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But before I proceed any further with my story I am bound to introduce you to a person who, as you will soon perceive, is the main cause and reason why I have any story at all to tell. The Baron de Guerre-à-mort had an only daughter. As, from the beginning of time, it has been the constant habit of maidens similarly circumstanced to fall in love with the person most objectionable to their respected father, Mathilde de Guerre-à-mort formed no exception to this most natural and reasonable rule. As a matter of course, she was desperately attached to Horace de St. Aunay, who, for his part, having fallen head over ears in love with her at their first interview, remained in the same condition with unwearied resolution. How they first came to meet I cannot say. One would have supposed that there would have been difficulties, considering the hostility, existing between the two families; but the young lady’s mother having been dead for many years, she enjoyed more liberty than was common to females of her rank and age in those days, and probably met the Count in some of her country rambles after birds’ nests, violets, or blackberries—three things which all young people who have lived much in the country find more or less attractive at certain seasons of the year. However this may be, it is certain that these two individuals met, took a mutual fancy to each other, and would, in all human probability, have been thought by their friends to have been exactly suited, had it not been for the highly respectable feud of which I have already spoken.
The Baron, who had not the remotest idea of the state of the case, grieved and afflicted his daughter beyond measure by the manner in which he abused her lover upon every possible occasion. Mathilde, poor girl, bore it all with exemplary fortitude, although she invariably endeavoured to turn the conversation into more pleasant channels. But when the matter went beyond words, and her father actually commenced to make preparations to invade his enemy’s country and destroy his castle, the agony of the poor young lady can be more easily imagined than described. She came down each morning with eyes red from crying all through the night; she grew daily paler and paler; lost her appetite; could scarcely take her five o’clock tea; sat with her hands before her, doing nothing; and burst out into hysterical fits of sobbing upon the slightest provocation. This sad condition of his daughter troubled the worthy baron not a little, and, naturally attributing it to any and every cause but the right one, he determined to try what change of air would do for her, and accordingly sent her to stay with his sister, who was the superior of a convent in Reading. Here it was his hope that the society of the nuns would cheer the sweet damsel and restore her spirits, whilst the change of air and scenery might benefit her health. There were those, indeed, including her faithful old Saxon nurse Elfreda, who declared that the conversation of nuns was, as a rule, anything but enlivening, and Reading by no means particularly healthy or reinvigorating; but as nobody dared question the Baron’s superior wisdom upon every subject, nothing was said against his plan, and Mathilde de Guerre-à-mort was safely transmitted to and domesticated in the convent just before the expedition against her lover’s castle was undertaken by her respected parent.
Horace de St. Aunay, although he received warning of the coming attack, was by no means in a condition to offer such resistance as he could have wished. The Lancastrians were by far the stronger party in his neighbourhood, and the Baron’s forces greatly outnumbered his own. I need not dwell upon the particulars of the events which followed. The Guerre-à-mort army crossed the river, defeated the levies of St. Aunay in a skirmish on the plain, and drove them in every direction before their victorious advance. Horace de St. Aunay, wounded by an arrow, was reported killed, and it was impossible to rally his people under another leader. The haughty Baron had it all his own way; he plundered the farmyards, raised a bonfire of what he didn’t want to carry away, and made himself as unpleasant as possible to the harmless population, who, naturally and properly enough, no doubt, always have to suffer for the whims and quarrels of the great. He next marched upon the Castle of St. Aunay, but found that it was deserted, and, having by that time had enough of burning and plundering for a time, contented himself with throwing down the big gates, breaking a few windows, and flaunting his own banner over the highest turret. Then, having collected all his booty, he turned homewards, and, having satisfied his private grudge against his neighbour, felt his interest in the Lancastrian cause wonderfully lessened, and began to want his daughter back again.
She, poor girl, had passed by no means a happy time in her convent, where the good nuns devoutly prayed for the Lancastrians, and especially for her worthy father, upon every possible opportunity, and where she never had a chance of hearing any news of her lover, or of saying a kind word for him or any other of his party. At last, one day, the lady superior informed her with an air of triumph that news had come of the defeat of St. Aunay’s people by her father, and that the Count had been killed in the battle. The poor girl turned deadly pale, and swooned away at this intelligence. Fortunately for her, the Lady Superior, being a person of extraordinary intelligence, knew at once that such a result must certainly have been produced by Mathilde’s alarm for her father’s safety, and gratitude for his success. Having therefore taken the usual means to recover her from her fainting fit, the good lady loudly praised her filial affection, and held her up to the rest of the sisterhood as an example worthy of imitation, Mathilde thought it best to receive these compliments without taking any steps to alter the opinion of her worthy relative, but her suspense and anxiety were very great, and all the more so from the fact that the difficulty of obtaining news of an authentic character was so considerable, that in all probability it would be weeks, and perhaps months, before she learned for certain whether her beloved Horace was alive or dead.
