Harold : the Last of the Saxon Kings — Complete by Lytton (an ebook reader TXT) 📖

“It is well,” said the third, an old man, leaning on a wand of solid silver, while the mountain wind, sweeping between the walls, played with the rags of his robe,—“it is well that the night’s sally, less of war than of hunger, was foiled even of forage and food. Had the saints been with Gryffyth, who had dared to keep faith with Tostig the Saxon.”

Owain laughed, a laugh hollow and false.

“Art thou Cymrian, and talkest of faith with a Saxon? Faith with the spoiler, the ravisher and butcher? But a Cymrian keeps faith with revenge; and Gryffyth’s trunk should be still crownless and headless, though Tostig had never proffered the barter of safety and food. Hist! Gryffyth wakes from the black dream, and his eyes glow from under his hair.”

And indeed at this moment the King raised himself on his elbow, and looked round with a haggard and fierce despair in his glittering eyes.

“Play to us, Harper; sing some song of the deeds of old!” The bard mournfully strove to sweep the harp, but the chords were broken, and the note came discordant and shrill as the sigh of a wailing fiend.

“O King!” said the bard, “the music hath left the harp.”

“Ha!” murmured Gryffyth, “and Hope the earth! Bard, answer the son of Llewellyn. Oft in my halls hast thou sung the praise of the men that have been. In the halls of the race to come, will bards yet unborn sweep their harps to the deeds of thy King? Shall they tell of the day of Torques, by Llyn-Afangc, when the princes of Powys fled from his sword as the clouds from the blast of the wind? Shall they sing, as the Hirlas goes round, of his steeds of the sea, when no flag came in sight of his prows between the dark isle of the Druid 167 and the green pastures of Huerdan? 168 Or the towns that he fired, on the lands of the Saxon, when Rolf and the Nortbmen ran fast from his javelin and spear? Or say, Child of Truth, if all that is told of Gryffyth thy King shall be his woe and his shame?”

The bard swept his hand over his eyes, and answered:

“Bards unborn shall sing of Gryffyth the son of Llewellyn. But the song shall not dwell on the pomp of his power, when twenty sub-kings knelt at his throne, and his beacon was lighted in the holds of the Norman and Saxon. Bards shall sing of the hero, who fought every inch of crag and morass in the front of his men,—and on the heights of Penmaen-mawr, Fame recovers thy crown!”

“Then I have lived as my fathers in life, and shall live with their glory in death!” said Gryffyth; “and so the shadow hath passed from my soul.” Then turning round, still propped upon his elbow, he fixed his proud eye upon Aldyth, and said gravely, “Wife, pale is thy face, and gloomy thy brow; mournest thou the throne or the man?”

Aldyth cast on her wild lord a look of more terror than compassion, a look without the grief that is gentle, or the love that reveres; and answered:

“What matter to thee my thoughts or my sufferings? The sword or the famine is the doom thou hast chosen. Listening to vain dreams from thy bard, or thine own pride as idle, thou disdainest life for us both: be it so; let us die!”

A strange blending of fondness and wrath troubled the pride on Gryffyth’s features, uncouth and half savage as they were, but still noble and kingly.

“And what terror has death, if thou lovest me?” said he.

Aldyth shivered and turned aside. The unhappy King gazed hard on that face, which, despite sore trial and recent exposure to rough wind and weather, still retained the proverbial beauty of the Saxon women—but beauty without the glow of the heart, as a landscape from which sunlight has vanished; and as he gazed, at the colour went and came fitfully over his swarthy cheeks whose hue contrasted the blue of his eye and the red tawny gold of his shaggy hair.

“Thou wouldst have me,” he said at length, “send to Harold thy countryman; thou wouldst have me, me—rightful lord of all Britain—beg for mercy, and sue for life. Ah, traitress, and child of robber-sires, fair as Rowena art thou, but no Vortimer am I! Thou turnest in loathing from the lord whose marriage-gift was a crown; and the sleek form of thy Saxon Harold rises up through the clouds of the carnage.”

All the fierce and dangerous jealousy of man’s most human passion—when man loves and hates in a breath—trembled in the Cymrian’s voice, and fired his troubled eye; for Aldyth’s pale cheek blushed like the rose, but she folded her arms haughtily on her breast, and made no reply.

“No,” said Gryffyth, grinding teeth, white 169 and strong as those of a young hound. “No, Harold in vain sent me the casket; the jewel was gone. In vain thy form returned to my side; thy heart was away with thy captor: and not to save my life (were I so base as to seek it), but to see once more the face of him to whom this cold hand, in whose veins no pulse answers my own, had been given, if thy House had consulted its daughter, wouldst thou have me crouch like a lashed dog at the feet of my foe! Oh Shame! shame! shame! Oh worst perfidy of all! Oh sharp—sharper than Saxon sword or serpent’s tooth, is—is—”

Tears gushed to those fierce eyes, and the proud King dared not trust to his voice.

Aldyth rose coldly. “Slay me if thou wilt—not insult me. I have said, ‘Let us die!’”

With these words, and vouchsafing no look on her lord, she moved away towards the largest tower or cell, in which the single and rude chamber it contained had been set apart for her.

Gryffyth’s eye followed her, softening gradually as her form receded, till lost to his sight. And then that peculiar household love, which in uncultivated breasts often survives trust and esteem, rushed back on his rough heart, and weakened it, as woman only can weaken the strong to whom Death is a thought of scorn.

He signed to his bard, who, during the conference between wife and lord, had retired to a distance, and said, with a writhing attempt to smile:

“Was there truth, thinkest thou, in the legend, that Guenever was false to King Arthur?”

“No,” answered the bard, divining his lord’s thought, for Guenever survived not the King, and they were buried side by side in the Vale of Avallon.”

“Thou art wise in the lore of the heart, and love hath been thy study from youth to grey hairs. Is it love, is it hate, that prefers death for the loved one, to the thought of her life as another’s?” A look of the tenderest compassion passed over the bard’s wan face, but vanished in reverence, as he bowed his head and answered:

“O King, who shall say what note the wind calls from the harp, what impulse love wakes in the soul—now soft and now stern? But,” he added, raising his form, and, with a dread calm on his brow, “but the love