think I will not pay it? Do you think I would not have burned Peterborough
minster over your head before now, had it not been for Uncle Brand's sake?
See that I do not do it yet. See that when there is another Prior in
Borough you do not find Hereward the Berserker smoking you out some dark
night, as he would smoke a wasps' nest. And I will, by--"

"Hereward, Hereward!" cried his mother, "godless, god-forgotten boy, what
words are these? Silence, before you burden your soul with an oath which
the devils in hell will accept, and force you to keep!" and she sprung up,
and, seizing his arm, laid her hand upon his mouth.

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