第51章

“Take care, young man,” she continues, “that you fasten the door well after us; and, above all, open to none in our absence; whatever sound you hear, stir not, and look not out.The night will soon fall; this forest is most wild and lonely; strange noises are often heard therein after sunset; wolves haunt these glades, and Danish warriors infest the country; worse things are talked of; you might chance to hear, as it were, a child cry, and on opening the door to afford it succour, a greet black bull, or a shadowy goblin dog, might rush over the threshold; or, more awful still, if something flapped, as with wings, against the lattice, and then a raven or a white dove flew in and settled on the hearth, such a visitor would be a sure sign of misfortune to the house; therefore, heed my advice, and lift the latchet for nothing.

Her husband calls her away, both depart.The stranger, leftalone, listens awhile to the muffled snow-wind, the remote, swollen sound of the river, and then he speaks.

“It is Christmas Eve,” says he, “I mark the date; here I sit aloneon a rude couch of rushes, sheltered by the thatch of a herdsman’s hut; I, whose inheritance was a kingdom, owe my night’s harbourage to a poor serf; my throne is usurped, my crown presses the brow of an invader; I have no friends; my troops wander broken in the hills of Wales; reckless robbers spoil my country; my subjects lie prostrate, their breasts crushed by the heel of the brutal Dane.Fate! thou hast done thy worst, and now thou standest before me resting thy hand on thy blunted blade.Ay; I see thine eye confront mine and demand why I still live, why I still hope.Pagan demon, I credit not thine omnipotence, and socannot succumb to thy power.My God, whose Son, as on this night, took on Him the form of man, and for man vouchsafed to suffer and bleed, controls thy hand, and without His behest thou canst not strike a stroke.My God is sinless, eternal, all-wise—in Him is my trust; and though stripped and crushed by thee— though naked, desolate, void of resource—I do not despair, I cannot despair: were the lance of Guthrum now wet with my blood, I should not despair.I watch, I toil, I hope, I pray; Jehovah, in his own time, will aid.”

I need not continue the quotation; the whole devoir was in thesame strain.There were errors of orthography, there were foreign idioms, there were some faults of construction, there were verbs irregular transformed into verbs regular; it was mostly made up, as the above example shows, of short and somewhat rude sentences, and the style stood in great need of polish and sustained dignity; yet such as it was, I had hitherto seen nothing like it in the course of my professorial experience.The girl’s mind had conceived a picture of the hut, of the two peasants, of the crownless king; she had imagined the wintry forest, she had recalled the old Saxon ghost-legends, she had appreciated Alfred’s courage under calamity, she had remembered his Christian education, and had shown him, with the rooted confidence of those primitive days, relying on the scriptural Jehovah for aid against the mythological Destiny.This she had done without a hint from me: I had given the subject, but not said a word about the manner of treating it.

“I will find, or make, an opportunity of speaking to her,” I said to myself as I rolled the devoir up; “I will learn what she has of English in her besides the name of Frances Evans; she is no novicein the language, that is evident, yet she told me she had neither been in England, nor taken lessons in English, nor lived in English families.”