The Count of the Saxon Shore; or The Villa in Vectis.

by Alfred John Church

  CHAPTER VI.

  THE SAXON.

  It was not easy to know what should be done with the survivor of the twoSaxon captives. The villa had no proper provision for the safe custody ofprisoners; and the problem of keeping a man under lock and key, without aquite disproportionate amount of trouble, was as difficult as it would bein the ordinary country house of modern times.

  "I shall send him to the camp at the Great Harbour," said the Count, a fewdays after the scene described in our last chapter. "It is quiteimpossible to keep him unless we chain him hand and foot, or set half adozen men to guard him; and even then he is such a giant that he mighteasily overpower them. At the camp they have got a prison, and stockswhich would hold him as fast as death."

  Carna's face clouded over when she heard the Count's determination, butshe said nothing. The lively AElia broke in--

  "My dear father, you will break poor Carna's heart if you do anything ofthe kind. She is bent on making a convert of the noble savage. And anyhow,whatever else she may induce him to worship, he seems ready, from what Ihave seen, to worship her. And besides, what harm can he do? He has noarms, and he can't speak a word of any language known here. If he were torun away he would either be killed or be starved to death."

  "Well, Carna," said the Count, with a smile, "what do you say? Will youstand surety for this young pagan? Or shall I make him your slave, andthen, if he runs away, it will be your loss?"

  "I hope," said the girl, "that you won't send him to the camp, where, Ifear, they hold the lives of such as he very cheap."

  "Well," replied the Count, "we will keep him here, at all events for thepresent, and I will give the bailiff orders to give him something to do inthe safest place that he can think of."

  Accordingly the young Saxon was set to work at the forge attached to thevilla, and proved himself a willing and serviceable labourer. No moresuitable choice, indeed, could have been made. That he was a man of somerank at home everything about him seemed to show--nothing more than hishands, which were delicate, and unusually small in proportion to hisalmost gigantic stature. But the greatest chief among his people would nothave disdained the hammer and anvil. Was not Thor a mighty smith? And wasit not almost as much a great warrior's business to make a good sword asto wield it well when it was made? So the young man, whose mightyshoulders and muscular arms were regarded with respect and evenastonishment by his British fellow-workmen, laboured with a will, showinghimself no mean craftsman in the blacksmith's art. Sometimes, as he pliedthe hammer, he would chant to himself, in a low voice, what sounded like awar-song. Otherwise he remained absolutely silent, not even attempting topick up the few common words which daily intercourse with his companionsgave him the opportunity of learning. There was an air of dignity abouthim which seemed to forbid any of the little affronts to which a prisonerwould naturally be exposed; his evidently enormous strength, too, was athing which even the most stupid of his companions respected. Silent,self-contained, and impassive, he moved quietly about his daily tasks; itwas only when he caught a glimpse of Carna that his features were lightedup for a moment with a smile.

  Cedric at the Forge.]

  The idea of opening up any communication with him seemed hopeless, when anunexpected, but still quite natural, way out of the difficulty presenteditself. An old peddler, who was accustomed to supply the inmates of thevilla with silks and jewellery, and who sometimes had a book in his packfor Carna, paid in due course one of his periodical visits. The old manwas a Gaul by birth, a native of one of the States on the eastern bank ofthe Rhine, and in youth he had been an adventurous trader, extending hisjourneys eastward and northward as far as the shores of the Baltic. Therisk was great, for the Germans of the interior looked with suspicion onthe visits of civilized strangers; but, on the other hand, the profitswere considerable. Amber, in pieces of a size and clearness seldom matchedon the coasts of Gaul and Britain, and beautiful furs, as of the seal andthe sea-otter, could be bought at very low prices from theseunsophisticated tribes, and sold again to the wealthy ladies ofLutetia(19) and Lugdunum(20) at a very considerable advantage. In thesewanderings Antrix--for that was the peddler's name--had acquired a goodknowledge of the language--substantially the same, though divided intoseveral dialects--spoken by the German tribes; and, indeed, without suchknowledge his trading adventures would have been neither safe norprofitable. As he approached old age Antrix had judged it expedient totransfer his business from Gaul to Britain. Gaul he found to be adangerous place for a peaceable trader, having lost more than once all theprofits of a journey, and, indeed, a good deal more, by one of themarauding bands by whom the country was periodically overrun. Britain, orat least the southern district of Britain, was certainly safer, and it wasthis that for the last ten years he had been accustomed to traverse, tillhe had become a well-known and welcome visitor at every villa andsettlement along the coast.

