.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 42284
   :PG.Title: Love Among the Ruins
   :PG.Released: 2013-03-9
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Warwick Deeping
   :MARCREL.ill: \W. Benda
   :DC.Title: Love Among the Ruins
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1904
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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LOVE AMONG THE RUINS
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   .. _`Cover`:

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      Cover

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   .. _`"FLAVIAN OF GAMBREVAULT STOOD BOUND BEFORE HER."`:

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      :alt: "FLAVIAN OF GAMBREVAULT STOOD BOUND BEFORE HER."

      "FLAVIAN OF GAMBREVAULT STOOD BOUND BEFORE HER."

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      LOVE
      AMONG THE RUINS

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      BY
      WARWICK DEEPING

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      AUTHOR OF "UTHER AND IGRAINE"
   
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   ..

   |  Grim work, sirs; what would you!
   |    War is the devil.

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      *WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY W. BENDA*

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      New York
      THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
      LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
      1904

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      *All rights reserved* 

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      COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY
      THE OUTLOOK COMPANY.

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      Set up and electrotyped.  Published June, 1904.

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      Norwood Press
      J. S. Cushing & Co. -- Berwick & Smith Co.
      Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

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      TO
      MY MOTHER AND FATHER
      WITH ALL LOVE AND GRATITUDE

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.. _`I`:

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   PART I

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   I

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The branches of the forest invoked the sky with the
supplications of their thousand hands.  Black, tumultuous,
terrible, the wilds billowed under the moon, stifled with
the night, silent as a windless sea.  Winter, like a pale
Semiramis of gigantic mould, stood with her coronet
touching the steely sky.  A mighty company of stars stared
frost-bright from the heavens.

A pillar of fire shone red amid the chaos of the woods.
Like a great torch, a blazing tower hurled spears of light
into the gloom.  Shadows, vast and fantastic, struggled
like Titans striving with Destiny in the silence of the
night.  Their substanceless limbs leapt and writhed
through the gnarled alleys of the forest.  Overhead, the
moon looked down with thin and silver lethargy on the
havoc kindled by the hand of man.

In a glade, all golden with the breath of the fire,
blackened battlements waved a pennon of vermilion flame
above the woods.  Smoke, in eddying and gilded clouds,
rolled heavenwards to be silvered into snow by the light
of the moon.  The grass of the glade shone a dusky,
yet brilliant green; the tower's windows were red as
rubies on a pall of sables.  About its base, cottages were
burning like faggots piled about a martyr's loins.

Tragedy had touched the place with her ruddy hand.
There had been savage deeds done in the silence of the
woods.  Hirelings, a rough pack of mercenaries in the
service of the Lord Flavian of Gambrevault, had stolen
upon the tower of Rual of Cambremont, slain him before
his own gate, and put his sons to the sword.  A feud had
inspired the event, a rotten shred of enmity woven on
Stephen's Eve in a tavern scuffle.  The burning tower
with its cracking walls bore witness to the extravagant
malice of a rugged age.

Death, that flinty summoner, salves but the dead, yet
wounds the living.  It is sport with him to pile woe
upon the shoulders of the weak, to crown with thorns the
brows of those who mourn.  Double-handed are his
blessings--a balm for those who sleep, an iron scourge for the
living.  The quick bow down before his feet; only the dead
fear him no more in the marble philosophy of silence.

On a patch of grass within the golden whirl of the
fire lay the body of Rual of Cambremont, stiff and still.
His face was turned to the heavens; his white beard
tinctured with the dye of death.  Beside him knelt a
girl whose unloosed hair trailed on his body, dark and
disastrous as a sable cloud.  The girl's eyes were
tearless, dry and dim.  Her hands were at her throat, clenched
in an ecstasy of despair.  Her head was bowed down
below her stooping shoulders, and she knelt like Thea over
Saturn's shame.

Behind her in the shadow, his face grey in the
uncertain gloom, an old man watched the scene with a
wordless awe.  He was a servant, thin and meagre,
bowed under Time's burden, a dried wisp of manhood,
living symbol of decay.  There was something of the
dog about his look, a dumb loyalty that grieved and gave
no sound.  Beneath the burning tower in the heat of the
flames, these twain seemed to mimic the stillness of the
dead.

There was other life in the glade none the less, a red
relic evidencing the handiwork of the sword.  A streak
of shadow that had lain motionless in the yellow glare of
the fire, stirred in the rank grass with a snuffling groan.
There was a curt hint in the sound that brought Jaspar
the harper round upon his heel.  He moved two steps,
went down on his knees in the ooze, turned the man's
head towards the tower, and peered into his face.  It
was gashed from chin to brow, a grim mask of war,
contorted the more by the uncertain palpitations of the
flames.

Jaspar had a flask buckled at his girdle.  He thrust
his knee under the man's head, trickled wine between
his lips, and waited.  The limp hands began to twitch;
the man jerked, drew a wet, stertorous breath, stared for a
moment with flickering lids at the face above him.  Jaspar
craned down, put his mouth to the man's ear, and spoke
to him.

The fellow's lips quivered; he stirred a little, strove
to lift his head, mumbled thickly like a man with a palsied
tongue.  Jaspar put his ear to the bruised mouth and
listened.  He won words out of the grave, for his rough
face hardened, his brows were knotted over the dying
man's stumbling syllables.  The harper shouted in his
ear, and again waited.

"Gam--Gambrevault, Flavian's men, dead, all dead,"
ran the death utterance.  "Ave Maria, my lips
burn--St. Eulalie--St. Jude, defend me----"

A cough snapped the halting appeal.  The man stiffened
suddenly in Jaspar's arms, and thrust out his feet with
a strong spasm.  His hands clawed the grass; his jaw
fell, leaving his mouth agape, a black circle of death.
There was a last rattling stridor.  Then the head fell
back over Jaspar's knee with the neck extended, the eyes
wide with a visionless stare.

A shadow fell athwart the dead man and the living,
a shadow edged with the golden web of the fire.  Looking
up, Jaspar the harper saw the girl standing above him,
staring down upon the dead man's body.  The red tower
framed her figure with flame, making an ebon cloud of
her hair, her body a pillar of sombre stone.  Her face
was grey, pinched, and expressionless.  Youth seemed
frozen for the moment into bleak and premature age.

She bowed down suddenly, her hair falling forward like
a cataract, her eyes large with a tearless hunger.
Pointing to the man on Jaspar's knee, she looked into the
harper's face, and spoke to him.

"Quick, the truth.  I fear it no longer."

Her voice was toneless and hoarse as an untuned
string.  She beat her hands together, and then stood with
her fists pressed over her heart.

"Quick, the truth."

The old man turned the body gently to the grass, and
still knelt at the woman's feet.

"It is Jean," he said, with great quietness, "Jean the
swineherd.  He is dead.  God rest his soul!"

She bent forward again with arm extended, her voice
deep and hoarse in her throat.

"Tell me, who is it that has slain my father?"

"They of Gambrevault."

"Ah!"

Her eyes gleamed behind her hair as it fell dishevelled
over her face.

"And the rest--Bertrand, my brothers?"

Her voice appealed him with a gradual fear.  Jaspar
the harper bowed his face, and pointed to the tower.  The
girl straightened, and stood quivering like a loosened bow.

"God!  In there!  And Roland?"

Again the harper's hand went up with the slow
inevitableness of destiny.  The flames, as beneath the
incantations of a sibyl, leapt higher, roaring hungrily towards
the heavens.  The girl swayed away some paces, her
lips moving silently, her hair fanned by the draught,
blowing about her like a veil.  She turned to the tower, thrust
up her hands to it with a strong gesture of anguish and
despair.

A long while she stood in silence as in a kind of torpor,
gazing at this red pyre of the Past, where memories leapt
heavenwards in a golden haze of smoke.  The roar of the
fire was as the voice of Fate.  She heard it dim and
distant like the far thunder of a sea.  Beyond, around, above,
the gaunt trees clawed at the stars with their leafless talons.
Night and the shadow of it were very apparent to the girl's
soul.

Jaspar the harper stood and watched her with a dumb
and distant awe.  Her rigid anguish cowed him into
impotent silence.  The woman's soul seemed to soar far
above comfort, following the saffron smoke into the silver
æther of the infinite.  The man stood apart, holding aloof
with the instinct of a dog, from a sorrow that he could not
chasten.  He was one of those dull yet happy souls, who
carry eloquence in their eyes, whose tongues are clumsy,
but whose hearts are warm.  He stood aloof therefore
from Yeoland, dead Rual's daughter, pulling his ragged
beard, and calling in prayer to the Virgin and the
saints.

Presently the girl turned very slowly, as one whose blood
runs chill and heavy.  Her eyes were still dry and crystal
bright, her face like granite, or a mask of ice.  The man
Jaspar hid his glances from her, and stared at the sod.  He
was fearful in measure of gaping blankly upon so great a
grief.

"Jaspar," she said, and her voice was clear now as the
keen sweep of a sword.

He crooked the knee to her, stood shading his eyes with
his wrinkled hand.

"We alone are left," she said.

"God's will, madame, God's will; He giveth, and taketh
away.  I, even I, am your servant."

Her eyes lightened an instant as though red wrath
streamed strongly from her heart.  Her mouth quivered.
She chilled the mood, however, and stood motionless,
save for her hands twining and twisting in her hair.

"Does Heaven mock me?" she asked him, with a level
bitterness.

"How so, madame?" he answered her; "who would
mock thee at such an hour?"

"Who indeed?"

"Not even Death.  I pray you be comforted.  There is
a balm in years."

They stood silent again in the streaming heat and
radiance of the fire.  A sudden wind had risen.  They
heard it crying far away in the infinite vastness of the
woods.  It grew, rushed near, waxed with a gradual
clamour till the bare wilds seemed to breathe one great
gathering roar.  The flames flew slanting from the
blackened battlements.  The trees clutched and swayed,
making moan under the calm light of the moon.

The sound thrilled the girl.  Her lips trembled, her form
dilated.

"Listen," she said, thrusting up her hands into the
night, "the cry of the forest, the voice of the winter
wind.  What say they but 'vengeance--vengeance--vengeance'?"





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   II

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Dawn came vaguely in a veil of mist.  A heavy dew lay
scintillant upon the grass; a great silence covered the
woods.  The trees stood grim and gigantic with dripping
boughs in a vapoury atmosphere, and there seemed no
augury of sunlight in the blind grey sky.

A rough hovel under a fir, used for the storing of wood,
had given Yeoland and the harper shelter for the night.
The sole refuge left to them by fire, the hut had served its
purpose well enough, for grief is not given to grumbling
over externals in the extremity of its distress.

The girl Yeoland was astir early with the first twitter of
the birds in the boughs overhead.  Jaspar had made her
a couch of straw, and she had lain there tossing to and fro
with no thought of sleep.  The moon had sunk early over
the edge of the world, and heavy darkness had wrapped her
anguish close about her soul, mocking her with the staring
of a dead face.  The burning tower had ceased to torch
her vigil towards dawn; yet there had been no fleeing
from the pale candour of the night.

A slim, white-faced woman she stood shivering in the
doorway of the hovel.  Her eyes were black and lustrous--swift,
darting eyes full of dusky fire and vivid unrest.
Her mouth ran a red streak, firm above her white chin.
Her hair gleamed like sable steel.  The world was cold
about her for the moment, dead and inert as her own heart.
As she stood there, fine and fragile as gossamer, the very
trees seemed to weep for her with the dawning day.

Some hundred paces from the hut, a cloud of smoke
mingled with the mist that hung about the blackened walls
of the forest tower.  Its windows were blind and frameless
to the sky; a zone of charred wood and reeking ashes
circled its base.  The mist hung above it like a ghostly
memory.  The place looked desolate and pitiful enough
in the meagre light.

The girl Yeoland watched the incense of smoke wreathing
grey spirals overhead, melting symbolic--into nothingness.
The pungent scent of the ruin floated down to her,
and became a recollection for all time.  This blackened
shell had been a home to her, a bulwark, nay, a cradle.
Sanguine life had run ruddy through its heart.  How often
had she seen its grey brow crowned with gold by the
mystic hierarchy of heaven.  She had found much joy there
and little sorrow.  A wrinkled face had taught her these
many years to cherish the innocence of childhood.  All
this was past; the present found her bankrupt of such
things.  The place had become but a coffin, a
charnel-house for the rotting bones of love.

As she brooded in the doorway, the smite of a spade
came ringing to her on the misty air.  Terse and rhythmic,
it was like the sound of Time plucking the hours from the
Tree of Life.  She looked out over the glade, and saw
Jaspar the harper digging a shallow grave under an oak.

She went and watched him, calmly, silently, with the
utter quiet of a measureless grief.  There was reason in
this labour.  It emphasised reality; helped her to grip the
present.  As the brown earth tumbled at her feet, she
remembered how much she would bury in that narrow
forest grave.

The man Jaspar was a ruddy soul, like a red apple in
autumn.  His strong point was his loyalty, a virtue that
had stiffened with the fibres of his heart.  He could boast
neither of vast intelligence, nor of phenomenal courage,
but he had a conscience that had made gold of his whole
rough, stunted body.  Your clever servant is often a rogue;
in the respect of apt villainy, the harper was a fool.

He ceased now and again from his digging, hung his
hooked chin over his spade, and snuffed the savour of the
clean brown earth.  He thrust curt, furtive glances up
into the girl's face as she watched him, as though desirous
of reading her humour or her health.

"You are weary," she said to him anon, looking blankly
into the trench.

The man wagged his head.

"Have ye broken fast?  There is bread and dried fruit
in the hut, and a pitcher of water."

"I cannot eat--yet," she answered him.

He sighed and continued his digging.  The pile of russet
earth increased on the green grass at her feet; the trench
deepened.  Jaspar moistened his palms, and toiled on, grunting
as he hove his libations of soil over his shoulder.  Presently
he stood up again to rest.

"What will you do, madame?" he asked her, squinting
at the clouds.

"Ride out."

"And whither?"

"Towards Gilderoy--as yet."

"Ah, ah, a fair town and strong.  John of Brissac is
madame's friend.  Good.  Have we money?"

"Some gold nobles."

They waxed silent again, and in a while the grave lay
finished.  'Twas shallow, but what of that!  It gave
sanctuary enough for the dead.

They went together, and gazed on the sleeping man's
face.  It was grey, but very peaceful, with no hint of
horror thereon.  The eyes were closed, and dew had starred
the white hair with a glistening web.  Yeoland knelt and
kissed the forehead.  She shivered and her hands trembled,
but she did not weep.

So they carried the Lord Rual between them, for he was
a spare man and frugal of frame, and laid him in the grave
beneath the oak.  When they had smoothed his hair, and
crossed his hands upon his breast, they knelt and prayed to
the Virgin and the saints that in God's heaven he might
have peace.  The wind in the boughs sang a forest
requiem.

When Yeoland had looked long at the white face in the
trench, she rose from her knees, and pointed Jaspar to his
spade.  The harper took the measure of her mind.  When
she had passed into the shadows of the trees, he mopped
his face, and entered on his last duty to the dead.  It was
soon sped, soon ended.  A pile of clean earth covered the
place.  Jaspar banked the grave with turf, shouldered his
spade, and returned to the hovel.

He found the girl Yeoland seated on a fallen tree in the
forest, her ebon hair and apple-green gown gleaming under
the sweeping boughs.  Her cheeks were white as windflowers,
her eyes full of a swimming gloom.  She raised her chin,
and questioned the man mutely with a look that smouldered
under her arched brows.

"Jaspar?"

"Madame----"

"Have you entered the tower?"

The man's wrinkled face winced despite his years.

"Would you have me go?" he asked her in a hoarse
undertone.

She looked into the vast mazes of the woods, shuddered
in thought, and was silent.  Her mouth hardened; the
desire melted from her eyes.

"No," she said anon, turning her hood forward, and
drawing a green cloak edged with sables about her, "what
would it avail us?  Let us sally at once."

A little distance away, their horses, that had been
hobbled over night, stood grazing quietly on a patch of grass
under the trees.  One was a great grey mare, the other a
bay jennet, glossy as silk.  Jaspar caught them.  He was
long over the girths and bridles, for his hands were stiff,
and his eyes dim.  When he returned, Yeoland was still
standing like a statue, staring at the blackened tower
reeking amid the trees.

"Truly, they have burnt the anguish of it into my heart
with fire," she said, as Jaspar held her stirrup.

"God comfort you, madame!"

"Let us go, Jaspar, let us go."

"And whither, lady?"

"Where revenge may lead."

The day brightened as they plunged down into the forest.
A light breeze rent the vapours, and a shimmer of sunlight
quivered through the haze.  The tree-tops began to glisten
gold; and there was life in the deepening promise of the
sky.  The empty woods rolled purple on the hills; the
greensward shone with a veil of gossamer; the earth grew
glad.

The pair had scant burden of speech upon their lips that
morning.  They were still benumbed by the violence of the
night, and death still beckoned to their souls.  Fate had
smitten them with such incredible and ponderous brevity.
On the dawn of yesterday, they had ridden out hawk on
wrist into the wilds, lost the bird in a long flight, and turned
homeward when evening was darkening the east.  From a
hill they had seen the tower lifting its flame like a red and
revengeful finger to heaven.  They had hastened on, with
the glare of the fire spasmodic and lurid over the trees.  In
one short hour they had had speech with death, and came
point to point with the bleak sword of eternity.

What wonder then that they rode like mutes to a burial,
still of tongue and dull of heart?  Life and the zest thereof
were at low ebb, colourless as a wintry sea.  Joy's crimson
wings were smirched and broken; the lute of youth was
unstrung.  A granite sky had drawn low above their heads,
and to the girl a devil ruled the heavens.

Before noon they had threaded the wild waste of woodland
that girded the tower like a black lagoon.  They came
out from the trees to a heath, a track that struck green and
purple into the west, and boasted nought that could infringe
the blue monotony of the sky.  It was a wild region, swept
by a wind that sighed perpetually amid the gorse and heather.
By the black rim of the forest they had dismounted and
partaken of bread and water before pushing on with a
listless persistence that won many miles to their credit.

The man Jaspar was a phlegmatic soul in the hot sphere
of action.  He was a circumspect being who preferred
heading for the blue calm of a haven in stormy weather,
to thrusting out into the tossing spume of the unknown.
The girl Yeoland, on the contrary, had an abundant spirit,
and an untamed temper.  Her black eyes roved restlessly
over the world, and she tilted her chin in the face of Fate.
Jaspar, knowing her fibre, feared for her moods with the
more level prudence of stagnant blood.  Her obstinacy
was a hazardous virtue, hawk-like in sentiment, not given
to perching on the boughs of reason.  Moreover, being
cumbered with a generous burden of pity, he was in mortal
dread of wounding her pale proud grief.

By way of being diplomatic, he began by hinting that
there were necessities in life, trivial no doubt, but inevitable,
as sleep and supper.

"Lord John of Brissac is your friend," he meandered,
"a strong lord, and a great; moreover, he hates those of
Gambrevault, God chasten their souls!  Fontenaye is no
long ride from Gilderoy.  Madame will lodge there till
she can come by redress?"

Madame had no thought of being beholden to the
gentleman in question.  Jaspar understood as much from
a very brief debate.  Lord John of Brissac was forbidden
favour, being as black a pard when justly blazoned as any
seigneur of Gambrevault.  The harper's chin wagged on
maugre her contradiction.

"We have bread for a day," he chirped, dropping upon
banalities by way of seeming wise.  "The nights are cold,
madame, damp as a marsh.  As for the water-pot----"

"Water may be had--for the asking."

"And bread?"

"I have money."

"Then we ride for Gilderoy?"

The assumption was made with an excellent unction
that betrayed the seeming sincerity of the philosopher.
Yeoland stared ahead over her horse's ears, with a clear
disregard for Jaspar and his discretion.

"We are like leaves blown about in autumn," she said to
him, "wanderers with fortune.  You have not grasped my
temper.  I warrant you, there is method in me."

Jaspar looked blank.

"Strange method, madame, to ride nowhere, to
compass nothing."

She turned on him with a sudden rapid gleam out of her
passionate eyes.

"Nothing!  You call revenge nothing?"

The harper appealed to his favourite saint.

"St. Jude forfend that madame should follow such a
marsh fire," he said.

They had drawn towards the margin of the heath.
Southwards it sloped to the rim of a great pine forest,
that seemed to clasp it with ebonian arms.  The place
was black, mysterious, impenetrable, fringed with a
palisading of dark stiff trunks, but all else, a vast undulation
of sombre plumes.  Its spires waved with the wind.
There was a soundless awe about its sable galleries, a
saturnine gloom that hung like a curtain.  In the vague
distance, a misty height seemed to struggle above the ocean
of trees, like the back of some great beast.

Yeoland, keen of face, reined in her jennet, and pointed
Jaspar to this landscape of sombre hues.  There was an
alert lustre in her eyes; she drew her breath more quickly,
like one whose courage kindles at the cry of a trumpet.

"The Black Wild," she said with a little hiss of
eagerness, and a glance that was almost fierce under her
coal-black brows.

Jaspar shook his head with the cumbersome wit of an ogre.

"Ha, yes, madame, a bloody region, packed with
rumours, dark as its own trees; no stint of terror, I
warrant ye.  See yonder, the road to Gilderoy."

The girl in the green cloak seemed strongly stirred
by her own thoughts.  Her face had a wild elfin look for
the moment, a beautiful and daring insolence that deified
her figure.

"And Gilderoy?" she said abstractedly.

"Gilderoy lies south-east; Gambrevault south-west
many leagues.  Southwards, one would find the sea, in due
season.  Eastwards, we touch Geraint, and the Roman
road."

Yeoland nodded as though her mind were already
adamant in the matter.

"We will take to the forest," ran her decretal.

Here was crass sentiment extravagantly in the ascendant,
mad wilfulness pinioning forth like a bat into gloom.
Jaspar screwed his mouth into a red knot, blinked and
waxed argumentative with a vehemence that did his
circumspection credit.

"A mad scheme."

"What better harbour for the night than yonder trees?"

"Who will choose us a road?  I pray you consider it."

Yeoland answered him quietly enough.  She had set her
will on the venture, was in a desperate mood, and could
therefore scorn reason.

"Jaspar, my friend," she said, "I am in a wild humour,
and ripe for the wild region.  Peril pleases me.  The
unknown ever draweth the heart, making promise of
greater, stranger things.  What have I to lose?  If you
play the craven, I can go alone."





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.. _`III`:

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   III

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The avenues of the pine forest engulfed the harper and
the lady.  The myriad crowded trunks hemmed them with
a stubborn and impassive gloom.  A faint wind moved in
the tree-tops.  Dim aisles struck into an ever-deepening
mystery of shadow, as into the dark mazes of a dream.

The wild was as some primæval waste, desolate and
terrible, a vast flood of sombre green rolling over hill and
valley.  Its thickets plunged midnight into the bosom of
day.  On the hills, the trees stood like traceried pinnacles,
spears blood-red in the sunset, or splashed with the
glittering magic of the moon.  There were dells sunk deep
beneath crags; choked with dense darkness, unsifted by
the sun.  Winding alleys white with pebbles as with the
bones of the dead, wound through seething seas of gorse.
In summer, heather sucked with purple lips at the tapestries
of moss blazoning the ground, bronze, green, and gold.  It
was a wild region, and mysterious, a shadowland moaned
over by the voice of a distressful wind.

Yeoland held southwards by the gilded vane of the sun.
She had turned back her hood upon her shoulders, and
fastened her black hair over her bosom with a brooch of
amethysts.  The girl was wise in woodlore and the
philosophies of nature.  The sounds and sights of the forest
were like a gorgeous missal to her, blazoned with all
manner of magic colours.  She knew the moods of hawk and
hound, had camped often under the steely stare of a winter
sky, had watched the many phases of the dawn.  Hers was
a nature ripe for the hazardous intent of life.  It was she
who led, not Jaspar.  The harper followed her with a
martyred reason, having, for all his discontent, some faith
in her keen eyes and the delicate decision of her chin.

There was a steady dejection in the girl's mood--a
dejection starred, however, with red wrath like sparks
glowing upon tinder.  She was no Agnes, no Amorette,
mere pillar of luscious beauty.  Her eyes were as
blue-black shields, flashing with many sheens in the face of
day.  The flaming tower, the dead figure in the forest
grave, had thrust the gentler part out of her being.  She
was miserable, mute, yet full of a volcanic courage.

As for the harper, a rheumy dissatisfaction pervaded his
temper.  His blood ran cold as a toad's in winter weather.
He blew upon his fingers, dreaming of inglenooks and hot
posset, and the casual luxuries the forest did not promise.
Yeoland considered not the old man's babblings.  Her
heart looked towards the dawn, and knew nothing of the
twilight under the dark eaves of age.

They had pressed a mile or more into the waste, and the
day was waxing sere and yellow in the west.  Before them
ran a huge thicket, its floor splashed with tawny splendours,
the sable plumes touched with gold by the sun.  Its deep
bosom hung full of purple gloom, dusted with amber, wild
and windless.

A sudden "hist" from his lady's lips made the harper
start in the saddle.  Her hand had snatched at his bridle.
Both horses came to a halt.  The man looked at her as
they sat knee to knee; she was alert and vigilant, her eyes
bright as the eyes of a hawk.

"Marked you that?" she said to him in a whisper.

Jaspar gave her a vacant stare and shook his head.

"Nothing?"

"Boughs swaying in the wind, no more."

Yeoland enlightened him.

"Tush.  There's no wind moving.  A glimmer of
armour, yonder, up the slope."

"Holy Jude!"

"A flash, it has gone."

They held silent under the drooping boughs, listening,
with noiseless breath.  The breeze made mysterious
murmurings with a vague unrest; now and again a twig
cracked, or some forest sound floated down like a filmy
moth on the quiet air.  The trees were dumb and saturnine,
as though resenting suspicion of their sable aisles.

Jaspar, peering over his shoulder, jerked out a word of
warning.  Yeoland, catching the monosyllable from his
lips, and following his stare, glanced back into the eternal
shadows of the place.

"I see nothing," she said.

Jaspar answered her slowly, his eyes still at gaze.

"A shadow slipping from trunk to trunk."

"Where?"

"I see it no longer.  The saints succour us!"

Yeoland's face was dead white under her hair; her
mouth gaped like a circle of jet.  She listened constantly.
Her head moved in stately fashion on her slim neck, as
she shot glances hither and thither into the glooms, her
eyes challenging the world.  She felt peril, but was no
craven in the matter--a contrast to Jaspar, who shook as
with an ague.

The harper's distress broke forth into petulant declaiming.

"Trapped," he said; "I could have guessed as much,
with all this fooling.  These skulkers are like crows round
carrion.  Shall we lose much, madame?"

"Gold, Jaspar, if they are content with such.  What
if they should be of Gambrevault!"

The harper gave a quivering whistle, a shrill breath
between his teeth, eloquent of the unpleasant savour of
such a chance.  It was beyond him for the moment
whether he preferred being held up by a footpad, to being
bullied by some ruffian of a feudatory.  He had a mere
bodkin of a dagger in his belt, and little lust for the letting
of blood.

"'Tis a chance, madame," he said, with a certain lame
sententiousness, "that had not challenged my attention.
Say nothing of Cambremont; one word would send us to
the devil."

"Am I a fool?  Since these gentlemen will not declare
themselves, let us hold on and tempt their purpose."

Thinking to see the swirl of shadows under the trees,
the glimmer of steel in the forest's murk, they rode on at
a lifeless trot.  Nothing echoed to their thoughts.  The
woods stood impassive, steeped in solitude.  There was a
strange atmosphere of peace about the place that failed to
harmonise their fears.  Yet like a prophecy of wind there
stole in persistently above the muffled tramp of hoofs, a
dull, characterless sound, touched with the crackling of
rotten wood, that seemed to hint at movement in the
shadows.

The pair pressed on vigilant and silent.  Anon they
came to a less multitudinous region, where the trees
thinned, and a columned ride dwindled into infinite gloom.
Betwixt the black stems of the trees flashed sudden a
streak of scarlet, torchlike in the shadows.  An armed
rider in a red cloak, mounted on a sable horse, kept vigil
silently between the boles of two great firs.  He was
immobile as rock, his spear set rigid on his thigh, his red
plume sweeping the green fringes of the trees.

This solemn figure stood like a sanguinary challenge to
Yeoland and the harper.  Here at least was something
tangible in the flesh, more than a mere shadow.  The pair
drew rein, questioning each other mutely with their eyes,
finding no glimmer of hope on either face.

As they debated with their glances over the hazard, a
voice came crying weirdly through the wood.

"Pass on," it said, "pass on.  Pay ye the homage of the
day."

This forest cry seemed to loosen the dilemma.  Certainly
it bore wisdom in its counsel, seeing that it advised
the inevitable, and ordered action.  Yeoland, bankrupt of
resource, took the unseen herald at his word, and rode on
slowly towards the knight on the black horse.

The man abode their coming like a statue, his red cloak
shining sensuously under the sombre green of the boughs.
A canopy of golden fire arched him in the west.  He sat
his horse with a certain splendid arrogance, that puzzled
not a little the conjectures of Yeoland and the harper.
This was neither the mood nor the equipment of a
vagabond soul.  The fine spirit of the picture hinted briskly
at Gambrevault.

The pair came to a halt under the two firs.  The man
towered above them on his horse, grim and gigantic, a
great statue in black and burnished steel.  His salade with
beaver lowered shone ruddy in the sun.  His saddle was
of scarlet leather, bossed with brass and fringed with sable
cord.  Gules flamed on his shield, devoid of all device, a
strong wedge of colour, bare and brave.

The girl caught the gleam of the man's eyes through the
grid of his vizor.  He appeared to be considering her much
at his leisure with a keen silence, that was not wholly
comforting.  Palpably he was in no mood for haste, or for
such casual courtesies that might have ebbed from his
soundless strength.

Full two minutes passed before a deep voice rolled
sonorously from the cavern of the casque.

"Madame," it said, "be good enough to consider yourself
my prisoner.  Rest assured that I bring you no peril
save the peril of an empty purse."

