“I care not,” replied Gurth, “how soon he makes a mark of me. Yesterday he left Wilfred, my young master, in his blood. Today he has striven to kill before my face the only other living creature that ever showed me kindness. By St. Edmund, St. Dunstan, St. Withold, St. Edward the Confessor, and every other Saxon saint in the calendar,” (for Cedric never swore by any that was not of Saxon lineage, and all his household had the same limited devotion,) “I will never forgive him!”
“To my thinking now,” said the Jester, who was frequently wont to act as peacemaker in the family, “our master did not propose to hurt Fangs, but only to affright him. For, if you observed, he rose in his stirrups, as thereby meaning to overcast the mark; and so he would have done, but Fangs happening to bound up at the very moment, received a scratch, which I will be bound to heal with a penny’s breadth of tar.”
“If I thought so,” said Gurth—“if I could but think so—but no—I saw the javelin was well aimed—I heard it whizz through the air with all the wrathful malevolence of him who cast it, and it quivered after it had pitched in the ground, as if with regret for having missed its mark. By the hog dear to St. Anthony, I renounce him!”
And the indignant swineherd resumed his sullen silence, which no efforts of the Jester could again induce him to break.
Meanwhile Cedric and Athelstane, the leaders of the troop, conversed together on the state of the land, on the dissensions of the royal family, on the feuds and quarrels among the Norman nobles, and on the chance which there was that the oppressed Saxons might be able to free themselves from the yoke of the Normans, or at least to elevate themselves into national consequence and independence, during the civil convulsions which were likely to ensue. On this subject Cedric was all animation. The restoration of the independence of his race was the idol of his heart, to which he had willingly sacrificed domestic happiness and