Days rolled on—days of miserable uncertainty, which was scarcely removed by a missive from her noble sire, which informed her indeed of the triumph of his arms, but at the same time only casually mentioned that the head of the rival house of St. Aunay had received a blow from which he would never recover. Now, it was obvious that this might be interpreted in two ways—either that the young Count had been grievously wounded in body, or that the fortunes of his house had been seriously injured. The latter was undoubtedly the case; but was the former also true? In this state of things uncertainty became madness, and Mathilde felt herself almost driven to desperation. This, however, being a condition of mind hardly suitable to a Norman lady of rank, she determined not to give way to it, but to take measures to relieve her anxiety. She resolved that she would, if possible, leave the convent and obtain, somehow or other, tidings of the being whom she so tenderly loved. It was not, however, in those days, a very easy thing to leave convents just when you pleased. If you were rich and well born, you could enter these institutions with but little difficulty; but quitting them was a different question altogether. Nor do I believe Mathilde would have accomplished her purpose had she not chanced to have a great friend in a worthy person who carried on the trade of a washerwoman in the town, and was fortunate enough to have secured the convent custom. Being devoted to the Guerre-à-mort family, and especially so to the young Baroness, this worthy woman agreed to smuggle her out of the convent in a large basket of dirty linen, in which pleasant manner she successfully carried out her project.
Once free, the question which Mathilde naturally had to consider was, what should she do next? She had forgotten to settle this before leaving her late abode, and yet it was a question which must certainly be settled without delay. The poor washerwoman, who had incurred great peril by assisting the escape of an inmate of a religious house, dared not keep her a moment longer than she could avoid, and there was no one in the town to whom she could trust herself. Under these circumstances she thought that the best thing to be done was to wander forth into the country, and this she accordingly did, having made such alterations in her dress as appeared necessary to prevent her being recognised as something different from the peasant woman for whom she wished to pass. The police were not very efficient in those days, and there were no detectives to speak of, so that she was not likely to be discovered by such agency. Newspapers also had not yet begun, and the advertisement system was unknown; otherwise her escape might have been attended with greater difficulties than was actually the case. As it was, she walked away from Reading without anybody taking the slightest notice of her, and wandered for many miles perfectly unmolested.
At last, as luck would have it, she reached a large farmhouse, and as she had by this time become weary and hungry, she followed her natural instincts, knocked at the door, and asked for victuals and leave to rest herself. It was an old woman who opened the door, whose husband was the occupier of the farm, and being kindly-disposed people, they granted Mathilde’s request, allowed her to sit down in the kitchen, and gave her a bowl of milk and a large piece of brown bread, which she gratefully devoured, and felt much the better for it. Then the old couple began to question her about her condition and ways of life, and when she had invented some tale about having seen better days, and being driven by misfortune to seek a living where she could get it, they expressed great pity, and professed themselves very willing to assist her in any manner within their power. True, they had not much to offer; but the boy who kept the pigs had lately gone off to the wars, and if pig-keeping was not beyond her, why, the place was very much at her service.
Now, if there was anything which Mathilde disliked, it was a pig. The greediness and dirtiness of the animal she deemed objectionable, and extended her dislike to it even when cooked and salted. She never touched roast pork, avoided it all the more when boiled, abhorred sausages, and looked the other way when anybody offered her bacon. But, having no very definite idea as to where she could go to if she left the farm, and thinking that, at all events, it might serve her as a temporary home until something better should turn up, she determined upon accepting the generous offer of the worthy couple, and expressed her gratitude in terms which increased the favourable opinion they had already formed of her manners and character.
That night she slept beneath their hospitable roof, and next morning her duties were pointed out to her, and she wandered forth upon the side of the hill near the farm, in close attendance upon a herd of pigs, to watch whom would be her daily duty. Although Mathilde’s objection to the creatures may have been foolish and unreasonable, it will probably be conceded that the pig is not an animal which the majority of mankind would choose as a special pet or favourite; and to a person nurtured in the luxurious habits of a baronial castle, and trained in the intellectual refinement of conventual life, the occupation of keeping pigs on the side of a hill could hardly ever be congenial. It is, therefore, not surprising that Mathilde found it first monotonous, secondly tiresome, thirdly exceedingly disagreeable. She would sit for hours together, grasping in both hands her pig-driving stick, and musing upon things far removed from considerations of pigs or pork.
At nights she would return to the farmhouse, heavy and dispirited, so that the old farmer and his wife would rally her on her dejected appearance, and declare to each other that she must either be in love, or have committed some offence over which she now brooded with remorse. Yet her youth appeared to contradict the probability of the latter supposition, and she looked them both so straight in the face when she spoke, that the old man remarked that no one who did that could be guilty of anything serious.
Meanwhile, it may be supposed that the Baron was not very well pleased when the news reached him that his daughter had disappeared. He hurried off at once to the convent, and refused for some time to believe that it could really be the case. If he had lived a little later there would have been plenty of people to suggest to him that Mathilde’s disappearance was only an invention of the Lady Superior’s, and that the poor girl was certainly either bricked up alive, or immersed in some dungeon below the convent.