by John Buchan
“You find a defenceless house and a woman to conquer,” she railed.
“Long may it need no other warder,” said Jehan, dismounting and looking at her across the water.
“The fortune of war has given me a home, mistress. I would dwell in amity with my neighbours.”
“Amity!” she cried in scorn. “You will get none from me. My brother Aelward will do the parleying.”
“So be it,” he said. “Be assured I will never cross this water into Galland till you bid me.”
He turned and rode home, and for a month was busied with the work of his farms. When he came again it was on a dark day in November, and every runnel of the fens was swollen. He got the same answer from the girl, and with it a warning “Aelward and his men wait for you in the oakshaw,” she told him. “I sent word to them when the thralls brought news of you.” And her pretty face was hard and angry.
Jehan laughed. “Now, by your leave, mistress, I will wait here the hour or two till nightfall. I am Englishman enough to know that your folk do not strike in the dark.”
He returned to Highstead unscathed, and a week later came a message from Aelward. “Meet me,” it ran, “to-morrow by the Danes’ barrow at noon, and we will know whether Englishman or Frenchman is to bear rule in this land.”
Jehan donned his hauberk and girt himself with his long sword. “There will be hot work to-day in that forest,” he told Arn, who was busied with the trussing of his mail.
“God prosper you, master,” said the steward. “Frenchman or no, you are such a man as I love. Beware of Aelward and his downward stroke, for he has the strength of ten.”
At noon by the Danes’ barrow Jehan met a young tow-headed giant, who spoke with the back of his throat and made surly-response to the other’s greeting. It was a blue winter’s day, with rime still white on the grass, and the forest was very still. The Saxon had the shorter sword and a round buckler; Jehan fought only with his blade.
At the first bout they strove with steel, and were ill-matched at that, for the heavy strength of the fenman was futile against the lithe speed of the hunter. Jehan ringed him in circles of light, and the famous downward stroke was expended on vacant air. He played with him till he breathed heavily like a cow, and then by a sleight of hand sent his sword spinning among the oak mast. The young giant stood sulkily before him, unarmed, deeply shamed, waiting on his death, but with no fear in his eyes.
Jehan tossed his own blade to the ground, and stripped off his hauberk. “We have fought with weapons,” he said, “now we will fight in the ancient way.”
There followed a very different contest. Aelward lost his shamefastness and his slow blood fired as flesh met flesh and sinew strained against sinew. His great arms crushed the Frenchman till the ribs cracked, but always the other slipped through and evaded the fatal hug. And as the struggle continued Aelward’s heart warmed to his enemy. When their swords crossed he had hated him like death; now he seemed to be striving with a kinsman.
Suddenly, when victory looked very near, he found the earth moving from beneath him, and a mountain descended on his skull. When he blinked himself into consciousness again, Jehan was laving his head from a pool in an oak-root.
“I will teach you that throw some-day, friend,” he was saying. “Had I not known the trick of it, you had mauled me sadly. I had liefer grapple with a bear.
Aelward moistened his lips. “You have beat me fairly, armed and weaponless,” he said, and his voice had no anger in it.
“Talk not of beating between neighbours,” was the answer. “We have played together and I have had the luck of it. It will be your turn to break my head to-morrow.”
“Head matters little,” grumbled Aelward. “Mine has stood harder dints. But you have broken my leg, and that means a month of housekeeping.”
Jehan made splints of ash for the leg, and set him upon his horse, and in this wise they came to the bridge of Galland fen. On the far side of the water stood the Lady Hilda. He halted and waited on her bidding. She gazed speechless at the horse whereon sat her brother with a clouted scalp.
“What ails you, Frenchman?” said Aelward. “It is but a half-grown girl of my father’s begetting.”
“I have vowed not to pass that bridge till yonder lady bids me.”
“Then for the pity of Christ bid him, sister. He and I are warm with play and yearn for a flagon.”
In this manner did Jehan first enter the house of Galland, whence in the next cowslip-time he carried a bride to Highstead.
