowess, recorded in one of the interminable
romances of the time. But to none of these did the
Lady Guendolen seriously incline her ear; and the faces of the
attendant girls began to wear an expression, not of weariness
only, but of discontent, and, perhaps, even of a deeper and
bitterer feeling.

The Lady Guendolen was ill at ease; she was, most rare
occurrence for one of her soft though impulsive disposition,
impatient, perhaps querulous.

She could not be amused by any of their efforts. Her
mind was far away; she craved something which they could
not give, and was restless at their inability. Three times since
her awakening, though the hour was still early, she had inquired
for Sir Yvo, and had sent to desire his presence. The
first time, her messengers brought her back word that he had
not yet arisen; the second, that he was breakfasting, but now,
in the knight's hall with Sir Philip, and the Sieurs of Maltravers,
De Vesey, and Mauleverer, who had ridden over to
Waltheofstow to fly their hawks, and that he would be with
her ere long; and the third, that the good knight must have

forgotten, for that he had taken horse and ridden away with
the rest of the company into the meadows by the banks of
brimful Idle, to enjoy the “Mystery of Rivers,” as it was the
fashion to term the sport of falconry, in the high-flown language
of the chase.

For a moment her pale face flushed, her eye flashed, and
she bit her lip, and drummed impatiently with her little
fingers on the velvet-pillows which supported her aching head;
then, smiling at her own momentary ill-humor, she bade her
girl Marguerite go seek the Saxon maiden, Edith, if she were
in the castle, and if not, to see that a message should be sent
down for her to the serfs' quarter.

With many a toss of her pretty head, and many a wayward
feminine expression of annoyance, which from ruder lips
would probably have taken the shape of an imprecation, the
injured damsel betook herself, through winding passages and
stairways in the thickness of the wall, to the pages' waiting-chamber
on the next floor below. Then tripping, with a demure
look, into the square vaulted room, in which were
lounging three gayly-dressed, long-haired boys, one twanging
a guitar in the embrasure of the window, and the other two
playing at tables on a board covered with a scarlet cloth—

“Here, Damian,” she said, somewhat sharply, for the temper
of the mistress is sure to be reflected in that of the maid,
losing nothing by the transmission, “for what are you loitering
there, with that old tuneless gittern, when the Lady Guendolen
has been calling for you this hour past?”

“And how, in the name of St. Hubert,” replied the boy,
who had rather been out with the falconers on the breezy leas,
than mewed in the hall to await a lady's pleasure—“how, in

the name of St. Hubert! should I know that the Lady Guendolen
had called for me, when no one has been near this old
den since Sir Yvo rode forth on brown Roncesval, with Diamond
on his fist? And as for my gittern being tuneless, I've
heard you tell a different tale, pretty Mistress Marguerite.
But let us have your message, if you 've got one; for I see
you 're as fidgety as a thorough-bred sorrel filly, and as hot-tempered,
too.”

“Sorrel filly, indeed!” said the girl, half-laughing, half-indignant.
“I wish you could see my lady, Damian, if you
call me fidgety and hot-tempered. I wish you could see my
lady, that 's just all, this morning.”

“The message, the message, Marguerite, if there be one, or
if you have aught in your head but to make mischief.”

“Why, I do believe my lady's bewitched since her fall;
for nothing will go down with her now-a-days but that pink-and-white,
flaxen-haired doll, Edith. I can't think what she
sees in her, that she must needs ever have the clumsy Saxon
wench about her. I should think gentle Norman blood might
serve her turn.”

“I don't know, Marguerite,” answered the boy, wishing to
tease her; “Edith is a very pretty girl, indeed; I don't know
but she 's the very prettiest I ever saw. Dark-haired and
dark-eyed people always admire their opposites, they say;
and for my part, I think her blue eyes glance as if they reflected
heaven's own light in them; and her flaxen-hair looks
like a cloud high up in heaven, that has just caught the first
golden glitter of the morning sunbeams. And clumsy! how
can you call her clumsy, Marguerite? I am sure, when she
came flitting down the hill, with her long locks flowing in

the breeze, and her thin garments streaming back from her
shapely figure, she looked liker to a creature of the air, than
to a mere mortal girl, running down a sandy road. I should
like to see you run like her, Mistress Marguerite.”

“Me run!” exclaimed the Norman damsel, indignantly;
“when ever did you see a Norman lady run? But you 're
just like the rest of them; caught ever by the first fresh face.
Well, sir, since you 're so bewitched, like my pretty lady above
stairs, with your Saxon angel, the message I have brought you
will just meet your humor. You will see, sir, if this Saxon
angel be in the castle, sir; and if she be not, sir, your magnificence
will proceed to the Saxon quarter, and request her
angelship to come forthwith to my lady's chamber, and to
come quickly, too. And you can escort her, Sir Page, and
lend her your hand up the hill; and steal a kiss, if you can,
Sir Page, on the way!”

“Just so, Mistress Marguerite,” returned the boy, “just so.
Your commands shall be obeyed to the letter. And as to
the kiss, I'll try, if I can get a chance; but I 'm afraid she 's
too modest to kiss young men.”

And, taking up his dirk and bonnet from the board, he
darted out of the room, without awaiting her reply, having
succeeded, to his heart's content, in chafing her to somewhat
higher than blood-heat; so that she returned to her lady's
bower even more discomposed than when she left it; but
Guendolen was too much occupied with other thoughts to
notice the girl's ill-temper, and within half an hour a light
foot was heard at the door, and the Saxon slave girl
entered.

“How can I serve you, dear lady?” she said, coming up,

and kneeling at the couch side. “You are very pale. I trust
you be not the worse this morning.”

“Very weak, Edith, and sore all over. I feel as if every
limb were broken; and I want you, with your gentle hand
and gentle voice, to soothe me.”

“Ah! dearest lady, our Holy Mother send that your spirit
never may be so sore as to take no heed of the body's aching,
nor your heart so broken as to know not whether your limbs
were torn asunder.”