  Here then chance, or, as Carna preferred to think, Providence, hadprovided an interpreter; and it so happened that, whether by another pieceof good fortune, or an additional interposition, his services were madepermanently useful. The old man had found his journeys becoming in thewinter too laborious for his strength, and it was not very difficult topersuade him to make his home in the villa for two or three months tillthe severity of the season should have passed. Every one was pleased atthe arrangement. Antrix was an admirable teller of tales, and his had beenan adventurous life, full of incident, with which he knew how to make thewinter night less long. The Count saw a rare opportunity, such as hadnever come to him before, of learning something about the hardyfreebooters whom it was his business to overawe; and Carna had theliveliest hopes of making a proselyte, if she could only make herself, andthe message in which she had so profound a faith, understood.

  The young Saxon's resolution and pride did not long hold out against theunexpected delight of being able once more to converse in his ownlanguage, and he soon began to talk with perfect freedom--for, he had noidea of having anything to conceal--about his home and his people. He wasthe son, they learnt from him, of the chief of one of the Saxonsettlements near the mouth of the Albis.(21) The people lived by huntingand fishing, and, more or less, by cultivating the soil. But life washard. The settlements were crowded; game was growing scarce, and had to befollowed further afield every year; the climate, too, was very uncertain,and the crops sometimes failed altogether. In short, they could not livewithout what they were able to pick up in their expeditions to richercountries and more temperate climates. On this point the young Saxon wasperfectly frank. The idea that there was anything of which a warrior couldpossibly be ashamed in taking what he could by the strong hand hadevidently never crossed his mind. To rob a neighbour or fellow-tribesmanhe counted shameful--so much could be gathered from expressions that he letdrop; as to others, his simple morality was this--to keep what you had, totake what others could not keep. The Count found him curiously wellinformed on what may be called the politics of Europe. He was well awareof the decay of the Roman power. Kinsmen and neighbours of his own hadmade their way south to get their share in the spoil of the Empire. Some,he had heard, had stopped to take service with the enemy; some had comeback with marvellous tales of the wealth and luxury which they had seen.About Britain itself he had very clear views. The substance of what hesaid to the Count was this: "You won't stop here very long. My father saysthat you have been weakening your fleet and armies here for years past,and that you will soon take them away altogether. Then we shall come andtake the country. It will hardly be in his time, he says. Perhaps it maynot be in mine. It is only you that hinder us; it is only you that we areafraid of. We shall have the island; we must have it. Our own country istoo small and too barren to keep us."

  Of his own adventures the young Saxon had little to say. This was thefirst voyage that he and his brother had taken. Their father was infailing health, and their mother, who had but one other child, a girl someten years younger, had kept them a
t home, till she had been unwillinglypersuaded that they were losing caste by taking no part in the warlikeexcursions of their countrymen. "We had a fairly successful time," went onthe young chief, with the absolute unconsciousness of wrong with which ahunter might relate his exploits; "took two merchantmen that had goodcargoes on board, and had a right royal fight with the people of a town onthe Gallic coast. We killed thirty of them; and only five of our warriorswent to the Walhalla. Then we turned homeward, but our ship struck on arock near some islands far to the west,(22) and had almost gone to thebottom. With great labour we dragged her ashore, and set to work repairingher; but our chief smith and carpenter had fallen in the battle, and wewere a long time in making her fit for sea. This was the reason why wewere going home so late, and also why we lagged behind our comrades whenyou were chasing us. By rights we were the best crew and had the swiftestship, but she had been clumsily mended, and dragged terribly in thewater."

  The Count listened to all this with the greatest interest, and plied thespeaker with questions, all of which he answered with perfect frankness.He found out how many warriors the settlement could muster, what were therelations with their neighbours, whether there had been any definite plansfor a common expedition. On the whole, he came to the conclusion thatthough there was no danger of an overpowering migration from this quartersuch as Western and Southern Europe had suffered from in former times,these sea-faring tribes of the East would be an increasing danger toBritain as years went on. Personally the prospect did not concern himgreatly; his fortunes were not bound up with the island. Still he lovedthe place and its people; it troubled him to see what dark days were instore for them. And taking a wider view--for he was a man of largesympathies--he was grieved to see another black cloud in an horizon alreadyso dark. Would anything civilized be left, he thought to himself, whenevery part of Europe has been swept by these hosts of barbarians?