The months passed smoothly in the house on the knoll above the fat fen pastures. Jehan forsook his woodcraft for the work of byre and furrow and sheepfold, and the yield of his lands grew under his wardenship. He brought heavy French cattle to improve the little native breed, and made a garden of fruit trees where once had been only bent and sedge. The thralls wrought cheerfully for him, for he was a kindly master, and the freemen of the manor had no complaint against one who did impartial justice and respected their slow and ancient ways. As for skill in hunting, there was no fellow to the lord of Highstead between Trent and Thames.
Inside the homestead the Lady Hilda moved happily, a wife smiling and well content. She had won more than a husband; it seemed she had made a convert; for daily Jehan grew into the country-side as if he had been born in it. Something in the soft woodland air and the sharper tang of the fens and the sea awoke response from his innermost soul. An aching affection was born in him for every acre of his little heritage. His son, dark like his father, who made his first diffident pilgrimages in the sunny close where the pigeons cooed, was not more thirled to English soil.
They were quiet years in that remote place, for Aelward over at Galland had made his peace with the King. But when the little Jehan was four years old the tides of war lapped again to the forest edges. One Hugo of Auchy, who had had a usurer to his father and had risen in an iron age by a merciless greed, came a-foraying from the north to see how he might add to his fortunes. Men called him the Crane, for he was tall and lean and parchment-skinned, and to his banner resorted all malcontents and broken men. He sought to conduct a second Conquest, making war on the English who still held their lands, but sparing the French manors. The King’s justice was slow-footed, and the King was far away, so the threatened men, banded together to hold their own by their own might.
Aelward brought the news from Galland that the Crane had entered their borders. The good Ivo was overseas, busy on the Brittany marches, and there was no ruler in Fenland.
“You he will spare,” Aelward told his sister’s husband. “He does not war with you new-comers. But us of the old stock he claims as his prey. How say you, Frenchman? Will you reason with him? Hereaways we are peaceful folk, and would fain get on with our harvest.”
“I will reason with him,” said Jehan, “and by the only logic that such carrion understands. I am by your side, brother. There is but the one cause for all us countrymen.”
But that afternoon as he walked abroad in his corn-lands he saw a portent. A heron rose out of the shallows, and a harrier-hawk swooped to the pounce, but the long bird flopped securely into the western sky, and the hawk dropped at his feet, dead but with no mark of a wound.
“Here be marvels,” said Jehan, and with that there came on him the foreknowledge of fate, which in the brave heart wakes awe, but no fear. He stood silent for a time and gazed over his homelands. The bere was shaking white and gold in the light evening wind; in the new orchard he had planted the apples were reddening; from the edge of the forest land rose wreaths of smoke where the thralls were busy with wood-clearing. There was little sound in the air, but from the steading came the happy laughter of a child. Jehan stood very still, and his wistful eyes drank the peace of it.
“Non nobis, Domine ,” he said, for a priest had once had the training of him. “But I leave that which shall not die.”
He summoned his wife and told her of the coming of the Crane. From a finger of his left hand he took the thick ring of gold
which Ivo had marked years before in the Wealden hut.
“I have a notion that I am going a long journey,” he told her. “If I do not return, the Lord Ivo will confirm the little lad in these lands of ours. But to you and for his sake I make my own bequest. Wear this ring for him till he is a man, and then bid him wear it as his father’s guerdon. I had it from my father, who had it from his, and my grandfather told me the tale of it. In his grandsire’s day it was a mighty armlet, but in the famine years it was melted and part sold, and only this remains. Some one of us far back was a king, and this is the badge of a king’s house. There comes a day, little one, when the fruit of our bodies shall possess a throne. See that the lad be royal in thought and deed, as he is royal in blood.”
Next morning he kissed his wife and fondled his little son, and with his men rode northward, his eyes wistful but his mouth smiling.
What followed was for generations a tale among humble folk in England, who knew nothing of the deeds of the King’s armies. By cottage fires they wove stories about it and made simple songs, the echo of which may still be traced by curious scholars. There is something of it in the great saga of Robin Hood, and long after the fens were drained women hushed their babies with snatches about the Crane and the Falcon, and fairy tales of a certain John of the Shaws, who became one with Jack the Giant-killer and all the nursery heroes.