There was a certain powerful complacency in the voice,
pealing with the deep clamour of a bell through the silence
of the woods.  The man seemed less ponderous and sinister,
giant that he was.  The girl's eyes fenced with him
fearlessly under the trees.

"Presumably," she said to him, "you are a notorious
fellow; I have the misfortune to be ignorant of these
parts and their possessors.  Be so courteous as to unhelm
to me."

Her tone did not stir the man from his reserve of gravity.
Her words were indeed like so many ripples breaking
against a rock.  The voice retorted to her calmly from
the helmet.

"Madame, leave matters to my discretion."

She smiled in his face despite herself, a smile half of
petulance, half of relish.

"You pretend to wisdom, sir."

"Forethought, madame."

"Am I your prisoner?"

"No new thing, madame; I have possessed you since
you ventured into these shadows."

He made a gesture with his spear, holding it at arm's
length above his head, where it quivered like a reed in his
staunch grip.  A sound like the moving of a distant wind
arose.  The dark alleys of the wood grew silvered with
a circlet of steel.  The shafts of the sunset flickered on
pike and bassinet, gleaming amid the verdured glooms.
Again the man's spear shook, again the noise as of a wind,
and the girdle of steel melted into the shadows.

"Madame is satisfied?"

She sucked in her breath through her red lips, and was
mute.

"Leave matters to my discretion.  You there, in the
brown smock, fall back twenty paces.  Madame, I wait
for you.  Let us go cheek by jowl."

The man wheeled his horse, shook his spear, hurled a
glance backward over his shoulder into the woods.  There
was no gainsaying him for the moment.  Yeoland, bending
to necessity, sent Jaspar loitering, while she flanked
the black destrier with her brown jennet.  She debated
keenly within herself whither this adventure could be
leading her, as she rode on with this unknown rider into
the wilds.

The man in the red cloak was wondrous mute at first,
an iron pillar of silence gleaming under the trees.  The
girl knew that he was watching her from behind his salade,
for she caught often the white glimmer of his stare.  He
bulked largely in the descending gloom, a big man deep
of chest, with shoulders like the broad ledges of some
sea-washed rock.  He was richly appointed both as to his
armour and his trappings; to Yeoland his shield showed
a blank face, and he carried no crest or token in his helmet.

They had ridden two furlongs or more before the man
stepped from his pedestal of silence.  He had been
studying the girl with the mood of a philosopher, had seen her
stark, strained look, the woe in her eyes, the firm closure
of her lips.  The strong pride of grief in her had pleased
him; moreover he had had good leisure to determine the
character of her courage.  His first words were neither
very welcome to the girl's ears nor productive of great
comfort, so far as her apprehensions were concerned.
Bluntly came the calm challenge from the casque.

"Daughter of Rual of Cambremont, you have changed
little these five years."

Yeoland gave the man a stare.  Seeing that his features
were screened by his helmet, the glance won her little
satisfaction.  She knew that he was watching her to his own
profit, and her discovery, for the reflex look she had flashed
at him, must have told him all he desired, if he had any
claim to being considered observant.  There was that also
in the tone and tenor of his words that implied that he had
ventured no mere tentative statement, but had spoken to
assure her that her name and person were not unknown
to him.  Acting on the impression, she tacitly confessed to
the justice of his charge.

"Palpably," she said, "my face is known to you."

"Even so, madame."

"How long will you hold me at a disadvantage?"

"Is ignorance burdensome?"

She imagined of a sudden that the man was smiling
behind his beaver.  Being utterly serious herself, she
discovered an illogical lack of sympathy in the stranger's
humour.  Moreover she was striving to spell Gambrevault
from the alphabet of word and gesture, and to come
to an understanding with the doubts of the moment.

"Messire," she began.

"Madame," he retorted.

"Are you mere stone?"

For answer he lapsed into sudden reflection.

"It is five years ago this Junetide," he said, "since the
King and the Court came to Gilderoy."

"Gilderoy?"

"You know the town, madame?"

She stared back upon a sudden vision of the past, a past
gorgeous with the crimson fires of youth.  That Junetide
she had worn a new green gown, a silver girdle, a red rose
in her hair.  There had been jousting in the Gilderoy
meadows, much braying of trumpets, much splendour,
much pomp of arms.  She remembered the scent and
colour of it all; the blaze of tissues of gold and green,
purple and azure.  She remembered the flickering of a
thousand pennons in the wind, the fair women thronging
the galleries like flowers burdening a bowl.  The vision
came to her undefiled for the moment, a dream-memory,
calm as the first pure pageant of spring.

"And you, messire?" she said, with more colour of face
and soul.

"Rode in the King's train."

"A noble?"

"Do I bulk for a cook or a falconer?"

"No, no.  Yet you remember me?"

"As it were yesterday, walking in the meadows at your
father's side--your father, that Rual who carried the banner
when the King's men stormed Gaerlent these forty years
ago.  Not, madame, that I followed that war; I was a mass
of swaddling-clothes puking in a cradle.  So we grow old."

The girl's face had darkened again on the instant.
The man in the red cloak saw her eyes grow big of
pupil, her lips straightened into a colourless line.  She
held her head high, and stared into the purple gloom of
the woods.  Memories were with her.  The present had
an iron hand upon her heart.

"Time changes many things," he said, with a discretion
that desired to soften the silence; "we go from cradle to
throne in one score years, from life to clay in a moment.
Pay no homage to circumstance.  The wave covers the
rock, but the granite shows again its glistening poll when
the water has fallen.  A Hercules can strangle Fate.  As
for me, I know not whether I have soared in the estimation
of heaven; yet I can swear that I have lost much of the
vagabond, sinful soul that straddled my shoulders in the
past."

There was a warm ruggedness about the man, a flippant
self-knowledge, that touched the girl's fancy.  He was
either a strong soul, or an utter charlatan, posing as a
Diogenes.  She preferred the former picture in her heart,
and began to question him again with a species of
picturesque insolence.

"I presume, messire," she said, "that you have some
purpose in life.  From my brief dealings with you, I should
deem you a very superior footpad.  I gather that it is your
intention to rob me.  I confess that you seem a gentleman
at the business."

The man of the red cloak laughed in his helmet.

"To be frank, madame," he said, "you may dub me a
gatherer of taxes."

"Explain."

"Being unfortunates and outcasts from the lawful ways
of life, my men and I seek to remedy the injustice of the
world by levying toll on folk more happy than ourselves."

"Then you condemn me as fortunate?"

"Your defence, madame."

The girl smiled with her lips, but her eyes were hard and
bright as steel.

"I might convince you otherwise," she said, "but no
matter.  Why should I be frank with a thief, even though
he be nobly born?"

"Because, madame, the thief may be of service to the lady."

"I have little silver for your wallet."

"Am I nothing but a money-bag!"

She looked up at him with a straight stare; her voice
was level, even imperious.

"Put up your vizor," she said to him.

The man in the black harness hesitated, then obeyed her.
She could see little of his face, however, save that it was
bronzed, and that the eyes were very masterful.  She
ventured further in the argument, being bent on fathoming the
baser instincts of the business.

"Knight of the red shield," she said.

"Madame?"

"I ask you an honest question.  If you would serve me,
speak the truth, and let me know my peril.  Are you the
Lord Flavian of Gambrevault, or no?"

The man never hesitated an instant.  There was no
wavering to cast doubt upon his sincerity, or upon his
intelligence as a liar.

"No, madame," he answered her, "I am not the Lord
of Gambrevault and Avalon, and may I, for the sake of my
own neck, never come single-handed within his walls.  I
have an old feud with the lords of Gambrevault, and when
the chance comes, I shall settle it heavily to my credit.  If
you have any ill to say of the gentleman, pray say it, and
be happy in my sympathy."

"Ha," she said, with a sudden flash of malice, "I would
give my soul for that fellow's head."

"So," quoth the man, with a keen look, "that would be a
most delectable bargain."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`IV`:

.. class:: center large

   IV

.. vspace:: 2

The stems thinned about them suddenly, and the sky
grew great beyond a more meagre screen of boughs.  To
the west, breaking the blood-red canopy with an edge of
agate, rocks towered heavenwards, smiting golden-fanged
into a furnace of splendour.  Waves of light beat in spray
upon the billowy masses of the trees, dying in the east into
a majestic mask of gloom.

Yeoland and the man in red came forth into a little
glade, hollowed by the waters of a rush-edged pool.  A
stream, a scolloped sheet of foam, stumbled headlong into
the mere, vanishing beyond like a frail white ghost into
the woods.  A fire danced in the open, and under the
trees stood a pavilion of red cloth.

The man dismounted and held the girl's stirrup.  A
quick glance round the glade had shown her bales of
merchandise, littering the green carpet of the place, horses
tethered in the wood, men moving like gnomes about the
fire.  Even as she dismounted, streaks of steel shone out
in the surrounding shadows.  Armed men streamed in,
and piled their pikes and bills about the pines.

At the western end of the glade, a gigantic fir, a forest
patriarch, stood out above the more slender figures of
his fellows.  The grotesque roots, writhing like talons,
tressled a bench of boughs and skins.  Before the tree
burnt a fire, the draught sweeping upwards to fan the
fringe of the green fir's gown.  The man in the black
harness took Yeoland to the seat under the tree.  The
boughs arched them like a canopy, and the wood fire gave
a lusty heat in the gloaming.

A boy had run forward to unhelm the knight in the red
cloak.  Casque and sword lay on the bench of boughs and
skins.  The girl's glance framed for the first time the
man's face.  She surveyed him at her leisure under drooping
lids, with a species of reticent interest that escaped
boldness.  It was one of those incidents to her that stand
up above the plain of life, and build individual history.

She saw a bronzed man with a tangle of tawny-red
hair, a great beak of a nose, and a hooked chin.  His eyes
were like amber, darting light into the depth of life, alert,
deep, and masterful.  There was a rugged and indomitable
vigour in the face.  The mouth was of iron, yet not
unkind; the jaw ponderous; the throat bovine.  The mask of
youth had palpably forsaken him; Life, that great chiseller
of faces, had set her tool upon his features, moulding them
into a strenuous and powerful dignity that suited his soul.

He appeared to fathom the spirit of the girl's scrutiny,
nor did he take umbrage at the open and critical revision
of her glances.  He inferred calmly enough, that she
considered him by no means blemishless in feature or in
atmosphere.  Probably he had long passed that age when the
sanguine bachelor never doubts of plucking absolute favour
from the eyes of a woman.  The girl was not wholly
enamoured of him.  He was rational enough to read that
in her glances.

"Madame is in doubt," he said to her, with a glimmer of
a smile.

"As to what, messire?"

"My character."

"You prefer the truth?"

"Am I not a philosopher?"

"Hear the truth then, messire, I would not have you for
a master."

The man laughed, a quiet, soundless laugh through
half-closed lips.  There was something magnetic about his
grizzled and ironical strength, cased in its shell of
blackened steel.  He had the air of one who had learnt to toy
with his fellows, as with so many strutting puppets.  The
world was largely a stage to him, grotesque at some seasons,
strenuous at others.

"Ha, a miracle indeed," he said, "a woman who can tell
the truth."

She ignored the gibe and ran on.

"Your name, messire?"

The man spread his hands.

"Pardon the omission.  I am known as Fulviac of the
Forest.  My heritage I judge to be the sword, and the
shadows of these same wilds."

Yeoland considered him awhile in silence.  The firelight
flickered on his harness, glittering on the ribbed and
jointed shoulder plates, striking a golden streak from the
edge of each huge pauldron.  Mimic flames burnt red
upon his black cuirass, as in a darkened mirror.  The
night framed his figure in an aureole of gloom, as he sat
with his massive head motionless upon its rock-like throat.

"Five years ago," she said suddenly, "you rode as a noble
in the King's train.  Now you declare yourself a thief.
These things do not harmonise unless you confess to a
dual self."

"Madame," he answered her, "I confess to nothing.  If
you would be wise, eschew the past, and consider the
present at your service.  I am named Fulviac, and I am an
outlaw.  Let that grant you satisfaction."

Yeoland glanced over the glade, walled in with the gloom
of the woods, the stream foaming in the dusk, the armed
men gathered about the further fire.

"And these?" she asked.

"Are mine."

"Outcasts also?"

"Say no hard things of them; they are folk whom the
world has treated scurvily; therefore they are at feud with
the world.  The times are out of joint, tyrannous and
heavy to bear.  The nobles like millstones grind the poor
into pulp, tread out the life from them, that the wine of
pleasure may flow into gilded chalices.  The world is
trampled under foot.  Pride and greed go hand in hand
against us."

She looked at him under her long lashes, with the zest
of cavil slumbering in her eyes.  Autocracy was a
hereditary right with her, even though feudalism had slain her
sire.

"I would have the mob held in check," she said to him.

"And how?  By cutting off a man's ears when he spits
a stag.  By splitting his nose for some small sin.  By
branding beggars who thieve because their children starve.
Oh, equable and honest justice!  God prevent me from
being poor."

She looked at him with her great solemn eyes.

"And you?" she asked.

He spread his arms with a half-flippant dignity.

"I, madame, I take the whole world into my bosom."

"And play the Christ weeping over Jerusalem?"

"Madame, your wit is excellent."

A spit had been turning over the large fire, a haunch of
venison being basted thereon by a big man in the cassock
of a friar.  Certain of Fulviac's fellows came forward
bearing wine in silver-rimmed horns, white bread and meat upon
platters of wood.  They stood and served the pair with a
silent and soldierly briskness that bespoke discipline.  The
girl's hunger was as healthy as her sleek, plump neck,
despite the day's hazard and her homeless peril.

Dusk had fallen fast; the last pennon of day shone an
eerie streak of saffron in the west.  The forest stood
wrapped in the stupendous stillness of the night.  An
impenetrable curtain of ebony closed the glade with its
rush-edged pool.

Fulviac's servers had retreated to the fire, where a ring
of rough faces shone in the wayward light.  The sound of
their harsh voices came up to the pair in concord with the
perpetual murmur of the stream.  Yeoland had shaken the
bread-crumbs from her green gown.  She was comforted
in the flesh, and ready for further foining with the man who
posed as her captor.

"Sincerity is a rare virtue," she said, with a slight lifting
of the angles of her mouth.

"I can endorse that dogma."

"Do you pretend to the same?"

"Possibly."

"You love the poor, conceive their wrongs to be your own?"

Fulviac smiled in his eyes like a man pleased with his
own thoughts.

"Have I not said as much?"

"Well?"

"I revere my own image."

"And fame?"

He commended her and unbosomed in one breath.

"Pity," he said, "is often a species of splendid pride.  We
toil, we fight, we labour.  Why?  Because below all life
and effort, there burns an immortal egotism, an eternal
vanity.  'Liberty, liberty,' we cry, 'liberty and justice
man for man.'  Yet how the soul glows at the sound of
its own voice!  The human self hugs fame, and mutters,
'Lo, what a god am I in the eyes of the world!'"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`V`:

.. class:: center large

   V

.. vspace:: 2

Silence fell between them for a season, a silence deep
and intangible as the darkness of the woods.  The man's
mood had recovered its subtle calm, even as a pool that
has been stirred momentarily by the plashing of a stone
sinks into rippleless repose.  He sat with folded arms
before the flare of the fire, watching the girl under his heavy
brows.

She was very fair to look upon, slim, yet spirited as a
band of steel.  Her ears shone out from her dusky hair
like apple blossoms in a mist of leaves.  Her lips were
blood-red, sensitive, clean as the petals of a rose.  Her
great grief had chastened her.  From the curve of her
neck to the delicate strength of her white hands, she was
as rich an idyll as a man could desire.

Fulviac considered her with a thought that leant
philosophically towards her beauty.  He had grown weary of
love in his time; the passions of youth had burnt to dry
ashes; possibly he had been luckless in his knowledge of
the sex.  He had married a wife of irreproachable birth, a
lady with a sharp nose and a lipless mouth, eyes of green,
and a most unholy temper.  She was dead, had been dead
many years.  The man had no delirious desire to meet her
again in heaven.  As for this girl, he had need of her for
revolutionary reasons, and his mood to her was more that
of a father.  Her spirit pleased him.  Moreover, he knew
what he knew.

Gazing at the flames, he spread his hands to them, and
entered again on the confines of debate.  His voice had
the steady, rhythmic insistence of a bell pealing a curfew.
Its tone was that of a man not willing to be gainsaid.

"Therefore, madame, I would have you understand that
I desire in some measure to be a benefactor to the human
race."

"I take your word for it," she answered him.

"That I am an ambitious man, somewhat vain towards
fame, one that can glow in soul."

"A human sun."

"So."

"That loves to be thought great through warming the
universe."

"Madame, you are epigrammatic."

"Or enigmatic, messire."

"As you will," he answered her; "your womanhood
makes you an enigma; it is your birthright.  Understand
that I possess power."

"Fifty cut-throats tied to a purse."

"Consider me a serious figure in the world's sum."

"As you will, messire.  You are an outlaw, a leader of
fifty vagabonds, a man with ideals as to the establishing of
justice.  You are going to subvert the country.  Very
good.  I have learnt my lesson.  But how is all this going
to help me out of the wood?"

Fulviac took his sword, and balanced it upon his wrist.
The red light from the fire flashed on the swaying
steel.

"Our hopes are more near of kin, madame, than you imagine."

"Well?"

"Flavian of Gambrevault's raiders burnt your home,
slew your father, exterminated your brethren.  This
happened but a day ago.  You do not love this Flavian of
Gambrevault."

Her whole figure stiffened spasmodically as at the prick
of a sword.  Her eyes, with widely open pupils, flashed up
to Fulviac's face.  She questioned him through her set
teeth with a passionate whisper of desire.

"How do you know this?"

His face mellowed; the arm bearing the sword was
steady as the limb of an oak.

"I am wiser in many ways than you imagine," he said.
"Look at me, I am no longer young; I hate women; I
patronise God.  You are a mere child; to you life is dark
and perilous as this wilderness of pines.  Your trouble is
known to me, because it is my business to know of such
things.  It was my deliberate intent that you should fall
into my hands to-day."

The girl was still rigidly astonied.  She stared at him
mutely with dubious eyes.  The man and his philosophy
were beyond her for the moment.

"Well?" she said to him with a quaver of entreaty.

"First, you will honour me by saying that I have your
trust."

"How may I promise you that?"

"Because I am surety for my own honour."

She smiled in his face despite the occasion.

"You seem very sure of your own soul," she said.

"Madame, it has taken me ten years to come by so
admirable a state.  Self-knowledge carried to the depths,
builds up self-trust.  I may take it for granted that you
hate the Lord Flavian of Gambrevault?"

"Need you ask that!"

Her eyes echoed the mood of the flame.  Fulviac, watching
her, saw the strong wrack of wrath twisting her delicate
features for the moment into pathetic ugliness.

"You have courage," he said to her.

"Ample, messire."

"Flavian of Gambrevault is the greatest lord in the south."

"I am as wise."

"On that score, this Flavian and Fulviac of the Forest
are irreconcilable as day and night."

The man stood his sword pommel upwards in the grass,
and ran on.

"Some day I shall slay this same Flavian of Gambrevault.
His blood will expiate the blood of these your
kinsfolk.  Therefore, madame, you will be my debtor."

"That is all?" she asked him with a wistfulness in her
voice that was even piteous.

Fulviac looked long into the fire like a man whose
thoughts channel under the crust of years.  Pity for the
girl had gone to the heart under the steel cuirass, a pity
that was not the pander of desire.  His eyes took a new
meaning into their keen depths; he looked to have grown
suddenly younger by some years.  When he spoke again,
his voice had lost its half-mocking and grandiose confidence.
It was the voice of a man who strides generous and eager
into the breach of fate.

"Listen," he said to her, "I may tell you that your
sorrow has armed my manhood.  Give me my due; I am
more than a mere vagabond.  You have been cruelly dealt
with; I take your cause upon the cross of my sword."

"You, messire?"

"Even so.  I need a good woman, a brave woman.
You please me."

"Well?"

"You are a necessity to me."

"And why, messire?"

"For a matter of religion and of justice.  Trust to my
honour.  You shall learn more in due season."

Yeoland, smitten with incredulity, stared at the man in
mute surmise.  Here was an amazing circumstance--robbery
idealised, soul, body, purse, at one bold swoop.  In
her mystification, she could find nothing to say to the man
for the moment, even though he had promised her a refuge.

"You are very sure of yourself," she said at length.

"I am a man."

"Yet you leave me in ignorance."

"Madame, we are to undertake great deeds together,
great perils.  I could hold up an astonishing future to your
eyes, but for the present I keep silence.  Rest assured
that you shall be accorded such honour as the Virgin
herself could desire.  Remember that I give you promise of
vengeance, and a home."

The girl drew a deep breath, as though taking the spirit
of the hour into her bosom.

"If I refuse?" she said to him.

"You cannot refuse," came the level retort.

"And why, messire?"

"Your consent, though pleasant, is not necessary in the
matter.  I have long ago determined to appropriate you to
my ambition."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`VI`:

.. class:: center large

   VI

.. vspace:: 2

Fulviac's lair lay deep within the waving wilderness of
pines.  Above the spires of the forest, a massive barrier of
rock thrust up its rugged bartisans into the blue.  East
and west it stretched a mile or more, concavitated towards
the north, and standing like a huge breakwater amid the
sea of boughs.

The rocky plateau above was peopled by pines and
rowans, thatched also with a wild tangle of briar, whin, and
heather.  Crannies cleft into it; caves tunnelled its massive
bosom; innumerable minarets of stone mingled with the
wind-wracked trees.  The cliffs rose like the walls of a
castle donjon from the forest floor, studded with dwarf
trees, bearded with ferns and grass.  The plateau was
inaccessible from the forest save by a thin rocky track, where
the western slope of the cliff tailed off to merge into the
trees.

The significance of the place to Fulviac lay in the
existence of a cavern or series of caves piercing the cliff,
and opening both upon the southern and northern facades
of the mass.  A wooden causeway led to the southern
entry, bridging a small gorge where a stream foamed under
the pines.  The yawn of the southern opening had been
built up with great blocks of stone, and the rough walls
pierced by narrow squints, and a gate opening under a
rounded arch.

Within, the roof of the main cavern arched abruptly
upwards, hollowing a great dome over the smooth floor
beneath.  This grotesque and rock-ripped hall served as
guard-room and dormitory, a very various chamber.
Winding ways smote from it into the black bowels of the cliff.
The height of the main cavern dwindled as it tunnelled
northwards into the rock.  A second wall of stone
partitioned the guard-room from a second and smaller chamber,
lit always by a great lamp pendent from the ceiling, a
chamber that served Fulviac as state-room.

From Fulviac's parlour the cavern narrowed to a throat-like
gallery that had been expanded by human craft into a
third and smaller room.  This last rock chamber was
wholly more healthy and habitable than the others.  Its
walls stood squarely from floor to rocky roof, and it was
blessed with a wide casement, that stared northwards over
a vista of obeisant trees.  A postern gave entry to the
room from a narrow platform, and from this ledge a stairway
cut in the flank of the cliff dwindled into the murk of
the forest below.

A more romantic atmosphere had swept into the bleak
galleries of the place that winter.  Plundered stores were
ransacked, bales of merchandise ungirded, caskets and chests
pilfered as for the endowing of the chamber of a queen.
The northern room in the cliff blossomed into the rich
opulence of a lady's bower.  Its stone walls were panelled
with old oak carvings taken from some ancient manor.
There were tapestries of green, gold, and purple; an
antique bed with a tester of silver silk, its flanks blazoned
with coloured escutcheons.  Painted glass, azure, red, and
gold, jewelled the casement, showing also Sebastian bound
to his martyr's tree.  A Jew merchant plundered on the
road had surrendered a set of brazen ewers, a lute inlaid
with pearl, a carpet woven on the looms of the purple East.
There were mirrors of steel about the walls.  A carved
prayer-desk, an embroidery frame, a crucifix wrought in
ivory: Fulviac had consecrated all these to Yeoland, dead
Rual's daughter.

A white lily amid a horde of thistles!  The girl's life
had drawn under the black shadow of the cliff, and into the
clanging torrent of these rough men of the sword.  It was
a wild age and a wild region.  Fulviac's rogues were like
wolves in a forest lair, keen, bloody, and relentless.  There
was a rude strain of violence running through the strenuous
mood of the place, like the song of Norse rovers, piercing
the roar of the sea.  Mystery enveloped the girl, war, and
the sound of the sword.  She fumbled at the riddle of Fate
with the trembling fingers of one who unbars a prison gate
in the hush of night.  It was all strange and fantastic
beyond the riot of a dream.

"Madame," Fulviac had said to her when he had hung a
key at her girdle, "I have bidden you trust me; remember
that I trust you in turn.  Take this room as your
sanctuary.  Lock me out when you will.  I prepare, among
other things, to perfect your vengeance."

Yeoland suffered him and her necessity.  She was
shrewdly wise in the conviction that it would be useless
to rebel against the man.  Though over-masterful and
secretive, his purpose appeared benignant in the opulence
of its favour.  Moreover, the forest was as a vast web
holding her within the maze of the unknown.

"I have no alternative," she said to him, "I am in your
power.  And yet, I believe you are no villain."

"Your charity pleases me.  I am a man with a strong
purpose."

"For good?"

"Do I not need you?"

"Am I then so powerful a person?"

"You will learn anon."

"You seem something of a mystic," she said to him.

"Madame," he retorted, "trust my discretion.  In due
season I shall unfold to you certain aspects of life that
will kindle your sympathies.  I shall appeal to the woman
in you.  When you are wise you will commend my ambition."

"You speak in riddles."

"Wait.  As yet you see through a glass darkly."

From the mountainous north to the warm southern sea,
from the wooded west to the eastern fens, the good King
ruled, holding many great barons in feudal faith, and
casting his fetters of gold over Church and State.  Chivalry
moved through the world to the clangour of arms and the
songs of the troubadour.  Lutes sounded on terrace and
in garden, fair women bloomed like roses, bathed in a
sensuous blaze of romance.  Baron made war upon baron;
glory and death were crowned together.  The painter spread
his colours in the halls of the great; the goldsmith and the
carver wrought wondrous things to charm the eye.  Church
bells tolled.  Proud abbots carried the sword, and made fine
flutter among the women.  Innumerable saints crowded the
avenues to heaven.  It was a fair age and very lovely, full
of colour and desire, music and the odour of romance.

And the poor?  Their lot hung largely on the humour
of an overlord, or the state of a gentleman's stomach.  They
had their saints' days, their games, their pageants, their
miracle plays.  They had hovels of clay and wattle; labour
in wind and rain; plagues and pestilences in the rotting
filth of their city alleys.  They marked the great folk go
by in silks and cloth of gold, saw the pomp and opulence
of that other life, remembered their own rags and their
squealing children.

And yet, consider the broad inclinations of the world.
To eat, to be warm, to satisfy the flesh, to ease a lust, to
drink beer.  There was no very vast gulf betwixt the rich
man and the poor.  The one feasted to music, the other
scraped a bone to the dirge of toil.  They had like appetites,
like satisfactions, and hell is considered to be Utopian
in the extreme.  The poor man envied the rich; the rich
man ruled the poor.  Envy, that jingling demagogue, has
made riotous profit out of such a stew since the world was
young.

Fulviac's cliff was shut out from the ken of man by
leagues of woodland, moor, and waste.  The great pine
forest girded it in its inmost bosom.  No wayfarers rode
that way; no huntsman ranged so deep; the place had an
evil rumour; many whom it had welcomed had never
returned.  Romancers had sung of it, the lay of Guingamor.
Horror ruled black-browed over its pine-cumbered hills, its
gloomy depths.  Solitude abode there, as over a primæval
sea, and there was no sound save the moan or storm-cry
of the wind over its troubled trees.

According to legend lore, Romulus peopled Rome with
the offscourings of Italy.  Fulviac had emulated the device
with the state-craft of a strong conspirator.  The forest
stood a grand accomplice, abetting him with its myriad
sentinels, who gossiped solely with the wind.  The venture
had been finely conceived, finely edificated.  A cliff, a cave,
five-score armed men.  Not a vast power on the face of
it to threaten a system or to shake a throne.  Superficialities
were fallacious, the surface false and fair as glistening
ice.  The forest hid more than a company of ruffians
banded together to resist tyranny.  Enthusiasm, genius,
vigour, such torches, like a burning hovel, can fling a city
into flame.

As for the girl Yeoland, she was more than mocked by
the swift vagaries of life.  Two days of mordant realism
had erased from her heart the dream visions of childhood.
To be declared homeless, kinless, in one day; to be bereft
of liberty the next!  To what end?  She stared round the
richly-garnished room into which Fate had thrust her,
fingered the pearl-set lute, gazed at her own face in the
steel mirrors.  She was the same woman, yet how
differently circumstanced!  Fulviac's mood had not hinted at
love, or at any meaner jest.  What power could he
prophesy to his advantage in the mere fairness of her face?
What was the gall of a woman's vengeance to a man who
had conceived the downfall of a kingdom?

Her knowledge of psychology was rustic in the extreme,
and she had no wit for the unravelling of Fulviac's
subtleties.  There were certain convictions, however, that abode
with her even in her ignorance.  She could have taken oath
that he was no mere swashbuckler, no captain of outlaws,
no mere spoiler of men.  Moreover, she believed him to be
the possessor of some honour, and a large guerdon of virility.
Lastly, pity appealed her as a sentiment not to be discarded.
The man, whoever he might be, appeared desirous of
putting his broad shoulders betwixt her and the world.

Fulviac grew perspicuous sooner than she could have
prophesied.  He had a fine, cloud-soaring way with him
that seemed to ignore the mole-hills of common circumspection.
He had wit enough also to impose his trust on
others with a certain graceful confidence that carried bribery
in the very generosity of its hardiness.

March was upon them like a spirit of discord, wild,
riotous weather, with the wind thundering like storm-waves
upon the cliff.  The pines were buffeting each other in the
forest, and reeling beneath the scourgings of the breeze.
Fulviac came to the girl one windy noon, when the caverns
were full of the breath of the storm.  His manner to her
seemed as a significant prelude, heralding the deep utterance
of some human epic.

