CHAPTER VII.
The stately mirth of the evening banquet seemed to Harold as the
malign revel of some demoniac orgy. He thought he read in every face
the exultation over the sale of England. Every light laugh in the
proverbial ease of the social Normans rang on his ear like the joy of
a ghastly Sabbat. All his senses preternaturally sharpened to that
magnetic keenness in which we less hear and see than conceive and
divine, the lowest murmur William breathed in the ear of Odo boomed
clear to his own; the slightest interchange of glance between some
dark-browed priest and large-breasted warrior, flashed upon his
vision. The irritation of his recent and neglected wound combined
with his mental excitement to quicken, yet to confuse, his faculties.
Body and soul were fevered. He floated, as it were, between a
delirium and a dream.
Late in the evening he was led into the chamber where the Duchess sat
alone with Adeliza and her second son William--a boy who had the red
hair and florid hues of the ancestral Dane, but was not without a
certain bold and strange kind of beauty, and who, even in childhood,
all covered with broidery and gems, betrayed the passion for that
extravagant and fantastic foppery for which William the Red King, to
the scandal of Church and pulpit, exchanged the decorous pomp of his
father's generation. A formal presentation of Harold to the little
maid was followed by a brief ceremony of words, which conveyed what to
the scornful sense of the Earl seemed the mockery of betrothal between
infant and bearded man. Glozing congratulations buzzed around him;
then there was a flash of lights on his dizzy eyes, he found himself
moving through a corridor between Odo and William. He was in his room
hung with arras and strewed with rushes; before him in niches, various
images of the Virgin, the Archangel Michael, St. Stephen, St. Peter,
St. John, St. Valery; and from the bells in the monastic edifice hard
by tolled the third watch [201] of the night--the narrow casement was
out of reach, high in the massive wall, and the starlight was darkened
by the great church tower. Harold longed for air. All his earldom
had he given at that moment, to feel the cold blast of his native
skies moaning round his Saxon wolds. He opened his door, and looked
forth. A lanthorn swung on high from the groined roof of the
corridor. By the lanthorn stood a tall sentry in arms, and its gleam
fell red upon an iron grate that jealously closed the egress. The
Earl closed the door, and sat down on his bed, covering his face with
his clenched hand. The veins throbbed in every pulse, his own touch
seemed to him like fire. The prophecies of Hilda on the fatal night
by the bautastein, which had decided him to reject the prayer of
Gurth, the fears of Edith, and the cautions of Edward, came back to
him, dark, haunting, and overmasteringly. They rose between him and
his sober sense, whenever he sought to re-collect his thoughts, now to
madden him with the sense of his folly in belief, now to divert his
mind from the perilous present to the triumphant future they foretold;
and of all the varying chaunts of the Vala, ever two lines seemed to
burn into his memory, and to knell upon his ear, as if they contained
the counsel they ordained him to pursue:
"GUILE BY GUILE OPPOSE, and never
Crown and brow shall Force dissever!"
So there he sat, locked and rigid, not reclining, not disrobing, till
in that posture a haggard, troubled, fitful sleep came over him; nor
did he wake till the hour of prime [202], when ringing bells and
tramping feet, and the hum of prayer from the neighbouring chapel,
roused him into waking yet more troubled, and well-nigh as dreamy.
But now Godrith and Haco entered the room, and the former inquired
with some surprise in his tone, if he had arranged with the Duke to
depart that day; "For," said he, "the Duke's hors-thegn has just been
with me, to say that the Duke himself, and a stately retinue, are to
accompany you this evening towards Harfleur, where a ship will be in
readiness for our transport; and I know that the chamberlain (a
courteous and pleasant man) is going round to my fellow-thegns in your
train, with gifts of hawks, and chains, and broidered palls."
"It is so," said Haco, in answer to Harold's brightening and appealing
eye.
"Go then, at once, Godrith," exclaimed the Earl, bounding to his feet,
"have all in order to part at the first break of the trump. Never, I
ween, did trump sound so cheerily as the blast that shall announce our
return to England. Haste--haste!"
As Godrith, pleased in the Earl's pleasure, though himself already
much fascinated by the honours he had received and the splendor he had
witnessed, withdrew, Haco said, "Thou has taken my counsel, noble
kinsman?"
"Question me not, Haco! Out of my memory, all that hath passed here!"
"Not yet," said Haco, with that gloomy and intense seriousness of
voice and aspect, which was so at variance with his years, and which
impressed all he said with an indescribable authority. "Not yet; for
even while the chamberlain went his round with the parting gifts, I,
standing in the angle of the wall in the yard, heard the Duke's deep
whisper to Roger Bigod, who has the guard of the keape, 'Have the men
all armed at noon in the passage below the council-hall, to mount at
the stamp of my foot: and if then I give thee a prisoner--wonder not,
but lodge him--' The Duke paused; and Bigod said, 'Where, my liege?'
