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Updated: June 7, 2025
"Can I be the same man?" said Hereward to himself, bitterly. And he was not the same man. He was besotted on Alftruda, and humbled himself accordingly. After a few days, there came down a priest to Crowland, and talked with Torfrida, in Archbishop Lanfranc's name. All this Torfrida, and the world, knew. And therefore she answered: "Lanfranc?
So Alftruda looked to her visit as to an honor which would enable her to hold her head high among the proud Norman dames, who despised her as the wife of an Englishman. Hereward looked on the visit in a different light. He called Judith ugly names, not undeserved; and vowed that if she entered his house by the front door he would go out at the back.
"What can I do for you, Alftruda, my old play-fellow: Alftruda, whom I saved from the bear?" "If she had foreseen the second monster into whose jaws she was to fall, she would have prayed you to hold that terrible hand of yours, which never since, men say, has struck without victory and renown. You won your first honor for my sake.
But his spirit was broken; indeed, so was the spirit of every Englishman; and he mounted his horse sullenly, and rode alongside of Gilbert, unarmed for the first time for many a year. "You had better have taken me," said Sir Ascelin aside to the weeping Alftruda. "I? helpless wretch that I am! What shall I do for my own safety, now he is gone?" "Let me come and provide for it."
And Hereward had been faithful likewise to Torfrida, and loved her with an overwhelming adoration, as all true men love. And for that very reason he was the more aware that his feeling for Alftruda was strangely like his feeling for Torfrida, and yet strangely different. There was nothing in the letter that he should not have read.
And there was a something in the tone of Alftruda's last letter which seemed to tell her that the weasel was still upon the scent of its game. But she was too proud to mistrust Hereward, or rather, to seem to mistrust him. And yet how dangerous Alftruda might be as a rival, if rival she choose to be.
There was a noise of trampling horses outside. The men were arming and saddling, and Hereward went with them, saying that he would be back in three days. After he had gone she found, close to where his armour had hung, a letter from Alftruda. It congratulated Hereward on having shaken himself free from the fascinations of "that sorceress."
Robert of Herepol, it would appear from the chronicle, did not much care whether they were spies or not. So the men went to and fro, and often sat with Hereward. But he forbade them sternly to mention Torfrida's name. Alftruda sent to him meanwhile, again and again, messages of passionate love and sorrow, and he listened to them as sullenly as he did to his two servants, and sent no answer back.
"You to say that?" gnashed the girl, as another spark of her mother's came out. "And you gaining what " "What I waited for for fifteen years," said Alftruda, coolly. "If you have courage and cunning, like me, to wait for fifteen years, you too may have your will likewise."
"That it is from the Countess Alftruda, whomsoever she may be." A chill struck through her heart. True, Alftruda had written before, only to warn Hereward of danger to his life, and hers. She might be writing again, only for the same purpose. But still, she did not wish that either Hereward, or she, should owe Alftruda their lives, or anything.
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