Chapter 6

Blessed Mary, mother dear,
To a maiden bend thine ear,
Virgin undefiled, to thee
A wretched virgin bends the knee.
HYMN TO THE VIRGIN.

The daughter of the slaughtered Raymond had descended from the
elevated station whence she had beheld the field of battle, in the
agony of grief natural to a child whose eyes have beheld the death
of an honoured and beloved father. But her station, and the
principles of chivalry in which she had been trained up, did not
permit any prolonged or needless indulgence of inactive sorrow. In
raising the young and beautiful of the female sex to the rank of
princesses, or rather goddesses, the spirit of that singular
system exacted from them, in requital, a tone of character, and a
line of conduct, superior and something contradictory to that of
natural or merely human feeling. Its heroines frequently resembled
portraits shown by an artificial light--strong and luminous, and
which placed in high relief the objects on which it was turned;
but having still something of adventitious splendour, which,
compared with that of the natural day, seemed glaring and
exaggerated.

It was not permitted to the orphan of the Garde Doloureuse, the
daughter of a line of heroes, whose stem was to be found in the
race of Thor, Balder, Odin, and other deified warriors of the
North, whose beauty was the theme of a hundred minstrels, and her
eyes the leading star of half the chivalry of the warlike marches
of Wales, to mourn her sire with the ineffectual tears of a
village maiden. Young as she was, and horrible as was the incident
which she had but that instant witnessed, it was not altogether so
appalling to her as to a maiden whose eye had not been accustomed
to the rough, and often fatal sports of chivalry, and whose
residence had not been among scenes and men where war and death
had been the unceasing theme of every tongue, whose imagination
had not been familiarized with wild and bloody events, or,
finally, who had not been trained up to consider an honourable
"death under shield," as that of a field of battle was termed, as
a more desirable termination to the life of a warrior, than that
lingering and unhonoured fate which comes slowly on, to conclude
the listless and helpless inactivity of prolonged old age.
Eveline, while she wept for her father, felt her bosom glow when
she recollected that he died in the blaze of his fame, and amidst
heaps of his slaughtered enemies; and when she thought of the
exigencies of her own situation, it was with the determination to
defend her own liberty, and to avenge her father's death, by every
means which Heaven had left within her power.

The aids of religion were not forgotten; and according to the
custom