“Well--he wants to marry her to Dolfin, his eldest son.”
“Why, Dolfin had a wife when I was at Dunsinane.”
“But she is dead since, and young Ulf, her son, murdered by Tosti last winter.”
“Whereon Gospatrick sends to me for the girl and her dowry. What was I to do? Give her up? Little it is, lad, that I ever gave up, after I had it once in my grip, or I should be a poorer man than I am now. Have and hold, is my rule. What should I do? What I did. I was coming hither on business of my own, so I put her on board ship, and half her dower,--where the other half is, I know; and man must draw me with wild horses, before he finds out;--and came here to my kinsman, Baldwin, to see if he had any proper young fellow to whom we might marry the lass, and so go shares in her money and the family connection. Could a man do more wisely?”
“But see how a wise man is lost by fortune. When I come here, whom should I find but Dolfin himself? The dog had scent of my plan, all the way from Dolfinston there, by Peebles. He hunts me out, the hungry Scotch wolf; rides for Leith, takes ship, and is here to meet me, having accused me before Baldwin as a robber and ravisher, and offers to prove his right to the jade on my body in single combat.”
“The villain!” quoth Hereward. “There is no modesty left on earth, nor prudence either. To come here, where he might have stumbled on Tosti, who murdered his son, and I would surely do the like by him, himself. Lucky for him that Tosti is off to Norway on his own errand.”
“Modesty and prudence? None now-a-days, young sire; nor justice either, I think; for when Baldwin hears us both--and I told my story as cannily as I could--he tells me that he is very sorry for an old vassal and kinsman, and so forth,--but I must either disgorge or fight.”
“‘Per se aut per campioneem,’--that’s the old law, you know.”
“Look you, Hereward. I am no coward, nor a clumsy man of my hands.”
“But see. I find it hard work to hold my own in Scotland now. Folks don’t like me, or trust me; I can’t say why.”
“And if I kill this youth, and so have a blood-feud with Gospatrick, I have a hornet’s nest about my ears. Not only he and his sons,--who are masters of Scotch Northumberland, [Footnote: Between Tweed and Forth.]--but all his cousins; King Malcolm, and Donaldbain, and, for aught I know, Harold and the Godwinssons, if he bid them take up the quarrel. And beside, that Dolfin is a big man. If you cross Scot and Saxon, you breed a very big man. If you cross again with a Dane or a Norseman, you breed a giant. His grandfather was a Scots prince, his grandmother an English Etheliza, his mother a Norse princess, as you know,--and how big he is, you should remember. He weighs half as much again as I, and twice as much as you.”