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"And it please you, my lord," said De Graville, "I know this gentle thegn, and will beg of you the grace to see to his entertainment, and sustain his spirits." "Thou shalt, but later; so noble a guest none but my chief seneschal should be the first to honour." As the Saxon sullenly withdrew, and as the door closed on him, William rose and strode to and fro the room exultingly. "I have him!
I will think over your words, Sire de Graville, and it shall not be my fault if old feuds be not forgotten, and those now in thy court be the last hostages ever kept by the Norman for the faith of the Saxon."
"Dread lord," said Osgood; "she was the betrothed of Harold; but, as within the degrees of kin, the Church forbade their union, and they obeyed the Church." Out from the banquet-throng stepped Mallet de Graville.
But the misgiving that beset him, as he motored out of Havre in the morning, was of another kind. It was that which attaches to the unlikely and the queer. Once having plunged into a country road, away from railways and hotels, he felt himself starting on a wild-goose chase. His assurance waned in proportion as conditions grew stranger. In vain an obliging chauffeur, accustomed to enlighten tourists as to the merits of this highway, pointed out the fact that the dusty road along which they sped had once and not so many years ago been the border of the bed of the Seine, that the white cliffs towering above them on the left, and edged along the top with verdure, marked the natural brink of the river, and that the church so admirably placed on a hillside was the shrine of a martyred maiden saint, whose body had come ashore here at Graville, having been flung into the water at Harfleur. Davenant was deaf to these interesting bits of information. He was blind, too. He was blind to the noble sweep of the Seine between soft green hills. He was blind to the craft on its bosom steamers laden with the produce of orchard and the farm for England; Norwegian brigantines, weird as The Flying Dutchman in their black and white paint, carrying ice or lumber to Rouen; fishing-boats with red or umber sails. He was blind to the villages, clambering over cliffs to a casino, a plage, and a Hôtel des Bains, or nestling on the uplands round a spire. He was blind to the picturesque wooded gorges, through which little tributaries of the great river had once run violently down from the table-land of the Pays de Caux. He was blind to the charms of Harfleur, famous and somnolent, on the banks of a still more somnolent stream. He resumed the working of his faculties only when the chauffeur turned and said: "Voil
"I will do so, and heedfully," said the Sire de Graville; and embracing his friend he renewed his journey.
"Here we shall learn," said Sexwolf, "what the Earl is about and here, at present, ends my journey." "Are these the Earl's headquarters, then? no castle, even of wood no wall, nought but ditch and palisades?" asked Mallet de Graville in a tone between surprise and contempt. "Norman," said Sexwolf, "the castle is there, though you see it not, and so are the walls.
"Nay, as to that, Sire de Graville," said Harold, who seemed well pleased with the knight's offer, "there shall be no hindrance or let, as I will make clear to you; and in spite of what you have just heard, Gryffyth shall harm you not in limb or in life. But, kindly and courteous Sir, will your wounds permit the journey, not long, but steep and laborious, and only to be made on foot?"
Holy Crosse!" rose high above the flagging sound of "Ha Rou! Ha Rou! Notre Dame!" "Per la resplendar De," cried William. "Our soldiers are but women in the garb of Normans. Ho, spears to the rescue! With me to the charge, Sires D'Aumale and De Littain with me, gallant Bruse, and De Mortain; with me, De Graville and Grantmesnil Dex aide! Notre Dame."
"See," said De Graville, "how near yon lonely woman hath come to the tent of the Duke yea, to the foot of the holy gonfanon, which supplanted 'the Fighting Man! pardex, my heart bleeds to see her striving to lift up the heavy dead!" The monks neared the spot, and Osgood exclaimed in a voice almost joyful: "It is Edith the Fair! This way, the torches! hither, quick!"
That object a brother's wrongs would create from a brother's love, and three hundred ships would sail up the Seine to demand your captive, manned by warriors as hardy as those who wrested Neustria from King Charles." "Granted," said De Graville. "But William, who could cut off the hands and feet of his own subjects for an idle jest on his birth, could as easily put out the eyes of a captive foe.
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