Ivanhoe: A Romance
were, methinks, their duty to comfort the outcast and oppressed
children of the soil.”
“They come not—or if they come, they better love to revel at the boards
of their conquerors,” answered Urfried, “than to hear the groans of
their countrymen—so, at least, report speaks of them—of myself I can
say little. This castle, for ten years, has opened to no priest save
the debauched Norman chaplain who partook the nightly revels of
Front-de-Bœuf, and he has been long gone to render an account of his
stewardship.—But thou art a Saxon—a Saxon priest, and I have one
question to ask of thee.”
“I am a Saxon,” answered Cedric, “but unworthy, surely, of the name of
priest. Let me begone on my way—I swear I will return, or send one of
our fathers more worthy to hear your confession.”
“Stay yet a while,” said Urfried; “the accents of the voice which thou
hearest now will soon be choked with the cold earth, and I would not
descend to it like the beast I have lived. But wine must give me
strength to tell the horrors of my tale.” She poured out a cup, and
drank it with a frightful avidity, which seemed desirous of draining
the last drop in the goblet. “It stupifies,” she said, looking upwards
as she finished her drought, “but it cannot cheer—Partake it, father,
if you would hear my tale without sinking down upon the pavement.”
Cedric would have avoided pledging her in this ominous conviviality,
but the sign which she made to him expressed impatience and despair. He
complied with her request, and answered her challenge in a large
wine-cup; she then proceeded with her story, as if appeased by his
complaisance.
“I was not born,” she said, “father, the wretch that thou now seest me.
I was free, was happy, was honoured, loved, and was beloved. I am now a
slave, miserable and degraded—the sport of my masters’ passions while I
had yet beauty—the object of their contempt, scorn, and hatred, since
it has passed away. Dost thou wonder, father, that I should hate
mankind, and, above all, the race that has wrought this change in me?
Can the wrinkled decrepit hag before thee, whose wrath must vent itself
in impotent curses, forget she was once the daughter of the noble Thane
of Torquilstone, before whose frown a thousand vassals trembled?”
“Thou the daughter of Torquil Wolfganger!” said Cedric, receding as he
spoke; “thou—thou—the daughter of that noble Saxon, my father’s friend
and companion in arms!”
“Thy father’s friend!” echoed Urfried; “then Cedric called the Saxon
stands before me, for the noble Hereward of Rotherwood had but one son,
whose name is well known among his countrymen. But if thou art Cedric
of Rotherwood, why this religious dress?—hast thou too despaired of
saving thy country, and sought refuge from oppression in the shade of
the convent?”
“It matters not who I am,” said Cedric; “proceed, unhappy woman, with
thy tale of horror and guilt!—Guilt there must be—there is guilt even
in thy living to tell it.”
“There is—there is,” answered the wretched woman, “deep, black, damning
guilt,—guilt, that lies like a load at my breast—guilt, that all the
penitential fires of hereafter cannot cleanse.—Yes, in these halls,
stained with the noble and pure blood of my father and my brethren—in
these very halls, to have lived the paramour of their murderer, the
slave at once and the partaker of his pleasures, was to render every
breath which I drew of vital air, a crime and a curse.”
“Wretched woman!” exclaimed Cedric. “And while the friends of thy
father—while each true Saxon heart, as it breathed a requiem for his
soul, and those of his valiant sons, forgot not in their prayers the
murdered Ulrica—while all mourned and honoured the dead, thou hast
lived to merit our hate and execration—lived to unite thyself with the
vile tyrant who murdered thy nearest and dearest—who shed the blood of
infancy, rather than a male of the noble house of Torquil Wolfganger
should survive—with him hast thou lived to unite thyself, and in the
hands of lawless love!”
“In lawless hands, indeed, but not in those of love!” answered the hag;
“love will sooner visit the regions of eternal doom, than those
unhallowed vaults.—No, with that at least I cannot reproach
myself—hatred to Front-de-Bœuf and his race governed my soul most
deeply, even in the hour of his guilty endearments.”
“You hated him, and yet you lived,” replied Cedric; “wretch! was there
no poniard—no knife—no bodkin!—Well was it for thee, since thou didst
prize such an existence, that the secrets of a Norman castle are like
those of the grave. For had I but dreamed of the daughter of Torquil
living in foul communion with the murderer of her father, the sword of
a true Saxon had found thee out even in the arms of thy paramour!”
“Wouldst thou indeed have done this justice to the name of Torquil?”
said Ulrica, for we may now lay aside her assumed name of Urfried;
“thou art then the true Saxon report speaks thee! for even within these
accursed walls, where, as thou well sayest, guilt shrouds itself in
inscrutable mystery, even there has the name of Cedric been sounded—and
I, wretched and degraded, have rejoiced to think that there yet
breathed an avenger of our unhappy nation.—I also have had my hours of
vengeance—I have fomented the quarrels of our foes, and heated drunken
revelry into murderous broil—I have seen their blood flow—I have heard
their dying groans!—Look on me, Cedric—are there not still left on this
foul and faded face some traces of the features of Torquil?”
“Ask me not of them, Ulrica,” replied Cedric, in a tone of grief mixed
with abhorrence; “these traces form such a resemblance as arises from
the graves of the dead, when a fiend has animated the lifeless corpse.”
