The Ward of King Canute: A Romance of the Danish Conquest

As the blackness of the midsummer night paled, the broken towers and wrecked walls of the monastery loomed up dim and stark in the grey light. The long-drawn sigh of a waking world crept through the air and rustled the ivy leaves. The pitying angel of dreams, who had striven all night long to restore the plundered shrine and raise from their graves the band of martyred nuns, ceased from his ministrations, softly as a bubble frees itself from the pipe that shaped it and floated away on the breath of the wind.

Through a breach in the moss-grown wall, the first sunbeam stole in and pointed a bright finger across the cloister garth at the charred spot in the centre, where missals and parchment rolls had made a roaring fire to warm the invaders’ blood-stained hands. As the lark rose through the brightening air to greet the coming day, a woman in the tunic and cowl of a nun opened what was left of the wicket gate in the one unbattered wall. A trace of the luxury that had dwelt under the gilded spires survived in her robes, which had been of a royal purple embroidered with silken flowers. Still, the voice of Time and Ruin spoke from them also, for the purple was faded to a rusty brown, and the silken embroideries were threadbare.

She struck a note perfectly harmonious with her surroundings as she stood under the crumbling arch, peering into the flowering lane. Stretching away from her feet in dewy freshness, it made a green link between the herb garden of St. Mildred’s and the highway of Watling Street. Like the straggling hedges that were half buried under a net of wild roses, red and white, the path was half effaced by grass, but beyond, her eye could follow the straight line of the great Roman road over marsh and meadow and hilltop.