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Hereward saw it, and shouting, "After me, Hereward's men! a bear! a bear!" swung Letts and Finns right and left like corn-sheaves, and stood face to face with Herluin. An angry Finn smote him on the hind-head full with a stone axe. He staggered, and then looked round and laughed. "Fool! hast thou not heard that Hereward's armor was forged by dwarfs in the mountain-bowels?
So Hereward went to Winchester, and with him forty of his knights, and placed his hands between the hands of William, and swore to be his man. And William walked out of the hall leaning on Hereward's shoulder, at which all the Normans gnashed their teeth with envy. And thereafter Hereward married Alftruda, after the scruples of Holy Church had been duly set at rest.
A curious gold ornament has been of late years found in the field where Edwin was killed, and antiquaries allow us to imagine that it might have been a love-token from the Norman princess to the Saxon earl. Another fugitive in Hereward's camp was the high-spirited Abbot Frithric, whose steady opposition to the illegal encroachments of the Normans had given great offence to William.
Pick up those splinters, and take them to King William; and say, 'The man who broke that lance against the gate is here to make his peace with thee, and he will know who I am." And so cowed were these two knights with Hereward's royal voice, and royal eye, and royal strength, that they went simply, and did what he bade them.
"Yet I have seen them kneel when I was in the country of the Gymnosophists," said a person present on the evening of Hereward's introduction.
His face could hardly be seen, hidden by helmet and nose-piece above, and mailed up to the mouth below. But his long mustache was that of a grown man; his vast breadth of shoulder, his hard hand, his sturdy limbs, these surely belonged not to the slim youth whom she had seen from her lattice riding at Hereward's side.
He had little difficulty in persuading Hereward, in the hopeless desolation of his condition, to join the Varangian Guard, at this moment at war with the Normans, under which name it suited Hereward's prepossessions to represent the Emperor's wars with Robert Guiscard, his son Bohemond, and other adventurers, in Italy, Greece, or Sicily.
That gentlemen should meet in the forest and commit, or try to commit, murder on each other's bodies, was far too common a mishap in the ages of faith to stir up more than an extra gossiping and cackling among the women, and an extra cursing and threatening among the men; and as the former were all but unanimously on Hereward's side, his plain and honest story was taken as it stood.
"And what says to that, Torfrida, Hereward's queen?" "You will not be angry if I answered the letter for you?" "If you answered it one way, no. If another, yes." Torfrida trembled. Then she looked Hereward full in the face with her keen clear eyes. "Now shall I see whether I have given myself to Hereward in vain, body and soul, or whether I have trained him to be my true and perfect knight."
A parchment, scrawled with characters which the owner herself probably did not understand, hung against the cob wall; and a human skull probably used only to frighten her patients dangled from the roof-tree. But in a corner, stuck against the wall, was something which chilled Hereward's blood a little.
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