Fulviac took the girl by a winding stair leading from the
guard-room--a stair that circled upwards in the thickness
of the rock some hundred steps or more, and opened into a
basin-shaped pit on the plateau above.  Dwarf trees and
briars domed the hollow, giving vision of a grey and hurrying
sky.  The pair climbed a second stair that led to a rock
perched like a pulpit on the margin of the southern
precipice.  The wind swept gusty and tempestuous over the
cliff.  It tossed back the girl's hood, made her stagger; she
would have fallen had not Fulviac gripped her arm.

Below stretched an interminable waste of trees, of bowing
pine-tops, and dishevelled boughs.  The dull green of the
forest merged into the grey of the cloud-strewn sky.  On
either hand the craggy bulwarks of the cliffs stretched east
and west, its natural bartisans and battlements topped by a
cornice of mysterious pines.  It was a superb scene, rich
with a wild liberty, stirred by the wizard chanting of the
wind.

Fulviac watched the girl as she stood limned against the
grey curtain of the sky.  Her hair blew about her white
throat and shoulders in sombre streams; her eyes were very
bright under their dusky lashes; and the wind had kissed a
stronger colour into her cheeks.  She was clad in a kirtle
of laurel-green cloth, bound about the waist with a girdle
of silver.  A white kerchief lay like snow over her shoulders
and bosom; her green sleeves were slashed and puffed with
crimson.

"Wild country," he said, looking in her eyes.

"Wild as the sea."

"You are a romanticist."

She gave a curt laugh.

"After what I have suffered!"

"Romance and sorrow go hand in hand.  For the
moment my words are more material.  You see this cliff?"

She turned to him and stood watching his face.

"This cliff is the core of a kingdom.  A granite wedge
to hurl feudalism to ruins, to topple tyranny."

She nodded slowly, with a grave self-reservation.

"You have hinted that you are ambitious," she said.

"Ambition would have stormed heaven."

"And your ladder?"

The man made a strong gesture, like one who points a
squadron to the charge.  His eyes shone with a glint of
grimness under his shaggy brows.

"The rabid discontent of the poor, fermenting ever under
the crust of custom.  The hate of the toiler for the fop
and the fool.  The iron that lies under the rusting
injustice of riches.  The storm-cry of a people's vengeance
against the tyrant and the torturer."

Yeoland, solemn of face, groped diligently amid her
surmises.  The man was a visionary by his own showing;
it was impossible to mistake him for a fool.  Like all
beings of uncommon power, he combined imagination
with that huge vigour of mind that moves the world.  A
vast element of strength lay coiled in him, subtle, yet
overpowering as the body of some great reptile.  The girl felt
the gradual magic of his might mesmerising her with the
inevitableness of its approach.

"You have brought me here?" she asked him.

"As I promised."

"Well?"

"To tell you something of the truth."

She looked at him with a penetrating frankness that was
in spirit--laudatory.

"You put great trust in me," she said.

"That I may trust the more."

He sat himself down on a ledge of rock, and proceeded
to parade before her imagination such visions as were well
conceived to daze the reason of a girl taken fresh from a
forest hermitage.  He spoke of riot, revolution, and
revenge; painted Utopias established beneath the benediction
of a just personal tyranny, a country purged of oppression,
a kingdom cleansed of pride.  He told of arms stored in the
warrens of the cliff, of grain and salted meat sufficient for an
army.  He pointed out the vast strength of the place, the
plateau approachable only by the stairway in the cliff, and the
narrow causeway towards the west.  He described it as
sufficient for the gathering and massing of a great host.
Finally, he swept his hand over the leagues of forestland,
dark as the sea, isleting the place from the ken of the
world.

"You understand me?" he said to her.

She nodded and waited with closed lips.  He gazed at
the horizon, and spoke in parables.

"The King and the nobles are throned upon a pile of
brushwood.  A torch is plunged beneath; a tempest
scourges the beacon into a furnace.  The kingdom burns."

"Yes?"

"Consider me no mere visionary; I have the country at
my back.  For five years the work has gone on in secret.  I
have trusted nothing to chance.  It needs a bold man to
strike at a kingdom.  I--Fulviac, am that man."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`VII`:

.. class:: center large

   VII

.. vspace:: 2

The free city of Gilderoy climbed red-roofed up a rocky
hill, a hill looped south-east and west by the blue breadth
of the river Tamar.  Its castle, coroneting the central
rock, smote into the azure, a sheaf of glistening towers
and turrets, vaned with gold.  Lower still, the cathedral's
sable crown brooded above a myriad red-tiled roofs and
wooden gables.  Many fair gardens blazoned the higher
slopes of the city.  Tall walls of grey stone ringed round
the whole, grim and quaint with bartisan and turret.  To
the north, green meadows dipped to the billowy distance
of the woods.  The silver streak of the sea could be
seen southwards from the platforms of the castle.

Gilderoy was a rich city and a populous, turbulent
withal, holding honourable charters from the King,
exceeding proud of its own freedom.  Its Guilds were the
wealthiest in all the south; the coffers of its Commune
overflowed with gold.  Nowhere was fairer cloth woven
than in Gilderoy.  Nowhere could be found more
cunning smiths, more subtle armourers.  The mansions
of its rich merchant folk were wondrous opulent and
great, bedight with goodly tapestry and all manner of rare
furniture.  Painters had gathered to it from the far south;
its courtezans were the joy of the whole kingdom.

Two days after his confessions on the cliff, Fulviac
took horse, mounted Yeoland on a white palfrey, and
rode for Gilderoy through the forest.  The man was
upholstered as a merchant, in a plum-coloured cloak, a
cap of sables, and a Venetian mail cape.  Yeoland wore
a light blue jupon edged with silver, a green kirtle, a
cloak of brocaded Tartarin.  She rode beside the man,
demure as a daughter, her bridle of scarlet leather merry
with silver bells.  Two armed servants and some six
packhorses completed the cavalcade.

Fulviac had fallen into one of his silent moods that day.
He was saturnine and enigmatic as though immersed in
thought.  The girl won nothing from him as to the
purpose of their ride.  They were for Gilderoy; thus much
he vouchsafed her, and no more.  She had a shrewd belief
that he was for giving her tangible evidence of the
hazardous schemes that were fermenting under the surface of
silence, and that she was to learn more of the tempest
that was gathering in the dark.  Being tactful in her
generation, she asked him no questions, and kept her
conjectures to herself.

They broke their ride to pass the night at a wayside
hostelry, where the road from Gambrevault skirted the
forest.  Holding on at their good leisure on the following
day, they entered Gilderoy by the northern gate, towards
evening, with the cathedral bell booming a challenge to
the distant sea.  Crossing the great square with its tall
mansions of carved oak and chiselled stone, they plunged
into a narrow highway that curled downhill under a
hundred overhanging gables.  Set back in a murky
court, a tavern hung out its gilded sign over the cobbles,
a Golden Leopard, that groaned in the wind on its rusty
hinges.  The inn's casements glowed red under the gloom
of roof and bracket.  Fulviac rode into its stone-paved
court with its balustraded gallery, its carved stairways,
its creaking lamps swaying under the high-peaked
gables.

Their horses were taken by a lean groom, blessed with
a most malevolent squint.  On the lower step of the
gallery stair stood a rotund little man, with a bunch of keys
reposing on his stomach, the light from a lantern overhead
shining on his bald pate, as on a half sphere of alabaster.
He seemed to sweat beef and beer at every pore.  Shuffling
his feet, he tilted his double chin to the sky, as though he
were conducting a monologue under the stars.

"No brew yet," he hummed in a high falsetto, throaty
and puling from so ponderous a carcase.

Fulviac set one foot on the stairs.

"St. Prosper's wine, fat Jean," he said.

The rotund soul turned his face suddenly earthwards,
as though he had been jerked down by one leg out of heaven.

"Ah, sire, it is you."

"Who else?  What of the good folk of Gilderoy?"

"Packed like a crowd of rats in a drain.  Will your
honour sup?"

The man stood aside with a great sweep of the hand,
and a garlic-ladened breath given full in Yeoland's face.

"And the lady, sire, a cup of purple; the roads are dry?"

Fulviac pushed up the stairs.

"We are late, and supped as we came.  Your private
cellar will suit us better."

"Of a truth, sire, most certainly."

"Send the men back with the horses; Damian has his
orders, and your money-bag."

"Rely on my dispatch, sire."

"Well, then, roll on."

Fat Jean, sweaty deity of pot and gridiron, took the keys
from his girdle and a lantern from a niche in the wall.
Going at a wheezy shuffle, he led them by a long passage
and two circles of stairs to a cellar packed with hogsheads,
tuns, and great vats of copper.  From the first cellar a
second opened, from the second, a third.  In the last vault
Jean rolled a cask from a corner, turned a flagstone on its
side, showed them a narrow stairway descending into the dark.

Fulviac took the lantern, made a sign to Jean, and passed
down the stairway with Yeoland at his heels.  The
tavern-keeper remained above in the cellar, and closed the stone
when the last gleam of the light had died down the stair.
He rolled the cask back into its place, and felt his way
back by cellar and stairway to the benignant glow of his
own tavern room.

Fulviac and the girl had descended the black well of the
stair.  Tunnels of gloom ran labyrinthine on every hand;
a musty scent burdened the air, and fine sand covered the
floor.  Fulviac held the lantern shoulder-high, took
Yeoland's wrist, and moved forward into a great gallery that
sloped downwards into the depths of the rock.  The place
was silent as the death-chamber of a pyramid.  The lantern
fashioned fantastic shadows from the gloom.

Yeoland held close to the man with an instinct towards
trust that made her smile at her own thoughts.  Fulviac
had been in her life little more than a week; yet his
unequivocating strength had won largely upon her liking--in
no sentimental sense indeed, but rather with the calm
command of power.  Possibly she feared him a very little.
Yet with the despair of a wrecked mariner she clung to
him, in spirit, as she would have clung to a rock.

As they passed down the gallery with the lantern swinging
in Fulviac's hand, she began to question him with a
quiet persistence.

"What place is this?" she said.

For retort, Fulviac pointed her to the wall, and held the
lantern to aid her scrutiny.  The girl saw numberless
recesses excavated in the rock; some had been bricked up
and bore tablets; others were packed with grinning skulls.
There were scattered paintings on the walls, symbolic
daubs, or scenes from scriptural history.  The place was
meaningless to the girl, save that the dead seemed ever
with them.

Fulviac smiled at her solemn face.

"The catacombs of the city of Gilderoy," he said;
"yonder are the niches of the dead.  These paintings were
made by early folk, centuries ago.  A veritable maze this,
a gallery of skulls, a warren for ghosts to squeak in."

Yeoland had turned to scan a tablet on the wall.

"We go to some secret gathering?" she asked.

Fulviac laughed; the sound echoed through the passages
with reverberating scorn.

"The same dark fable," he said, "telling of vaults and
secret stairs, passwords and poniards, masks and murder.
Remember, little sister, you are to be black and subtle to
the heart's chords.  This is life, not a romance or an
Italian fable.  We are men here.  There is to be no strutting
on the stage."

The girl loitered a moment, as though her feet kept pace
with her cogitations.

"I am content," she said, "provided I may eschew
poison, nor need run a bodkin under some wretch's ribs."

"Be at peace on that score.  I have not the heart to
make a Rosamund of you."

Sudden out of a dark bye-passage, like a rat out of a
hole, a man sprang at them and held a knife at Fulviac's
throat.  The mock merchant gave the password with great
unconcern, putting his cap of sables back from off his face.
The sentinel crossed himself, fell on one knee, and gave
them passage.  Turning a bluff buttress of stone, they
came abruptly upon a short gallery that widened into a
great circular chamber, pillared after the manner of a church.

A flare of torches harassed the shadowy vault, and played
upon a thousand upturned faces that seemed to surge wave
on wave out of the gloom.  In the centre of the crypt
stood an altar of black marble, and before it on the dais,
a priest with a cowl down, a rough wooden crucifix in his
hand.  A knot of men in armour gleamed about the altar,
ringing a clear space about the steps.  Others, with drawn
swords, kept the entries of the galleries leading to the
cavern.  A great quiet hung over the place, a silence solid as
the rock above.

A group of armed men waited for Fulviac at the main
entry to the crypt.  He merged into their ranks, exchanging
signs and words in an undertone with one who seemed
in authority.  The ring of figures pressed through the
crowd towards the altar, Fulviac and Yeoland in their
midst.  Fulviac mounted the steps, and drew the girl up
beside him.  He uncovered his face to the mob with the
gesture of a king uncovering to his people.

"Fulviac, Fulviac!"

The press swayed suddenly like the black waters of a
lake, stirred by the rush of flood water through a broken
dam.  The ring of armed men gave up the shout with a
sweeping of swords and a clangour of harness.  The great
cavern took up the cry, reverberating it from its thundering
vault.  A thousand hands were thrust up, as of the dead
rising from the sea.

Yeoland watched the man's face with a mute kindling
of enthusiasm.  As she gazed, it beaconed forth a new
dignity to her that she had never seen thereon before.  A
sudden grandeur of strength glowed from its weather-beaten
features.  The mouth and jaw seemed of iron; the eyes
were full of a stormy fire.  It was the face of a man
transfigured, throned above himself on the burning pinnacle of
power.  He towered above the mob like some granite god,
colossal in strength, colossal in courage.  His manhood
flamed out, a watch-fire to the world.

As the cry dwindled, the priest, who still kept his cowl
down over his face, held his crucifix on high, and broke
into the strident cadence of a rebel ballad.  The people
followed as by instinct, knowing the song of old.  Many
hundred voices gathered strenuously into the flood, the
massed roar rolling through the great crypt, echoing along
the galleries like the sound of some subterranean stream.
It was a deep chant and a stirring, strong with the strength
of the storm wind, fanatic as the sea.

The silence that fell at the end thereof was the more
solemn in contrast to the thundering stanzas of the hymn.
Under the flare of the torches, Fulviac stood forward to
turn the task from the crucifix to the sword.

"Men of Gilderoy."

A billow of cheering dashed again to the roof.

"Fulviac, Fulviac!"

The man suffered the cry to die into utter silence,
before leaping into a riot of words, a harangue that had more
justification in it than appeal.  His voice filled the cavern
with its volume and depth.  It was more the voice of a
captain thundering commands to a squadron of horse than
the declamatory craft of the orator.  Fulviac knew the
mob, that they were rough and turbulent, and loved a
demagogue.  Scholastic subtleties could never fill their
stomachs.

"Men of Gilderoy, I come to you with the sword.
Bombast, bombast, come hither all, I'll laden ye with
devilry, puff you up with pride.  Ha, who is for being
strong, who for being master?  Listen to me.  Damnation
and death, I have the kingdom in the palm of my
hand.  Liberty, liberty, liberty.  We strike for the people.
Geraint is ours; Gore is ours; all the southern coast
waits for the beacons.  Malgo of the Mountain holds the
west like a storm cloud under his cloak.  The east raves
against the King.  Good.  Who is for the stronger side,
for Fulviac, liberty, and the people?"

He halted a moment, took breath, quieted all clamour
with a sweep of the hand, plunged on again like a great
carrack buffeting tall billows.

"Are there spies here?  By God, let them listen well,
and save their skins.  Go and tell what ye have heard.
Set torch to tinder.  Blood and fire, the country would
be in arms before the King could stir.  No, no, there are
no spies in Gilderoy; we are all brothers here.  By my
sword, sirs, I swear to you, that before harvest tide, we
shall sweep the nobles into the sea."

A great shout eddied up to answer him.  Fulviac's
voice pierced it like a trumpet cry.

"Liberty, liberty, and the people!"

Sound can intoxicate as well as wine.  The thunder of
war, the bray of clarions, can fire even the heart of the
coward.  The mob swirled about the altar of black marble,
vociferous and eager.  Torches rocked to and fro in the
cavern; shadows leapt grotesquely gigantic over the rough
groinings of the roof.  Yet Fulviac had further and fiercer
fuel for the fire.  At a sign from him, the circle of armed
men parted; two peasants stumbled forward bearing a
cripple in their arms.  They carried him up the steps and
set him upon the altar before all the people, supporting
him as he stared round upon the sea of faces.

He was a shrivelled being, yellow, black of eye, cadaverous.
He looked like a man who had wallowed for years
among toads in a pit, and had become as one of them.
His voice was cracked and querulous, as he brandished
a claw of a hand and screamed at the crowd.

"Look at me, mates and brothers.  Five years ago I
was a tall man and lusty.  I forbade the Lord of Margradel
my wife.  They racked and branded me, tossed me into a
stinking pit.  I am young, young.  I shall never walk
again."

A woman rushed from the crowd, grey-haired, fat, and
bloated.  She climbed the altar steps, and stretched out her
hands in a kind of frenzy towards the people.

"Look at me, men of Gilderoy.  Last spring I had a
daughter, a clean wench as ever danced.  Seek her from
John of Brissac and his devils.  Ha, good words these for
a mother.  Men of Gilderoy, remember your children."

Fulviac's pageant gathered grimly before the mob.  A
blind man tottered up and pointed to his sightless eyes.
A girl held up an infant, and told shrilly of its father's
murder.  One fellow displayed a tongueless mouth;
another, a face distorted by the iron; a third had lost nose
and ears; a fourth showed arms shrivelled and contracted
by fire.  It was a sinister appeal, strong yet piteous.  The
tyranny of the age showed in the bodies of these wronged
and mutilated beings.  They had been mere carrion tossed
under the iron heel of power.  The granite car of ruthless
opulence and passion had crushed them under its reddened
wheels.

At a gesture from Fulviac, the priest upon the steps
threw back his cowl and stood forward in the torchlight.
His face was the face of a zealot, fanatical, sanguine,
lined with an energy that was prophetic of power.  His
eyes smouldered under their straight black brows.  His
hands, white and bony, quivered as he stretched them out
towards the people.

They knew him on the instant; their clamour told as
much.  Often had the shadow of that thin figure fallen
athwart the parched highways of stricken cities.  Often
had those hands tended death, those lips smitten awe into
the souls of the drunkard and the harlot.

"Prosper, Prosper the Preacher!"

There rang a rude, rough joy in the clamour that was
spontaneous and eloquent.  It was the heart's cry of the
people, wild, trusting, and passionate.  Men and women broke
through the circle of armed men, cast themselves upon the
altar steps, kissed the friar's gown, and fawned on him.
He put them back with a certain awkward dignity, and a
hot colour upon his almost boyish face.  The man had a
fine humility, though the strenuous ideals of his soul ran in
fire to the zenith.

Anon he signed a benediction, and a hush descended on
the place.

"God's peace to you, people of Gilderoy!"

The clamour revived.

"Preach to us, preach to us!" came the cry.

The friar stretched forth his hands; his voice rang
strong and strident over the packed upturned faces.

"Children, what need have we of words!  To-night
have we not seen enough to scourge the manhood in us,
to bear forth the Holy Cross of war?  The evil beast is
with us even yet; Mammon the Mighty treads you under
foot.  Ye saints, what cause more righteous since the
martyrs fell?  Look on these scars, these wrongs, these
agonies.  Preach!  I am dumb beside such witnesses as
these."

The crypt thundered to him when he lowered his hands.
It was the cry of men bankrupt of liberty, thirsty for
revenge.  Fulviac grappled the climax, and stood forward
with uplifted sword.  His lion's roar sounded above the
din.

"Go, people of Gilderoy," he cried, "go--but
remember.  When castles burn, and bolts scream, when spears
splinter, and armies crash to the charge, remember your
children and your wrongs.  Strike home for God, and for
your liberty."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`VIII`:

.. class:: center large

   VIII

.. vspace:: 2

The crowd had streamed from the cavern, swirling like
black water under the tossing torches, the hollow galleries
reverberating to the rush of many feet.  Prosper had gone,
borne away by the seditious captains of the Commune and
the armed burghers who had guarded the entries.  A great
silence had fallen upon the crypt.  Fulviac and the girl
were left by the altar of black marble, their one lamp
burning solitary in the gulf of gloom.

Fulviac had the air of a man whose favourite hawk had
flown with fettle, and brought her quarry tumbling out of
the clouds.  He was warm with the zest of it, and his
tawny eyes sparkled.

"May the Virgin smile on us!" he said.  "Gilderoy
will serve our ends."

The girl's eyes searched him gravely.

"You make holy war," she charged him.

"Ha, my sister, it is well to profess a strong conviction
in the justice of one's cause.  Tell men they are heroes,
patriots, martyrs, and you will make good fighting stuff.
Applaud fanaticism, make great parade of righteousness,
hail the Deity as patron, assemble all the saints under your
banner.  Ha, trust me, that is a way to topple a kingdom.
Come, we must stir."

By many labyrinthine passages, strange galleries of death,
they passed together from the dark deeps of the catacombs.
At one point the roof shone silvered as with dew, and the
air stood damp as in a marsh on a winter's eve.  The river
Tamar flowed above them in its rocky bed, so Fulviac told
the girl.  Anon they came out by a narrow stair that
opened by a briar-grown throat into a thicket of old oaks
in the Gilderoy meadows.  The stairhead was covered by
a species of stone trap that could be covered and
concealed by sods.  In the thicket a man awaited them with
the bridles of three horses over his arm.  Fulviac held
Yeoland's stirrup, and they rode out, the three of them,
from under the trees.

A full moon swam in a purple black sky amid a shower
of shimmering stars.  Gilderoy, with its climbing towers
and turrets, stood out white under the moon.  The city
walls gleamed like alabaster in the magic glow.  In the
meadows the ringlets of the river glimmered.  Far and
distant rose the nebulous midnight of the woods.

Fulviac had bared his head to an inconstant and torpid
breeze.  They were riding for the west along a bridle track
that curled grey and dim through the sombre meadows.
The calm, soundless vault of the world rose now in
contrast to the canopies of stone and the passion-throes of the
catacombs.  Human moil and effort seemed infinitely little
under the eternal scrutiny of the stars.  So thought the
man for the moment, as he rode with his chin sunk upon
his breast, watching keenly the girl at his side.

Yeoland was young.  All the roses of youth were budding
about her soul; idealism, like the essence of crushed
violets, hovered heavy over the world.  Her soul as yet
was no frayed and listless lute, thrummed into discords by
the bony hand of care.  She was built for love, a temple
of white marble, lit by lamps of rubeous glory.  Colours
flashed through the red sanctuaries of the flesh.  Yet pain
and great woe had smitten her.  The grim destinies of
earth seemed bent on thrusting an innocent pilgrim into
the turbulent contradictions of life.

The pageant in the catacombs that night had stirred her
strangely beyond belief.  The fantastic faces, the zeal, the
hot words of gesturing enthusiasm, these were things new
to her, therefore the more vivid and convincing.  New
worlds, new passions, seemed to burst into being under the
stars.  She was utterly silent as she rode, looking forth
into the night.  Her hood had fallen back; her face shone
white and clear; her eyes gleamed in the moonlight.
Fulviac, like a chess-player who had evolved some subtle
scheme, rode and watched her with a smile deep in his
eyes.  For the moment he was content to leave her to the
magic of her own thoughts.

At certain rare seasons in life, virgin light floods down
into the heart, as from some oriel opened in heaven.  The
world stands under a grander scheme of chiaroscuro; men
comprehend where they once scoffed.  It was thus that
Yeoland rose inspired, like a spiritual Venus from a sea of
dreams.  As molten glass is shaped speedily into fair and
exquisite device, so the red wax of her heart had taken the
impress of the hour.  Gilderoy had stirred her like a
blazoned page of romance.

Fulviac caught the girl's half glance at him; read in
measure the meaning of her mood.  Her lips were half
parted as though she had words upon her tongue, but still
hesitated from some scruple of pride.  He straightened in
the saddle, and waited for her to unbosom to him with a
confident reserve.

"Well?" he said at length, since she still lingered in her
silence.

"How much one may learn in a day," she answered,
drawing her white palfrey nearer to his horse.

Fulviac agreed with her.

"The man on the end of the rope," he said, "learns in
two minutes that which has puzzled philosophers since
Adam loved Eve."

She turned to him with an eagerness that was almost
passionate even in its suppressed vigour.

"How long was it before you came to pity your fellows?"

"Some minutes, not more."

"And the conversion?"

"Shall satisfy you one day.  For the present I will
buckle up so unsavoury a fable in my bosom.  Tell me
what you have learnt at Gilderoy."

Yeoland looked at the moon.  The man saw great sadness
upon her face, but also an inspired radiance that made
its very beauty the more remarkable.  He foresaw in an
instant that they were coming to deeper matters.
Superficialities, the mannerisms of life, were falling away.  The
girl's heart beat near to his; he felt a luminous sympathy
of spirit rise round them like the gold of a Byzantine
background.

"Come," he said, with a burst of beneficence, "you are
beginning to understand me."

She jerked a swift glance at him, like the look of a
half-tamed falcon.

"You are a man, for all your sneers and vapourings."

"I had a heart once.  Call me an oak, broken, twisted,
aged, but an oak still."

Yeoland drew quite close to him, so that her skirt almost
brushed his horse's flank.  Fulviac's shadow fell athwart
her.  Only her face shone clear in the moonlight.

"I have ceased," she said, "to look upon life as a stretch
of blue, a laughing dawn."

"Good."

"I have learnt that woe is the crown of years."

"Good again."

"That life is full of violence and wrong."

"A platitude.  Yes.  Life consists in learning platitudes."

"I am only one woman among thousands."

"A revelation."

"You jeer."

"Not so.  Few women learn the truth of your proverb."

"Lastly, my trouble is not the only woe in the world.
That it is an error to close up grief in the casket of
self."

Fulviac flapped his bridle, and looked far ahead into the
cavern of the night.  He was silent awhile in thought.
When he spoke again, he delivered himself of certain curt
cogitations, characteristic confessions that were wholly
logical.

"I am a selfish vagabond," he said; "I appeal to Peter's
keys whether all ambition is not selfish.  I am an egotist
for the good of others.  The stronger my ambition, the
stronger the hope of the land in generous justice.  I live
to rule, to rule magnanimously, yet with an iron sceptre.
There, you have my creed."

"And God?" she asked him.

"Is a most useful subordinate."

"You do not mean that?"

"I do not."

She saw again the mutilated beings in the catacombs,
aye, even her own home flaming to the sky, and the white
face of her dead father.  Faith and devotion were great
in her for the moment.  Divine vengeance beaconed over
the world, a torch borne aloft by the hand of Pity.

"It is God's war," she said to him with a finer solemnity
sounding in her voice; "you have stirred the woman in
me.  Is that enough?"

"Enough," he answered her.

"And the rest?"

"God shall make all plain in due season."

Gilderoy had dwindled into the east; its castle's towers
still netted the moonlight from afar.  The meadowlands
had ceased, and trees strode down in multitudes to guard
the track.  The night was still and calm, with a whisper
of frost in the crisp, sparkling air.  The world seemed
roofed with a dome of dusky steel.

Before them a shallow valley lay white in the light of
the moon.  Around climbed the glimmering turrets of the
trees, rank on rank, solemn and tumultuous.  The bare
gable ends of a ruined chapel rose in the valley.  Fulviac
drew aside by a bridle path that ran amid rushes.  To the
left, from the broken wall of the curtilage, a great beech
wood ascended, its boughs black against the sky, its floor
ankle-deep with fallen leaves.  The chapel stood roofless
under the moon.  Hollies, a sable barrier that glistened in
the moonlight, closed the ruin on the south.  Yews cast
their gloom about the walls.  A tall cross in the forsaken
graveyard stretched out its mossy arms east and west.

The armed groom took the horses and tethered them
under a clump of pines by the wall.  Fulviac and the girl
Yeoland passed up through weeds and brambles to the
porch.  A great briar rose had tangled the opening with a
thorny web, as though to hold the ruin from the hand of
man.  The tiled floor was choked with grass; a rickety door
drooped rotten on its rusty hinges.

Fulviac pushed through and beckoned the girl to follow.
Within, all was ruinous and desolate, the roof fallen, the
casements broken.

"We must find harbour here," said the man, "our horses
go far to-morrow."

"A cheerful hostel, this."

"Its wildness makes it safe.  You fear the cold.  I'll
see to that."

"No.  I am hungry."

The high altar still stood below the small rose window
in the east, where the rotting fragments of a triptych hid
the stonework.  There was a great carved screen of stone
on either side, curiously recessed as though giving access to
an ambulatory.  The altar stood in dense shadow, with
broken timber and a tangle of briars ringing a barrier about
its steps.  On the southern side of the nave, a patch of
tiled flooring still stood riftless, closed in by two fallen
pillars.  The groom came in with two horse-cloaks, and
Fulviac spread them on the tiles.  He also gave her a small
flask of wine, and a silver pyx holding meat and bread.

"We crusaders must not grumble at the rough lodging,"
he said to her; "wrap yourself in these cloaks, and play the
Jacob with a stone pillow."

She smiled slightly in her eyes.  The groom brought in
a saddle, ranged it with a saddle cloth covering it, that it
might rest her head.

"And you?" she said to Fulviac.

"Damian and I hold the porch."

"You will be cold."

"I have a thick hide.  The Lady of Geraint give you
good rest!"

He threaded his way out amid the fallen stones and
pillars, and closed the rickety gate.  The groom, a tall
fellow in a battered bassinet and a frayed brigantine, stood
by the yew trees, as on guard.  Fulviac gestured to him.
The man moved away towards the eastern end of the
chapel, where laurels grew thick and lusty about the walls.
When he returned Fulviac was sitting hunched on a fallen
stone in the corner of the porch, as though for sleep.  The
man dropped a guttural message into his master's ear, and
propped himself in the other angle of the porch.

An hour passed; the moon swam past the zenith towards
the west; a vast quiet watched over the world, and no
wind rippled in the woods.  In the sky the stars shivered,
and gathered more closely their silver robes.  In the
curtilage the ruined tombs stared white and desolate at the
moon.

An owl's cry sounded in the woods.  Sudden and strange,
as though dropped from the stars, faint music quivered on
the frost-brilliant air.  It gathered, died, grew again, with a
mysterious flux of sweetness, as of some song stealing from
the Gardens of the Dead.  Flute, cithern, and viol were
sounding under the moon, merging a wizard chant into the
magic of the hour.  Angels, crimson-winged, in green
attire, seemed to descend the burning stair of heaven.

