Hereward looked at her majestic face, once lovely, now careworn, and
trembled for a moment. Had there been any tenderness in it, his history
might have been a very different one; but alas! there was none. Not that
she was in herself untender; but that her great piety (call it not
superstition, for it was then the only form known or possible to pure and
devout souls) was so outraged by this, or even by the slightest insult to
that clergy whose willing slave she had become, that the only method of
reclaiming the sinner had been long forgotten, in genuine horror at his
sin. "Is it not enough," she went on, sternly, "that you should have
become the bully and the ruffian of all the fens?--that Hereward the
leaper, Hereward the wrestler, Hereward the thrower of the hammer--sports,
after all, only fit for the sons of slaves--should be also Hereward the
drunkard, Hereward the common fighter, Hereward the breaker of houses,
Hereward the leader of mobs of boon companions which bring back to us, in
shame and sorrow, the days when our heathen forefathers ravaged this land
with fire and sword? Is it not enough for me that my son should be a
common stabber--?"
"Whoever called me stabber to you, lies. If I have killed men, or had them
killed, I have done it in fair fight."
But she went on unheeding,--"Is it not enough, that, after having
squandered on your fellows all the money that you could wring from my
bounty, or win at your brutal sports, you should have robbed your own
father, collected his rents behind his back, taken money and goods from
his tenants by threats and blows; but that, after outraging them, you must
add to all this a worse sin likewise,--outraging God, and driving me--me
who have borne with you, me who have concealed all for your sake--to tell
your father that of which the very telling will turn my hair to gray?"
"So you will tell my father?" said Hereward, coolly.
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