This eBook was produced by Tapio Riikonen
and David Widger
In the heart of the forest land in which Hilda's abode was situated, agloomy pool reflected upon its stagnant waters the still shadows ofthe autumnal foliage. As is common in ancient forests in theneighbourhood of men's wants, the trees were dwarfed in height byrepeated loppings, and the boughs sprang from the hollow, gnarledboles of pollard oaks and beeches; the trunks, vast in girth, andcovered with mosses and whitening canker-stains, or wreaths of ivy,spoke of the most remote antiquity: but the boughs which theirlingering and mutilated life put forth, were either thin and feeblewith innumerable branchlets, or were centred on some solitarydistorted limb which the woodman's axe had spared. The trees thusassumed all manner of crooked, deformed, fantastic shapes—allbetokening age, and all decay—all, in despite of the noiselesssolitude around, proclaiming the waste and ravages of man.
The time was that of the first watches of night, when the autumnalmoon was brightest and broadest. You might see, on the opposite sideof the pool, the antlers of the deer every now and then, movingrestlessly above the fern in which they had made their couch; and,through the nearer glades, the hares and conies stealing forth tosport or to feed; or the bat wheeling low, in chase of the forestmoth. From the thickest part of the copse came a slow human foot, andHilda, emerging, paused by the waters of the pool. That serene andstony calm habitual to her features was gone; sorrow and passion hadseized the soul of the Vala, in the midst of its fancied security fromthe troubles it presumed to foresee for others. The lines of the facewere deep and care-worn—age had come on with rapid strides—and thelight of the eye was vague and unsettled, as if the lofty reasonshook, terrified in its pride, at last.
"Alone, alone!" she murmured, half aloud: "yea, evermore alone! Andthe grandchild I had reared to be the mother of kings—whose fate,from the cradle, seemed linked with royalty and love—in whom,watching and hoping for, in whom, loving and heeding, methought Ilived again the sweet human life—hath gone from my hearth—forsaken,broken-hearted—withering down to the grave under the shade of thebarren cloister! Is mine heart, then, all a lie? Are the gods wholed Odin from the Scythian East but the juggling fiends whom thecraven Christian abhors? Lo! the Wine Month has come; a few nightsmore, and the sun which all prophecy foretold should go down on theunion of the icing and the maid, shall bring round the appointed day:yet Aldyth still lives, and Edith still withers; and War stands sideby side with the Church, between the betrothed and the altar. Verily,verily, my spirit hath lost its power, and leaves me bowed, in the aweof night, a feeble, aged, hopeless, childless woman!"
Tears of human weakness rolled down the Vala's cheeks. At thatmoment, a laugh came from a thing that had seemed like the fallentrunk of a tree, or a trough in which the herdsman waters his cattle,so still, and shapeless, and undefined it had lain amongst the rankweeds and night-shade and trailing creepers on the marge of the pool,The laugh was low yet fearful to hear.
Slowly, the thing moved, and rose, and took the outline of a humanform; and the Prophetess beheld the witch whose sleep she haddisturbed by the Saxon's grave.
"Where is the banner?" said the witch, laying her hand on Hilda's arm,and looking into her face with ble