A sudden great radiance lit the ruin, a glory of gold
streaming from the altar.  Cymbals clashed; waves of
shimmering light surged over the broken walls.  Incense,
like purple smoke, curled through the casements.  The
music rushed in clamorous rapture to the stars.  A voice
was heard crying in the chapel, elfin and wild, yet full of a
vague rich sanctity.  It ceased sudden as the brief moan of a
prophecy.  The golden glow elapsed; the music sank to
silence.  Nought save the moonlight poured in silver
omnipotence over the ruin.

From the chapel came the sound of stumbling footsteps
amid the stones.  A hand clutched at the rotting door,
jerked it open, as in terror.  The girl Yeoland came out
into the porch, and stood swaying white-faced in the
shadow.

"Fulviac."

Her voice was hoarse and whispering, strained as the
overwrought strings of a lute.  The man did not stir.  She
bent down, dragged at his cloak, calling to him with a quick
and gathering vehemence.  He shook himself, as from the
thongs of sleep, stood up and stared at her.  The groom
still crouched in the dark corner.

"Fulviac."

She thrust her way through the briars into the moonlight.
Her hood had fallen back, her hair loose upon her
shoulders; her eyes were full of a supernatural stupor, and
she seemed under the spell of some great shock of awe.
She trembled so greatly, that Fulviac followed her, and held
her arm.

"Speak.  What has chanced to you?"

She still shook like some flower breathed upon by the
oracular voice of God.  Her hands were torn and bloody
from the thorns.

"The Virgin has appeared to me."

"Are you mad?"

"The Virgin."

"Some ghost or phantom."

"No, no, hear me."

She stretched out her hands like one smitten blind, and
took breath swiftly in sudden gasps.

"Hear me, I was but asleep, woke, and heard music.
The Virgin came out upon the altar, her face like the
moon, her robes white as the stars.  There was great light,
great glory.  And she spoke to me.  Mother of God, what
am I that I should be chosen thus!"

"Speak.  Can this be true?"

"The truth, the truth!"

Fulviac fell on his knees with a great gesture of awe.
The girl, her face turned to the moon, stood quivering
like a reed, her lips moving as if in prayer.

"Her message, child?"

"Ah, it was this: 'Go forth a virgin, and lead the hosts
of the Lord.'"

Fulviac's face was in shadow.  He thrust up his hands
to the heavens, but would not so much as glance at the
girl above him.  His voice rang out in the silence of the
night:--

"Gloria tibi, Sancta Maria!  Gloria tibi, Domine!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`IX`:

.. class:: center large

   IX

.. vspace:: 2

Faith, golden crown of the Christian!  Self-mesmerism,
subtle alchemy of the mind!  How the balance of belief
swings between these twain!

A spiritual conception born in a woman's brain is as a
savour of rich spices sweetening all the world.  How great
a power of obstinacy stirs in one small body!  A pillar of
fire, a shining grail.  She will bring forth the finest gems
that hang upon her bosom, the ruby of heroism, the
sapphire of pity.  She will cast all her store of gold into the
lap of Fate.  Give to her some radiant dream of hope, and
she may prove the most splendid idealist, even if she do
not prove a wise one.  Remember the women who watched
about the Cross of Christ.

There had been trickery in the miracle, a tinge of flesh
in the vision.  The Virgin, in the ruck of religion, had
suffered herself to be personated by a clever little "player"
from Gilderoy, aided and idealised by a certain notorious
charlatan who dealt in magic, was not above aiding
ecclesiastical mummeries on occasions, and conspiring for the
solemn production of miracles.  A priest's juggling box,
a secret door at the back of the altar used in bygone days
for the manipulation of a wonder-working image, musicians,
incense, and Greek fire.  These had made the portent
possible.  As for Fulviac, rugged plotter, he was as grave as
an abbot over the business; his words were wondrous
beatific; he spoke of the interventions of Heaven with bated
breath.

It was a superstitious age, touched with phantasy and
gemmed with magic.  Relics were casketed in gold and
silver; holy blood amazed with yearly liquefactions the
souls of the devout; dreamers gazed into mirrors,
crystals, finger-nails, for visions of heaven.  Jewels were
poured in scintillant streams at the white feet of the
Madonna.  It was all done with rare mysticism, colour,
and rich music.  The moon ruled marriage, corn, and
kine.  The saints, like a concourse of angels, walked
with melancholy splendour through the wilds.

As for the girl Yeoland, she had the heart of a woman
in the noblest measure, a red heart, pure yet passionate.
The world waxed prophetic that shrill season.  She was
as full of dreams and phantasies as an astrologer's missal.
Nothing amazed her, and yet all earth was mysterious.
The wind spoke in magic syllables; the trees were
oracular; the stars, white hands tracing symbols in the
sky.  She was borne above herself on the pinions of
ecstasy, heard seraph wings sweep the air, saw the
glimmer of their robes passing the portals of the night.
Mysticism moved through the world like the sound of
lutes over a moonlit sea.

One March morning, Fulviac came to her in the
northern chamber of the cliff.  Yeoland had masses of
scarlet cloth and threads of gold upon her knees, for she
was broidering a banner, the banner of the Maid of
Gilderoy.  Her eyes were full of violet shadow.  She
wore a cross over her bosom, emeralds set in silver; a
rosary, dangling on her wrist, told how her prayers kept
alternate rhythm with her fingers.  Fulviac crooked the
knee to the crucifix upon the wall, sat down near her on
a rich bench of carved cedar wood.

The man was in a beneficent mood, and beamed on
her like a lusty summer.  He had tidings on his tongue,
tidings that he hoarded with the craft of an epicure.  It
was easy to mark when the world trundled well with his
humour.  He put forth smiles like a great oak whose
boughs glisten in the sun.

"You will tire yourself, little sister."

She looked at him with one of her solemn glances, a
glance that spoke of vigils, soul-searchings, and prayer.

"My fingers tire before my heart," she said to him.

"Rest, rest."

"Do I seem weary to you?"

"Nay, you are fresh as the dawn."

He brushed back the tawny hair from off his forehead,
and the lines about his mouth softened.

"I have news from the west."

"Ah!"

"We gather and spread like fire in a forest.  The
mountain men are with us, ready to roll down from the
hills with hauberk and sword.  In two months Malgo
will have sent the bloody cross through all the west."

The golden thread ran through the girl's white fingers;
the beads of her rosary rattled; she seemed to be
weaving the destiny of a kingdom into the device upon her
banner.

"How is it with us here?" she asked him.

"I have a thousand stout men and true camped upon
the cliff.  Levies are coming in fast, like steel to a
magnet.  In a month we shall outbulk a Roman
legion."

"And Gilderoy?"

"Gilderoy and Geraint will give us a score thousand
pikemen."

"The stars fight for us."

Fulviac took her lute from the carved bench and began
to thrum the chords of an old song.

   |  "Spears crash, and swords clang,
   |  Fame maddens the world.
   |    Come battle and love.
   |            Iseult--
   |          Ah, Iseult."

He broke away with a last snap at the strings, and set the
lute aside.

"Bear with me," he said.

Her dark eyes questioned him over her banner.

"I offer you the first victim."

"Ah!"

"Flavian of Gambrevault."

An indefinite shadow descended upon the girl's face.
The inspired radiance seemed dimmed for the moment;
the crude realism of her thoughts rang in discord to her
dreams.  She lost the glimmering thread from her needle.
Her hands trembled a little as she played with the scarlet
folds of the banner.

"Well?"

"A lad of mine bears news--a black-eyed rogue from
the hills of Carlyath, sharp as a sword's point, quaint as
an elf.  I sent him gleaning, and he has done bravely.
You would hear his tale from his own lips?"

She nodded and seemed distraught.

"Yes.  Bring him in to me," she said.

Fulviac left her, to return with a slim youth sidling in
behind him like a shadow.  The lad had a nut-brown
skin and ruddy cheeks, a pair of twinkling eyes, a thatch
of black hair over his forehead.  Bred amid the hills of
Carlyath, where the women were scarlet Eves, and the
land a paradise, he had served in Gilderoy as apprentice
to an armourer.  Carlyath's wilds and the city's roguery
had mingled in him fantastic strains of extravagant
sentiment and cunning.  Half urchin, half elf, he stood with
bent knees and slouched shoulders, his black eyes alert on
Fulviac, his lord.

The man thrust him forward by the collar, with an
eloquent gesture.

"The whole tale.  Try your wit."

The Carlyath lad advanced one foot, and with an
impudent southern smirk, remarked--

"This, madame, is an infatuated world."

Thus, sententiously delivered, he plunged into a declamation
with a picturesque and fanciful extravagance that
he had imbibed from the strolling romancers of his own land.

"In the city of Gilderoy," he said, speaking very volubly
and with many gestures, "there lives a lady of surpassing
comeliness.  Her eyes are as the sky, her cheeks as June
roses, her hair a web of gold.  She is a right fair lady, and
daily she sits at her broad casement, singing, and plaiting
her hair into shackles of gold.  She has bound the Lord
Flavian of Gambrevault in a net starred with poppies,
scarlet poppies of the field, so that he ever dreams dreams of
scarlet, and sees visions of lips warm as wine.  Daily the
Lord Flavian scours the country between Avalon and the
fair city of Gilderoy, till the very dust complains of his
fury, and the green grass curses his horse's heels.  But the
lady with the hair of gold compasses him like the sunset;
she has stolen the eyes of heaven, and the stars are blind."

Fulviac smiled over the extreme subtlety of the rendering.
It was a delicate matter, delicately handled.  The
Carlyath lad had wit, and a most seraphic tongue.

"What more?"

"There is yet another lady at Avalon."

"Well?"

"A lady whose name is Duessa, a lady with black hair
and a blacker temper.  Lord Flavian has a huge horror of
her tongue.  Therefore he rides like a thief, without
trumpets, to Gilderoy."

"Yet more."

The lad spread his hands with an inimitable gesture,
shrugged, and heaved a most Christian sigh.

"The Lady Duessa is the Lord Flavian's wife," he said.

"Surely."

"Therefore, sire, he is a coward."

The lad drew back with a bow and a scrape of the foot,
keeping his eyes on the floor with the discretion of a
veteran lackey.  At a sign from Fulviac, he slipped away, and
left Yeoland and the man alone.

The girl's hands were idle in her lap; the great scarlet
banner trailed in rich folds about her feet.  There was a
white mask of thought upon her face, and her eyes searched
the distance with an oblivious stare.  All the strong
discords of the past rushed clamorous to her brain; her
consecrated dreams were as so many angels startled by the
assaults of hell.

She rose from her chair, cast the casement wide, and
stood gazing over the forest.  Youth seemed in the breeze,
and the clear voice of the Spring.  The green woods surged
with liberty; the strong zest of life breathed in their bosoms.
In the distance the pines seemed to beckon to her, to wave
their caps in windy exultation.

Fulviac had stood watching her with the calm scrutiny
of one wise in the passionate workings of the soul.  He
suffered her to possess her thoughts in silence for a season,
to come by a steady comprehension of the past.  Presently
he gathered the red banner, and hung it on the frame, went
softly to her and touched her sleeve.

"Shall they kill him on the road?" he asked.

She pondered a moment, and did not answer him.

"It is easy," he said, "and a matter of sheer justice."

The words seemed to steel her decision.

"No," she said, "let them bring him here--to me."

"So be it," he answered her.

Fulviac found her cold and taciturn, desirous of solitude.
He humoured the mood, and she was still staring from the
window when he left her.  The woodland had melted
before her into an oblivious mist.  In its stead she saw a
tower flaming amid naked trees, a white face staring
heavenwards with the marble tranquillity of death.





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Down through the woods of Avalon rode the Lord Flavian
of Gambrevault, down towards the forest track in the grey
face of the dawn.  In the meadows and beyond the orchards,
water shone, and towers stood mistily.  The voice of Spring
pulsed in the air, songs of green woods, the wild wine of
violets, pavements of primrose gold.  Birds piped lustily in
wood and thicket, and the ascending sun lavished his
glittering archery from the chariots of the clouds.

The Lord Flavian was inordinately cheerful that
morning, as he rode in green and red through the prophetic
woods.  Heart and weather were in kindred keeping, and
his youth sang like a brook after April rains.  The woods
danced in dew.  Far on its rocky hill the towers of
Gilderoy would soon beckon him above the trees.  Beneath the
shadow of the cathedral tower stood a gabled house with
gilded vanes and roofs of generous red.  There in Gilderoy,
in a room hung with cloth of purple and gold, white arms
waited, and the bosom of a golden Helen held love like a
red rose in a pool of milky spikenard.

Picture a slim but muscular man with the virile figure of
a young David, a keen, smooth face, a halo of brown hair,
eyes eloquent as a woman's.  Picture a good grey horse
trapped in red and green, full of fettle as a colt, burly as a
bull.  Picture the ermined borderings, the jewelled clasps,
brigantine of quilted velvet, fur-lined bassinet bright as a
star.  Youth, clean, adventurous, aglow to the last finger-tip,
impetuous to the tune of thirty breaths a minute.  Youth
with all its splendid waywardness, its generosities, its
immense self-intoxications.  Youth with the voice of a Golden
Summer in its heart, and for its plume the gorgeous fires
of eve.

Wealth often breeds apathy and parsimonious instincts.
It is the beggar whose purse bursts with joy, whose soul
blazes generous red upon the clouds.  As for Flavian of
Gambrevault and Avalon, he was rich but no miser, proud
yet not haughty, sanguine but not vicious.  Like many a
man inspired by an instinctive idealism, his heart ran before
his reason: they not having come cheek by jowl as in later
years.  He was very devout, yet very worldly; very ardent,
yet over hasty.  Mark him then, a lovable fool in the eyes
of philosophy; a cup of mingled wine, both white and red.
He was a great lord; yet his serfs loved him.

The Lady Duessa's parents, good folk, had been blessed
with aspirations.  Gambrevault and Avalon had bulked
very gloriously under the steel-blue vault of pride.
Moreover, their daughter was a sensuous being, who panted for
poetic surroundings, and lived to music.  A boy of twenty;
a passionate, dark-eyed, big-bosomed houri of twenty and
five; bell, book, and ring--such had been the bridal
bargain consummated on church principles five years ago or
more.  A youth of twenty is not supremely wise concerning
the world, or his own heart.  The Lord Flavian's
marriage had not proved a magic blessing to him.  Parentally
sealed marriage deeds are the edicts of the devil.

Quickly are the mighty fallen, and the chalices of love
broken.  It was no mere chance ambuscade that waited
open-mouthed for Flavian, Lord of Gambrevault and
Avalon, Warden of the Southern Marches, Knight of the Order
of the Rose, as he rode that morning to Gilderoy, a
disciple of Venus.  In a certain perilous place, the road ran
betwixt walls of rock, and under the umbrage of overhanging
trees.  Twenty men with pike and gisarme swarming
out of the woods; a short scuffle and a stabbed horse; a
gag in the mouth, a bandage over the eyes, a mule's back,
half a dozen thongs of stout leather.  That same evening
the Lord Flavian was brought like a bale of merchandise
into Fulviac's guard-room, and tumbled on a heap of straw
in a corner.

They were grim men, these forest rangers, not given
to pity, or the light handling of a feud.  A poniard point
was their pet oath, a whip of the sword the best word with
an enemy.  They bit their thumb nails at creation, and
were not gentle in the quest of a creed.  Fulviac heard
their news, and commended them.  They were like the
ogres of the old fables; the red blood of a lusty aristocrat
smelt fresh for the sword's supper.

The girl Yeoland was at her prayer-desk with a
blazoned breviary under her fingers, when Fulviac came to
her with tidings of the day's capture.  She knelt with her
hands crossed upon her bosom, as Fulviac stood in the
darkened doorway.  To the man she appeared as the
Madonna in some picture of the Annunciation, the yellow
light from the lamp streaming down upon her with a lustre
of sanctity.

"They have brought the boar home."

"Dead?"

"Nay; but his corpse candle walks the cavern."

For the girl it was a descent from spiritual themes to
the stark realism of life.  She left her prayer-desk with a
little sigh.  Her hands trembled as she drew a scarlet cloak
about her, and fastened it with a girdle of green leather.
Her eyes dwelt on Fulviac's face with a species of dusky
pain.

"Come," he said to her.

"Whither?"

"To judge him."

"Not before all, not in the guard-room."

"Leave it to me," he said.  "Be forewarned.  We deal
with no mere swashbuckler."

They went together to Fulviac's parlour, where a great
brazen lamp hung from the roof, and a book bound in
black leather lay chained on the table.  Yeoland took the
man's carved chair, while he stood behind her leaning on
the rail.  She was paler than was her wont.  Now and
again she pressed a hand to her breast, as though to stay
the too rapid beating of her heart.

Two guards bearing partisans came in from the guard-room
with a man bound and blindfold between them.  A
third followed, bearing a two-handed sword naked over his
shoulder.  He was known as Nord of the Hammer, an
armourer like to a Norse Volund, burly, strong as a bear.
The door was barred upon them.  One of the guards
plucked the cloth from the bound man's face.

In the malicious imagery of thought, Yeoland had often
pictured to herself this Flavian of Gambrevault, a coarse,
florid ruffian, burly and brutal, a fleshly demigod in the
world of feudalism.  So much for conjecture.  What she
beheld was a straight-lipped, clean-limbed man, slim as a
cypress, supple as good steel.  The face was young yet
strong, the grey eyes clear and fearless.  Moreover there
was a certain lonely look about him that invoked pity, and
angered her in an enigmatic way.  She was wrath with
him for being what he was, for contradicting the previous
imaginings of her mind.

Flavian of Gambrevault stood bound before her, an
aristocrat of aristocrats, outraged in pride, yet proud beyond
complaint.  The self-mastery of his breeding kept him a
stately figure despite his tumbling and his youth, one
convinced of lordship and the powerful splendour of his name.
The whole affair to him was illogical, preposterous,
insolent.  A gentleman of the best blood in the kingdom could
not be hustled out of his dignity by the horse-play of a
bevy of cut-throats.

Possibly the first vision to snare the man's glance was
the elfin loveliness of the girl, who sat throned in the great
chair as on a judgment seat.  He marked the rose-white
beauty of her skin, her sapphire eyes gleaming black in
certain lights, her ebon hair bound with a fillet of sky-blue
leather.  Moreover, it was plain to the man in turn that
this damoisel in the red gown was deciphering his features
in turn with a curiosity that was no vapid virtue.  As for
Fulviac, he watched them both with his amber-brown eyes,
eyes that missed no movement in the mask of life.  To
him the scene under the great brazen lamp was a study in
moods and emotions.

The aristocrat was the first to defy the silence.  He had
stared round the room at his leisure, and at each of its
motionless figures in turn.  The great sword, slanted in
gleaming nakedness over Nord's shoulder, appeared to
fascinate him for the moment.  Despite his ambiguous
sanctity, he showed no badge of panic or distress.

Ignoring the woman, he challenged Fulviac, who leant
upon the chair rail, watching him with an enigmatic
smile.

"Goodman in the red doublet," quoth he, "when you
have stared your fill at me, I will ask you to read me
the moral of this fable."

Fulviac stroked his chin with the air of a man who
holds an adversary at some subtle disadvantage.

"Messire," he said, "address yourself to madame--here;
you are her affair in the main."

The Warden of the Southern Marches bowed as by
habit.  His grey eyes reverted to Yeoland's face, searching
it with a certain courteous curiosity that took her beauty
for its justification.  The woman was an enigma to him,
a most magical sphinx whose riddle taunted his reason.

"Madame," he began.

The girl stiffened in her chair at the word.

"You hold me at a disadvantage, seeing that I am
ignorant of sin or indiscretion against you.  If it is a
question of gold----"

"Messire!"

He swept her exclamation suavely aside and ran on
mellifluously.

"If it is a question of gold, let me beseech you to be
frank with me.  I will covenant with you instanter.  My
seneschal at Gambrevault will unbolt my coffers, and ease
your greed.  Pray be outspoken.  I will renounce the
delight of lodging here for a purse of good rose nobles."

There was the faintest tinge of insolence in the man's
voice, an insolence that exaggerated to the full the charge
of plunder in his words.  Whether he hinted at blood
money or no, there was sufficient poison in the sneer to
fire the brain and scorch the heart to vengeance.

The woman had risen from her chair, and stood gripping
the carved woodwork with a passion that set her arms
quivering like bands of tightened steel.  The milk-white
calm had melted from her face.  Wrath ran riot in her
blood.  So large were her pupils that her eyes gleamed red.

"Ha, messire, I bring you to justice, and you offer me gold."

The man stared; his eyes did not quail from hers.

"Justice, madame!  Of what sin then am I accused?
On my soul, I know not who you are."

She calmed herself a little, shook back her hair from her
shoulders, fingered her throat, breathing fast the while.

"My name, messire?  Ha, you shall have it.  I am
Yeoland, daughter of that Rual of Cambremont whom
you slaughtered at the gate of his burning house.  I--am
the sister of those fair sons whom you did to death.
Blood money, forsooth!  God grant, messire, that you are
in honest mind for heaven, for you die to-night."

The man had bent to catch her words.  He straightened
suddenly like a tree whose throat is loosed from the grim
grip of the wind.  He went grey as granite, flushed red
again as a dishonoured girl.  The words had touched him
with the iron of truth.

"Hear me," he said to her.

"Ah, you would lie."

"By Heaven, no; give me an hour's justice."

"Murderer."

"Before God, you wrong me."

He stood with twitching lips, shackled hands twisting
one within the other.  For the instant words eluded him,
like fruit jerked from the mouth of a thirst-maddened
Tantalus.  Anon, his manhood gathered in him, rushed
forth redly like blood from a stricken throat.

"Daughter of Rual, hear me, I tell you the truth.  I,
Flavian of Gambrevault, had in my pay a company of hired
'spears,' rough devils from the north.  The braggarts
served me against John of Brissac, were half their service
drunk and mutinous.  When Lententide had come, their
captain swore to me, 'Lording, pay us and let us go.
We have spilt blood near Gilderoy,' scullion blood he
swore, 'give us good bounty, and let us march.'  So at
his word I gave them largesse, and packed them from
Gambrevault with pennons flying.  Methought they and
their brawlings were at an end.  Before God and the saints,
I never knew of this."

Yeoland considered him, strenuous as he seemed towards
truth.  He was young, passionate, sanguine; for one short
moment she pitied him, and pondered his innocence in her
heart.  It was then that Fulviac plucked at her sleeve,
spoke in her ear, words that hardened her like a winter
frost.

She stared in the man's eyes, as she gave him his
death-thrust with the sureness of hate.

"Blood for blood," were her words to him.

"Is this justice!"

"I have spoken."

"Monstrously.  Hear me----"

"Messire, make your peace with Heaven, I give you till
daylight."

The man stumbled against the table, white as the moon.
Youth strove in him, the crimson fountain of life's wine,
the wild cry of the dawn.  His eyes were great with a
superhuman hunger.  Fulviac's strong voice answered him.

"Hence, hence.  At dawn, Nord, do your duty."





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Give doubt the password, and the outer battlements are
traitorously stormed.  Parley with pity, and the white
banner flutters on the keep.

Provided her emotions inspire her, a woman is strong;
let her take to logic, and she is a rushlight wavering in
the wind.  In her red heart lies her divinity; her feet are
of clay when reason rules her head.

The girl Yeoland took doubt to her chamber that night,
a malicious sprite, sharp of wit and wild of eye.  All the
demons of discord were loosed in the silence of the night.
Pandora's box stood open, and the hours were void of
sleep; faces crowded the shadows, voices wailed in the
gloom.  Her thoughts rioted like frightened bats fluttering
and squeaking round a torch.  Sleep, like a pale Cassandra,
stood aloof and watched the mask of these manifold
emotions.

Turn and twist as she would amid her fevered pillows,
a wild voice haunted her, importunate and piteous.  As
the cry of one sinking in a stormy sea, it rang out with
a passionate vehemence.  Moreover, there was a subtle
echo in her own heart, a strong appeal that did not spare
her, toss and struggle as she would.  Decision fluttered
like a wounded bird.  Malevolence rushed back as an
ocean billow from the bastion of a cliff that emblemed
mercy.

With a beating of wings and a discordant clamour, a
screech-owl buffeted the casement.  A lamp still burnt
beneath the crucifix; the glow had beaconed the bird out
of the night.  Starting up with a shiver of fear, she
quenched the lamp, and crept back to bed.  The darkness
seemed to smother her like a cloak; the silence took
to ghostly whisperings; a death-watch clicked against the
wall.

The night crawled on like a funeral cortège.  Baffled,
outfaced, sleepless, she rose from her tumbled bed, and
paced the room as in a fever.  Still wakefulness and a
thousand dishevelled thoughts that hung about her like her
snoodless hair.  Again and again, she heard the distant
whirr and rattle of wheels, the clangour of the wire, as
the antique clock in Fulviac's chamber smote away the
hours of night.  Each echo of the sound seemed to spur
to the quick her wavering resolution.  Time was flying,
jostling her thoughts as in a mill race.  With the dawn,
the Lord Flavian would die.

Anon she flung the casement wide and stared out into
the night.  A calm breeze moved amid the masses of ivy,
and played upon her face.  She bared her breast to its
breath, and stood motionless with head thrown back, her
white throat glimmering amid her hair.  Below, the
sombre multitudes of the trees showed dim and ghostly,
deep with mystery.  A vague wind stirred the branches;
the dark void swirled with unrest, breaking like a midnight
sea upon a cliff.  A few straggling stars peeped through
the lattice of the sky.

She leant against the sill, rested her chin upon her
palms, and brooded.  Thoughts, fierce, passionate, and
clamorous, came crying like gusts of wind through a ruined
house.  Death and dead faces, blood, the yawn of
sepulchres, life and the joy of it, all these passed as visions
of fire before her fancy.  Vengeance and pity agonised her
soul.  She answered yea and nay with the same breath;
condemned and pardoned with contradicting zeal.  Youth
lifted up its face to her, piteous and beautiful.  Death
reached out a rattling hand into her bosom.

Presently, a far glow began to creep into the sky; a
gradual greyness absorbed the shadows of the night.  The
day was dawning.  From the forest, the trembling orisons
of the birds thrilled like golden light into the air.
Unutterable joy seemed to flood forth from the piping throats.
Even the trees seemed to quiver to the sound.  With a
rush of bitter passion, she closed the casement, cast herself
upon her bed, and strove to pray.

Again came the impotent groping into nothingness.  A
dense mist seemed to rise betwixt her soul and the white
face of the Madonna.  Aspiration lessened like an afterglow,
and dissolved away into a dark void of doubt.  Prayer
eluded her; the utterances of her heart died in a miserable
endeavour, and she could not think.

The spiritual storm wore itself away as the dawn
streamed in with a glimmer of gold.  Yeoland lay and
stared at the casement, and the figure of Sebastian rendered
radiant by the dawn, the whiteness of his limbs tongued
with dusky rills of blood, where the barbs had smitten into
the flesh.  Sombre were the eyes, and shadowy with suffering.
A halo of gold gilded the youthful face.  The painted
glass about him blazed like a shower of gems.

The Sebastian of the casement recalled to her with
wizard power the face of the man whom death claimed at
dawn.  The thought woke no new passion in her.  The
night's vigil had left her reason like a skein of tangled silk,
and with the day she verged towards a wearied apathy.
The voice of pity in her waned to an infrequent whisper
that came like the rustling of leaves on a summer night.
She realised that it had dawned an hour or more; that the
man had knelt and fallen to Nord's sword.

Suddenly the silence was snapped by a far outcry sounding
in the bowels of the cliff.  Gruff voices seemed to
echo and re-echo like breakers in a cavern.  A horn blared.
She heard the thudding of a door, the shrilling of mail, the
clangour of iron steps passing up the gallery.

Shivering, she raised herself upon her elbow to listen.
Were they bringing her the man's head, grey and blood-dabbled,
with closed lids and mangled neck?  She fell back
again upon her pillows, pressed her hands to her face with
a great revulsion of pity, for the image had burnt in upon
her brain.

The clangour of harness drew near, with an iron rhythm
as of the march of destiny.  It ceased outside the door.  A
heavy hand beat upon the panelling.

"Who knocks?"

Her own voice, strained and shrill, startled her like an
owl's hoot.  Fulviac's deep bass answered her from the
passage.

"Unbar to me, I must speak with you."

She started up from the bed in passionless haste, ran to
a closet, drew out a cloak and wrapped it about her
shoulders.  Her bare feet showed white under her night-gear
as she slid the bolt from its socket, and let the man
in.  He was fully armed save for his salade, which he
carried in the hollow of his arm.  His red cloak swept his
heels.  A tower of steel, there was a clangorous bluster
about him that bespoke action.

The girl had drawn apart, shivering, and gathering her
cloak about her, for in the gloom of the place she had
thought for an instant that Fulviac carried a mangled head.

"A rider has brought news," he said to her.  "John of
Brissac's men have taken Prosper the Preacher, to hang
him, as their lord has vowed, over the gate of Fontenaye.
They are on the march home from Gilderoy, ten lances
and a company of arbalestiers.  I ride to ambuscado them.
Prosper shall not hang!"

She stood with her back to the casement, and looked at
him with a restless stare.  Her thoughts were with the
man whose grey eyes had pleaded with her through the
night.  Her fears clamoured like captives at the gate of a
dungeon.

"What is more, this vagabond of Avalon has been begging
twelve hours' grace to scrape his soul clean for Peter."

"Ah!" she said, with a sudden stark earnestness.

"I will give him till sunset----"

"If I suffer it----"

"The dog has spirit.  I would thrust no man into the
dark till he has struck a bargain with his own particular
saints."

She drew back, sank down into a chair with her hair
half hiding her face.

"You are right in being merciful," she said very slowly.

Magic riddle of life; rare roseate rod of love.  Was it
youth leaping towards youth, the cry of the lark to the
dawn, the crimson flowering of a woman's pity?  The air
seemed woven through with gold.  A thousand lutes had
sounded in the woods.  Voiceless, she sat with flickering
lids, amazed at the alchemy that had wrought ruth out of hate.

Fulviac had drawn back into the gloom of the gallery.
He turned suddenly upon his heel, and his scabbard smote
and rang against the rock.