Jehan and his band met Aelward at the appointed rendezvous, and soon were joined by a dozen knots of lusty yeomen, who fought not only for themselves but for the law of England and the peace of the new king. Of the little force Jehan was appointed leader, and once again became the Hunter, stalking a baser quarry than wolf or boar. For the Crane and his rabble, flushed with easy conquest, kept ill watch, and the tongues of forest running down to the fenland made a good hunting ground for a wary forester.
Jehan’s pickets found Hugo of Auchy by the Sheen brook and brought back tidings. Thereupon a subtle plan was made. By day and night the invaders’ camp was kept uneasy; there would be sudden attacks, which died down after a few blows; stragglers disappeared, scouts never returned; and when a peasant was brought in and forced to speak, he told with scared face a tale of the great mustering of desperate men in this or that quarter. The Crane was a hardy fighter, but the mystery baffled him, and he became cautious, and — after the fashion of his kind credulous. Bit by bit Jehan shepherded him into the trap he had prepared. He had but one man to the enemy’s six, and must drain that enemy’s strength before he struck. Meantime the little steadings went up in flames, but with every blaze seen in the autumn dusk the English temper grew more stubborn. They waited confidently on the reckoning.
It came on a bleak morning when the east wind blew rain and fog from the sea. The Crane was in a spit of open woodland, with before him and on either side deep fenland with paths known only to its dwellers. Then Jehan struck. He drove his enemy to the point of the dry ground, and thrust him into the marshes. Not since the time of the Danes had the land known such a slaying. The refuse of France and the traitor English who had joined them went down like sheep before wolves. When the Lord Ivo arrived in the late afternoon, having ridden hot-speed from the south coast when he got the tidings, he found little left of the marauders save the dead on the land and the scum of red on the fen pools.
Jehan lay by a clump of hazels, the blood welling from an axe-wound in the neck. His face was ashen with the oncoming of death, but he smiled as he looked up at his lord.
“The Crane pecked me,” he said. “He had a stout bill, if a black heart.”
Ivo wept aloud, being pitiful as he was brave. He would have scoured the country for a priest.
“Farewell, old comrade,” he sobbed. “Give greeting to Odo in Paradise, and keep a place for me by your side. I will nourish your son, as if he had been that one of my own whom Heaven has denied me. Tarry a little, dear heart, and the Priest of Glede will be here to shrive you.”
Through the thicket there crawled a mighty figure, his yellow hair dabbled in blood, and his breath labouring like wind in a threshing-floor. He lay down by Jehan’s side, and with a last effort kissed him on the lips.
“Priest!” cried the dying Aelward. “What need is there of priest to help us two English on our way to God?”
CHAPTER 3. THE WIFE OF FLANDERS
From the bed set high on a dais came eerie spasms of laughter, a harsh cackle like fowls at feeding time.
“Is that the last of them, Anton?” said a voice.
A little serving-man with an apple-hued face bowed in reply. He bowed with difficulty, for in his arms he held a huge grey cat, which still mewed with the excitement of the chase. Rats had been turned loose on the floor, and it had accounted for them to the accompaniment of a shrill urging from the bed. Now the sport was over, and the domestics who had crowded round the door to see it had slipped away, leaving only Anton and the cat.
“Give Tib a full meal of offal,” came the order, “and away with yourself. Your rats are a weak breed. Get me the stout grey monsters like Tuesday se’ennight.”
The room was empty now save for two figures both wearing the habit of the religious. Near the bed sat a man in the full black robe and hood of the monks of Cluny. He warmed plump hands at the brazier and seemed at ease and at home. By the door stood a different figure in the shabby clothes of a parish priest, a curate from the kirk of St. Martin’s who had been a scandalised spectator of the rat hunt. He shuffled his feet as if uncertain of his next step — a thin, pale man with a pinched mouth and timid earnest eyes.
