River Legends; Or, Father Thames and Father Rhine
leader. The haughty Baron had it all his own way; he plundered the
farmyards, raised a bonfire of what he didn’t want to carry away, and
made himself as unpleasant as possible to the harmless population, who,
naturally and properly enough, no doubt, always have to suffer for the
whims and quarrels of the great. He next {110}marched upon the Castle of
St. Aunay, but found that it was deserted, and, having by that time
had enough of burning and plundering for a time, contented himself with
throwing down the big gates, breaking a few windows, and flaunting
his own banner over the highest turret. Then, having collected all his
booty, he turned homewards, and, having satisfied his private grudge
against his neighbour, felt his interest in the Lancastrian cause
wonderfully lessened, and began to want his daughter back again.
She, poor girl, had passed by no means a happy time in her convent,
where the good nuns devoutly prayed for the Lancastrians, and especially
for her worthy father, upon every possible opportunity, and where she
never had a chance of hearing any news of her lover, or of saying a
kind word for him or any other of his party. At last, one day, the lady
superior informed her with an air of triumph that news had come of the
defeat of St. Aunay’s people by her father, and that the Count had been
killed in the battle. The poor girl turned deadly pale, and swooned away
at this intelligence. Fortunately for her, the Lady Superior, being a
person of extraordinary intelligence, knew at once that such a result
must certainly have been produced by Mathilde’s alarm for her father’s
safety, and gratitude for his success. Having therefore taken the usual
means to recover her from her fainting fit, the good lady loudly praised
her filial affection, and held her up to the rest of the sisterhood
as an example worthy of imitation, Mathilde thought it best to receive
these compliments without taking any steps to alter the opinion of her
worthy relative, but her suspense and anxiety were very {111}great, and
all the more so from the fact that the difficulty of obtaining news of
an authentic character was so considerable, that in all probability
it would be weeks, and perhaps months, before she learned for certain
whether her beloved Horace was alive or dead.
Days rolled on--days of miserable uncertainty, which was scarcely
removed by a missive from her noble sire, which informed her indeed of
the triumph of his arms, but at the same time only casually mentioned
that the head of the rival house of St. Aunay had received a blow from
which he would never recover. Now, it was obvious that this might be
interpreted in two ways--either that the young Count had been grievously
wounded in body, or that the fortunes of his house had been seriously
injured. The latter was undoubtedly the case; but was the former also
true? In this state of things uncertainty became madness, and Mathilde
felt herself almost driven to desperation. This, however, being
a condition of mind hardly suitable to a Norman lady of rank, she
determined not to give way to it, but to take measures to relieve her
anxiety. She resolved that she would, if possible, leave the convent
and obtain, somehow or other, tidings of the being whom she so tenderly
loved. It was not, however, in those days, a very easy thing to leave
convents just when you pleased. If you were rich and well born, you
could enter these institutions with but little difficulty; but quitting
them was a different question altogether. Nor do I believe Mathilde
would have accomplished her purpose had she not chanced to have a great
friend in a worthy person who carried on the trade of a washerwoman
in the town, and was fortunate enough to have secured the convent
{112}custom. Being devoted to the Guerre-à-mort family, and especially
so to the young Baroness, this worthy woman agreed to smuggle her out of
the convent in a large basket of dirty linen, in which pleasant manner
she successfully carried out her project.
Once free, the question which Mathilde naturally had to consider was,
what should she do next? She had forgotten to settle this before leaving
her late abode, and yet it was a question which must certainly be
settled without delay. The poor washerwoman, who had incurred great
peril by assisting the escape of an inmate of a religious house, dared
not keep her a moment longer than she could avoid, and there was no one
in the town to whom she could trust herself. Under these circumstances
she thought that the best thing to be done was to wander forth into the
country, and this she accordingly did, having made such alterations
in her dress as appeared necessary to prevent her being recognised as
something different from the peasant woman for whom she wished to pass.
The police were not very efficient in those days, and there were no
detectives to speak of, so that she was not likely to be discovered by
such agency. Newspapers also had not yet begun, and the advertisement
system was unknown; otherwise her escape might have been attended with
greater difficulties than was actually the case. As it was, she walked
away from Reading without anybody taking the slightest notice of her,
and wandered for many miles perfectly unmolested.
At last, as luck would have it, she reached a large farmhouse, and as
she had by this time become weary and hungry, she followed her natural
instincts, knocked at {113}the door, and asked for victuals and leave to
rest herself. It was an old woman who opened the door, whose husband was
the occupier of the farm, and being kindly-disposed people, they granted
Mathilde’s request, allowed her to sit down in the kitchen, and gave her
a bowl of milk and a large piece of brown bread, which she gratefully
devoured, and felt much the better for it. Then the old couple began
to question her about her condition and ways of life, and when she had
invented some tale about having seen better days, and being driven by
misfortune to seek a living where she could get it, they expressed great
pity, and professed themselves very willing to assist her in any manner
within their power. True, they had not much to offer; but the boy who
kept the pigs had lately gone off to the wars, and if pig-keeping was
not beyond her, why, the place was very much at her service.