"I take all the men I have," he said to her, "even the
dotard Jaspar, for he knows the ways.  Gregory and
Adrian I leave on guard; they are tough gentlemen, and
loyal.  As for the lordling, he is well shackled."

Yeoland was still cowering in her chair with the mysterious
passions of the moment.

"You will return?" she asked him.

"By nightfall, if we prosper; as we shall."

He moved two paces, stayed again in his stride, and
flung a last message to her from the black throat of the
passage.

"Remember, there is no recantation over this business.
The man is my affair as well as yours.  He is a power in
the south, and would menace us.  Remember, he must die."

He turned and left her without more palaver.  She
heard him go clanging down the gallery, heard the thunder
of a heavy door, the braying of a horn.  A long while she
sat motionless, still as stone, her hands lying idle in her
lap.  When an hour had passed, the sun smote in, and
found her kneeling at her prayer-desk, her breviary dewed
with tears.





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Fulviac passed away that morning into the forest, a shaft
of red amid the mournful glooms.  Colour and steel streamed
after him fantastically.  The great cliff, silent and desolate,
basked like a leviathan in the sun.

Of the daylight and its crown of gold, the girl Yeoland
had no deep joy.  When she had ended her passion over
the blazoned pages of her breviary, and mopped her tears
with a corner of her gown, she rose to realism, and turned
her mood to the cheating of the dues of time.

The hours lagged with enough monotony to degenerate
a saint; Yeoland was very much a woman.  The night
had left her a legacy of evil.  She had shadows under
her eyes, and a constant swirl of thoughts within her
brain that made solitude a torture-house, full of prophetic
pain.  There was her lute, and she eschewed it, seeing
that her fingers seemed as ice.  As for her embroidery,
the stitches wandered haphazard, wrought grotesque
things, or lost all method in a stupor of sloth.  She
threw the banner aside in a fume at last, and let her
broodings have their way.

The forenoon crawled, like a beggar on a dusty
high-road in the welt of August.  Time seemed to stand and
mock her.  Hour by hour, she was tortured by the
vision of steel falling upon a strong young neck, of a
white face lying in a pool of blood, of a dripping carcase
and a sweating sword.  Though the vision maddened
her, what could her weak hands do?  The man was
shackled, and guarded by men with whom she dared not
tamper.  Moreover, she remembered the last look in
Fulviac's keen eyes.

Towards evening she grew rabid with unrest, fled from
the cave by the northern stair, and took sanctuary amid the
tall shadows of the forest.  The pine avenues were ever
like a church to her, solemn, stately, sympathetic as night.
There was nought to anger, nought to bring discord, where
the croon of the branches soothed like a song.

It was as she played the nun in this forest cloister,
that a strange thought challenged her consciousness under
the trees.  It was subtle, yet full of an incomprehensible
bitterness, that made her heart hasten.  Even as she
considered it, as a girl gazes at a jewel lying in her palm,
the charm flashed magic fire into her eyes.  This victim
for the sword lay shackled to the wall in the great
guard-room.  She would go and steal a last glance at him before
Fulviac and death returned.

Stairway, bower, and gallery were behind her.  She
stood in Fulviac's parlour, where the lamp burnt dimly,
and harness glimmered on the walls.  The door of the
room stood ajar.  She stole to it, and peered through the
crack left by the clumsy hingeing, into the lights and
shadows of the room beyond.

At the lower end of a long table the two guards sat
dicing, sprawling greedily over the board, the lust of
hazard writ large in their looks.  The dice kept up a
continuous patter, punctuated by the intent growls of
the gamesters.  By the sloping wall of the cavern,
palleted on a pile of dirty straw, lay the Lord Flavian of
Gambrevault, with his hands shackled to a staple in the
rock.  He lay stretched on his side, with his back turned
towards the light, so that his face was invisible to the girl
behind the door.

She watched the man awhile with a curious and dark-eyed
earnestness.  There was pathos in the prostrate
figure, as though Hezekiah-like the man had turned to
the bare rock and the callous comfort despair could give.
Once she imagined that she saw a jerking of the shoulders,
that hinted at something very womanish.  The thought
smote new pity into her, and sent her away from the
cranny, trembling.

Yeoland withdrew into Fulviac's room, and thence into
the murk of the gallery leading to her bower.  A sudden
sense of impotence had flooded into her heart; she even
yearned for some shock of Fate that might break the very
bonds that bound her to her vengeance, as to a corpse.
On the threshold of her room, a sudden sound brought her
to a halt like a hand thrust out of the dark to clutch her
throat.  She stood listening, like a miser for thieves, and
heard much.

A curse came from the guard-room, the crash of an
overturned bench, the tingling kiss of steel.  She heard
the scream as of one stabbed, a smothered uproar, an
indiscriminate scuffling, then----silence.  She stood a
moment in the dark, listening.  The silence was heavy
and implacable as the rock above.  Fear seized her, a
lust to know the worst.  She ran down the gallery into
Fulviac's room.  The door was still ajar; she thrust it
open and entered the great cavern.

Her doubts elapsed in an instant.  At the long table,
a man sat with his head pillowed on his arms.  A red
rivulet curled away over the board, winding amid the
drinking horns, isleting the dice in its course.  On the
floor lay the second guard, a smudge of crimson oozing
from his grey doublet, his arms rigid, his hands clawing
in the death-agony.  At the end of the table stood the
Lord Flavian of Gambrevault, free.

Three cubits of steel had tangled the plot vastly in the
passing of a minute.  The climax was like a knot of silk
thrust through with a sword.  The two stood motionless
a moment, staring at each other across the length of the
table, like a couple of mutes over a grave.  The man was
the first to break the silence.

"Madame," he said, with a certain grand air, and a
flippant gesture, "suffer me to condone with you over
the lamentable tricks of Fortune.  But for gross selfishness
on my part, I should still be chastening myself for the
unjust balancing of our feud.  God wills it, seemingly,
that I should continue to be your debtor."

Despite her woman's wit, the girl was wholly puzzled
how to answer him.  She was wickedly conscious in her
heart of a subtle gratitude to Heaven for the sudden
baulking of her malice.  The man expected wrath from her,
perhaps an outburst of passion.  Taking duplicity to her
soul, she stood forward on the dais and tilted her chin at
him with dutiful defiance.

"Thank my irresolution, messire," she said, "for this
reprieve of fortune."

He came two steps nearer, as though not unminded to
talk with her in open field.

"At dawn I might have had you slain," she continued,
with some hastening of her tongue; "I confess to having
pitied you a little.  You are young, a mere boy, weak and
powerless.  I gave you life for a day."

The man reddened slightly, glanced at the dead men,
and screwed his mouth into a dry smile.

"Most harmless, as you see, madame," he said.  "For
your magnanimity, I thank you.  *Deo gratias*, I will be as
grateful as I may."

She stood considering him out of her dark, long-lashed
eyes.  The man was good to look upon, ruddy and clean
of lip, with eyes that stared straight to the truth, and a pose of
the head that prophesied spirit.  The sunlight of youth played
sanguine upon his face; yet there was also a certain shadow
there, as of premature wisdom, born of pain.  There were
faint lines about the mouth and eyes.  For all its sleek and
ruddy comeliness, it was not the face of a boy.

"Messire," she said to him at last.

"Madame."

"He who lurks over long in the wolf's den may meet
the dam at the door."

He smiled at her, a frank flash of sympathy that was
not devoid of gratitude.

"Haste would be graceless," he said to her.

"How so?" she asked him.

"Ha, Madame Yeoland, have I not watched my arms
at night before the high altar at Avalon?  Have I not
sworn to serve women, to keep troth, and to love God?
You judge me hardly if you think of me as a butcher
and a murderer.  For the death of your kinsfolk I hold
myself ashamed."

There was a fine light upon his face, a power of truth
in his voice that was not hypocritic.  The girl stared
him over with a certain critical earnestness that boasted
a gleam of approval.

"Fair words," she said to him; "you did not speak
thus to me last eve."

"Ah!" he cried, beaming on her, "I was cold as a
corpse; nor could I whine, for pride."

"And your shackles?"

He laughed and held up both hands; the wrists were
chafed and bloody.

"It was ever a jest against me," he said, "that I had
the hands of a woman, white and meagre, yet strong with
the sword.  Your fellows thrust a pair of wristlets on me
fit for a Goliath, strong, but bulky.  My hands have
proved my salvation.  I pulled them through while the
guards diced, crept for a sword, gained it, and my
freedom."

She nodded, and was not markedly dismal, though the
wind had veered against her cause.  The man with the grey
eyes was a being one could not quarrel with with easy
sincerity.  Probably it did not strike her at the moment that
this friendly argument with the man she had plotted to
slay was a contradiction worthy of a woman.

The Lord of Avalon meanwhile had drawn still nearer
to the girl upon the dais.  His grey eyes had taken a
warmer lustre into their depths, as though her beauty
had kindled something akin to awe in his heart.  He set
the point of the sword on the floor, his hands on the hilt,
and looked up at the white face medallioned in the black
splendour of its hair.

"Madame," he said very gravely, "it is the way of the
world to feel remorse when such an emotion is expedient,
and to fling penitence into the bottomless pit when the
peril is past.  I shall prove to you that mine is no such
April penitence.  Here, on the cross of my sword, I swear
to you a great oath.  First, that I will build a chapel in
Cambremont glade, and establish a priest there.  Secondly,
I will rebuild the tower, refit it royally, attach to it cottars
and borderers from mine own lands.  Lastly, mass shall be
said and tapers burnt for your kinsfolk in every church in
the south.  I myself will do such penance as the Lord
Bishop shall ordain for my soul."

The man was hotly in earnest over the vow--red as a
ruby set in the sun.  Yeoland looked down upon him with
the glimmer of a smile upon her lips as he kissed the cross
of the sword.

"You seem honest," she said to him.

"Madame, on this sword I swear it.  It is hard to
believe any good of an enemy.  Behold me then before
you as a friend.  There is a feud betwixt us, not of my
willing.  By God's light I am eager to bridge the gulf
and to be at peace."

She shook her head and looked at him with a sudden
mysterious sadness.  Such a pardon was beyond belief,
the man's pure ardour, nothing but seed cast upon sand.
Fulviac, a tower of steel, seemed to loom beyond
him--an iron figure of Fate, grim and terrible.

"This can never be," she said.

His eyes were honestly sorrowful.

"Is madame so implacable?"

"Ah!" she said, "you do not understand me."

He stood a moment in thought, as though casting
about in his heart for the reason of her sternness.  Despite
her wrongs, he was assured by some spirit voice that it
was not death that stalked betwixt them like an angel of
doom.  As he stood and brooded, a gleam of the truth
flashed in upon his brain.  He went some steps back
from her, as though destiny decreed it that they should
sever unabsolved.

"Your pardon, madame," he said to her; "the riddle
is plain to me.  I no longer grope into the dark.  This
man, here, is your husband."

She went red as a rose blushing on her green throne
at the coming of the dawn.

"Messire."

"Your pardon."

"Ah, I am no wife," she said to him.  "God knows
but for this man I should be friendless and without home.
He has spread honour and chivalry before my feet like a
snow-white cloak.  Even in this, my godless vengeance,
he has served me."

The man strode suddenly towards the dais, with his face
turned up to hers.  A strange light played upon it, half
of passion, half of pity.  His voice shook, for all its
sanguine strength.

"Ah, madame, tell me one thing before I go."

"Messire."

"Have I your pardon?"

"If you love life, messire, leave me."

"Have I your pardon?"

"Go! ere it is too late."

Like a ghostly retort to her appeal came the sound of
armed men thundering over the bridge.  Their rough
voices rose in the night's silence, smitten through with
the clash and clangour of arms.  Fulviac had caught
John of Brissac's company in the woods by Gilderoy.
There had been a bloody tussle and much slaughter.
Triumphant, they were at the gate with Prosper the
Preacher in their midst.

The pair in the cavern stared at each other with a mute
appeal.

"Fulviac," said the girl in a whisper.

"The door!"

"It is barred."

They were silent and round-eyed, as children caught
in the midst of mischief.  Mailed fists and pike staves
were beating upon the gate.  A babel of impatience
welled up without.

"Adrian, Gregory!"

"Lazy curs!"

"Unbar, unbar!"

Mocking silence leered in retort.  Yeoland and the
Lord of Avalon were still as mice.  The din slackened
and waned, as though Fulviac's men were listening for
sound of life within.  Then came more blows upon the
gate; fingers fumbled at the closed grill.  The man
Gregory lay and stared at the rocky roof; Adrian sat
with his face pooled by his own blood.

A fiercer voice sounded above the clamour.  It was
Fulviac's.  The girl shivered as she stood.

"Ho, there, Gregory, Adrian; what's amiss with ye?"

Still silence, mocking and implacable.  The lull held for
the moment; then the storm gathered.

"Break down the gate," roared the voice; "by God,
we will see the bottom of this damned silence."

The Lord Flavian of Avalon had stood listening with
the look of a man cooped in a cavern, who hears the sea
surging to his feet.  He glanced at the dead guards, and
went white.  To save his soul from purgatory it behoved
him to act, and to act quickly.  A single lamp still burnt
in the oratory of hope.  He went near to the girl on the
dais, and held up the crossed hilt of his sword.

"By the Holy Cross, mercy!"

She cast a frightened glance into his eyes, and continued
mute a moment.  The thunder grew against the gate, the
crash of steel, a rending din that went echoing into all the
pits and passage-ways of the place.  Fulviac's men had
dragged the trunk of a fallen pine up the causeway, and
were charging the gate till the timber groaned.

The man, with his sword held like a crucifix, stood and
pleaded with his eyes.

"Mercy!" he said; "you know this warren and can save me."

"Are you a craven?"

"Craven? before God, no, only desperate.  What hope
have I unharnessed, one sword against fifty?"

For yet another moment she appeared irresolute, dazed
by the vision of Fulviac's powerful wrath.  He was a stark
man and a terrible, and she feared him.  The timbers of
the gate began to crack and gape.  Flavian of Avalon
lifted up his voice to her with a passionate outburst of
despair.

"God, madame, I cannot die.  I am young, look at me,
life is at its dawn.  By your woman's mercy, hide me.
Give me not back to death."

His bitter agitation smote her to the core.  She looked
into his eyes; they were hungry as love, and very piteous.
There could be no sinning against those eyes.  Great fear
flooded over her like a green billow, bearing her to the
inevitable.  In a moment she was as hot to save him as if
he had been her lover.

"Come," she said, "quick, before the gate gives."

She led him like the wind through Fulviac's parlour, and
down the gallery to her own bower.  It was dark and
lampless.  She groped to the postern, fumbled at the latch
and conquered it.  Night streamed in.  She pushed the
man out and pointed to the steps.

"The forest," she said, "for your life; bear by the stars
for the north."

A full moon had reared her silver buckler in the
sky.  The night was sinless and superb, drowned in
a mist of phosphor glory.  The man knelt at her
feet a moment, and pressed his lips to the hem of her gown.

"The Virgin bless you!"

"Go----"

"I shall remember."

He descended and disappeared where the trees swept up
with wizard glimmerings to touch the cliff.  When he had
fled, Yeoland passed back into the cavern, and met Fulviac
before the splintered gate with a lie upon her lips.





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.. _`XIII`:

.. class:: center large

   PART II

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center large

   XIII

.. vspace:: 2

Fra Balthasar rubbed his colours in the chapel of Castle
Avalon, and stared complacently upon the frescoes his fingers
had called into being.

A migratory friar, Fra Balthasar had come from the
rich skies, the purple vineyards, the glimmering orange
groves of the far south.  Gossip hinted that a certain
romantic indiscretion had driven him northwards over
the sea.  A "bend sinister" ran athwart his reputation as
a priest.  Men muttered that he was an infidel, a
blasphemous vagabond, versed in all the damnable heresies of
antiquity.  Be that as it may, Fra Balthasar had come
to Gilderoy on a white mule, with two servants at his
back, an apt tongue to serve him, and much craft as a
painter and goldsmith.  He had set up a *bottega* at
Gilderoy, and had cozened the patronage of the magnates
and the merchants.  Moreover, he had netted the favour
of the Lord Flavian of Avalon, and was blazoning his
chapel for him with the lavish fancy of a Florentine.

Fra Balthasar stood in a cataract of sunlight, that
poured in through a painted window in the west.  He
wore the white habit of Dominic and the long black
mantle.  A golden mist played about his figure as he
rubbed his palette, and scanned with the egotism of the
artist the *Pietà* painted above the Lord Flavian's state
stall.  That gentleman, in the flesh, had established
himself on a velvet hassock before the altar steps, thus
flattering the friar in the part of a sympathetic patron.  The
Lord of Avalon had dedicated his own person to art as
an Eastern King in the splendour of Gothic arms, kneeling
bare-headed before the infant Christ.

Fra Balthasar was a plump man and a comely, black
of eye and full of lip.  His shaven chin shone blue as
sleek velvet.  He had turned from the *Pietà* towards the
altar, where a triptych gleamed with massed and brilliant
colour.  The Virgin, a palpitating divinity breathing stars
and gems from her full bosom, gazed with a face of
sensuous serenity at the infant lying in her lap.  She
seemed to exhale an atmosphere of gold.  On either wing,
angels, transcendant girls in green and silver, purple and
azure, scarlet and white, made the soul swim with visions
of ruddy lips and milk-white hands.  Their wings gleamed
like opals.  They looked too frail for angels, too human
for heaven.

The Lord of Avalon sat on his scarlet hassock, and
stared at the Madonna with some measure of awe.  She
was no attenuated, angular, green-faced fragment of
saintliness, but by every curve a woman, from plump
finger to coral lip.

"You are no Byzantine," quoth the man on the hassock,
with something of a sigh.

The priest glanced at him and smiled.  There were
curves in lip and nostril that were more than indicative
of a sleek and sensuous worldliness.  Fra Balthasar was
much of an Antinous, and doted on the conviction.

"I paint women, messire," he said.

His lordship laughed.

"Divinities?"

Balthasar flourished his brush.

"Divine creatures, golden flowers of the world.  Give
me the rose to crush against my mouth, violets to burn
upon my bosom.  Truth, sire, consider the sparkling
roundness of a woman's arm.  Consider her wine-red lips,
her sinful eyes, her lily fingers dropping spikenard into
the soul.  I confess, sire, that I am a man."

The friar's opulent extravagance of sentiment suited the
litheness of his look.  Balthasar had enthroned himself in
his own imagination as a species of Apollo, a golden-tongued
seer, whose soul soared into the glittering infinitudes of art.
An immense egotist, he posed as a full-blooded divinity,
palpitating to colour and to sound.  He had as many
moods as a vain woman, and was a mere fire-fly in the
matter of honour.

"Reverend sire," quoth the man on the footstool with
some tightening of the upper lip, "you bulk too big for
your frock, methinks."

Balthasar touched a panel with his brush; cast a glance
over his shoulder, with a cynical lifting of the nostril.

"My frock serves me, sire, as well as a coat of mail."

"And you believe the things you paint?"

The man swept a vermilion streak from his brush.

"An ingenuous question, messire."

"I am ever ingenuous."

"A perilous habit."

"Yet you have not answered me."

The friar tilted his chin like a woman eyeing herself in
a mirror.

"Religion is full of picturesque incidents," he said.

"And is profitable."

"Sire, you shame Solomon.  There are ever many rich
and devout fools in the world.  Give me a gleaming Venus,
rising ruddy from the sea, rather than a lachrymose
Magdalene.  But what would you?  I trim my Venus up in
fine apparel, put a puling infant in her lap.  *Ecce--Sancta
Maria*."

The man on the footstool smiled despite the jester's
theme, a smile that had more scorn in it than sympathy.

"You verge on blasphemy," he said.

"There can be no blasphemy where there is no belief."

"You are over subtle, my friend."

"Nay, sire, I have come by that godliness of mind when
man discovers his own godhead.  Let your soul soar, I
say, let it beat its wings into the blue of life.  Hence with
superstition.  Shall I subordinate my mind to the prosings
of a mad charlatan such as Saul of Tarsus?  Shall I, like
each rat in this mortal drain, believe that some god cares
when I have gout in my toe, or when I am tempted to bow
to Venus?"

The man on the hassock grimaced, and eyed the friar
much as though he had stumbled on some being from the
underworld.  He was a mystic for all his manhood.

"God pity your creed," he said.

"God, the inflated mortal----"

"Enough."

"This man god of yours who tosses the stars like so
many lemons."

"Enough, sir friar."

"Defend me from your mass of metaphor, your relics
of barbarism.  We, the wise ones, have our own hierarchy,
our own Olympus."

"On my soul, you are welcome to it," quoth the man
by the altar.

Balthasar's hand worked viciously; he was strenuous
towards his own beliefs, after the fashion of dreamers
delirious with egotism.  The very splendour of his infidelity
took its birth from the fact that it was largely of his own
creating.  His pert iconoclasm pandered to his own vast
self-esteem.

"Tell me for what you live," said the man by the altar.

"For beauty."

"And the senses?"

"Colours, odours, sounds.  To breathe, to burn, and
to enjoy.  To be a Greek and a god."

"And life?"

"Is a great fresco, a pageant of passions."

The Lord of Avalon sprang up and began to pace the
aisle with the air of a man whose blood is fevered.  For
all his devoutness and his mystical fidelity, he was in too
human and passionate a mood to be invulnerable to
Balthasar's sensuous shafts of fire.  The Lord Flavian had
come by a transcendental star-soaring spirit, an inspiration
that had torched the wild beacon of romance.  He was
red for a riot of chivalry, a passage of desire.

Turning back towards the altar, he faced the Madonna
with her choir of angel girls.  Fra Balthasar was watching
him with a feline sleekness of visage, and a smile that
boasted something of contempt.  The friar considered spirituality
a species of magician's lanthorn for the cozening of
fools.

"What quip have you for love?" said the younger man,
halting by the altar rails.

Balthasar stood with poised brush.

"There is some sincerity in the emotion," he said.

"You are experienced?"

"Sire, consider my 'habit.'"

The friar's mock horror was surprising, an excellent jest
that fell like a blunted bolt from the steel of a vigorous
manhood.  The Lord Flavian ran on.

"Shall I fence with an infidel?" he asked.

"Sire, a man may be a man without the creed of
Athanasius."

"How much of me do you understand?"

Fra Balthasar cleared his throat.

"The Lady Duessa, sire, is a rose of joy."

"Monk!"

"My lord, it was your dictum that you are ever
ingenuous.  I echo you."

"Need I confess to you on such a subject?"

"Nay, sire, you have the inconsistency of a poet."

"How so?"

"Well, well, one can sniff rotten apples without opening
the door of the cupboard."

The younger man jerked away, and went striding
betwixt the array of frescoes with something of the wild
vigour of a blind Polyphemus.  Balthasar, subtle sophist,
watched him from the angle of his eye with the sardonic
superiority of one well versed in the contradictions of the
world.  He had scribbled a shrewd sketch of the passions
stirring in his patron's heart.  Had he not heard from the
man's own lips of the white-faced elf of the pine woods
and her vengeance?  And the Lady Duessa!  Fra Balthasar
was as wise in the gossip of Gilderoy as any woman.

"Sire," he said, as the aristocrat turned in his stride, "I
ask of you a bold favour."

"Speak out."

"Suffer me to paint your mood in words."

The man stared, shrugged his shoulders, smiled
enigmatically.

"Try your craft," he said.

Balthasar began splashing in a foreground with irritable
bravado.

"My lord, you were a fool at twenty," were his words.

"A thrice damned fool," came the echo.

Balthasar chuckled.

"And now, messire, a golden chain makes a Tantalus
of you.  Life crawls like a sluggish river.  You chafe,
you strain, you rebel, feed on your own heart, sin to assert
your liberty.  Youth slips from you; the sky narrows
about your ears.  Well, well, have I not read aright?"

"Speak on," quoth the man by the altar.

"Ah, sire, it is the old tale.  They have cramped up
your youth with book and ring; shut you up in a moral
sarcophagus with a woman they call your wife.  You burn
for liberty, and the unknown that shines like a purple streak
in a fading west.  Ah, sire, you look for that one marvellous
being, who shall torch again the youth in your heart,
make your blood burn, your soul to sing.  That one woman
in the world, mysterious as the moon, subtle as the night,
ineffably strange as a flaming dawn.  That woman who
shall lift you to the stars; whose lips suck the sap of the
world; whose bosom breathes to the eternal swoon of all
sweet sounds.  She shall light the lust of battle in your
heart.  For her your sword shall leap, your towers totter.
Chivalry should lead you like a pillar of fire out of the
night, a heroic god striving for a goddess."

The Lord of Avalon stood before the high altar as one
transfigured.  Youth leapt in him, red, glorious, and
triumphant.  Balthasar's tongue had set the pyre aburning.

"By God, it is the truth," he said.

The friar gathered his brushes, and took breath.

"Hast thou found thy Beatrice, O my son?"

"Have I gazed into heaven?"

Balthasar's voice filled the chapel.

"Live, sire, live!" he said.

"Ah!"

"Be mad!  Drink star wine, and snuff the odours of
all the sunsets!  Live, live!  You can repent in comfort
when you are sixty and measure fifty inches round the
waist."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XIV`:

.. class:: center large

   XIV

.. vspace:: 2

Dame Duessa had come to Avalon, having heard certain
whisperings of Gilderoy, and of a golden-haired Astarte
who kept house there.  Dame Duessa was a proud woman
and a passionate, headstrong as a reformer, jealous as a
parish priest.  She boasted a great ancestry and a great
name, and desires and convictions in keeping.  She was a
woman who loved her robe cupboard, her jewel-case, and
her bed.  Moreover, she pretended some affection for the
Lord Flavian her husband, perhaps arrogance of ownership,
seeing that Dame Duessa was very determined to keep him
in bonded compact with herself.  She suspected that the
man did not consider her a saint, or worship her as such.
Yet, termagant that she was, Dame Duessa could suffer
some trampling of empty sentiment, provided Fate did not
rob her of her share in the broad demesne and rent-roll of
Gambrevault.

Avalon was a castle of ten towers, linked by a strong
curtain wall, and built about a large central court and
garden.  A great moat circled the whole, a moat broad
and silvery as a lake, with water-lilies growing thick in
the shallows.  Beyond the moat, sleek meadows tufted
with green rushes swept to the gnarled piers of the old
oaks that vanguarded the forest.  The black towers
slumbered in a mist of green, girded with sheeny water,
tented by the azure of a southern sky.

Dame Duessa, being a lady of silks and tissues, did not
love the place with all her soul.  Avalon of the Orchards
was dull, and smacked of Arcady; it was far removed from
that island of fair sin, Lauretia, the King's city.  Moreover,
the Lord Flavian and his ungallant gentlemen held rigorously
to the northern turrets, leaving her to lodge ascetically
in her rich chamber in a southern tower.

Her husband contrived to exile himself as far as Castle
Avalon could suffer him.  If the pair went to mass, they
went separately, with the frigid hauteur of an Athanasius
handing an Aryus over to hell.  When they hunted they
rode towards opposite stars.  No children had chastened
them, pledges of heaven-given life.  The Lady Duessa
detested ought that hinted at caudle, swaddling-clothes,
and cradles.  Moreover, all Avalon seemed in league with
the Lord Flavian.  Knights, esquires, scullions, horse-boys
swore by him as though he were a Bayard.  Dame Duessa
could rely solely on a prig of a page, and a lady-in-waiting
who wore a wig, and perhaps on Fra Balthasar, the
Dominican.

Meanwhile, the Lord of Avalon had been putting forth
his penitence in stone and timber, and an army of
craftsmen from Geraint.  The glade in Cambremont wood rang
to the swing of axes and the hoarse groaning of the saw.
The tower had been purged of its ashes, its rooms
retimbered, its casements filled with glass.  A chapel was
springing into life under the trees; the cleverest masons of
the south were at work upon its pillars and its arches.  Fra
Balthasar, the Dominican, held sway over the whole, subtle
in colour and the carving of stone.  Flavian could have
found no better pander to his penitence.  Rose nobles had
been squandered.  Frescoes, jewel bright, were to blaze out
upon the walls.  The vaulted roof was to be constellated
with glimmering gold stars, shining from skies of purple
and azure.

To turn to Fulviac's great cliff hid in the dark depths of
the forest of pines.  The disloyal chaff of the kingdom
was wafted thither day by day, borne on the conspiring
breeze.  The forest engulfed all comers and delivered
them like ghosts into Fulviac's caverns.  An army might
have melted into the wilds, and the countryside have been
none the wiser.  Amid the pines and rocks of the cliffs
there were marchings and countermarchings, much
shouldering of pikes and ordering of companies.  Veterans who
had fought the infidels under Wenceslaus, drilled the raw
levies, and inculcated with hoarse bellowings the rudiments
of military reason.  They were rough gentlemen, and
Fulviac stroked them with a gauntlet of iron.  They were
to attempt liberty together, and he demonstrated to them
that such freedom could be won solely by discipline and
soldierly concord.  The rogues grumbled and swore behind
his back, but were glad in their hearts to have a man for
master.

To speak again of the girl Yeoland.  That March night
she had met Fulviac over the wreckage of the broken gate,
and had made a profession of the truth, so far, she said, as
she could conjecture it.  She had been long in the forest,
had returned to the cliff to find the guards slain, and the
Lord Flavian gone.  By some device he had escaped from
his shackles, slain the men, and fled by the northern
postern.  The woman made a goodly pretence of vexation of
spirit over the escape of this reprobate.  She even taunted
Fulviac with foolhardiness, and lack of foresight in so
bungling her vengeance.

The man's escape from the cliff roused Fulviac's energies
to full flood.  The aristocrat of Avalon was ignorant
of the volcano bubbling under his feet, yet any retaliatory
meddling on his part might prove disastrous at so critical
an hour.  Fulviac thrust forward the wheels of war with a
heavy hand.  The torrents of sedition and discontent were
converging to a river of revolt, that threatened to crush
tyranny as an avalanche crushes a forest.

The Virgin with her moon-white face still inspired
Yeoland with the visionary behest given in the ruined
chapel.  The girl's fingers toiled at the scarlet banner;
she spent half her days upon her knees, devout as any
Helena.  She knew Fulviac's schemes as surely as she did
the beads on her rosary.  The rough rangers of the forest
held her to be a saint, and knelt to touch her dress as she
passed by.