The glance from the bed fell on him “What will the fellow be at?” said the voice testily. “He stands there like a sow about to litter, and stares and grunts. Good e’en to you, friend. When you are wanted you will be sent for Jesu’s name, what have I done to have that howlet glowering at me?”
The priest at the words crossed himself and turned to go, with a tinge of red in his sallow cheeks. He was faithful to his duties and had come to console a death bed, though he was well aware that his consolations would be spurned.
As he left there came again the eerie laughter from the bed. “Ugh, I am weary of that incomparable holiness. He hovers about to give me the St. John’s Cup, and would fain speed my passing. But I do not die yet, good father. There’s life still in the old wolf.”
The monk in a bland voice spoke some Latin to the effect that mortal times and seasons were ordained of God. The other stretched out a skinny hand from the fur coverings and rang a silver bell. When Anton appeared she gave the order “Bring supper for the reverend father,” at which the Cluniac’s face mellowed into complacence.
It was a Friday evening in a hard February. Out-of-doors the snow lay deep in the streets of Bruges, and every canal was frozen solid so that carts rumbled along them as on a street. A wind had risen which drifted the powdery snow and blew icy draughts through every chink. The small-paned windows of the great upper-room were filled with oiled vellum, but they did not keep out the weather, and currents of cold air passed through them to the doorway, making the smoke of the four charcoal braziers eddy and swirl. The place was warm, yet shot with bitter gusts, and the smell of burning herbs gave it the heaviness of a chapel at high mass. Hanging silver lamps, which blazed blue and smoky, lit it in patches, sufficient to show the cleanness of the rush-strewn floor, the glory of the hangings of cloth-of-gold and damask, and the burnished sheen of the metal-work. There was no costlier chamber in that rich city.
It was a strange staging for death, for the woman on the high bed was dying. Slowly, fighting every inch of the way with a grim tenacity, but indubitably dying. Her vital ardour had sunk below the mark from which it could rise again, and was now ebbing as water runs from a little crack in a pitcher. The best leeches in all Flanders and Artois had come to doctor her. They had prescribed the horrid potions of the age: tinctures of earth-worms; confections of spiders and wood-lice and viper’s flesh; broth of human skulls, oil, wine, ants’ eggs, and crabs’ claws; the bufo preparatus, which was
a live toad roasted in a pot and ground to a powder; and innumerable plaisters and electuaries . She had begun by submitting meekly, for she longed to live, and had ended, for she was a shrewd woman, by throwing the stuff at the apothecaries’ heads. Now she ordained her own diet, which was of lamb’s flesh lightly boiled, and woman’s milk, got from a wench in the purlieus of St. Sauveur. The one medicine which she retained was powdered elk’s horn, which had been taken from the beast between two festivals of the Virgin. This she had from the foresters in the Houthulst woods, and swallowed it in white wine an hour after every dawn.
The bed was a noble thing of ebony, brought by the Rhine road from Venice, and carved with fantastic hunting scenes by Hainault craftsmen. Its hangings were stiff brocaded silver, and above the pillows a great unicorn’s horn, to protect against poisoning, stood out like the beak of a ship. The horn cast an odd shadow athwart the bed, so that a big claw seemed to lie on the coverlet curving towards the throat of her who lay there. The parish priest had noticed this at his first coming that evening, and had muttered fearful prayers.
The face on the pillows was hard to discern in the gloom, but when Anton laid the table for the Cluniac’s meal and set a lamp on it, he lit up the cavernous interior of the bed, so that it became the main thing in the chamber. It was the face of a woman who still retained the lines and the colouring of youth. The voice had harshened with age, and the hair was white as wool, but the cheeks were still rosy and the grey eyes still had fire. Notable beauty had once been there. The finely arched brows, the oval of the face which the years had scarcely sharpened, the proud, delicate nose, all spoke of it. It was as if their possessor recognised those things and would not part with them, for her attire had none of the dishevelment of a sickroom. Her coif of fine silk was neatly adjusted, and the great robe of marten’s fur which cloaked her shoulders was fastened with a jewel of rubies which glowed in the lamplight like a star.
Something chattered beside her. It was a little brown monkey which had made a nest in the warm bedclothes.