University of Virginia Library

10. CHAPTER X.
THE LADY AND THE SLAVE.

“What mean you, Edith?” inquired the girl, raising herself
from her pillow, as her attention was called to the unusually
subdued tones of the Saxon maiden, who was, in her
ordinary mood, so gay and joyous, and who appeared to be
the general favorite of all around her; “what mean you,
Edith?” she repeated; “you can not be speaking of yourself;
you, who are ever blithesome and light-hearted as the bee on
the blossom, or the bird on the bough. You can have no
sorrows of the heart, I think, so penetrating as to make all
outward bodily pains forgotten, and yet—you are pale, you
are weeping? Tell me, girl—tell me, dear Edith, and let me
be your friend.”

“Friend! lady,” said the girl, looking at her wistfully, yet
doubtfully withal; “you my friend, noble lady! That were

indeed impossible. I will not say, that to the poor, to the
Saxon, to the slave, there can be no friend, under heaven; but
that you—you, a noble and a Norman! Alas! alas! that
were indeed impossible!”

“Impossible!” cried Guendolen, eagerly, forgetting her ailments
in her fine and feeling excitement. “Wherefore, how
should it be impossible? One God made us both, Edith;
and made us both out of one clay, with one life here on earth,
and one hereafter; both children of one fallen race, and heirs
of one promise; both daughters of one fair, free land; both
Englishwomen—then why not friends, Edith, and sisters?”

“Of one land, lady, it is true,” said the girl, gently. “Yes!
daughters of one fair land, for even to the slave England is
very beautiful and dear, even as to you she is free. But for
us, who were once her first-born and her favorites, that magic
word has passed away, that charm has ceased, forever. For
us, in free England's wide-rejoicing acres, there is no spot
free, save the six feet of earth that shall receive our bodies,
when the soul shall be a slave's no longer. Lady, lady, alas!
noble lady, if one God made us both of one clay, that shall
go downward to mingle with the common sod, and of one spirit
that shall mount upward, when the weariness and woe shall be
at an end forever, man has set a great gulf between us, that
we can not pass over it at all, to come the one unto the other.
Our wants may be the same, while we are here below, and
our hopes may be the same heavenward; but there all sameness
ends between us. My joys can not be your joys, and
God forbid that my sorrows should be yours, either. Our
hearts may not feel, our heads may not think, in unison, even
if our flesh be of one texture, and our souls of one spirit.

You are good, and gentle, and kind, lady, but you may never
understand what it is to be such as I.”

She ceased, but she ceased weeping also, and seemed lost in
deep thought, and almost forgetful of herself and her surroundings,
as she remained on her knees by the bedside of
Guendolen, with her head drooping from her fair bended
neck, and her embrowned but shapely hands folded in her lap.

The lady looked at her silently for a few moments, partly
in sympathy, partly, it must be said, in wonder. New ideas
were beginning to be awakened in her mind, and a perception
of something, which had never before dawned upon her, became
palpable and strong.

That which we behold, and have beheld daily perhaps for
years, naturally becomes so usual and customary in our eyes,
that we cease to regard it as any thing but as a fact, of which
we have never seen and scarcely can conceive any thing to the
contrary—that we look at it as a part of that system which
we call nature, and of which we never question the right or
the wrong, the injustice or the justice, but, knowing that it is,
never think of inquiring wherefore it is, and whether it ought
to be.

Thus it was with Guendolen de Taillebois. She had been
accustomed, during all her life, to see Saxons as serfs, and
rarely in any other capacity; for the franklins and thanes
who had retained their independence, their freedom, and a
portion of their ancestral acres, were few in numbers, and
held but little intercourse with their Norman neighbors,
being regarded by them as rude and semi-barbarous inferiors,
while they, in turn, regarded them as cruel and insolent usurpers
and oppressors.

She had seen these serfs, rudely attired indeed, and employed
in rugged, laborious, and menial occupations; but,
then, it was clear that their boorish demeanor, stolid expression,
and apparent lack of capacity or intelligence for any superior
employment, seemed to indicate them as persons filling
the station in society for which nature had adapted them.
Well-clad, sufficiently clothed, warmly lodged—in all outward
things perhaps equal, if not superior, to the peasantry of most
European countries in the present day—never, except in extreme
and exceptional cases, cruelly or severely treated, since
it was ever the owner's interest to regard the well-doing of his
serfs, it had never occurred to her that the whole race was in
itself, from innate circumstances, and apart from extraordinary
sorrows or sufferings, hopeless, miserable, and conscious of
unmerited but irretrievable degradation.