Yet what are dreams but snowflakes drifting from the
heavens, now white, now red, as God or man carries the
lamp of love?  The girl's ecstasy of faith was but a potion
to her, dazing her from a yet more subtle dream.  A faint
voice summoned her from the unknown.  She would hear
it often in the silence of the night, or at full noon as she
faltered in her prayers.  The rosary would hang idle on
her wrist, the crucifix melt from her vision.  She would
find her heart glowing like a rose at the touch of the sun.
Anon, frightened, she would shake the human half of
herself, and run back penitent to her prayers.

It was springtide and the year's youth, when memories
are garlanded with green, and romance scatters
wind-flowers over the world.  Many voices awoke, like the
chanting of birds, in Yeoland's heart.  She desired, even
as a swallow, to see the old haunts again, to go a pilgrim
to the place where the dear dead slept.  Was it yearning
grief, or a joy more subtle, the cry of the wild and the
voice of desire?  Mayhap white flowers shone on the
tree of life, prophetic of fruit in the mellow year.  Jaspar
the harper heard her plea; 'twas wilful and eager, but what
of that!  Fulviac, good man, had ridden to Gilderoy.
The girl had liberty enough and to spare.  She took it
and Jaspar, and rode out from the cliff.

Threading the sables of the woods, they came one noon
to the open moor.  It was golden with the western sun,
solitary as the sea.  The shadows were long upon the
sward when Cambremont wood billowed out in its valley.
There was no hope of their reaching the tower before
dusk, so they piled dead bracken under a cedar, where the
shelving eaves swept to the ground.

They were astir early upon the morrow, a sun-chastened
wind inspiring the woodlands, and sculpturing grand friezes
from the marbles of the sky.  The forest was full of the
glory of Spring, starred with anemones and dusted with the
azure campaniles of the hyacinth horde.  Primroses lurked
on the lush green slopes.  In the glades, the forest
peristyles, green gorse blazed with its constellations of gold.

To the dolt and the hag the world is nothing but a fat
larder; only the unregenerate are blind of soul.  Beauty,
Diana-like, shows not her naked loveliness to all.  The
girl Yeoland's eyes were full of a strange lustre that May
morning.  Many familiar landmarks did she pass upon the
way, notched deep on the cross of memory.  There stood
the great beech tree where Bertrand had carved his name,
and the smooth bark still bore the scars where the knife
had wantoned.  She forded the stream where Roland's
pony had once pitched him into the mire.  Her eyes grew
dim as she rode through the sun-steeped woods.

The day had drawn towards noon when they neared
the glade in the midst of Cambremont wood.  Heavy wain
wheels had scarred the smooth green of the ride, and the
newly-sawn pedestals of fallen oaks showed where
woodmen had been felling timber.  To Jaspar the harper these
signs were more eloquent of peril than of peace.  He began
to snuff the air like an old hound, and to jerk restless
glances at the girl at his side.

"See where wheels have been," he began.

"And axes, my friend."

"What means it?"

"Some one rebuilds the tower."

The harper wagged his head and half turned his horse
from the grass ride.

"Have a care," he said.

"Hide in the woods if you will."

She rode on with a triumphant wilfulness and he followed her.

As they neared the glade, the noise of axe and hammer
floated on the wind, and they saw the scene flicker towards
them betwixt the great boles of the trees.  The tower stood
with battlements of fresh white stone; its windows had been
reset, the blasting touch of fire effaced from the walls.  The
glade was strewn with blocks of stone and lengths of
timber; the walls of a chapel were rising from the grass.  Men
were digging trenches for the foundations of the priest's
cell.  Soldiers idled about gossiping with the masons.

There was a smile in the girl's eyes and a deeper tint
upon her cheeks as she stared betwixt the trees at the
regarnished tower.  Those grey eyes had promised the
truth in Fulviac's cavern.  She was glad in her heart of
the man's honour, glad with a magic that made her colour.
As for the harper, he stroked his grey beard and was mute.
He lacked imagination, and was no longer young.

On a stump of an oak tree at the edge of the wood sat a
man in a black mantle and a habit of white cloth.  He had
a panel upon his knee, and a small wooden chest beside him
on the grass.  His eyes were turned often to the rolling
woods, as his plump hand flourished a brush with nervous
and graceful gestures.

Seeing the man's tonsure, and his dress that marked him
a Dominican, Yeoland rode out from the trees, casting her
horse's shadow athwart his work.  The man looked up
with puckered brow, his keen eye framing the girl's figure
at a glance.  It was his destiny to see the romantic and
the beautiful in all things.

The priest and the girl on the horse eyed each other a
moment in silence.  Each was instinctively examining the
other.  The churchman, with an approving glint of the
eye, was the first to break the woodland silence.

"Peace be with you, madame."

His tone hinted at a question, and the girl adopted
therewith an ingenuous duplicity.

"My man and I were of a hunting party," she said;
"we went astray in the wood.  You, Father, will guide us?"

"Madame has not discovered to me her desire."

"We wish for Gilderoy."

Balthasar rose and pointed with his brush towards the
ride by which they had come.  He mapped the road for
them with sundry jaunty flourishes, and much showing of
his white teeth.  Yeoland thanked him, but was still
curious.

"Ah, Father, whither have we wandered?"

"Men call it Cambremont wood, madame."

"And these buildings?  A retreat, doubtless, for holy men."

Balthasar corrected her with much unction.

"The Lord Flavian of Avalon builds here," he said,
"but not for monks.  I, madame, am his architect, his
pedagogue in painting."

Yeoland pretended interest.  She craned forward over
her horse's neck and looked at the priest's panel.  The act
decided him.  Since she was young and comely, Balthasar
seized the chance of a chivalrous service.  The girl had
fine eyes, and a neck worthy of a Venus.

"Madame has taste.  She would see our work?"

Madame appeared very ready to grant the favour.
Balthasar put his brushes aside, held the girl's stirrup, and,
unconscious of the irony of the act, expatiated to Yeoland
on the beauties of her own home.  At the end of their
pilgrimage, being not a little bewitched by such eyes and
such a face, he begged of her the liberty of painting her
there and then.  'Twas for the enriching of religious art,
as he very properly put it.

Dead Rual's grave was not ten paces distant, and Jaspar
was standing by it as in prayer.  Thus, Yeoland sat to Fra
Balthasar, oblivious of him indeed as his fingers brought her
fair face into being, her shapely throat and raven hair.
His picture perfected, he blessed her with the unction of a
bishop, and stood watching her as she vanished down the
southern ride, graceful and immaculate as a young Dian.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XV`:

.. class:: center large

   XV

.. vspace:: 2

Hardly had an hour passed, and Fra Balthasar was still
touching the study he had made of Yeoland's face, when
a company of spears flashed out by the northern ride
into the clearing.  At their head rode a knight in harness
of burnished steel, a splendid figure flashing chivalry in the
eyes of the sun.  On his shield he bore "a castle, argent,
with ports voided of the field, on a field vert," the arms of
the house of Gambrevault.  His surcoat was diapered
azure and green with three gold suns blazoned thereon.
His baldric, a splendid streak of scarlet silk, slashed his
surcoat as with blood.  His troop, men in half armour,
rode under the Pavon Vert of the demesne of Avalon.

They thundered into the open stretch of grass with a
clangorous rattle of steel.  Flavian, bare-headed, for his
salade hung at his saddle-bow and he wore no camail,
scanned the glade with a keen stare.  Seeing Fra Balthasar
seated under a tree, he turned his horse towards him, and
smiled as the churchman put his tools aside and gave him
a benediction.  The man made a fine figure; judged by
the flesh, Balthasar might have stood for an Ambrose or a Leo.

"Herald of heaven, how goes the work?"

"Sire, we emulate Pericles."

"What have you there, a woman's head, some rare Madonna?"

Balthasar showed his white teeth.

"A pretty pastoral, messire.  The study of a lady who
had lost her way hunting, and craved my guidance this
morning.  A woman with the face and figure of a Dian."

"Ha, rogue of the brush, let us see it."

Balthasar passed the parchment into the other's hand.
Flavian stared at it, flushed to the temples, rapped out an
ejaculation in ecclesiastic Latin.  His eyes devoured the
sketch with the insatiable enthusiasm of a lover; words
came hot off his tongue.

"Quick, man, quick, is this true to life?"

"As ruby to ruby."

"None of your idealisations?"

"Messire, but an hour ago that girl was sitting her
horse where your destrier now stands."

"And you sketched this at her desire?"

"At my own, sire; it was courtesy for courtesy: I had
shown her our handiwork here."

"You showed her this tower and chapel?"

"Certainly, sire."

"She seemed sad?"

"Nay, merry."

"This is romance!"  He lifted the little picture at
arm's length to the sun, kissed it, and put it in his bosom.
His face was radiant; he laughed as though some golden joy
rang and resounded in his heart.

"A hundred golden angels for this face!"

Fra Balthasar was in great measure mystified.  The
Lord of Avalon seemed an inflammable gentleman.

"Messire, you are ever generous."

"Man, man, you have caught the one woman in the world."

"Sire----"

"The Madonna of the Pine Forest, the Madonna of
Mercy; she whose kinsfolk were put to the sword by
my men; even the daughter of Rual whose tower stands
yonder."

The priest comprehended the whole in a moment.
The dramatic quaintness of the adventure had made him
echo Flavian's humour.  He laughed and shrugged his
shoulders.

"Romance, romance!  By all the lovers who ever
loved, by Tristan and the dark Iseult, by Launcelot and
Guinivere, follow that picture."

"Which way went she?"

"By the southern ride, towards Gilderoy."

The man was in heroic humour; his sword flashed out
and shook in the sun.

"By God, I'll see her face again, and yet again, though
I burn in hell for it.  Roland, Godamar, come, men,
come, throw away your spears.  Ride, ride, we chase the
sunset.  Life and desire!"

He sprang away on his great bay horse, a shimmering
shaft of youth--youth that flashed forth chivalry into the
burgeoning green of Spring.  The sunlight webbed his
hair with gold; his face glowed like a martyr's.  Balthasar
watched him with much poetic zest, as he swept away
with his thundering knights into the woods.

The friar settled to his work again, but it was fated that
he was to have no lasting peace that morning.  He was
painting in a background, a landscape, to a small
Crucifixion.  His hand was out of touch, however; the subject
was not congenial.  A pale face and a pair of dusky eyes
had deepened a different stream of thought in the man.
Themes hypersensuous held his allegiance; from prim
catholic ethics, he reverted to his glorious paganism with
an ever-broadening sense of satisfaction.

He was interrupted once more, and not unpleasantly,
by a lady, with two armed servants at her back, riding in
from the forest by the northern ride.  The woman was
clad in a cloak of damask red, and a jupon of dark green,
broidered with azure scroll work.  Her hood, fallen back,
showed her purple black hair bound up in a net of gold.
Her large dark eyes flashed and smouldered under their
long lashes.  She had high cheek-bones, a big nose, lips
full as an over-ripe rose.  She was big of body, voluptuous
to look upon, as an Eastern odalisque, a woman of great
passions, great appetites.

Fra Balthasar tumbled his brushes and paints aside, and
went to meet her as she rode over the grass.  There
was a smile on the man's lips, a flush upon his sleek face,
as he walked with a courtly and debonair vanity.  The
woman caught sight of him and wheeled her horse in his
direction.  The autumn splendour of her cheeks told of
hard riding, and her horse dropped foam from his black
muzzle.

Fra Balthasar crossed himself with much meekness.

"Good greeting, Madame Duessa," were his words, as
he kept his eyes on the ground.

The woman scanned the glade with the strenuous spirit
of a Boadicea.

"My Lord Flavian?"

"Madame?"

"He has been here."

"But is here no longer."

"These buildings?"

"Are the Lord Flavian's."

"And you?"

"I am his architect."

"Morally, messire monk?"

"Madame, I do not edificate souls."

The woman stared him over with a critical comprehensiveness.

"Balthasar."

The man half glanced at her.

"Look me in the face."

He gave a sigh, made a gesture with his hands,
looked melancholy and over-ecstasied to the point of
despair.

"Madame, there are thoughts beyond one's liberty."

"Well?"

"There are women, a woman, one dares not look
upon.  There are eyes, well--well, that are too bright.
Pardon me, I would serve you."

She took a deep breath, held out her hand to him, a
big, warm hand, soft and white.  The man's lips
burnt upon it.  She touched his cheek and saw him colour.

"Well?"

"My Lord Flavian is not here."

"But has been.  Where now?"

"Away hunting."

"Ha, what?"

"Madame, what do men hunt and burn for?"

"Sometimes a stag, a hare, a standard, a woman."

"Sometimes--a woman."

Balthasar, looking slantwise under half-closed lids, saw
her eyes flash and her lips tighten.

"Which way?"

"The southern ride, towards Gilderoy."

Duessa shook her bridle, and threw one look into
Balthasar's eyes.

"Remember," she said, "remember, a woman loves a
friend, a true friend, who can tell a lie, or keep a secret."

Balthasar watched her ride away.  He stood and
smiled to himself, while his long fingers played with the
folds of his mantle.  Red wine was bounding in his blood,
and his imagination revelled.  He was a poetic person,
and a poet's soul is often like tinder, safe enough till the
spark falls.

"*Gloria*," he said to himself with a smirk, "here's
hunting with a vengeance.  Two women and a man!
The devil is loose.  Soul of Masaccio, that woman has
fine eyes."

That day, when the sky was growing red over the
woods, Flavian and his troop drew close on the heels of
Yeoland and the harper.  The man, for all his heat, had
kept his horse-flesh well in hand.  Once out of
Cambremont wood, they had met a charcoal-burner, who had seen
Yeoland and her follower pass towards the west.  They
had hunted fast over fell and moor.  While not two miles
behind came Duessa of the Black Hair, biting her lips and
giving her brute lash and spur with a woman's viciousness.

Yeoland, halting on a slope above the pine woods,
looked back and saw something that made her crane her
neck and wax vigilant.  Out of the wine-red east and the
twilight gloom came the lightning of harness, the galloping
gleam of armed men.  Jaspar's blear eyes were unequal to
the girl's.  The men below were riding hard, half under
the lea of the midnight pines, whose tops touched the
sunset.  A half-moon of steel, their crescent closed wood and
moor.  They had the lead in the west; they were mounting
the slope behind.

Jaspar saw them at last.  He was for galloping.
Yeoland held him in.

"Fool, we are caught.  Sit still.  We shall gain nothing
by bolting."

A knight was coming up the slope at a canter.
Yeoland saw his shield, read it and his name.  She
went red under her hood, felt her heart beating, wondered
at its noise.

Youth, aglitter in arms, splendid, triumphant!  A face
bare to the west, eyes radiant and tender, a great horse
reined in on its haunches, a mailed hand that made the sign
of the cross!

"Madame, your pardon."

He drew Balthasar's picture from his bosom and held it
before her eyes.

"My torch," he said, "that led me to see your face again."

The girl was silent.  Her head was thrown back, her
slim throat showing, her face turned heavenwards like the
face of a woman who is kissed upon the lips.

"You have seen your home?"

"Yes, messire."

"God pardon me your sorrow.  You see I am no
hypocrite.  I keep my vows."

"Yes, messire."

"Madame, let me be forgiven; you have trusted one
man, trust another."

She turned her horse suddenly and began to ride towards
the black maw of the forest.  Her lips were tightly closed,
and she looked neither to the right nor the left.  Flavian,
a tower of steel, was at her side.  Armed men ranged in a
circle about them.  They opened ranks at a sign from
their lord, and gave the woman passage.

"Madame----"

"Messire----"

"Am I to be forgiven?"

She was mute a moment, as in thought.  Then she spoke
quietly enough.

"Yes, for a vow."

"Tell it me."

"If you will never see my face again."

He looked at her with a great smile, drew his sword,
and held the point towards her.

"Then give me hate."

"Messire!"

"Hate, not forgiveness, hate, utter and divine, that I
may fight and travail, labour and despair."

"Messire!"

"Hate me, hate me, with all the unreason of your
heart.  Hate me a hundred times, that I may but leap
a hundred times into your life.  Bar me out that I may
storm your battlements again and again."

"Are you a fool?"

"A glorious, mad, inspired fool."

They were quite near the trees.  Their black masses
threw a great shadow over the pair.  Higher still the sky
burnt.

"Madame, whither do you go?"

"Where you may not venture, messire."

"God, I know no such region."

She flashed round on him with sudden bitterness.

"Go back to your wife.  Go back to your wife,
messire; remember her honour."

It was a home-thrust, but it did not shame or weaken
him.  He sheathed his sword, and looked at her sadly
out of his grey eyes.

"What a world is this," he said, "when heaven comes
at last, hell yawns across the path.  When summer
burns, winter lifts its head.  Even as a man would grow
strong and pure, his own cursed shackles cumber him.
To-night I say no more to you.  Go, madame, pray for
me.  You shall see my face again."

He let life vanish under the pines, and rode back with
the sunset on his armour, his face staring into the rising
night.  His men came round him, silent statues of steel.
He rode slowly, and met his wife.

Her eyes were turbulent, her lips red streaks of scorn.

"Ha, sire, I have found you."

"Madame, I trust you are well?"

They looked at each other askance like angry dogs,
as they rode side by side, and the night came down.
The men left them to themselves, and went on ahead.
A wind grew gusty over the moor.

.. _`"THEY LOOKED AT EACH OTHER ASKANCE LIKE ANGRY DOGS."`:

.. figure:: images/img-116.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: "THEY LOOKED AT EACH OTHER ASKANCE LIKE ANGRY DOGS."

   "THEY LOOKED AT EACH OTHER ASKANCE LIKE ANGRY DOGS."

"Messire, I have borne enough from you."

"Madame, is it fault of mine?"

His whole soul revolted from her with an immensity
of hate.  She cumbered, clogged, crushed him.  Mad
brutality leapt in his heart towards her.  He could have
smitten the woman through with his sword.

"Five years ago----" she said.

"You did the wooing.  Damnation, we have been
marvellously happy."

She bit her lip and was white as the moon.

"Have a care, messire, have a care."

"Threats, threats."

"Have a care----"

"Look at my shield.  Have I quartered your arms
with mine?  God's blood, there is nothing to erase."

"Ha!"

"We have no children."

"Go on."

"I shall send gold and an embassage to the Pope."

She clenched her hands and could not speak for the
moment.

"You dare do this?"

"I dare ten thousand greater things than this."

"By God, messire."

"By God, woman, am I going down to hell because
you are my wife!"

She grew quiet very suddenly, a dangerous move in a woman.

"Very well," she said, "try it, dear lord.  I am no fool.
Try it, I am as strong as you."

And so they rode on towards Avalon together.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XVI`:

.. class:: center large

   XVI

.. vspace:: 2

It is impossible for two persons of marked individuality to
be much together without becoming more or less faceted
one towards the other.  We appeal by sympathy, and
inspire by contrast.  What greater glory falls to a man's lot
than to be chastened by the warm May of some girl's pure
heart!  Yeoland had felt the force of Fulviac's manhood;
the more eternal and holier instincts were being stirred in
him by a woman's face.

The man's life had been a transmigration.  In his
younger days the world had banqueted him; new poignancies
had bubbled against his lips in the cup of pleasure.
Later had come that inevitable weariness, that distaste of
pomp, the mood that discovers vanity in all things.  Finally
he had set his heart upon a woman, a broken reed indeed,
and had discovered her a hypocrite, according to the
measure of her passions.  There had been one brief burst of
blasphemy.  He had used his dagger and had disappeared.  There
had been much stir at the time.  A ruby had fallen from
the King's crown.  Some spoke of Palestine, others of a
monastery, others of a cubit of keen steel.

Fulviac had begun life over again.  He had fallen back
upon elemental interests--had gone hungry, fought for
his supper, slept many a storm out under a tree.  The
breath of the wilderness had winnowed out luxury; rain
had scourged him into philosophic hardihood.  He had
learnt in measure that nothing pleases and endures like
simplicity.  Even his ambition was simple in its audacious
grandeur.

Now the eyes of the daughter of Rual were like the eyes
of a Madonna, and she stood in a circle of white lilies like
the spirit of purity.  Fulviac had begun to believe in her a
little, to love her a little.  She stood above all other women
he had known.  The ladies of the court were superb and
comely, and marvellously kind, but they loved colour and
contemned the robe of white.  They were like a rich posy
for a man to choose from, scarlet and gold, azure, damask
or purple.  You could love their bodies, but you could not
trust their souls.

As for the girl Yeoland, she was very devout, very
enthusiastic, but no Agnes.  Her rosary had little rest, and
with the suspicions of one not utterly sure of herself, she
had striven to make religion and its results satisfy her soul.
In some measure she had succeeded.  Yet there is ever
that psychic echo, that one mysterious being, subtle as the
stars, that may come before Christ in the heart.
Transcendent spirit of idolatry!  And yet it is often
heaven-sent, seeing that it leads many a soul to God.

It had become Yeoland's custom to walk daily in the
pine wood at the foot of the stairway leading from the
northern room.  She had discovered a quaint nook, a mile
or more from the cliff, a nook where trees stood gathered
in a dense circle about a grassy mound capped by a square
of mouldering stone.  It was a grave, nameless and
without legend.  Perhaps a hermit had crumbled away there
under the sods, or the bones of some old warrior slept
within rusty harness.  None knew, none cared greatly.
Fulviac's men had hinted at treasure, yet even they were
kept from desecrating the place by a crude and superstitious
veneration for the dead.

She had wandered here one day and had settled herself
on the grassy slope of the grave.  The ribbon of her lute
lay over her shoulder.  A breeze sang fitfully through the
branches, and a golden haze shimmered down as from
the clerestory windows of a cathedral.  Her lute seemed
sad when it made answer to her fingers.  Thought was
plaintive and not devotional, if one might judge by the
mood of the music, and the notes were wayward and
pathetically void of discipline.

It was while the girl thrummed idly at the strings that
a vague sound floated down to her with the momentary
emphasis born of a fickle wind.  It was foreign to the
forest, or it would not have roused her as it did.  As she
listened the sound came again from the west.  It was
neither the distant bay of a hound nor a horn's solitary
note.  There was something metallic about it, something
musical.  When it disappeared, she listened for its
recurrence; when she heard it again, she puzzled over its nature.

The sound grew clearer at gradual intervals, and then
ceased utterly.  The girl listened for a long while to no
purpose, and then prepared to forget the incident.  The
decision was premature.  She was startled anon by the
sound breaking out at no great distance.  There was no
doubt as to its nature: it was the clanging of a bell.

Yeoland wondered who could be carrying such a thing
in such a place.  Possibly some of Fulviac's men were
coming home with stolen cattle, and an old bell-wether
from some wild moorland with them.

The sound of the bell came very near; it seemed
close amid the circling ranks of pines.  Twigs were
cracking too, and she heard the beat of approaching
footsteps.  Then her glance caught something visible, a
streak of white in the shadows, moving like a ghost.
The thing went amid the trees with the bell mute.  The
girl's doubts were soon set at rest as to whether she had
been seen or no.  The figure in grey slipped between
the pines, and came out into the grass circle about the
grave, cowled, masked, bell at girdle, a leper.

The girl stared at it with a cold flutter at her heart.
The thing stood under the boughs motionless as stone.
The bell gave never a tinkle; a white chin poked
forward from under the hood; the masked face was in
shadow.  Then the bell jangled, and a gruff voice came
from the cowl.

"Unclean, unclean!" it said; "avoid the white death,
and give alms."

Yeoland obeyed readily enough, put a portion of the
grave betwixt herself and the leper, fumbled in her pouch
and threw the man a piece of silver.  He came forward
suddenly into the light, fell on his knees, put his hood
back, plucked off the mask.

It was the face of the Lord Flavian of Gambrevault.

The girl stood and stared at him with unstinted
astonishment.

"You," she said, "you?"

"Madame, I said that you should see my face again."

She conceived a sudden impetuous desire to turn and
leave him on his knees, but some inner potency of
instinct restrained her.  She looked down at the man,
with no kindling kindness upon her face.  She did not
know what to say to him, how to tune her mood.  The
first thought that rushed into her mind was seized upon
and pressed into service, discretion or no discretion.

"Madman, they will kill you if they find you here."

"No woman ever loved a coward."

"For Heaven's sake, go away."

He rose from his knees and lifted up his frock.  The
girl saw harness and a sword beneath it.  This young
leopard of the southern shores had fettle enough, and
spirit.  He was a mixture of imperturbable determination
and sanguine Quixotism, as he faced her under the trees.

"This dress is privileged; my bell warns folk away;
who would fall foul of a miserable leper?  If this frock
fails me, I have my sword."

She looked at him with the solemnity of a child, hand
folded in hand.

"I cannot understand you," she said.

"Not yet."

"Are you the man whose life I saved?  That breath of
death on your brow, messire, should have made you
thoughtful of your soul."

"Let me plead a moment."

"For what?"

"My honour."

"Why your honour?"

"Because I want you to believe that I have a soul."

He was vastly earnest, and his eyes followed her, as
though she were some being out of heaven.  She had never
seen such a look in a man's eyes before; it troubled her.
She questioned her own heart, laughed emptily, and gave in
to him.

"We are both mad," she said, "but go on.  I will
listen for one minute.  Keep watch lest any one should
come upon us suddenly."

She sat down on the grass bank, while he stood before
her, holding his lazar bell by the clapper.

"Look at this dress," he said.

"Yes?"

"It is how I feel in soul when I look at you."

She frowned visibly.

"If you wax personal, messire, I shall leave you."

"No, no, I will keep to my own carcase, and play the
egotist.  Well, I will be brief.  Look at me, I am the first
lord in the south, master of an army, one of the twelve
knights of the Order of the Rose."

"Go on."

"When I was twenty years old, certain clever people
found me a wife, a woman five years my senior in time,
twenty years my superior in knowledge of the world.
Well, six months had not passed before I hated her, hated
her with my whole soul.  My God, what a thing for a
boy to begin life with a woman who made him half the
bounden vassal of the devil!"

"You seem generous.  The faults were all on her side."

"Madame, I say nothing against the woman, only that
she had no soul.  We were incompatible as day and night,
fire and water.  The thing crushed the youth out of me,
made me desperate, and worse, made me old beyond my
years.  I have done my best.  I have groped along like a
man in the dark, knowing nothing, understanding nothing,
save that I had a warm heart in me, and that life seemed
one grim jest.  The future had no fire for me; I drank
the wine of the present, strove to please my senses, plunged
into the abysses of the world.  Sometimes I tried to pray.
Sometimes I played the cynic.  The eternal beacon of love
had gone out of my life.  I had no sun, no inspiration for
my soul."

She sprang up suddenly, breathing fast like one who is
near tears.

"Why do you speak to me of this?"

"God knows."

His voice was utterly lonely.

"What am I to you?  You have hardly seen me three
hours in your life.  Why do you speak to me of this?"

He put a hand to his throat, and did not look at her.

"Madame, there are people who come near our hearts in
one short hour, people who are winter to us to eternity.
Do not ask me to explain this truth; as Christ's death,
I know it to be true.  I trust you.  All the logicians of
the world could not tell me why.  I do not know that I
could bring forward one single reason out of my own
soul, save that you showed me great mercy once.  And
now--and now----"

He broke down suddenly, and could not speak.  Yeoland
appealed to him out of the quickness of her fear.

"Messire, messire, your promise."

"Let me speak, or I stifle."

"Go, for God's sake, go!"

He flung his hands towards her with a great outburst of
passion.

"Heaven and God's throne, you shall hear me to the
end.  Woman, woman, my soul flows to you as the sea
ebbs to the moon; deep in the sky a new sun burns;
the stars are dust, dust blown from the coffins of the
dead who loved.  Life leaps in me like another chaos.
All my heart glows like an autumn orchard, and I burn.
The world is red with a myriad roses.  God's in the
heaven, Christ bleeds on quaking Calvary."

She ran to him suddenly and seized his wrist.

"GO----!"

"I cannot."

"Men are coming, I hear them in the woods, they will
kill you!"

"I hear them too."

"Go, go, for my sake and for God's."

He kissed her sleeve, pulled his cowl down, and fled
away into the woods.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XVII`:

.. class:: center large

   XVII

.. vspace:: 2

The Lady Duessa stood in the chapel of water-girded
Avalon, with Fra Balthasar the Dominican beside her.
She had slipped in without his noticing her, and had
watched him awhile in silence at his work.  The jingling
of her chatelaine had brought him at last to a consciousness
of her presence.  Now they stood together before
the high altar and looked at the Madonna seated on her
throne of gold, amid choirs of angel women.

The Lady Duessa's intelligence had waxed critical on
the subject.

"You have altered the Virgin's face," she said.

Balthasar stared at his handiwork and nodded.

"The former has been erased, the latter throned in her
stead."

The words had more significance for the lady than
the friar had perhaps intended.  A better woman would
have snubbed him for his pains.  As it was, he saw her
go red, saw the tense stare of her dark eyes, the
tightening of the muscles of her jaw.  She had a wondrous
strong jaw, had the Lady Duessa.  She was no mere
puppet, no bright-eyed, fineried piece of plasticity.  Fra
Balthasar guessed the hot, passionate power of her soul;
she was the very woman for the rough handling of a
cause, such as the Lord Flavian her husband had roused
against her.

"I suppose," she said, "this alteration was a matter of
art, Balthasar?"

"A matter of heart, madame."

"So?"

"My Lord Flavian commanded it."

"And yonder face is taken from life?"

"Madame, I leave the inference to your charity."

She laughed a deep, cynical laugh, and went wandering
round the chapel, looking at the frescoes, and swinging a
little poniard by the chain that linked it to her girdle.
Balthasar made a pretence of mixing colours on his palette.
Worldly rogue that he was, he knew women, especially
women of the Lady Duessa mould.  He had a most shrewd
notion as to what was passing in her mind.  Morally, he
was her abettor, being a person who could always take
a woman's part, provided she were pretty.  He believed
women had no business with religion.  To Balthasar, like
fine glass, their frailty was their most enhancing characteristic.
It gave such infinite scope to a discreet confessor.

The Lady Duessa strolled back again, and stood by the
altar rails.