  Before long another source of interest was discovered in the young Saxon.The Count happened to overhear him chanting to himself, and though hecould not distinguish the words, he recognized in the rhythm somethinglike the camp-songs that he had often listened to from German warriors inStilicho's camp. Here again the peddler's services as an interpreter wereput in requisition, and though the old man's Latin, which went littlebeyond his practical wants as a trader, fell lamentably short of what waswanted, enough was heard to interest the villa family, which had aliterary turn, very much. What the young man had sung to himself was anearly Saga, a curious romance(23) of heroes fighting with monsters, asunlike as can be conceived to anything to be found in Roman poetry--versein its rudest shape, but still making itself felt as a real poet's work.

  Lastly, Carna, now that she had found a way of communicating her thoughts,threw herself with ardour into the work of proselytizing the stranger.Here the peddler was more at home in his task as interpreter. Carna usedthe dialect of South Britain, with which he was far more familiar than hewas with Latin--it differed indeed but little from his native speech. Thetopics too were familiar, for he had been brought up in the Christianfaith, and though he scarcely understood the girl's zeal, he was quitewilling to help her as much as he could.

  Carna found her task much more difficult than she had expected. She hadthought in her simple faith that it would be enough for her to tell to theyoung heathen the story of the Crucified Christ for him to fall down atonce and worship. He listened with profound attention and respect. This,perhaps, he would have accorded to anything that came from her lips; but,beyond this, the story itself profoundly interested him. But it must beconfessed that there was a good deal in it which did not commend itself tohis warrior's ideal of what the God whom he could worship should be. Hewas a soldier, and he could scarcely conceive of anything great or goodthat was outside a soldier's virtues. The gods of his own heaven, Odin andThor and Balder, were great conquerors, armed with armour which no mortalblow could pierce, wielders of sword and hammer which were too heavy forany mortal arm to wield. He could bow down to them because they weregreater, immeasurably greater than himself, in the qualities and giftswhich he most honoured. Now he was called upon to receive a quitedifferent set of ideas, to set up a quite different standard ofexcellence. The story of the Gospels touched him. It roused him almost tofury when he heard how the good man who had gone about healing the sickand feeding the hungry had been put shamefully to death by His owncountrymen, by those who knew best what He had done. If Carna had biddenhim avenge the man who had been so ungratefully treated, he would haveperformed her bidding with pleasure. But to worship this Crucified One, todepose for Him Odin, Lord of Battles--that seemed impossible.

  Still he was impressed, and impressed chiefly by the way in which thepreacher seemed to translate into her own life the principles of the faithwhich she tried to set forth to him. She had told him that this CrucifiedOne had died for him. He could not understand why He should have done so,why He should not have led His twelve legions of angels against thewicked, swept them off from the face of the earth, and established byforce of arms a kingdom of justice. Still the idea of so much having beengiven, so much endured for his sake touched him, especially when he sawhow passionately in earnest was this wonderful creature, this beautifulprophetess, as, with the German reverence for women, he was ready toregard her, how eager she was to do him good, how little, as he could notbut feel, she thought of herself in comparison with others.

  As long as Carna dwelt on these topics she made good way; when shewandered away from them, as naturally she sometimes did, she was not sosuccessful. One day it unluckily occurred to her that she would appeal tohis fears.

  "Do not refuse to listen," she said to him, "for if He is infinitely goodto those who love Him, He can also be angry with those who love Him not."

  "What will He do with them?" asked the young Saxon.

  "He will send them to suffer in everlasting fire."

  "Ah!" answered the youth, "I have heard from our wise men of such a placeinto which Odin drives cowards, and oath-breakers, and such as are falseto their friends. But they say it is a place of everlasting cold, and thisindeed seems to me to be worse than fire."

  "Yes," said Carna, "there is such a place of torment, and it is kept notonly for the wicked, as you say, but for all who do not believe."

  "Will the Lord Christ then banish thither all who do not own Him as theirMaster, and call themselves by His name?"

  "Yes--and think how terrible a thing it would be if it should happen toyou."

  "And that is why you are so anxious to persuade me?"

  "Yes."

  "And why you were so troubled about my brother when you could not make himunderstand before he died?"

  "Yes. Oh! it was dreadful to think he should pass away when safety was inhis reach."

  "And you think that the Lord Christ has sent him to that place because hedid not know Him?"

  "I fear that it must be so."

  "Then He shall send me also. For how am I better because I have livedlonger? No--I will be with my brother, whom I loved, and with my ownpeople."

  And neither for that day nor for many days to come would he speak again onthis subject. Carna was greatly troubled; but she began to think whetherthere might not be something in what the young man had said.