Now, if there was anything which Mathilde disliked, it was a pig. The
greediness and dirtiness of the animal she deemed objectionable, and
extended her dislike to it even when cooked and salted. She never
touched roast pork, avoided it all the more when boiled, abhorred
sausages, and looked the other way when anybody offered her bacon. But,
having no very definite idea as to where she could go to if she left
the farm, and thinking that, at all events, it might serve her as a
temporary home until something better should turn up, she determined
upon accepting the generous offer of the worthy couple, and expressed
her gratitude in terms which increased the favourable opinion they had
already formed of her manners and character.
That night she slept beneath their hospitable roof, and {114}next
morning her duties were pointed out to her, and she wandered forth upon
the side of the hill near the farm, in close attendance upon a herd
of pigs, to watch whom would be her daily duty. Although Mathilde’s
objection to the creatures may have been foolish and unreasonable,
it will probably be conceded that the pig is not an animal which the
majority of mankind would choose as a special pet or favourite; and to
a person nurtured in the luxurious habits of a baronial castle,
and trained in the intellectual refinement of conventual life, the
occupation of keeping pigs on the side of a hill could hardly ever be
congenial. It is, therefore, not surprising that Mathilde found it
first monotonous, secondly tiresome, thirdly exceedingly disagreeable.
She would sit for hours together, grasping in both hands her pig-driving
stick, and musing upon things far removed from considerations of pigs or
pork.
At nights she would return to the farmhouse, heavy and dispirited,
so that the old farmer and his wife would rally her on her dejected
appearance, and declare to each other that she must either be in love,
or have committed some offence over which she now brooded with remorse.
Yet her youth appeared to contradict the probability of the latter
supposition, and she looked them both so straight in the face when she
spoke, that the old man remarked that no one who did _that_ could be
guilty of anything serious.
Meanwhile, it may be supposed that the Baron was not very well pleased
when the news reached him that his daughter had disappeared. He hurried
off at once to the convent, and refused for some time to believe that
it {115}could really be the case. If he had lived a little later there
would have been plenty of people to suggest to him that Mathilde’s
disappearance was only an invention of the Lady Superior’s, and that
the poor girl was certainly either bricked up alive, or immersed in some
dungeon below the convent.
As it was, however, that age being comparatively ignorant, the Baron
was told the simple truth, and actually believed it. His daughter
had disappeared, and no one was more distressed thereat than the Lady
Superior herself. The discipline of her convent was so good, and the
sisterhood were all so much attached to her, that it was with difficulty
that she could {116}bring herself to believe that any of them had
assisted the runaway to escape; and as to the washerwoman, no thought
of her connivance ever entered the Lady Superior’s head. Had it done so,
indeed, she would never have believed that a daughter of the noble house
of Guerre-à-mort would have so far demeaned herself as to hide in a
box of dirty clothes, or wander forth, alone and unattended, into the
country. The good Lady, never having admitted the god of love into her
well-regulated breast, did not know his powers, which experience has
proved to be such as are able to overcome all considerations of rank and
dignity, and occasionally to make people do things even more strange and
incongruous than hide in dirty-linen boxes or keep pigs on a hill-side.
The Baron was easily convinced that no blame was to be attributed to his
saintly relative, but this by no means put an end to his trouble.
His daughter had gone, and he had no clue whatever to her place of
concealment. Under these circumstances, he determined that the best
thing he could do was to consult the powers of magic, who in those
days were the substitute for our present Rural Police, and occasionally
discharged their functions in a manner equally satisfactory. Those were
not days in which witches and warlocks were so common as in earlier
ages; but, scattered about the country, there were a goodly number of
the creatures; and the Baron had little difficulty in determining whom
to consult.
The Witch of Salt Hill was a famous personage in those days. The
vicinity of Eton and Slough was at that time a favourite resort of
witches, who used to flit about {117}through Windsor Forest at
nights, and, I suppose, preferred to have their day-residences not
inconveniently remote therefrom. It is not improbable that they would
have continued to frequent the neighbourhood down to the present day,
but for the establishment of the sacred foundation of Eton College.
There, as we know, the Provost and Fellows have, from the very earliest
days of the college, been a body of men of singularly holy as well as
learned reputation. Their blameless and saintly lives have driven evil
far from the locality in which they dwell, and in the days of which
I tell their power was already beginning to be felt. It gradually
increased until, as I say, all witches and warlocks left the