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

by Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

Pages
about 331
Category
Literature & Fiction
Language
English
Reading time
6.1 h at 250 wpm
Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 3.4 h at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

Full stocked folds I saw at the sons of Fitjung, Now they carry beggars’ staffs; Wealth is Like the twinkling of an eye, The most unstable of friends. Hávamál.

As the blackness of the midsummer night paled, the broken towers and wrecked walls of the monastery loomed up dim and stark in the gray 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 and embroidered with silken flowers; but the voice of Time and of Ruin spoke from them also, for the purple was faded to a rusty brown, and the silken embroideries were threadbare. She struck a note in perfect harmony with her surroundings, as she stood under the crumbling arch, peering out 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 the Watling Street.

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