"Am I such a plain woman?" she asked.

"Madame!"

"You have never painted me."

"There are people above the artist's brush."

"But you paint the Madonna."

"Madame, the Madonna is anybody's property."

"Am I?"

"God forbid that a poet should speak lightly of beauty."

She laughed again, and touching her hair with her fingers,
scanned herself in a little mirror that she carried at her
girdle.

"Tell me frankly, am I worth painting?"

"Madame, that purple hair, those splendid eyes, the superb
colour of those cheeks, would blaze out of a golden
background as out of heaven."

She gave a musical little titter.

"Heaven, heaven, ha--ha."

"I should be grateful for so transcendent a chance."

"And you would do me justice?"

"Where inspiration burns, there art soars."

"You would be true?"

"To the chiselling of a coral ear."

"And discreet?"

"To the curve of a lip."

"And considerate?"

"My hands are subtle."

"And your heart?"

"Is ingenuous as a little child's."

She laughed again, and held out her hands.  Balthasar
kissed the white fingers, crowded with their gems.  His
eyes were warm as water in the sun; the colours and the
glimmering richness of the chapel burnt into his brain.

"You shall paint me," she said.

"Here, madame, here?"

"No, my own bower is pleasanter.  You can reach it
by my Lord Flavian's stair in the turret.  Here is the key;
he never uses it now.  Avalon has not seen him these six
days."

"Madame, I will paint you as man never painted woman
before."

Dame Duessa's bower was a broad chamber on the
western walls, joining the south-western tower.  A great
oriel, jewelled with heraldic glass, looked over the mere
with its dreaming lilies, over the green meadows to the
solemn silence of the woods.

Calypso's grotto!  The bower of a luxurious lady in
a luxurious age!  The snuff of Ind and Araby tingled in
Balthasar's nostrils.  The silks of China and Bagdad,
the cloths of Italy, bloomed there; flowers crowded the
window, the couches, every nook.  Blood-red hangings
warmed the walls.

The Lady Duessa sat to Balthasar in the oriel, with
her lute upon her bosom.  She was in azure and violet,
with neck and bosom showing under a maze of gossamer
gold.  Her arms were bare to the shoulder, white, gleaming
arms, subtle, sinuous, voluptuous.  Her hair had been
powdered with gold.  Her lips were wondrous red, her
eyes dark as wells.  Musk and lavender breathed from her
samites; her girdle glowed with precious stones.

Fra Balthasar sat on a stool inlaid with mother-of-pearl
and ivory.  An embroidery frame served him as an easel.
The man was living under the many-constellationed vault
of beauty.  All the scent and floweriness of the room
played on his brain; all the wealth of it pandered to his
art; all the woman's splendour made molten wax of his
being.

As he painted she sang to him, an old lay of Arthurian
love, so that he might catch the music in her eyes, and
watch the deep notes gathering in her throat.  He saw
her bosom sway beneath her lace, saw the inimitable
roundness of her arms.  Often his brush lingered.  He
might gaze upon the woman as he would, drink her
beauty like so much violet wine, open his soul to the
opulent summer of her power.  His heart was in a
sunset mood; he lived the life of a poet.

   |  "And the green spring grew subtle," sang the dame,
   |  "With song of birds and laughter, and the woods
   |  Were white for maying.  So fair Guinivere
   |  Loosed her long hair like rivulets of gold
   |  That stream from the broad casement of the dawn.
   |  And her sweet mouth was like one lovely rose,
   |  And her white bosom like a bowl of flowers;
   |  So wandered she with Launcelot, while the wind
   |  Blew her long tresses to him, and her eyes
   |  Were as the tender azure of the night."

Of such things sang Duessa, while the friar spread his
colours.

And then she questioned him.

"Love you the old legends, Balthasar?"

"Madame, as I love life."

"Ah! they could love in those old days."

"Madame, men can love even now."

She put her lute aside, and knelt upon the couch before
the window, with her elbows on the cushioned sill.  Her
silks swept close upon her shapely back, her shoulders
gleamed under her purple hair.  In the west the world
grew red; the crimson kisses of the sunset poured upon
the ecstasied green woods.  The mere was flaked with a
myriad amber scales.  The meadows broidered their broad
laps with cowslips, as with dust of gold.

"Balthasar."

"Madame?"

"Look yonder at the sunset.  You must be tired of
gazing on my face."

He rose up like one dazed--intoxicated by colours,
sounds, and odours.  Duessa's hand beckoned him.  He
went and knelt on the couch at her side, and looked out
over the flaming woods.

"And the other woman?" she said.

"The other woman?"

"This Madonna of my lord's chapel."

"Yes?"

"She amuses me; I am not jealous; what is jealousy
to me?  Tell me about her, Balthasar; no doubt it is a
pretty tale, and you know the whole."

"I, madame?"

"I, Duessa."

"But----"

"You are my Lord Flavian's friend; he was ever a man
to be garrulous: he has been garrulous to you.  Tell me
the whole tale."

"Duessa!"

"Better, better, my friend."

She put her hands upon his shoulders, and stared straight
into his eyes.  Her lips overhung his like ripe red fruit.
Her arms were fragrant of myrrh and violet; her bosom
was white as snow under the moon.

"Can you refuse me this?"

"God, madame, I can refuse you nothing."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XVIII`:

.. class:: center large

   XVIII

.. vspace:: 2

The girl Yeoland saw nothing of the leper for a season.
For several days she did not venture far into the pine
forest, and the nameless grave heard not the sound of her
lute.  The third night after the incident, as she lay in
her room under her canopy of purple cloth, she heard
distinctly the silver clangour of a bell floating up through
the midnight silence.  She lay as still as a mouse, and
scarcely drew breath, for fear the man in grey should
venture up the stairway.  The casement was open, with
a soft June air blowing in like peace.  The bell
continued to tinkle, but less noisily, till it vanished into
silence.

Other folk from the cliff had seen the leper, and
Yeoland could not claim to have monopolised the
gentleman.  One of Fulviac's fellows had seen him one
morning near the cliff, gliding like a grey ghost among the
pines.  Another had marked him creeping swiftly away
through the twilight.  It was a superstitious age and
a superstitious region.  The figure in grey seemed to
haunt the place, with the occasional and mournful
sounding of its bell.  Men began to gossip, as the ignorant
always will.  Fulviac himself grew uneasy for more
material reasons, and contemplated the test of a clothyard
shaft or a bolt upon the leper's body.  The man might
be a spy, and if the bolt missed its mark it would
at least serve as a sinister hint to this troublesome
apparition.

It was then that Yeoland took alarm into her woman's
heart.  There was great likelihood of the man ending his
days under the tree with a shaft sticking fast between his
shoulders.  Though he was something of a madman, she
did not relish such a prospect.  The day after she had
heard the bell at midnight near the stair she haunted the
forest like a pixie, keeping constant watch between the
cliff and the forest grave.  Fulviac had ridden out on a
plundering venture, and she was free of him for the day.

It was not till evening that she heard the faint signal of
the bell, creeping down through the gold-webbed boughs
like the sound of a distant angelus.  The sound flew from
the north, and beckoned her towards the forest grave.
Fearful of being caught, she followed it as fast as her feet
could carry her, while the deepening clamour led her on.
Presently she called the man by name as she ran.  His grey
frock and cowl came dimly through the trees.

"At last you are merciful," was his greeting.

She stood still and twisted her gown restlessly between
her two hands.  Anarchy showed in her face; fear, reason,
and desire were calling to her heart.  The intangible touch
of the man's soul threw her being into chaos.  She feared
greatly for him, stood still, and could say nothing.  Flavian
put his cowl back, and stood aloof from her, looking in her
face.

"Seemingly we are both embarrassed," he said.

She made a petulant little gesture.  He forestalled her in
speech.

"It is best to be frank when life runs deep.  I will
speak the truth to you, and you may treat me as you will."

Yeoland leant against a tree, and began to pull away the
brittle scales of the bark.

"If you stay here longer, messire----" she began.

"Well, madame, what then?"

"You will be shot like a dog; you are suspected; they
are going to try your leper's gown with a crossbow bolt."

The man smiled optimistically.

"And you came to tell me this?"

"Yes."

"I thank you."

The wind moved through the trees; a fir-cone came
pattering through the branches and fell at their feet.  On
the cliff a horn blared; its throaty cry came echoing faintly
through the trees.

Flavian looked towards the gold of the west.  His mood
was calm and deliberate; he had his enthusiasms in leash
for the moment, for there were more mundane matters in
his mind--matters that were not savoury, however
crimson shone the ideal years.

"I have thrown down the glove," he said, "for good or
evil, honour or dishonour.  I will tell you the whole truth."

Yeoland, watching his face, felt her impatient dreads
goad her to the quick.

"Will you talk for ever?" she said to him.

"Take the core then.  I am going to rend my bonds as
I would rend flax.  I have appealed to the Church; I have
poured out gold."

"To the point, messire."

"I shall divorce my wife."

He threw his head back, and challenged the world in
her one person.  Her good favour was more to him than
the patronage of Pope or King.  It was in his mind that
she should believe the worst of him from the beginning, so
that in some later season he might not emulate Lucifer,
toppled out of the heaven of her heart.  She should have
the truth from the first, and build her opinion of him on no
fanciful basis.  Even in this justice to the more sinister
side of his surroundings, he was an idealist, thorough and
enthusiastic.

"So you must understand, madame, that I am not
without blemishes, not without things that I myself would
rather see otherwise.  With me it is a question of going to
hell for a woman, or getting rid of her.  Being an egotist,
I choose the latter alternative."

Yeoland still evaded his eyes.

"And the woman loves you?"

"Not an atom; she only cares to be called the Lady of
Gambrevault, Signoress of Avalon, the first dame in the
south."

"Why do you tell me this?"

"Madame, have I need of more words?  It is for this:
that you might not picture me as I am not, or form any
false conception of me.  I have bared my moral skeleton
to you.  Perhaps you will never know what it costs a man
at times to make his mind as glass to the woman he
honours above the whole world."

"Well?"

"It is because I honour you that I have goaded myself
to tell you the whole truth."

Her verdict was more sudden and more human than he
might have expected.

"Messire, you are a brave man," she said; "I believe I
am beginning to trust you."

The sky flamed into sunset; the tracery of the trees
seemed webbed with gold into shimmering domes and fans of
quivering light.  In the distance, the great cliff stood out
darkly from the scarlet caverns of the west.  The pine tops
rose like the black spires of some vast city.  Above, floated
clouds, effulgent mounts of fire, hurled from the abysmal
furnace of the sun.

Flavian came two steps nearer to the woman, leaning
against the tree.

"Give me my due," he said; "I have uncovered the
difficult workings of my heart, I have shown you the inner
man in his meaner mould.  Suffer me to speak of my
manhood in godlier words.  I have shown you Winter; let me
utter forth Spring."

Yeoland turned and faced him at last.

"You have risked your life and my honour long enough,"
she said, "I am going back to the cliff."

"And I with you, as far as the stairway."

"To the threshold of death."

"What care I if I tread it at your side?"

She turned homewards with obstinate intent, and the
mild hauteur of a good woman.  The man followed her,
went with her step for step, looking in her face.

"Hear my confession," he said; "you shall have it
before you leave me.  For the sake of your honour, I hold
my soul by the collar.  But--but, I shall win liberty,
liberty.  When I am free, ah, girl, girl, I shall flash golden
wings in the face of the sun.  I shall soar to you that I
may look into your eyes, that I may touch your hands, and
breathe the warm summer of your soul.  I want God, I
want purity, I want the Eternal peace, I want your heart.
I have said the whole; think of me what you will."

Twilight had gathered; all the violet calmness of the night
came down upon the world.  Under the shadows of the tall
trees, the girl was deeply stirred beyond her own compassion.
She halted, hesitated, went suddenly near the man with her
face turned heavenwards like a new-spread flower.  Her
eyes were very wistful, and she spoke almost in a whisper.

"You have told me the whole truth, you have shown
me your whole soul?"

"As I serve you, madame, I have kept nothing back."

"Ah, messire, I will speak to you the truth in turn.
God be merciful to me, but you have come strangely
near my heart.  These are bitter words for my soul.
Ah, messire, if you have any honour for me, trust me
that I aspire to heaven.  I cannot suffer you to come
deeper into my life."

The man held out his hands.

"Why, why?"

"Because in following me, you go innocently to your
death."

He lifted up his arms, and leapt into heroics like an
Apollo leaping into a blood-red sky.

"What care I; you speak in riddles; can I fear death?"

"Messire, messire, it is the woman who fears.  I tell
you this, because, because--God help me----"

She fled away, but that night he did not follow her.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XIX`:

.. class:: center large

   XIX

.. vspace:: 2

As a wind sweeps clamorous into a wood, so Modred
and his fellows, household knights, streamed into the great
hall of Avalon, where the Lord Flavian sat at supper.
Bearers of angry steel, fulminators of vengeance,
vociferous, strong, they poured in through the screens like a
mill race, bearing a tossed and impotent figure in their
midst.  Their swords yelped and flashed over this bruised
fragment of humanity.

A gauntlet of steel was dashed often into the white face.
Hands clawed his collar, clutched his body.  Dragged,
jerked onwards, buffeted, beaten to his knees, he sank
down before the Lord Flavian's chair, blood streaming
from his mouth and nostrils, specking his white habit,
drabbling the floor.  Then only did the flashing, growling
circle recede like waves from a fallen rock.

Modred, a black man, burly, a bigot to honour, stood
out a giant before his fellows.  His great sword quivered
to the roof; his deep voice shook the rafters.

"Blood, sire, blood."

The man in the white habit quailed, and held up his
hands.

"Let me smite him as he kneels."

"Sirs, give me the courtesy of silence."

Flavian started from his chair and looked at the man,
who knelt, huddled into himself, at his feet.  It was a
scene replete with the grim cynicism of life.  Here was
a man of mind and genius, cowering, quivering before
the strong wrath of a dozen muscular illiterates.  Here
was the promulgator of bold truths, an utter dastard when
the physical part of him was threatened with dissolution.
Not that this event was any proof against the moral power
of pagan self-reliance.  Not that there was any cause for
the bleating of sanctimonious platitudes, or the pointing
of a proverb.  A true churchman might have carved a
fine moral fable out of the reality.  It would have been
a fallacy.  Fra Balthasar was a coward.  He had none of
the splendid mental anatomy of a Socrates.  He would
have played the coward even under the eye of Christ.

Silence had fallen.  Far away, choked by the long throats
of gallery and stair, rose the wild, passionate screaming of
a woman.  It had the rebellious, blasphemous agony of one
flung into eternal fire.  Without modulation, abatement, or
increase, malevolent, impotent, ferocious, piteous, it pealed
out in long, tempestuous bursts that swept into the ears
like some unutterable discord out of hell.

The kneeling man heard it, and seemed to contract, to
shrink into himself.  His white habit was rent to the
middle; his ashy face splashed over with blood.  He tottered
and shook, his hands clasped over the nape of his neck, for
fear of the sword.  His tongue clave to his palate; his eyes
were furtively fixed on the upreared yard of steel.

Torches and cressets flared.  Servants stared and
shouldered and gaped in the screens; all the castle underlings
seemed to have smelt out the business like the rats they
were.  Modred's knights put them out with rough words
and the flat of the sword.  The doors were barred.  Only
Flavian, the priest, and Modred and his men took part in
that tribunal in the hall of Avalon.

Flavian stood and gazed on Balthasar, the man of tones
and colours.  The Lord of Gambrevault was calm,
unhurried, and dispassionate, yet not unpleased.  The man's
infinite abasement and terror seemed to arrest him like
some superb precept from the lips of a philosopher.  He
had the air of a man who calculates, the look of a diplomat
whose scheme has worked out well.  From Balthasar he
looked to Modred the Strong, the torchlight lurid on his
armour, his great sword quivering like a falcon to leap
down upon its prey.  The distant screaming, somewhat
fainter and less resolute, still throbbed in his ears.  He
thought of Dante, and the *bolgias* of that superhuman singer.

Going close to the Dominican, he spoke to him in
strong, yet not unpitying tones.  Balthasar dared not look
above the Lord Flavian's knees.

"Ha, my friend, where is all your fine philosophy?"

The man cringed like a beggar.

"Where are all your sonorous phrases, your pert blasphemies,
your subtleties, your fine tinsel of intellect and
vanity?"

Balthasar had no word.

"Where is your godliness, my friend, where your
glowing and superhuman soul?  Have we found you out, O
Satanas; have we shocked your pagan heroism?  Be a
man.  Stand up and face us.  You could hold forth
roundly on occasions.  Even that Saul of Tarsus was not
afraid of a sword."

Balthasar cowered, and hid his face behind his hands.
He began to whimper, to rock to and fro, to sob.  The
grim men round him laughed, deep-chested, iron, scoffing
laughter.  Modred pricked the priest's neck with the point
of his sword.  It was then that Balthasar fell forward upon
his face, senseless from sheer terror.

Flavian abandoned philosophic irony, and addressed
himself to Modred and his knights.

"Put up your swords, sirs; this man shall go free."

"Sire, sire!" came the massed cry.

"Trust my discretion.  The fellow has done me the
greatest service of my life."

"Sire!"

"He has given me liberty.  He has gnawed the shackles
from my soul.  You are all my witnesses in this, and may
count upon my gratitude.  But this man here, he has
danced to my whim like a doll plucked by a string.  For
my liberty has he sinned; out of Avalon shall he go
scatheless."

The men still murmured.  Modred shot home his sword
into its scabbard with a vicious snap.  Flavian read their
humour.

"Do not imagine, gentlemen," he said, "that your
vigilance and your loyalty to my honour can go unrewarded.
Modred, your lands are heavily mortgaged, I free you at a
word, with this my signet.  To you, Bertrand, I give the
Manor of Riesole to keep and hold for you and yours.  To
all you, good friends, I give a hundred golden angels, man
and man.  And now, sirs, as to madame, my wife."

They gathered round him in curious conclave, Balthasar
lying in their midst.

"Sir Modred, you will order out my state litter, set the
Lady Duessa therein, and have her borne with all courtesy
to Gilderoy, to her father's house.  Then you will take
these gentlemen who are my true friends and witnesses, and
you will ride to Lauretia, to make solemn declaration before
Bishop Hilary.  He has already received my earlier embassage.
After this affair, we have no need of ethical subtleties
and clerical conveniences.  You will obtain a dispensation
at his hands.  *Ex vinculo matrimonii*.  Nothing less than that."

They bowed to him and his commands, like the loyal
gentlemen they were.  Modred pointed to the prostrate
Balthasar, who was already squirming back to consciousness,
with his fingers feeling at his throat, as though to discover
whether it was still sound or no.

"And this fellow, sire?"

"Pick him up."

Balthasar had found his tongue at last.  He was jerked
to his feet, and held up by force, with the handle of a
poniard rammed into his mouth to stem his garrulity.

Flavian read him an extemporary lecture.  There was
something like a smile hovering about his lips.

"Go back to your missal, man, and forswear women.
They are like strong wine, too much for your flimsy brain.
I have more pity for you than censure.  Say to yourself,
when you patter your prayers, 'Flavian of Gambrevault
saved me from the devil once.'  And yet, my good saint,
I have a shrewd notion that you will be just as great a fool
two months hence."

The man gave a scream of delight, and attempted to
throw himself at Flavian's feet.  His superlative joy was
almost ludicrous.  Half a dozen hands dragged him back.

"Take him away--who cares for such gratitude!"

As they marched him off, he broke like an imbecile into
hysterical laughter.  Tears streamed from his eyes.  He
mopped his face with the corner of his habit, laughed and
snivelled, and sang snatches of tavern ditties.  So, with
many a grim jest, they cuffed Fra Balthasar out of Avalon.

At the end of the drama, Flavian called for tapers, and
marched in state to the chapel.  He knelt before the altar
and prayed to the Madonna, whose face was the face of
the girl Yeoland.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XX`:

.. class:: center large

   XX

.. vspace:: 2

"Fulviac, I cannot fasten all these buckles."

The man waited at the door of her room, and looked at
her with a half-roguish smile in his eyes.

She stood by the window in Gothic armour of a grandly
simple type, no Maximilian flutings, no Damascening, the
simple Gothic at its grandest, nothing more.  Her
breast-plate, with salient ridge, was blazoned over with golden
fleur-de-lis.  The pauldrons were slightly ridged;
vam-brace and rere-brace were beautifully jointed with most
quaint elbow-pieces.  She wore a great brayette, a short
skirt of mail, but no tassets.  In place of cuishes, jambs,
and solerets, she had a kirtle of white cloth, and laced
leather shoes.  It was light work and superbly wrought;
Fulviac had paid many crowns for it from an armourer at
Geraint.

Her beauty, mailed and cased in steel, seemed to shine
upon the man with a new glory.  When he had played the
armourer, she stood and looked at him with a most
conscious modesty, a warm colour in her cheeks, eyes full of
tremulous light, her masses of dark hair rolling down over
her blazoned cuirass.  A hand and a half sword in a gilded
scabbard, a rich baldric, and a light bassinet lay on the oak
table.  Fulviac took the sword, and belted it to her, and
slung the baldric over her shoulder.  His hands moved
through her dark hair.  For a moment, her eyes trembled
up at him under their long lashes.  He gave the helmet
into her hands, but she did not wear it.

A sudden gust of youth seized the man, an old strain of
chivalry woke in his heart.  Grizzled and gaunt, he went
on his knees in front of her and held up his hands as in
prayer.  There was a warm light in his eyes.

"The Mother Virgin keep you, little woman.  May all
peril be far from your heart, all trouble far from your soul.
May my arm ever ward you, my sword guard your womanhood.
All the saints watch over you; may the Spirit of
God abide with you in my heart."

It was a true prayer, though Fulviac stumbled up from
his knees, looking much like an awkward boy.  He was
blushing under his tanned skin, blushing, scarred and
battered worldling that he was, for his heart still showed gold
to the knife of Time.  Yeoland thought more of him that
moment than she had done these four months.  A shadow
passed over her face, and she touched her forehead with her
hand.

Fulviac, a far-away look in his eyes, was furling her
great scarlet banner upon its staff.  Yeoland spoke to him
over her shoulder.

"I am in your hands," she said.

Fulviac smoothed out a crease.

"What is your will, you have not yet enlightened me?"

He looked at her gravely for a moment.

"You are ours," he said, "a woman given to us by
heaven," he hesitated, as over a lie; "you are to shine out
a star, a pillar of fire before the host; every man who
follows you will know your story; every man who follows
you will worship you in his heart.  You will inspire us as
no mere man could inspire; your blood-red banner will
wave on heroes, patriots.  You will play the comet with
an army for your tail."

Some sudden emotion seemed to sweep over her.  She
stood motionless with clasped hands, looking at her crucifix.
There was a strange sadness upon her face, a tragic
sanctity, as on the face of a woman who renounces the world,
and more.  For a long while she was silent, as though
suffering some lustre light out of heaven to stream into her
heart.  Presently she answered Fulviac.

"God help me to be strong," she said, "God help me
to bear the burden He has put upon my soul."

"Amen, little woman."

"And now?"

"Prosper is preaching to all our men upon the cliff.
He is telling them your story.  I take you now to set you
before them all, that they may look upon a living Saint.
I leave the rest to your soul.  God will tell you how to
bear yourself in the cause of the people.  Come, let us
pray a moment."

They knelt down side by side before the crucifix, like
effigies on a tomb.  Fulviac's face was in shadow;
Yeoland's turned heavenward to the Cross.  It was her
renunciation.  Then they arose; Fulviac took up the scarlet
banner, and they passed out together from the room.

Traversing parlour and guard-room, finding them empty
and silent as a church, they came by the winding stairway
in the rock to the hollow opening upon the platform above.
Two sentinels stood by the rough door.  Above and
around, great stones had been piled up so as to form a
species of natural battlement.  Fulviac, bearing the banner,
climbed the rocks, and signed to Yeoland to follow.  They
were still within a kind of rude tower, walled in by heaped
blocks of stone on every side.  They were alone save for
the two sentinels.  Above, they saw Prosper the Preacher
standing on a great square mass of rock, his tall figure
outlined against the sky.

They could see that the man was borne along by the
strong spirit of the preacher.  His arms tossed to the sky
as he bent forward and preached to those invisible to
Fulviac and the girl.  His oratory was of a fervid,
strenuous type, like fire leaping in a wind, fierce, mobile,
passionate.  They could see him stride to and fro on his
platform, gesticulate, point to heaven, smite his bosom,
strike attitudes of ecstasy.  His voice rang out the while,
full of subtle modulations, the pathetic abandonments, the
supreme outbursts of the orator.  Much that he said fell
deep into the girl's heart.  The man had that strange
power, that magnetic influence that exists in the individual,
defying analysis, yet real as the stirring witchery of great
music, or as the voice of the sea.

Anon they saw him fall upon his knees, and lift his
hands to the heavens.  He had cast a quick glance
backward over his shoulder.  Prosper had soared to his zenith;
he had his men listening as for the climax of some great epic.
Fulviac thrust Yeoland forward up the slope.  She
understood the dramatic pause in an instant.  Prosper's words
had been like the orisons of birds preluding the dawn.  She
climbed the rocks, and stepped out at the kneeling monk's side.

The scene below dazed her for the moment.  Many
hundred faces were turned to her from the slopes at her
feet.  Innumerable eyes seemed fixed upon her with a
mesmeric stare.  She saw the whole cliff below her packed
with men, every rock crowned with humanity, even the
pine trees had their living burden.  She saw swords waving
like innumerable streaks of light; she had a confused
vision of fanaticism, exultation, power.  Deep seemed calling
unto deep; a noise like the noise of breakers was in her ears.

Then the whole grew clear on the instant.  The sky
seemed strangely luminous; every outline in the
landscape took marvellous and intelligent meaning.  Strange
Promethean fire flashed down into her brain.  She felt
her heart leaping, her blood bounding through her body,
yet her mind shone clear as a crystal grael.

Below her, she had humanity, plastic, inflammable, tinder
to her touch.  An infinite realisation of power seemed to leap
in her as at the beck of some spirit wand.  She felt all the dim
heroism of dreams glowing in her like wine given of the gods.

Holy fire burnt on her forehead and her tongue was
loosed.  She stood out on the great rock, her armour
flashing in the sun, her face bright as the moon in her
strength.  Her voice, clear and silvery, carried far over cliff
and wood, for the day was temperate and without a wind.

"Look upon me well.  I tell you the truth.  I am she
to whom the Madonna appeared from heaven."

Great silence answered her, the silence of awe, not of
disbelief or disapprobation.  Her voice rang solitary as the
voice of a wood-fay in the wilderness.  The huddled men
below were silent as children whose solemn eyes watch a
priest before the altar.  She spoke on.

"I am she whose tale you have heard.  God has given me
to the cause of the poor.  To your babes and to your womenfolk
I lift my hands; from the Mother of Jesus I hold my
command.  Men of the land, will you believe and follow my
banner?"

A thousand hands leapt to the sun, yet hardly a voice broke
the silence, the calm as of supreme revelation.  All the simple
mediæval faith shone in the rough faces; all the quaint
reverence, the unflinching fidelity, of the unlettered of the age
shone in their hearts.  They were warm earth to the seed
of faith.

"Men of the land, I hear great noise of violence and
wrong, of hunger and despair.  Your lords crush you;
your priests go in jewels and fine linen, and preach not
the Cross.  Your babes are slaves even before they see the
light.  Your children, like brute beasts, are bound to the
soil.  Men of the land, give me your strength, give me
your strength for the cause of God."

She drew her sword from its sheath, pressed the blade to her
lips, held it up to heaven.  Her voice rang over rock and tree.

"Justice and liberty!"

Her shrill hail seemed to lift the silence from a thousand
throats.  The human sea below gave up its soul to her
with thundering surges and vast sound of faith.  As roar
followed roar, she stood a bright, silvery pinnacle above
the black fanaticism beneath, transcendent Hope holding
her sword to the eternal sun.

Behind her, Fulviac unwrapped the great scarlet banner
she had wrought.  Its cross of gold gleamed out as he
lifted the staff with both hands.  Prosper, erect and
exultant, stood pointing to its device.  Then, in sight of all
men, he bowed down before the girl and kissed her feet, as
though she had been some rare messenger out of heaven.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXI`:

.. class:: center large

   XXI

.. vspace:: 2

The day had done gloriously till noon, but the sky's mood
changed as evening advanced.  Clouds were huddled up in
grey masses by a gathering and gusty wind, and the June
calm took flight like a girl in a new gown when rain
threatens.

By nightfall, a storm held orgy over the cliff.  Billow
upon billow of wind came roaring over the myriad trees.
The pines were sweeping a murky sky with their black
brooms, creaking and moaning in chorus.  Rain rattled
heavily, and over the cliff the storm thundered and cried
with the long wail of the wind over rock and tree.

In Yeoland's chamber the lamp flared and smoked, and
the postern clattered.  Rain splashed upon the shivering
casement; the carpet breathed restlessly with the draught
under the door.  It was late, yet the girl was still at her
devotions.  Her thoughts were dishevelled and full of
discords, while between her fingers the beads of her rosary
moved listlessly, and her prayers were broken by the
anathemas of the storm.

The dual distractions of life had come in her to grappling
point again.  She could boast no omnipotence in her own
heart, and could but give countenance to one of the two
factions that clamoured for her favour.  As her mood
changed like the mood of a fickle despot none too sure of
his throne, so tumult and despair were let loose time after
time into the echoing courts and alleys of her soul.  She
had neither the courage nor the force of will for the
moment to compel herself either to satisfy her womanhood
or sacrifice her instincts to a religious conviction.
Man and God held each a half of her being.  The man's
face outstared God's face; God's law overshadowed the
man's.

She had been carried into the palpitating azure of
religious exaltation.  The world had rolled at her feet.  She
had bathed her forehead in the infinite forethought of
eternity; she had heard the stupendous sounding of the
spheres.  Then some mischievous sprite had plucked the
wings from her shoulders, and she had fallen far into an
abyss.  After spiritual exaltation comes physical depression.
Neither is a normal state; neither strictly sane to the
intellect.  Peter-like, she had trod the waves; faith had played
her false; the waters had gone over her soul.

