Ivanhoe, Walter Scott [the lemonade war series txt] 📗
- Author: Walter Scott
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long gone to render an account of his stewardship.---But thou art
a Saxon---a Saxon priest, and I have one question to ask of
thee.”
“I am a Saxon,” answered Cedric, “but unworthy, surely, of the
name of priest. Let me begone on my way---I swear I will return,
or send one of our fathers more worthy to hear your confession.”
“Stay yet a while,” said Urfried; “the accents of the voice which
thou hearest now will soon be choked with the cold earth, and I
would not descend to it like the beast I have lived. But wine
must give me strength to tell the horrors of my tale.” She
poured out a cup, and drank it with a frightful avidity, which
seemed desirous of draining the last drop in the goblet. “It
stupifies,” she said, looking upwards as she finished her
drought, “but it cannot cheer---Partake it, father, if you would
hear my tale without sinking down upon the pavement.” Cedric
would have avoided pledging her in this ominous conviviality, but
the sign which she made to him expressed impatience and despair.
He complied with her request, and answered her challenge in a
large wine-cup; she then proceeded with her story, as if appeased
by his complaisance.
“I was not born,” she said, “father, the wretch that thou now
seest me. I was free, was happy, was honoured, loved, and was
beloved. I am now a slave, miserable and degraded---the sport of
my masters’ passions while I had yet beauty---the object of their
contempt, scorn, and hatred, since it has passed away. Dost thou
wonder, father, that I should hate mankind, and, above all, the
race that has wrought this change in me? Can the wrinkled
decrepit hag before thee, whose wrath must vent itself in
impotent curses, forget she was once the daughter of the noble
Thane of Torquilstone, before whose frown a thousand vassals
trembled?”
“Thou the daughter of Torquil Wolfganger!” said Cedric, receding
as he spoke; “thou---thou---the daughter of that noble Saxon, my
father’s friend and companion in arms!”
“Thy father’s friend!” echoed Urfried; “then Cedric called the
Saxon stands before me, for the noble Hereward of Rotherwood had
but one son, whose name is well known among his countrymen. But
if thou art Cedric of Rotherwood, why this religious dress?
---hast thou too despaired of saving thy country, and sought
refuge from oppression in the shade of the convent?”
“It matters not who I am,” said Cedric; “proceed, unhappy woman,
with thy tale of horror and guilt!---Guilt there must be---there
is guilt even in thy living to tell it.”
“There is---there is,” answered the wretched woman, “deep, black,
damning guilt,---guilt, that lies like a load at my breast
—guilt, that all the penitential fires of hereafter cannot
cleanse.---Yes, in these halls, stained with the noble and pure
blood of my father and my brethren---in these very halls, to have
lived the paramour of their murderer, the slave at once and the
partaker of his pleasures, was to render every breath which I
drew of vital air, a crime and a curse.”
“Wretched woman!” exclaimed Cedric. “And while the friends of
thy father---while each true Saxon heart, as it breathed a
requiem for his soul, and those of his valiant sons, forgot not
in their prayers the murdered Ulrica---while all mourned and
honoured the dead, thou hast lived to merit our hate and
execration---lived to unite thyself with the vile tyrant who
murdered thy nearest and dearest---who shed the blood of infancy,
rather than a male of the noble house of Torquil Wolfganger
should survive---with him hast thou lived to unite thyself, and
in the hands of lawless love!”
“In lawless hands, indeed, but not in those of love!” answered
the hag; “love will sooner visit the regions of eternal doom,
than those unhallowed vaults.---No, with that at least I cannot
reproach myself---hatred to Front-de-Boeuf and his race governed
my soul most deeply, even in the hour of his guilty endearments.”
“You hated him, and yet you lived,” replied Cedric; “wretch! was
there no poniard---no knife---no bodkin!---Well was it for thee,
since thou didst prize such an existence, that the secrets of a
Norman castle are like those of the grave. For had I but dreamed
of the daughter of Torquil living in foul communion with the
murderer of her father, the sword of a true Saxon had found thee
out even in the arms of thy paramour!”
“Wouldst thou indeed have done this justice to the name of
Torquil?” said Ulrica, for we may now lay aside her assumed name
of Urfried; “thou art then the true Saxon report speaks thee! for
even within these accursed walls, where, as thou well sayest,
guilt shrouds itself in inscrutable mystery, even there has the
name of Cedric been sounded---and I, wretched and degraded, have
rejoiced to think that there yet breathed an avenger of our
unhappy nation.---I also have had my hours of vengeance---I have
fomented the quarrels of our foes, and heated drunken revelry
into murderous broil---I have seen their blood flow---I have
heard their dying groans!---Look on me, Cedric---are there not
still left on this foul and faded face some traces of the
features of Torquil?”
“Ask me not of them, Ulrica,” replied Cedric, in a tone of grief
mixed with abhorrence; “these traces form such a resemblance as
arises from the graves of the dead, when a fiend has animated the
lifeless corpse.”
“Be it so,” answered Ulrica; “yet wore these fiendish features
the mask of a spirit of light when they were able to set at
variance the elder Front-de-Boeuf and his son Reginald! The
darkness of hell should hide what followed, but revenge must
lift the veil, and darkly intimate what it would raise the dead
to speak aloud. Long had the smouldering fire of discord glowed
between the tyrant father and his savage son---long had I nursed,
in secret, the unnatural hatred---it blazed forth in an hour of
drunken wassail, and at his own board fell my oppressor by the
hand of his own son---such are the secrets these vaults conceal!