Had she considered the subject, she would of course have
perceived and admitted that sick or in health, sorrowful or at
ease, to be compelled to toil on, toil on, day after day, wearily,
at the bidding and for the benefit of another, deriving no benefit
from that toil beyond a mere subsistence, was an unhappy
and forlorn condition. Yet, how many did she not see of her
own conquering countrymen of the lower orders, small land-holders
in the country, small artisans and mechanics in the
boroughs, reduced to the same labors, and nearly to the same
necessity.

With the personal condition or habits of the serfs, the ladies
and even the lords of the great Norman families had little acquaintance,
little means even of becoming acquainted. The
services of their fortalices, all but those menial and sordid
offices of which those exalted persons had no cognizance, were

discharged by domestics, higher or lower in grade, the highest
being of gentle blood, and, in very noble houses, even of noble
blood, of their own proud race; and the Saxons, whether
bond-servants of the soil, or, what was of rare occurrence at
that time, free tenants on man service, were employed in the
fields or in the forest, under the bailiff or overseer, who ruled
them at his own discretion, and punished them, if punishment
were needed, with the stocks, the gyves, or the scourge, without
consulting the lord, and of course without so much as the
knowledge of the lady.

Even if, by hazard, it did reach the dainty ears of some fair
chatelaine, that Osrick or Edmund had undergone the lash for
some misdoing or short-coming, she heard of it much as a
modern lady would read of the committal of a pickpocket or
drunkard to the treadmill, or of a vagrant hussy to pick hemp;
wondering why those low creatures would do such wicked
things, and sorrowfully musing why such punishments should
be necessary—never suspecting the injustice of the law, or
doubting the necessity of the punishment.

And eminently thus it was with Guendolen. While in her
good aunt's priory, she had ever seen the serfs of the church
well looked after, well doing, not overworked, not oppressed,
cared for if sick, comforted if sorrowing, well tended in age, a
contented if not a happy race, so far as externals only were
regarded, and nothing hitherto had led her to look farther
than to externals. On her father's princely barony she saw
even less of them than she had been accustomed to do at the
priory, passing them casually only when in the fields at hay-making
or harvest work, or pausing perhaps to observe a rosy-cheeked
child in the Saxon quarter, or to notice a cherry-lipped

maiden by the village well. But here, too, so far as
she did see, she saw them neither squalid nor starved, neither
miserable nor maltreated. No acts of tyranny or cruelty
reached her ears, perhaps none happened which should reach
them; and of the rigorous, oppressive, insolent, and cruel laws
which regulated their condition, controlled their progress,
prevented their rise in the social scale, fettered and cramped
their domestic relations, she knew nothing.

Since her sojourn at Waltheofstow, she had gained more
personal acquaintance with her down-trodden Saxon countrymen
and countrywomen, and more especially since her accident
in the forest, than in all her previous life.

For, in the first place, Sir Philip de Morville, being unmarried
and without female relations in his family, had no
women of Norman blood employed as attendants or domestics
in the castle, the whole work of which was performed
by serf girls of various degrees, under the superintendence of
an emancipated Saxon dame, who presided over what we
should now call the housekeeper's department. Of these
girls, Edith, and one or two others, Elgythas, Berthas, and
the like, ministered to the Lady's Bower, and having perhaps
contracted something of unusual refinement and expression
from a nearer attendance on the more courtly race, and
especially on the Norman ladies who at times visited the
castle, presented, it is certain, unusually favorable specimens
of the Saxon peasantry, and had attracted the attention of
Guendolen in a greater degree than any Saxons she had previously
encountered.