“Be it so,” answered Ulrica; “yet wore these fiendish features the mask
of a spirit of light when they were able to set at variance the elder
Front-de-Bœuf and his son Reginald! The darkness of hell should hide
what followed, but revenge must lift the veil, and darkly intimate what
it would raise the dead to speak aloud. Long had the smouldering fire
of discord glowed between the tyrant father and his savage son—long had
I nursed, in secret, the unnatural hatred—it blazed forth in an hour of
drunken wassail, and at his own board fell my oppressor by the hand of
his own son—such are the secrets these vaults conceal!—Rend asunder, ye
accursed arches,” she added, looking up towards the roof, “and bury in
your fall all who are conscious of the hideous mystery!”
“And thou, creature of guilt and misery,” said Cedric, “what became thy
lot on the death of thy ravisher?”
“Guess it, but ask it not.—Here—here I dwelt, till age, premature age,
has stamped its ghastly features on my countenance—scorned and insulted
where I was once obeyed, and compelled to bound the revenge which had
once such ample scope, to the efforts of petty malice of a discontented
menial, or the vain or unheeded curses of an impotent hag—condemned to
hear from my lonely turret the sounds of revelry in which I once
partook, or the shrieks and groans of new victims of oppression.”
“Ulrica,” said Cedric, “with a heart which still, I fear, regrets the
lost reward of thy crimes, as much as the deeds by which thou didst
acquire that meed, how didst thou dare to address thee to one who wears
this robe? Consider, unhappy woman, what could the sainted Edward
himself do for thee, were he here in bodily presence? The royal
Confessor was endowed by heaven with power to cleanse the ulcers of the
body, but only God himself can cure the leprosy of the soul.”
“Yet, turn not from me, stern prophet of wrath,” she exclaimed, “but
tell me, if thou canst, in what shall terminate these new and awful
feelings that burst on my solitude—Why do deeds, long since done, rise
before me in new and irresistible horrors? What fate is prepared beyond
the grave for her, to whom God has assigned on earth a lot of such
unspeakable wretchedness? Better had I turn to Woden, Hertha, and
Zernebock—to Mista, and to Skogula, the gods of our yet unbaptized
ancestors, than endure the dreadful anticipations which have of late
haunted my waking and my sleeping hours!”
“I am no priest,” said Cedric, turning with disgust from this miserable
picture of guilt, wretchedness, and despair; “I am no priest, though I
wear a priest’s garment.”
“Priest or layman,” answered Ulrica, “thou art the first I have seen
for twenty years, by whom God was feared or man regarded; and dost thou
bid me despair?”
“I bid thee repent,” said Cedric. “Seek to prayer and penance, and
mayest thou find acceptance! But I cannot, I will not, longer abide
with thee.”
“Stay yet a moment!” said Ulrica; “leave me not now, son of my father’s
friend, lest the demon who has governed my life should tempt me to
avenge myself of thy hard-hearted scorn—Thinkest thou, if Front-de-Bœuf
found Cedric the Saxon in his castle, in such a disguise, that thy life
would be a long one?—Already his eye has been upon thee like a falcon
on his prey.”
“And be it so,” said Cedric; “and let him tear me with beak and talons,
ere my tongue say one word which my heart doth not warrant. I will die
a Saxon—true in word, open in deed—I bid thee avaunt!—touch me not,
stay me not!—The sight of Front-de-Bœuf himself is less odious to me
than thou, degraded and degenerate as thou art.”
“Be it so,” said Ulrica, no longer interrupting him; “go thy way, and
forget, in the insolence of thy superority, that the wretch before thee
is the daughter of thy father’s friend.—Go thy way—if I am separated
from mankind by my sufferings—separated from those whose aid I might
most justly expect—not less will I be separated from them in my
revenge!—No man shall aid me, but the ears of all men shall tingle to
hear of the deed which I shall dare to do!—Farewell!—thy scorn has
burst the last tie which seemed yet to unite me to my kind—a thought
that my woes might claim the compassion of my people.”
“Ulrica,” said Cedric, softened by this appeal, “hast thou borne up and
endured to live through so much guilt and so much misery, and wilt thou
now yield to despair when thine eyes are opened to thy crimes, and when
repentance were thy fitter occupation?”
“Cedric,” answered Ulrica, “thou little knowest the human heart. To act
as I have acted, to think as I have thought, requires the maddening
love of pleasure, mingled with the keen appetite of revenge, the proud
consciousness of power; droughts too intoxicating for the human heart
to bear, and yet retain the power to prevent. Their force has long
passed away—Age has no pleasures, wrinkles have no influence, revenge
itself dies away in impotent curses. Then comes remorse, with all its
vipers, mixed with vain regrets for the past, and despair for the
future!—Then, when all other strong impulses have ceased, we become
like the fiends in hell, who may feel remorse, but never
repentance.—But thy words have awakened a new soul within me—Well hast
thou said, all is possible for those who dare to die!—Thou hast shown
me the means of revenge, and be assured I will embrace them. It has
hitherto shared this wasted bosom with other and with rival
passions—henceforward it shall possess me wholly, and thou thyself
shalt say, that, whatever was the life of Ulrica, her death well became
the daughter of the noble Torquil. There is a force without
beleaguering this accursed castle—hasten to lead them to the attack,
and when thou shalt see a red flag wave from the turret on the eastern
angle of the donjon, press the Normans hard—they will then have enough
to do within, and you may win the wall in spite both of bow and
mangonel.—Begone, I pray thee—follow thine own fate, and leave me to
mine.”
Cedric would have enquired farther into the purpose which she thus