---Rend asunder, ye accursed arches,” she added, looking up
towards the roof, “and bury in your fall all who are conscious
of the hideous mystery!”
“And thou, creature of guilt and misery,” said Cedric, “what
became thy lot on the death of thy ravisher?”
“Guess it, but ask it not.---Here---here I dwelt, till age,
premature age, has stamped its ghastly features on my countenance
---scorned and insulted where I was once obeyed, and compelled to
bound the revenge which had once such ample scope, to the efforts
of petty malice of a discontented menial, or the vain or unheeded
curses of an impotent hag---condemned to hear from my lonely
turret the sounds of revelry in which I once partook, or the
shrieks and groans of new victims of oppression.”
“Ulrica,” said Cedric, “with a heart which still, I fear, regrets
the lost reward of thy crimes, as much as the deeds by which thou
didst acquire that meed, how didst thou dare to address thee to
one who wears this robe? Consider, unhappy woman, what could the
sainted Edward himself do for thee, were he here in bodily
presence? The royal Confessor was endowed by heaven with power
to cleanse the ulcers of the body, but only God himself can cure
the leprosy of the soul.”
“Yet, turn not from me, stern prophet of wrath,” she exclaimed,
“but tell me, if thou canst, in what shall terminate these new
and awful feelings that burst on my solitude---Why do deeds, long
since done, rise before me in new and irresistible horrors? What
fate is prepared beyond the grave for her, to whom God has
assigned on earth a lot of such unspeakable wretchedness? Better
had I turn to Woden, Hertha, and Zernebock---to Mista, and to
Skogula, the gods of our yet unbaptized ancestors, than endure
the dreadful anticipations which have of late haunted my waking
and my sleeping hours!”
“I am no priest,” said Cedric, turning with disgust from this
miserable picture of guilt, wretchedness, and despair; “I am no
priest, though I wear a priest’s garment.”
“Priest or layman,” answered Ulrica, “thou art the first I have
seen for twenty years, by whom God was feared or man regarded;
and dost thou bid me despair?”
“I bid thee repent,” said Cedric. “Seek to prayer and penance,
and mayest thou find acceptance! But I cannot, I will not,
longer abide with thee.”
“Stay yet a moment!” said Ulrica; “leave me not now, son of my
father’s friend, lest the demon who has governed my life should
tempt me to avenge myself of thy hard-hearted scorn---Thinkest
thou, if Front-de-Boeuf found Cedric the Saxon in his castle, in
such a disguise, that thy life would be a long one?---Already his
eye has been upon thee like a falcon on his prey.”
“And be it so,” said Cedric; “and let him tear me with beak and
talons, ere my tongue say one word which my heart doth not
warrant. I will die a Saxon---true in word, open in deed---I bid
thee avaunt!---touch me not, stay me not!---The sight of
Front-de-Boeuf himself is less odious to me than thou, degraded
and degenerate as thou art.”
“Be it so,” said Ulrica, no longer interrupting him; “go thy way,
and forget, in the insolence of thy superority, that the wretch
before thee is the daughter of thy father’s friend.---Go thy way
---if I am separated from mankind by my sufferings---separated
from those whose aid I might most justly expect---not less will I
be separated from them in my revenge!---No man shall aid me, but
the ears of all men shall tingle to hear of the deed which I
shall dare to do!---Farewell!---thy scorn has burst the last tie
which seemed yet to unite me to my kind---a thought that my woes
might claim the compassion of my people.”
“Ulrica,” said Cedric, softened by this appeal, “hast thou borne
up and endured to live through so much guilt and so much misery,
and wilt thou now yield to despair when thine eyes are opened to
thy crimes, and when repentance were thy fitter occupation?”
“Cedric,” answered Ulrica, “thou little knowest the human heart.
To act as I have acted, to think as I have thought, requires the
maddening love of pleasure, mingled with the keen appetite of
revenge, the proud consciousness of power; droughts too
intoxicating for the human heart to bear, and yet retain the
power to prevent. Their force has long passed away---Age has no
pleasures, wrinkles have no influence, revenge itself dies away
in impotent curses. Then comes remorse, with all its vipers,
mixed with vain regrets for the past, and despair for the future!
---Then, when all other strong impulses have ceased, we become
like the fiends in hell, who may feel remorse, but never
repentance.---But thy words have awakened a new soul within me
---Well hast thou said, all is possible for those who dare to
die!---Thou hast shown me the means of revenge, and be assured I
will embrace them. It has hitherto shared this wasted bosom with
other and with rival passions---henceforward it shall possess me
wholly, and thou thyself shalt say, that, whatever was the life
of Ulrica, her death well became the daughter of the noble
Torquil. There is a force without beleaguering this accursed
castle---hasten to lead them to the attack, and when thou shalt
see a red flag wave from the turret on the eastern angle of the
donjon, press the Normans hard---they will then have enough to do
within, and you may win the wall in spite both of bow and
mangonel.---Begone, I pray thee---follow thine own fate, and
leave me to mine.”
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