Up to that time, she had regarded them, certainly, on the
whole, as a slow, as a somewhat stolid, impassive, and unimpassioned

race, less mercurial than her own impetuous,
impulsive kindred, and far less liable to strong emotions or
keen perceptions, whether of pain or pleasure. The girlish
liveliness and gentleness, and even the untaught graces of
Edith had, at the first, attracted her; and, as she was thrown
a good deal into contact with her, from the fact of her constant
attendance on the chambers she occupied, she had
become much interested in her, regarding her as one of the
happiest, most artless, and innocent little girls she had ever
met—one, she imagined, on whom no shadow of grief had
ever fallen, and whose humble lot was one of actual contentment,
if not of positive enjoyment.

Nor, hitherto, insomuch as actual realities were concerned,
was Guendolen much in error. Sir Philip de Morville, as has
been stated already, was, according to the times and their
tenor, a good and considerate lord. His bailiff was a well-intentioned,
strict man, intent on having his master's work
done to the last straw, but beyond that neither an oppressor
nor a tyrant. Kenric, her distant kinsman and betrothed,
was confessedly the best man and most favored servant in the
quarter; and his mother, who had grown old in the service
of Sir Philip's father, whom she had nursed with simple skill
through the effects of many a mimic battle in the lists,
or real though scarce more dangerous fray, now superannuated,
reigned as much the mistress of her son's hearth as though
she had been a free woman, and the cot in which she dwelt
her freehold.

Edith herself was the first bower-maiden of the castle, and,
safe under the protecting wings of dame Ulrica, the housewife,
defied the impertinence of forward pages, the importunate

gallantry of esquires, and was cheerfully acknowledged as the
best and prettiest lass of the lot, by the old gray-haired
seneschal, in his black velvet suit and gold chain of office.

Really, therefore, none of her own immediate family had
known any actual wants, or suffered any material hardships
or sorrows, through their condition, up to the period at which
my tale commences. Their greatest care, perhaps, had arisen
from the temper, surly, rude, insolent, and provocative, of
Eadwulf the Red, Kenric's brother, who had already, by misconduct,
and even actual crime, according to the Norman
code, subjected himself to severe penalties, and been reduced,
in default of harsher treatment, to the condition of a mere
slave, a chattel, saleable like an ox or ass, at the pleasure
of their lord.

This, both in its actual sense, as keeping them in constant
apprehension of what further distress Eadwulf's future misconduct
might bring upon them, and in its moral bearing, as
holding them constantly reminded of their own servile condition,
had been, thus far, their prime grief and cause of complaint,
had they been persons given to complain.

Still, although well-nigh a century had elapsed since the
Norman Conquest, and the heir of the Conqueror in the
fourth generation was sitting on the throne which that great
and politic prince won on the fatal day of Hastings, their condition
had not become habitual or easy to those, at least, who
had been reduced to slavery from freedom, by the consequences
of that disastrous battle. And such was the condition
of the family whence sprang Kenric and Edith. The Saxon
thane, Waltheof, whose name and that of his abode had descended
to the Norman fortalice which had arisen from the

ashes of his less aspiring manor, had resisted the Norman invaders
so long, with such inveterate and stubborn valor, and,
through the devotion of his tenants and followers, with such
cost of life, that when he fell in fight, and his possessions
were granted to his slayer, all the dwellers on his lands were
involved in the common ruin.

To the serfs of the soil, who had been serfs before the conquest,
it mattered but little. The slave to the Saxon was
but changed into the slave of the Norman, and did not perhaps
find in him a crueller, though he might a haughtier and
more overbearing master. But to the freeman, the doom
which consigned him to the fetters of the Norman, which converted
him from the owner into the serf of the soil, was
second only, if second, to the bitterness of death. And such
had been the doom of the grandfather of Kenric and Eadwulf.

Their mother herself had been born free, not far from the
hovel in which she still dwelt a slave, though she was but an
infant when the hurricane of war and ruin swept over the
green oaks of Sherwood, and had no memory of the time
when she was not the thrall of a foreign lord. Her father,
Wulfred, was the largest tenant under Waltheof, himself a
franklin, or small landholder, and of blood as noble, and station
more elevated than that of one half the adventures who
had flocked to the banner of William the invader. 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.

And the memory of these things had not yet passed away,
nor the bitterness of the iron departed from the children,
which had then entered into the soul of the parent.

