第13章 THE ENGLISHMAN(5)

Inside the homestead the Lady Hilda moved happily, a wife smiling and well content.She had won more than a husband; it seemed she had made a convert;for daily Jehan grew into the country-side as if he had been born in it.

Something in the soft woodland air and the sharper tang of the fens and the sea awoke response from his innermost soul.An aching affection was born in him for every acre of his little heritage.His son, dark like his father, who made his first diffident pilgrimages in the sunny close where the pigeons cooed, was not more thirled to English soil.

They were quiet years in that remote place, for Aelward over at Galland had made his peace with the King.But when the little Jehan was four years old the tides of war lapped again to the forest edges.One Hugo of Auchy, who had had a usurer to his father and had risen in an iron age by a merciless greed, came a-foraying from the north to see how he might add to his fortunes.Men called him the Crane, for he was tall and lean and parchment-skinned, and to his banner resorted all malcontents and broken men.He sought to conduct a second Conquest, making war on the English who still held their lands, but sparing the French manors.The King's justice was slow-footed, and the King was far away, so the threatened men, banded together to hold their own by their own might.

Aelward brought the news from Galland that the Crane had entered their borders.The good Ivo was overseas, busy on the Brittany marches, and there was no ruler in Fenland.

"You he will spare," Aelward told his sister's husband."He does not war with you new-comers.But us of the old stock he claims as his prey.How say you, Frenchman? Will you reason with him? Hereaways we are peaceful folk, and would fain get on with our harvest.""I will reason with him," said Jehan, "and by the only logic that such carrion understands.I am by your side, brother.There is but the one cause for all us countrymen."But that afternoon as he walked abroad in his cornlands he saw a portent.Aheron rose out of the shallows, and a harrier-hawk swooped to the pounce, but the long bird flopped securely into the western sky, and the hawk dropped at his feet, dead but with no mark of a wound.

"Here be marvels," said Jehan, and with that there came on him the foreknowledge of fate, which in the brave heart wakes awe, but no fear.He stood silent for a time and gazed over his homelands.The bere was shaking white and gold in the light evening wind; in the new orchard he had planted the apples were reddening; from the edge of the forest land rose wreaths of smoke where the thralls were busy with wood-clearing.There was little sound in the air, but from the steading came the happy laughter of a child.

Jehan stood very still, and his wistful eyes drank the peace of it.

"Non nobis, Domine," he said, for a priest had once had the training of him."But I leave that which shall not die."He summoned his wife and told her of the coming of the Crane.From a finger of his left hand he took the thick ring of gold which Ivo had marked years before in the Wealden hut.

"I have a notion that I am going a long journey," he told her."If I do not return, the Lord Ivo will confirm the little lad in these lands of ours.