Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Release Date: March 2005 [EBook #7683] [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 12
***
THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS
In the heart of the forest land in which Hilda’s
abode was situated, a gloomy pool reflected upon its
stagnant waters the still shadows of the autumnal
foliage. As is common in ancient forests in the
neighbourhood of men’s wants, the trees were
dwarfed in height by repeated loppings, and the boughs
sprang from the hollow, gnarled boles of pollard oaks
and beeches; the trunks, vast in girth, and covered
with mosses and whitening canker-stains, or wreaths
of ivy, spoke of the most remote antiquity: but
the boughs which their lingering and mutilated life
put forth, were either thin and feeble with innumerable
branchlets, or were centred on some solitary distorted
limb which the woodman’s axe had spared.
The trees thus assumed all manner of crooked, deformed,
fantastic shapes—all betokening age, and
all decay—all, in despite of the noiseless
solitude around, proclaiming the waste and ravages
of man.
The time was that of the first watches of night, when
the autumnal moon was brightest and broadest.
You might see, on the opposite side of the pool,
the antlers of the deer every now and then, moving
restlessly above the fern in which they had made their
couch; and, through the nearer glades, the hares and
conies stealing forth to sport or to feed; or the
bat wheeling low, in chase of the forest moth.
From the thickest part of the copse came a slow human
foot, and Hilda, emerging, paused by the waters of
the pool. That serene and stony calm habitual
to her features was gone; sorrow and passion had seized
the soul of the Vala, in the midst of its fancied security
from the troubles it presumed to foresee for others.
The lines of the face were deep and care-worn—age
had come on with rapid strides—and the
light of the eye was vague and unsettled, as if the
lofty reason shook, terrified in its pride, at last.