An irrepressible desire came over the mind of Guendolen,
to know and comprehend something more fully the sentiments
and sorrows of the girl who had nursed and attended her so
gently since her adventure with the stag; and perceiving
intuitively that the slave girl, who, strange as it appeared to
her, seemed to have a species of pride of her own, would not
reveal her inward self in the presence of the vain and flippant
Norman waiting girls, she hastened to dismiss them, without
wounding their self-esteem, on a pretext of which they would
be willing enough to avail themselves.

“Lilian and Marguerite,” she said, “you must be weary
my good girls, with watching me through this long night
and my peevish temper must have made you yet more weary, for
I feel that I am not myself, and that I have tried your patience.
Go, therefore, now, and get some repose, that when I shall
truly need your services again, you may be well at ease to
serve me. I feel as if I could sleep now; and while I slumber
Edith, here, can watch beside me, and drive away the gnats
with her fan, as well as a more experienced bower-woman.”

Whether the girls suspected or not that their mistress desired
to be rid of them, they were not sorry to be dismissed
from attendance on her couch; and whether they proposed to

devote the opportunity to repose, or to gay flirtation with the
pages of their own lord's or of Sir Philip's household, they
withdrew at once, leaving the lady gazing fixedly on the motionless
and hardly conscious figure of the slave girl.

By a sudden impulse she passed her small white hand caressingly
over the soft and abundant tresses of Edith's fair
hair; and so unusual was the sensation to the daughter of the
downfallen race, that she started, as if a blow had been dealt
her, and blushed crimson, between surprise and wonder, as she
raised her great blue eyes wide open to the face of the young
lady.

“And is it so hard?” she asked, in reference more to what
she understood Edith to mean, than to any thing she had
spoken, or even hinted—“is it so hard, my poor child? I
had thought that your lot sat as lightly on you as the dewdrop
in the chalice of the bluebell. I had fancied you as
happy as any one of us here below. Will you not tell me
what is this sorrow which weighs on you so heavily? It may
be I can do something to relieve it.”

“Lady, I am, as you know, a Saxon, and a slave, the
daughter of a slave, and, should it ever be my lot to wed, the
wife, to be, of a serf, a bondman of the soil, and the mother
of things doomed, or ere they see the blessed light of Heaven,
to the collar and the chain from the cradle to the grave.
Think you a woman, with such thoughts as these at her heart,
can be very gay or joyous?”

“And yet, you were both gay and joyous yesterday, Edith;
and all last week, since I have been at the castle, I have heard
no sounds so gay or so pleasant to my ear as your merry ballads.
And you are no more a serf this morn than you were

yestrene, and the good God alone knows what any of us all
may be on the morrow, Edith. Something, I know, must
have happened, girl, to make you wear a face so altered on
this beautiful summer day, and carry so sad a heart, when all
the world is so happy.”

“All the world, lady!” replied Edith; “all the world
happy! Alas! not one tenth of it, unless you mean the
beasts and the birds, which, knowing nothing, are blithe in their
happy innocence. Of the human world around us, lady, one
half knows not, and more by far than one half cares not, how
miserable or how hopeless are their fellows—nor, if all knew
and cared for all, could they either comprehend or console,
much less relieve, the miserable.”

“But if I be one of those, Edith, who know not, I am at
least not one of those who care not. Therefore, I come back
to the place whence I started. Something has happened,
which makes you dwell so much more dolefully to-day, upon
that which weighed not on you, yestrene, heavier than a
feather.”

“Something has happened, lady. But it is all one; for it
resolves itself in all but into this; I am a slave—a slave, until
life is over.”

“This is strange,” said Guendolen, thoughtfully. “I do
not understand—may not understand this. It does not seem
to me that your duties are so very hard, your life so very
painful, or your rule so very strict, that you should suddenly
thus give way to utter gloom and despondency, for no cause
but what you have known for years, and found endurable
until this moment.”

“But henceforth unendurable. Oh! talk not, lady, talk

not. You may console the dying, for to him there is a hope,
a present hope of a quick-coming future. But comfort not
the slave; for to him the bitterest and most cruel past is happier
than the hopeless present, if only for that it is past; and
the present, hopeless as it is, is yet less desperate than the future;
for to the slave, in the future, every thing except happiness
is possible. I may seem to speak enigmas to you, lady,
and I am sure that you do not understand me—how should
you? 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? Then you
must let me divine it. You have learned your own heart of
late. You have discovered that you love, Edith.”

