CHAPTER IX.

GUENDOLEN.

"The sweetest lady of the time,-- Well worthy of the golden prime Of good Haroun Alraschid."

ALFRED TENNYSON.

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 alms-houses; 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 dependents, 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

"Music in running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in every thing;"

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."