And the Duke answered fiercely, 'Where? why, where but in the Tour
noir?--where but in the cell in which Malvoisin rotted out his last
hour?' Not yet, then, let the memory of Norman wile pass away; let
the lip guard the freedom still."
All the bright native soul that before Haco spoke had dawned gradually
back on the Earl's fair face, now closed itself up, as the leaves of a
poisoned flower; and the pupil of the eye receding, left to the orb
that secret and strange expression which had baffled all readers of
the heart in the look of his impenetrable father.
"Guile by guile oppose!" he muttered vaguely; then started, clenched
his hand, and smiled.
In a few moments, more than the usual levee of Norman nobles thronged
into the room; and what with the wonted order of the morning, in the
repast, the church service of tierce, and a ceremonial visit to
Matilda, who confirmed the intelligence that all was in preparation
for his departure, and charged him with gifts of her own needlework to
his sister the Queen, and various messages of gracious nature, the
time waxed late into noon without his having yet seen either William
or Odo.
He was still with Matilda, when the Lords Fitzosborne and Raoul de
Tancarville entered in full robes of state, and with countenances
unusually composed and grave, and prayed the Earl to accompany them
into the Duke's presence.
Harold obeyed in silence, not unprepared for covert danger, by the
formality of the counts, as by the warnings of Haco; but, indeed,
undivining the solemnity of the appointed snare. On entering the
lofty hall, he beheld William seated in state; his sword of office in
his hand, his ducal robe on his imposing form, and with that
peculiarly erect air of the head which he assumed upon all ceremonial
occasions [203]. Behind him stood Odo of Bayeux, in aube and gallium;
some score of the Duke's greatest vassals; and at a little distance
from the throne chair, was what seemed a table; or vast chest, covered
all over with cloth of gold.
Small time for wonder or self-collection did the Duke give the Saxon.
"Approach, Harold," said he, in the full tones of that voice, so
singularly effective in command; "approach, and without fear, as
without regret. Before the members of this noble assembly--all
witnesses of thy faith, and all guarantees of mine--I summon thee to
confirm by oath the promises thou mad'st me yesterday; namely, to aid
me to obtain the kingdom of England on the death of King Edward, my
cousin; to marry my daughter Adeliza; and to send thy sister hither,
that I may wed her, as we agreed, to one of my worthiest and prowest
counts. Advance thou, Odo, my brother, and repeat to the noble Earl
the Norman form by which he will take the oath."
Then Odo stood forth by that mysterious receptacle covered with the
cloth of gold, and said briefly, "Thou wilt swear, as far as is in thy
power, to fulfil thy agreement with William, Duke of the Normans, if
thou live, and God aid thee; and in witness of that oath thou wilt lay
thy hand upon the reliquaire," pointing to a small box that lay on the
cloth of gold.
All this was so sudden--all flashed so rapidly upon the Earl, whose
natural intellect, however great, was, as we have often seen, more
deliberate than prompt--so thoroughly was the bold heart, which no
siege could have sapped, taken by surprise and guile--so paramount
through all the whirl and tumult of his mind, rose the thought of
England irrevocably lost, if he who alone could save her was in the
Norman dungeons--so darkly did all Haco's fears, and his own just
suspicions, quell and master him, that mechanically, dizzily,
dreamily, he laid his hand on the reliquaire, and repeated, with
automaton lips:
"If I live, and if God aid me to it!"
Then all the assembly repeated solemnly:
"God aid him!"
And suddenly, at a sign from William, Odo and Raoul de Tancarville
raised the gold cloth, and the Duke's voice bade Harold look below.
As when man descends from the gilded sepulchre to the loathsome
charnel, so at the lifting of that cloth, all the dread ghastliness of
Death was revealed. There, from abbey and from church, from cyst and
from shrine, had been collected all the relics of human nothingness in
which superstition adored the mementos of saints divine; there lay,
pell mell and huddled, skeleton and mummy--the dry dark skin, the
white gleaming bones of the dead, mockingly cased in gold, and decked
with rubies; there, grim fingers protruded through the hideous chaos,
and pointed towards the living man ensnared; there, the skull grinned
scoff under the holy mitre;--and suddenly rushed back, luminous and
searing upon Harold's memory, the dream long forgotten, or but dimly
remembered in the healthful business of life--the gibe and the wirble
of the dead men's bones.
"At that sight," say the Norman chronicles, "the Earl shuddered and
trembled."
"Awful, indeed, thine oath, and natural thine emotion," said the Duke;
"for in that cyst are all those relics which religion deems the
holiest in our land. The dead have heard thine oath, and the saints
even now record it in the halls of heaven! Cover again the holy
bones!"