“And if it were so, lady,” replied the girl, darkly, “were
not that enough to make a woman, who is at once a Christian
and a slave, both despond and despair? First to love a
slave—for to love other than a slave, being herself a slave
were the same, as for a mortal to be enamored of a star in
heaven—and then, even if license were granted to wed him
she loved, which is not certain or even of usual occurrence, to
be the mother of babes, to whom but one reality is secured,
beyond a peradventure, the reality that they too must be slaves
and wretched. But you are wrong, lady. I have not learned
my own heart of late—I have known it long. I have not

discovered but now that I love, nor has he whom I love. We
have been betrothed this year and better.”

“What then? what then?” cried Guendolen, eagerly.
“Will not Sir Philip consent? If that be all, dry your tears,
Edith; so small a boon as that I can command by a single
word.”

“Sir Philip heeds not such matters, lady. His bailiff has
consented, if that were all.”

“What is it, then? This scruple about babes,” said Guendolen,
thoughtfully. “It is sad—it is sad, indeed. Yet if
you love him, as you say, and your life in its actual reality be
not so bitter—”

“No, lady, no; it is not even that. If I had scruples on
that head, they have vanished; Kenric has convinced me—”

“Kenric!” exclaimed Guendolen, starting erect into a sitting
attitude, forgetful of her pains and bruises. “What, the
brave man who saved me from the stag at the risk of his own
life, who was half slain in serving me—is he—is he your
Kenric?”

“The same,” answered Edith, with the quiet accent of fixed
sorrow. “And the same for whom you procured the priceless
boon of liberty.”

An idea flashed, like the electric fluid, across the mind of
Guendolen, who up to that moment had suspected nothing of
the connection between her preserver and the beautiful girl
before her, and who knew nothing of his grand refusal to
accept even liberty itself, most inestimable of all gifts, which
could not be shared by those whom he loved beyond liberty
or life; and she imagined that she read the secret, and had
pierced the maiden's mystery.

“Can it be?” she said, sorrowfully, and seeming rather to
be communing with herself, than inquiring of her companion.
“Can it be that one so brave, so generous, and seemingly so
noble, should be so base and abject? Oh! but these men,
these men, if tale and history speak true, they are the same
all and ever—false, selfish, and deceivers!”

“Kenric, lady?”

“And because he is free—the freeman but of the hour—
he has despised thee, Edith, the slave girl? But hold thy
head high, sweet one, and thy heart higher. Thou shalt be
free to-morrow, girl, and the mate of his betters; it shall be
thou, to-morrow, who shall repay scorn with scorn, and—”

“No, lady, no,” cried the girl, who had been hitherto
silenced and overpowered by the impulsive vehemence of
Guendolen. “You misapprehend me altogether. It is not I
whom he rejected, for that he was free; but liberty that he
cast from him, as a toy not worth the having, because I might
not be free with him—I, and his aged mother, of whom he
is, alone, the only stay and comfort.”

“Noble! noble!” cried the Norman girl, joyously clapping
her hands together. “Noble and glorious, gentle and great!
This, this, indeed, is true nobility! Why do we Normans
boast ourselves, as if we alone could think great thoughts, or
do great deeds? and here we are outdone, beyond all question
or comparison, in the true gentleness of perfect chivalry; and
that, by a Saxon slave. But be of good cheer, Edith, my
sister and my friend; be of good cheer. 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. So small a
thing as this I can right readily do with my good father, and
he as readily with our true friend, noble Sir Philip de Morville.
But hark! I hear their horses' hoofs and the whimpering
of their hounds in the court-yard. To the bartizan, girl,
to the bartizan! Is it they—is it the chase returning?”

“It is they, dear lady—your noble sire and Sir Philip, and
all the knights who rode forth this morning—all laughing in
high merriment and glee! and now they mount the steps—
they have entered.”

“No better moment, then, to press a boon. Fly, girl, be
your wishes wings to your speech. I would see my father
straightway!”