“Are the terms I give not tempting eno’
to my captive—to the son of the great Godwin,
who, no doubt falsely, but still by the popular voice
of all Europe, had power of life and death over my
cousin Alfred and my Norman knights? or dost thou
thyself covet the English crown; and is it to a rival
that I have opened my heart?”
“Nay,” said Harold in the crowning effort
of his new and fatal lesson in simulation. “Thou
hast convinced me, Duke William: let it be as
thou sayest.”
The Duke gave way to his joy by a loud exclamation,
and then recapitulated the articles of the engagement,
to which Harold simply bowed his head. Amicably
then the Duke embraced the Earl, and the two returned
towards the tent.
While the steeds were brought forth, William took
the opportunity to draw Odo apart; and, after a short
whispered conference, the prelate hastened to his
barb, and spurred fast to Bayeux in advance of the
party. All that day, and all that night, and
all the next morn till noon, courtiers and riders
went abroad, north and south, east and west, to all
the more famous abbeys and churches in Normandy, and
holy and awful was the spoil with which they returned
for the ceremony of the next day.
The stately mirth of the evening banquet seemed to
Harold as the malign revel of some demoniac orgy.
He thought he read in every face the exultation over
the sale of England. Every light laugh in the
proverbial ease of the social Normans rang on his ear
like the joy of a ghastly Sabbat. All his senses
preternaturally sharpened to that magnetic keenness
in which we less hear and see than conceive and divine,
the lowest murmur William breathed in the ear of Odo
boomed clear to his own; the slightest interchange
of glance between some dark-browed priest and large-breasted
warrior, flashed upon his vision. The irritation
of his recent and neglected wound combined with his
mental excitement to quicken, yet to confuse, his faculties.
Body and soul were fevered. He floated, as it
were, between a delirium and a dream.
Late in the evening he was led into the chamber where
the Duchess sat alone with Adeliza and her second
son William—a boy who had the red hair
and florid hues of the ancestral Dane, but was not
without a certain bold and strange kind of beauty,
and who, even in childhood, all covered with broidery
and gems, betrayed the passion for that extravagant
and fantastic foppery for which William the Red King,
to the scandal of Church and pulpit, exchanged the
decorous pomp of his father’s generation.
A formal presentation of Harold to the little maid
was followed by a brief ceremony of words, which conveyed
what to the scornful sense of the Earl seemed the
mockery of betrothal between infant and bearded man.
Glozing congratulations buzzed around him; then there
was a flash of lights on his dizzy eyes, he found himself
moving through a corridor between Odo and William.
