Harold : the Last of the Saxon Kings — Volume 12 eBook

Then Hilda went slowly home, and the maids worked all night at the charmed banner.  All that night, too, the watch-dogs howled in the yard, through the ruined peristyle—­howled in rage and in fear.  And under the lattice of the room in which the maids broidered the banner, and the Prophetess muttered her charm, there couched, muttering also, a dark, shapeless thing, at which those dogs howled in rage and in fear.

CHAPTER II.

All within the palace of Westminster showed the confusion and dismay of the awful time;—­all, at least, save the council-chamber, in which Harold, who had arrived the night before, conferred with his thegns.  It was evening:  the courtyards and the halls were filled with armed men, and almost with every hour came rider and bode from the Sussex shores.  In the corridors the Churchmen grouped and whispered, as they had whispered and grouped in the day of King Edward’s death.  Stigand passed among them, pale and thoughtful.  The serge gowns came rustling round the archprelate for counsel or courage.

“Shall we go forth with the King’s army?” asked a young monk, bolder than the rest, “to animate the host with prayer and hymn?”

“Fool!” said the miserly prelate, “fool! if we do so, and the Norman conquer, what become of our abbacies and convent lands?  The Duke wars against Harold, not England.  If he slay Harold——­”

“What then?”

“The Atheling is left us yet.  Stay we here and guard the last prince of the House of Cerdic,” whispered Stigand, and he swept on.

In the chamber in which Edward had breathed his last, his widowed Queen, with Aldyth, her successor, and Githa and some other ladies, waited the decision of the council.  By one of the windows stood, clasping each other by the hand, the fair young bride of Gurth and the betrothed of the gay Leofwine.  Githa sate alone, bowing her face over her hands—­desolate; mourning for the fate of her traitor son; and the wounds, that the recent and holier death of Thyra had inflicted, bled afresh.  And the holy lady of Edward attempted in vain, by pious adjurations, to comfort Aldyth, who, scarcely heeding her, started ever and anon with impatient terror, muttering to herself, “Shall I lose this crown too?”

In the council-hall debate waxed warm,—­which was the wiser, to meet William at once in the battle-field, or to delay till all the forces Harold might expect (and which he had ordered to be levied, in his rapid march from York) could swell his host?

“If we retire before the enemy,” said Gurth, “leaving him in a strange land, winter approaching, his forage will fail.  He will scarce dare to march upon London:  if he does, we shall be better prepared to encounter him.  My voice is against resting all on a single battle.”

“Is that thy choice?” said Vebba, indignantly.  “Not so, I am sure, would have chosen thy father; not so think the Saxons of Kent.  The Norman is laying waste all the lands of thy subjects, Lord Harold; living on plunder, as a robber, in the realm of King Alfred.  Dost thou think that men will get better heart to fight for their country by hearing that their King shrinks from the danger?”