Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Release Date: March 2005 [EBook #7680] [Yes,
we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This
file was first posted on April 8, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** Start of the project gutenberg
EBOOK Harold, by Lytton, book 9
***
THE BONES OF THE DEAD.
William, Count of the Normans, sate in a fair chamber
of his palace of Rouen; and on the large table before
him were ample evidences of the various labours, as
warrior, chief, thinker, and statesman, which filled
the capacious breadth of that sleepless mind.
There lay a plan of the new port of Cherbourg, and
beside it an open Ms. of the Duke’s favourite
book, the Commentaries of Caesar, from which, it is
said, he borrowed some of the tactics of his own martial
science; marked, and dotted, and interlined with his
large bold handwriting, were the words of the great
Roman. A score or so of long arrows, which had
received some skilful improvement in feather or bolt,
lay carelessly scattered over some architectural sketches
of a new Abbey Church, and the proposed charter for
its endowment. An open cyst, of the beautiful
workmanship for which the English goldsmiths were
then pre-eminently renowned, that had been among the
parting gifts of Edward, contained letters from the
various potentates near and far, who sought his alliance
or menaced his repose.
On a perch behind him sate his favourite Norway falcon
unhooded, for it had been taught the finest polish
in its dainty education—viz., “to
face company undisturbed.” At a kind of
easel at the farther end of the hall, a dwarf, misshapen
in limbs, but of a face singularly acute and intelligent,
was employed in the outline of that famous action
at Val des Dunes, which had been the scene of one of
the most brilliant of William’s feats in arms—an
outline intended to be transferred to the notable
“stitchwork” of Matilda the Duchess.
Upon the floor, playing with a huge boar-hound of
English breed, that seemed but ill to like the play,
and every now and then snarled and showed his white
teeth, was a young boy, with something of the Duke’s
features, but with an expression more open and less
sagacious; and something of the Duke’s broad
build of chest and shoulder, but without promise of
the Duke’s stately stature, which was needed
to give grace and dignity to a strength otherwise
cumbrous and graceless. And indeed, since William’s
visit to England, his athletic shape had lost much
of its youthful symmetry, though not yet deformed by
that corpulence which was a disease almost as rare
in the Norman as the Spartan.