As she knelt brooding before her crucifix, under the
wavering lamp, she was smitten into listening immobility,
her rosary idle in her hand.  A cry had come to her amid
the multitudinous voices of the storm, a cry like a hail from
a ship over a tumbling sea at night.

She waited and wondered.  Again the cry rose above
the babel of the wind.  Was it from Fulviac's room; or a
sentinel's shout from the cliff, seized upon and carried by
the wind with distorting vehemence?  Midnight covered
the world, and the girl was in an impressionable mood.  She
took the lamp from its bracket and, opening the door,
peered down the gallery that led to Fulviac's room.

A sudden sinister sound made her start back into the
room, the lamp flashing tremulous beams upon the walls,
and striking confusion into the shadows.  A hand was
beating heavily upon the postern.

She set the lamp in its bracket, crept to the door, put
her ear to the lock and listened.  The knocking had
ceased, and in a momentary lulling of the wind she even
fancied she could hear the sound of deep breathing.  Her
heart was hurrying, but suspense emboldened her.

"Who's there?"

A sudden gust made such a bluster that her voice died
almost unheard in the night.  There was a vague clangour
without, as of arms, and the knocking re-echoed sullenly
through the room.  A lull came again.

"Who knocks?"

This time an answer came back to her.

"I--Flavian."

She caught her breath and shivered.

"What do you want at midnight, and in such a
storm?"

"Let me in.  Open to me."

"No--no."

"Open to me."

"Are you still mad?"

Silence held a moment.  Then the voice rose again,
with the hoarse moan of the wind for an underchant.

"Liberty, liberty, I am free, I am free."

She shrank aside against the wall.

"The night gave me my chance; I have men in the
wood.  Let me in."

"Ah, messire."

"I plead for love and my own soul.  I come to give
you life, sword, all.  I cannot leave you; I am in outer
darkness; you are in heaven.  Let me in."

She stood swaying like a reed in a breeze.  Her brain
glowed like some rich scheme of colour, some sun-ravished
garden.  The massed moan of a hundred viols seemed
to sweep over her soul.  God, for the courage to be weak!

"Yeoland!  Yeoland! have you no word for me?"

Her hand trembled to the door; her fingers closed upon
the key.  She hesitated and her dangling rosary caught
her glance; sudden revulsions of purpose flooded back;
she stumbled away from the door like one about to faint.

"I cannot, I cannot," she said.

"I will break down the door."

The threat inspired her.

"No, no, not thus can you win me."

"I will break in."

"Attempt it, and I will call the guard.  You will lose
hope of me for ever.  I swear it."

Her voice rang true and strong as a sword.  With her
judgment, silence fell again, and ages seemed to crawl
over the world.  When the man spoke again, his voice
was less masterful, more pathetic.

"Have you no hope for me?" it said.

"I have given you life."

"What is life without love?"

She sighed very bitterly.

"Messire, you do not understand," she said.

"No, you are a riddle to me."

"A riddle that you may read anon; time will show you
the truth.  I tell you I am given to God.  Only in one
way can you win me."

"Are you solemn over this?"

"Solemn as death."

"Tell me that only way."

"Only by breaking the bonds about my soul, by
liberating me from myself, by battle and through perils that
you cannot tell."

"War and the sword!"

"Yet not to-night.  You would need ten thousand men
to take me from this cliff.  I advise you for your good.
Only by great power and the sword can you win your
desire."

"By God, then, let it be war."

An utter sense of loneliness flooded over her.  She
sobbed in her throat, leant against the door, listened,
waited.  The wind roared without, the rain beat upon the
quaking casement, and she heard the multitudinous moaning
of the pines.  No voice companioned her, and the night
was void.

A sudden access of passion prompted her.  She
twisted at the key, tore the bolts aside, flung the door
open.  The stairway was empty.  Rain whirled in her
face, as she stood out in the wind, and called the
man many times by name.  It was vain and to no
purpose.

Presently she re-entered the room, very slowly, and barred
the door.  Her rosary rolled under her feet.  She picked
it up suddenly and dashed it away into a corner.  The face
on the crucifix seemed to leer at her from the wall.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXII`:

.. class:: center large

   PART III

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center large

   XXII

.. vspace:: 2

Aurelius, physician of Gilderoy, flourished on the fatness
of a fortunate reputation.  He was a rubicund soul, clean
and pleasant, with a neatly-trimmed beard, and a brow that
seemed to dome a very various and abundant wisdom.  He
combined a sprightly humour and an enlivening presence with
the reverent solemnity necessary to his profession.

As for the ladies of Gilderoy, they reverenced Master
Aurelius with a loyalty that became perhaps less remarkable
the more one considered the character of the worthy
charlatan.  Aurelius was an Æsculap in court clothing.  He
was ignorant, but as no one realised the fact, the soul of
Hippocrates would have been wasted in his body.  Discretion
was his crowning virtue.  He was so sage, so
intelligent, so full of a simple understanding for the ways of
women, that the frail creatures could not love him enough.
The confidences granted to a priest were nothing compared
to the truths that were unmasked to his tactful ken.  The
physician is the priest of the body, a privileged person,
suffered to enter the bed-chamber before the solemn rites of
the toilet have been performed.  He sees many strange
truths, beholds fine and wonderful transfigurations,
presides over the confessional of the flesh.  And Aurelius never
whispered of these mysteries; never displayed astonishment;
always discovered extraordinary justification for the
quaintest inconsistencies, the most romantic failings.  He
carried a sweet and sympathetic air of propriety about with
him, like a perfume that exhaled a most comfortable odour
of religion.  His salves were delectable to a degree, his
unguents and cosmetics remarkable productions.  Dames
took his potions in lieu of Malmsey, his powders in place
of sweetmeats.  Never did a more pleasant, a more tactful
old hypocrite pander to the failings of an unregenerate
world.

Aurelius stood in his laboratory one June morning,
balancing a money-bag in his chubby pink palm.  He seemed
tickled by some subtlety of thought, and wonderfully well
pleased with his own good-humour.  He smiled, locked the
money-bag in a drawer that stood in a confidential cupboard,
and, taking his cap and walking-staff, repaired to the street.
Pacing the narrow pavement like a veritable potentate,
pretentious as any peacock, yet mightily amiable from the
superb self-satisfaction that roared in him like a furnace,
he acknowledged the greetings of passers-by with the
elevation of a hand, a solemn movement of the head.  It was
well to seem unutterably serious when under the eyes of the
mob.  Only educated folk can properly understand levity
in a sage.

In the Erminois, a stately highway that ran northwards
from the cathedral, he halted before a mansion whose
windows were rich with scutcheons and proud blazonry.
Aurelius prospered with the rich.  The atmosphere of the mean
quarters was like a miasma to him; he loved sunlight and
high places where he might bask like a lizard.  He passed
by a great gateway into the inner court, and was admitted
into the house with that ready deference that speaks of
familiarity and respect.

Aurelius climbed the broad stairway, and sailed like a
stately carrack into my lady's chamber.  A dame in blue
and silver greeted him from an oriel.  The compounder of
cosmetics bowed, disposed his staff and velvet cap upon a
table, and appropriated the chair the lady had assigned to
him.

"Superb weather, madame."

"Too sultry, though I am a warm-souled person."

"True, madame, true, Gilderoy would be fresher if there
were no mean folk to stifle up the streets like weeds.  The
alleys send up such an unpleasant stench upon the breeze,
that it makes the cultured sense revolt from poverty."

The Lady Duessa's lips curled approvingly,

"Poverty, poverty, my dear Aurelius, is like a carcase,
fit only for quicklime.  If I had the rule of the place, I
would make poverty a crime, and cram all our human
sweepings into lazar quarters."

The man of physic nodded for sympathy.

"Exactly so, madame, but one would have to deal with
the inevitable religious instinct."

"That would be simple enough," she simpered.  "I
should confine religion to shadows and twinkling tapers,
lights streaming in through enamelled casements upon
solemn colours bowing before dreamy music; pardons and
absolutions bought with a purse of gold.  It is sad, Aurelius,
but who doubts but that religion makes scavengers of us
all?  Away with your smug widows, your frouzy burgher
saints, your yellow-skinned priest-hunters!  I would rather
have picturesque sin than vulgar piety."

The man of herbs sighed like an organ pipe.

"Everything can be pardoned before coarseness," he
said; "give me a dirty heart before a dirty face, provided
the sinner be pretty.  I trust that madame was satisfied
with my endeavours, that the perfumes were such as she
desired, the oil of Arabia pleasant and fragrant?"

"Magical, my Æsculap.  The oil makes the skin like
velvet, and the drugs are paradisic and full of languors.
Ah, woman, set the tray beside Master Aurelius' chair."

The man's eyes glistened over the salver and the cup.
He bowed to his hostess, sniffed, and pursed his lips over
the wine.

"Madame knows how to warm the heart."

"Truth to you.  Who have you been renovating of
late?  What carcase have you been painting, you useful
rogue?"

"Madame, my profession is discreet."

"I see your work everywhere.  There is the little
brown-faced thing who is to marry John of Brissac.  Well, she
needed art severely.  Now the lady has a complexion like
apple-blossom."

The old man's eyes twinkled.

"Madame is pleased to jest," he said, "and to think her
fancies--realities.  Were all ladies as fresh as Madame
Duessa, what, think you, would become of my delectable
art, my science of beauty?  I should be a poor bankrupt
old man, ruined by too much comeliness."

Aurelius always had the wit to say the pleasantest thing
possible, and to press the uttermost drop of honey from the
comb of flattery.  A surly tongue will break a man, a glib
intelligence ensure him a fortune.  Aurelius earned many
a fee by a pretty speech, or a tactful suggestion.  Then of
course he was never hindered by sincerity.

"Holy Dominic," laughed the lady, "I have proved a
good patron to you in many ways."

"And I trust I shall always deserve madame's trust."

"A discreet tongue and a comfortable obedience are
sweet things to a woman, Aurelius."

"Madame's voice recalls Delphi."

"Ah, the Greeks were poets; they knew how to fit their
religion to their pleasures.  'Tis only we, poor fools, who
measure sin by a priest's pardon.  Give me a torch before
an aspergill."

The man of physic sipped his wine, cogitating over it
with Jovian wisdom.

"The chief aim in life, madame," he said, "should be
the perfecting of one's own comfort.  'Tis my contention
that a fat bishop is a finer Christian than a lean friar.
The truism is obvious.  Is not my soul the more mellifluous
and benign if its shell is gilded and its vest of velvet?"

Duessa chuckled, and flipped her chin.

"Give me a warm bed," she laughed, "and I will pity
creation.  The world's saints are plump and comely; the
true goddess has a supple knee.  Am I the worse for being
buxom!"

"Madame," said the sage with great unction, "only
beggars denounce gold, and heaven is the dream of
diseased souls.  The cult of pleasure is the seal of health.
Discontent is the seed of religion."

The door opened a few inches, and there was the sound
of voices in muffled debate in the gallery.  The Lady
Duessa listened, rose from her chair, appeared restless.
The man of physic comprehended the situation, and with
that tact that characterised him, declared that he had
patronage elsewhere to assuage.  The lady did not detain
him, but dismissed him with a smile--a smile that on
such a face as hers often took the place of words.  So
Master Aurelius took his departure.

Five minutes later Sforza, Gonfaloniere of Gilderoy,
occupied the vacant chair in the oriel.

There are many ways to fame.  By the broad, embattled
gate where the Cerberus of War crouches; by the
glistening stair of glass where all the beauty of the world
gleams as in a thousand mirrors; by the cloaca of
diplomacy and cunning, that tunnels under truth and honour.
Sforza of Gilderoy was a man who never took his finger
off a guinea till he had seen ten dropped into the other
palm.  He was a narrow-faced, long-whiskered rat, ever
nibbling, ever poking his keen snout into prospective
prosperity.  He had no real reverence for anything under the
sun.  To speak metaphorically, he would as soon steal
the sacrificial wafer from the altar as the cheese from a
burgher's larder.  When he lived in earnest, he lived in
moral nebulosity, that is to say, he had no light save his
own lantern.  Publicly, he appeared a sleek, dignified
person, quick with his figures, apt at oratory, a man who
could quote scripture by the ell and swear by every saint
in the calendar.

Sforza, Gonfaloniere of Gilderoy, sat and faced Dame
Duessa over a little table that held wine and a bowl of
roses.  His large hands rested on the carved arms of the
chair.  He had a debonair smirk on his face, a mask of
complacency that suffered him to be vigilant in a polite
and courteous fashion.

"Madame has considered my proposition?"

The woman leant back in her chair and worked her full
lower lip against her teeth.

"I recognise your infallibility, Gonfaloniere."

"Only to the level of human foresight, madame."

"You have a longer nose than most men."

"I take the insinuation as a compliment."

He contemplated her awhile in silence.

"How am I to know that you are sincere?" he said.

"Need you disbelieve me?"

"It is my custom to disbelieve in everybody."

"Till they have satisfied you?"

"Exactly."

Duessa looked out of the window, and played with her
chatelaine.

"You know women?"

"I would never lay claim to such an arrogance of cunning."

"Nevertheless you are no fool."

"I am no fool."

"And you imagine my protestations are not sincere,
even after what I have suffered?"

He smiled at her most cunningly.

"You want proof?"

"I do not like unsigned documents."

She started forward in her chair with a strangely
strenuous look on her face.

"Fanatic fools have often made some show of fortitude,"
she said, "by thrusting a hand into the fire, or the like.
See now if I am a liar or a coward."

Before he could stay her she drew a small stiletto from
her belt, spread her left hand on the table, and then smote
the steel through the thick of the palm, and held it there
without flinching as the blood flowed.

"My signature," she said, with her cheeks a shade paler.

"Madame, you have spirit."

"Do you believe in me?"

"I may say so."

"You will include me in your schemes?"

"I will."

"You remember our mutual bargain?"

"I remember it."

She withdrew the stiletto and wrapped her bleeding
hand in her robe.

"You will initiate me--at once."

"To-morrow, madame, you shall go with me to the council."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXIII`:

.. class:: center large

   XXIII

.. vspace:: 2

Castle Gambrevault stood out on a great cliff above
the sea, like a huge white crown on the country's brow.
It was as fine a mass of masonry as the south could show,
perched on its great outjutting of the land, precipiced on
every side, save on the north.  Hoary, sullen, stupendously
strong, it sentinelled the sea that rolled its blue to the black
bastions of the cliffs.  Landwards, green downs swept with
long undulations to the valleys and the woods.

That Junetide Gambrevault rang with the clangour of
arms.  The Lord Flavian's riders had spurred north, east,
and west to manor and hamlet, grange and lone moorland
tower.  There had been a great burnishing of arms, a
bending of bows through all the broad demesne.  Steel had
trickled over the downs towards the tall towers of
Gambrevault.  Knights, with esquires, men-at-arms, and yeomen,
had ridden in to keep feudal faith.  The Lord Flavian had
swept the country for a hundred miles for mercenary troops
and free-lances.  His coffers poured gold.  He had pitched
a camp in the Gambrevault meadows; some fifteen hundred
horse and two thousand foot were gathered under his
banner.

From the hills cattle were herded in, and heavy wains
laden with flour creaked up to the castle.  There was
much victualling, much blaring of trumpets, much blowing
of pennons, much martial stir in the meadows.  It seemed
as though the Lord Flavian had a strenuous campaign in
view, and there was much conjecture on the wind.  The
strange part of it was, that none save Sir Modred had any
knowledge for what or against whom they were to fight.
It might be John of Brissac, Gambrevault's mortal enemy;
it might develop into a demonstration against the
magistracy of Gilderoy.  Blood was to be spilt, so ran the
current conviction.  For the rest, Flavian's feudatories
were loyal, and left the managing of the business to
their lord.

The men had been camped a week, and yet there
was no striking of tents, no plucking up of pennons.
Sir Modred had ridden out to bring in a body of five
hundred mercenaries from Geraint.  The Lord Flavian
himself, with a troop of twenty spears, was lodged for
a few days in Gilderoy, in the great Benedictine
monastery, where his uncle held rule as abbot.  He was
negotiating for arms, fifty bassinets, two hundred
gisarmes, a hundred ranseurs, fifty glaives, and a number
of two-handed swords.  He had found the Armourer's
Guild peculiarly insolent, and disinclined to serve him.
He had little suspicion that Gilderoy was seething under
the surface like so much lava.

Thus, while the Lord Flavian was preparing for his
march into the great pine forest, Fulviac had completed
his web of revolt.  He had heard of the gathering at
Gambrevault, and had hurried on his schemes in
consequence.  Five thousand men were ready at his back.
He would gain ten thousand men from Gilderoy; seven
thousand from Geraint.  These outlaw levies, free-lances,
and train-bands would give him the nucleus of the vast
host that was to spring like corn from every quarter of
the land.  Malgo was to head the rising in the west,
and to concentrate at Conan, a little town in the
mountains.  In the east, Godamar was to gather a great camp
in Thorney Isle amid the morasses of the fens.  Fulviac
would himself overthrow the lords of the south.  Then
they were to converge and to gather strength for the
march upon Lauretia, proud city of the King.

It would be a great war and a bitter, full of fanatical
fierceness and revenge.  Fulviac had given word to take,
pillage, and burn all strong places.  Destiny stood with
wild hands to the heavens, a bosom of scarlet, and hair
aghast.  If the horde conquered, the seats of the mighty
would reek amid flame; there would be death, and a great
silence over proud cities.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXIV`:

.. class:: center large

   XXIV

.. vspace:: 2

In an antechamber in the palace of Sforza of Gilderoy
stood the Lady Duessa, watching the day die in the west over
a black chaos of spires and gables.  Before her, under the
casement, lay the palace garden, a pool of perfume, banked
with tall cypresses, red with the fire of a myriad roses.
As night to the sunset, so seemed this antechamber to the
garden, panelled with black oak, a dark square of gloom
red-windowed to the west.  The place had a sullen,
iron-mouthed look, as though its walls had developed through
the years a sour and world-wise silence.

The Lady Duessa was not a woman who could trail
tamely in anterooms.  A restless temper chafed her pride
that evening, and kept her footing the polished floor like a
love-lorn nun treading a cloister.  The casements were
open to the garden, and the multitudinous sounds of the
city flooded in--the thunder of the tumbrils in the
narrow streets, the distant blare of trumpets from the
castle, the clangour of the cathedral bells.  A solitary
figure companioned the Lady Duessa in the anteroom,
cloaked and masked as was the dame herself.  It was
Balthasar the Dominican, who followed her now in
secular habit, having forsworn his black mantle and
taken refuge in her service.  From time to time the two
spoke together in whispering undertones; more than once
their lips touched.

The Lady Duessa turned and stood by a casement with
her large white hands on the sill.  She appeared to grow
more restive as the minutes passed, as though the antique
clock on the mantle clicked its tongue at her each gibing
second.

"This is insolence," she said anon, "holding us idling
here like ragged clients."

Balthasar joined her, soft-footed and debonair, his black
eyes shining behind his mask.

"Peter kept Paul before the gate of heaven," quoth
he, with a curl of the lip.  "Sforza is a meddler in many
matters, a god-busied Mercury.  As for me, I am content."

Their hands touched, and intertwined with a quick
straining of the fingers.

"Pah," said the woman with a shiver, "this room is
like a funeral litter; it chills my marrow."

Balthasar sniggered.

"See, the sky burns," he said; "yon garden is packed
with colour.  We could play a love chase amid those
dark hedges of yew."

She pressed her flank to his; her eyes glittered like
amethysts; her breath hastened.

"My mouth, man."

She pouted out her full red lips to his; suffered his
arms to possess her; they kissed often, and were out of
breath.  A door creaked.  The two started asunder in
the shadows with an impatient stare into each other's eyes.

Sforza the Gonfaloniere stood on the threshold, clad
plainly in a suit of black velvet, with a sword buckled at
his side.  He bowed over Duessa's hand, kissed her finger
tips, excusing himself the while for the delay.  He was
very suave, very facile, as was his wont.  The Lady
Duessa took his excuses with good grace, remembering
their compact, and the common purpose of their ambitions.

"Gonfaloniere, we wait our initiation."

Sforza's eyes were fixed on Balthasar with a keen and
ironical glitter.

"Very good, madame."

"Remember; Lord Flavian's head, that is to be my
guerdon."

"Madame, we will remember it.  And this gentleman?"

"Is the friend of whom I spoke."

"A most loyal friend, methinks?"

"True."

The Gonfaloniere coughed behind his fingers, and spoke
in his half-husky tenor.

"You are ready to risk everything?"

Duessa reassured him.

"Expect no blood and thunder ceremonial," he said to
them; "we are grim folk, but very simple.  Your presence
will incriminate you both.  Be convinced of that."

He led them by a little closet into the state-room of the
palace, a rich chamber lit by many tapers, its doorway held
by a guard of armed men.  Statues in the antique gleamed
in the alcoves.  The panelling shone with gem-brilliant
colouring.  Armoires and carved cabinets stood against the
walls.  The ceiling was of purple, with the signs of the
Zodiac in gold thereon.

In the centre of the room, before a slightly raised dais,
stood a round table inlaid with diverse-coloured stones.
Scrolls, quills, and inkhorns covered it.  Some twoscore
men were gathered round the table, staring with masked
faces at a map spread before them--a map showing all
the provinces of the south, with towns and castles marked
in vermilion ink thereon.  A big man in a red cloak stood
conning the parchment, pointing out with a long forefinger
certain marches to the masked folk about him.

Sforza pointed Duessa and Balthasar to a carved bench
by the wall.

"Have the patience to listen for an hour," he said,
turning to join the men about the table.

A silver bell tinkled, and a priest came forward to patter
a few prayers in Latin.  At the end thereof, the masked
Samson in the red cloak stood forward on the dais with
uplifted fist.  Instant silence held throughout the room.
The man in red began to speak in deep, full-throated tones
that seemed to vibrate from his sonorous chest.

His theme was the revolt, his arguments, the grim bleak
facts that bulked large in the brain of a leader of men.  He
dealt with realism, with iron detail, and the strong suggestions
of success.  Revolt, in the flesh, bubbled like lava at
a crater's brim, seething to overflow and scorch the land.
It was plain that the speaker had great schemes, and a will
of adamant.  His ardour ran down like a cataract, smiting
into foam the duller courage of the multitude.

When he had ended his heroic challenge to the world,
he took by the hand a girl who stood unmasked at his side.
She was clad all in white with a cross of gold over her
bosom, and her face shone nigh as pallid as her mantle.
The men around the table craned forward to get the better
view of her.  Nor was it her temporal beauty alone that
set the fanatical chins straining towards her figure.  There
was a radiance as of other worlds upon her forehead, a
glamour of sanctity as though some sacred lamp shed a
divine lustre through all her flesh.

At the moment that the man in the red mask had
drawn the girl forward beside him on the dais, Balthasar,
with a stifled cry, had plucked the Lady Duessa by the
sleeve.  She had started, and stared in the friar's face as he
spoke to her in a whisper, a scintillant malice gathering in
her eyes.  Balthasar held her close to him by the wrist.
They were observed of none save by Fulviac, whose care
it was to watch all men.

As Balthasar muttered to her, Duessa's frame seemed
to straighten, to dilate, to stiffen.  She did not glance at
the friar, but sat staring at the girl in white upon the dais.
The Madonna of the chapel of Avalon had risen before
her as by magic; her dispossessor stood before her in the
flesh.  Balthasar's tongue bore witness to the truth.  In
the packed passion of a moment, Duessa remembered her
shame, her dishonour, her hunger for revenge.

The girl upon the dais had been speaking to the men
assembled round her with the simple calm of one whose
soul is assured of faith.  For all her fierce distraction
each word had fallen into Duessa's brain like pebbles into
a well.  A mocking, riotous scorn chuckled and leapt in
her like the laughter of some lewd faun.  She heard not
the zealous mutterings that eddied through the room.  Her
eyes were fixed on the man in the red cloak, as he bent to
kiss the girl's slim hand.

She saw Fulviac turn and point to a roll of parchment
on the table.

"We swim, sirs, or sink together," were his words;
"there can be no traitors to the cause.  In three days
we hoist our banner.  In three days Gilderoy shall rise.
Sign, gentlemen, sign, in the name of God and of our Lady."

The leaders of Gilderoy crowded about the table where
Prosper the Preacher waited with quill and testament,
Sforza standing with drawn sword beside him.  Fulviac
had headed those who took the oath, and had drawn back
from the press on to the dais.  Meanwhile Duessa, with
Balthasar muttering discretions in her ear, had skirted the
black knot of conspirators and come close upon Fulviac.
While Sforza and the rest were intent upon the scroll, she
plucked the man in red by the sleeve, and spoke to him in
an undertone.

"A word with you in an alcove."

Fulviac stared, but drew aside from the group none the
less and followed her.  She had moved to an oriel and sat
down on the cushioned seat, her black robe sweeping the
crimson cloth.  Fulviac stood and faced her, thus closing
her escape from the oriel.  Midway between them and
the table, Balthasar stood biting his nails in sullen vexation,
ignorant of where the woman's headstrong passions might
be bearing them.

Duessa soon had Fulviac at the tongue's point.

"You are the first man in this assemblage?" she had
asked him.

"Madame, that is so."

"I have a truth to make known."

"Unmask to me."

She hesitated, then obeyed him.

"Possibly I am known to you," she said.

Fulviac stood back a step, and looked at her as a man
might look at an old love.  A knot of wrinkles showed
on his forehead.

"Duessa of the Black Hair."

"Ah, in the old days."

"What would you now, madame?"

"Let me see your face."

"No."

"You hold me at a disadvantage."

"That is well.  Tell me this tale of yours."

His voice was cold as a frost, and there was an
inclement look about him that should have warned the woman
had she been less blinded by her own malice.  She had
lost her cunning in her fuming passion, and denounced
when she should have suggested, blurted the whole when
a hint would have sufficed her.

"I was the Lord Flavian of Gambrevault's wife," she said.

"That man!"

"That devil!"

Fulviac drew a deep breath.

"Well?" he said.

"The fellow has divorced me; I will tell you why.  You
are the man they call Fulviac.  It was you who took the
Lord Flavian in an ambuscade, to kill him, for the sake of
Yeoland of Cambremont, who stands yonder.  The whole
tale is mine.  It was that girl who let the Lord Flavian
escape out of your hands.  A fine fool she is making of you,
my friend.  A saint, forsooth!  Flavian of Avalon might
sing you a strange song."

Duessa took breath.  She had prophesied passion, a
volcanic outburst.  Fulviac leant against the wainscotting with
folded arms, his masked face impenetrable, and calm as
stone.  He stirred never a muscle.  Duessa had ventured
forth into the deeps.

The man thrust a question at her suddenly.

"You can prove the truth of this?"

Duessa pointed him to Fra Balthasar.

"The priest can bear out my tale.  I will beckon him."

"Wait."

"Ah!"

"Does Sforza know of this?"

"None know it, save I and yonder priest."

"Then I uncover to you."

He jerked his mask away, and stood half stooping towards
her with a peculiar lustre in his eyes.  Duessa stared at
him as at one risen from the dead.  Her face blanched and
stiffened into a bleak, gaping terror, and she could not
speak.

"Your tale dies with you."

He smote her suddenly in the bosom with his poniard,
smote her so heavily that the blow dragged her to her knees.
She screamed like a trapped hare, pressed her hands over
her bosom, blood oozing over them.  A last malevolence
leapt into her eyes; she panted and strove to speak.

"Listen, sirs, hear me----"

Fulviac, standing over her like a Titan, smote her again
to silence, and for ever.  With arms thrust upwards, she
fell forward along the floor, her white face hidden by her
hood.  A red ringlet curled away over the polished oak.
Fulviac had sprung away with jaw clenched, his face as
stone.  He drew his sword, plucked Balthasar by the
throat, hurled him back against the wainscotting.

"A spy, poniard him."

The great room rushed into uproar; the guards came
running from the door.  Fulviac had passed his sword
through Balthasar's body.  The friar rolled upon the floor,
yelping, and clutching at the swords that stabbed him.  It
was soon over; not a moan, not a whimper.  Sforza, white
as a corpse, gripped Fulviac by the shoulder.

"Know you whom you have killed?"

"Well enough, Gonfaloniere."

"What means it?"

"That I am a brave man."

Sforza quailed from him and ran to the oriel, where
several men had lifted the woman in their arms.  Her lustrous
hair fell down from under her hood; her hands, stained
with her own blood, trailed limply on the floor.  She was
a pathetic figure with her pale, fair face and drooping lids.
The men murmured as they held her, like some poor bird,
still warm and plastic, with the life but half flown from her
body.

Fulviac stood and looked down into her face.  His
sword still smoked with Balthasar's blood.

"Sirs," he said, and his strong voice shook, "hear me,
I will tell you the truth.  Once I loved that woman, but
she was evil, evil to the core.  To-night she came
bringing discord and treachery amongst us.  I have done
murder before God for the sake of the cause.  Cover her
face; it was ever too fair to look upon.  Heaven rest her
soul!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXV`:

.. class:: center large

   XXV

.. vspace:: 2

Two days had passed since the secret assembly in the
house of Sforza, Gonfaloniere of Gilderoy.  They had
buried Duessa and Balthasar by night in the rose garden,
by the light of a single lantern, with the fallen petals for
a pall.  It was the evening before the day when the land
should rise in arms to overthrow feudal injustice and
oppression.  On the morrow the great cliff would be
desolate, its garrison marching through the black pine woods on
Avalon and Geraint.

Towards eve, when the sky was clear as a single
sapphire, Fulviac came from his parlour seeking Yeoland, to
find her little chamber empty.  A strange smile played
upon his face as he looked round the room with crucifix,
embroidery frame, and prayer-desk, with rosary hung
thereon.  He picked up her lute, thrummed the strings,
and broke broodingly into the sway of some southern song:

   |  "Ah, woman of love,
   |  With the stars in the night,
   |  I see thee above
   |  In a circlet of light.
   |  On the west's scarlet scutcheon
   |  I mark thy device;
   |  And the shade of the forest
   |  Makes gloom of thine eyes,
   |  God's twilight
   |      To me."
   |

He ended the stanza, kissed the riband, and set the lute
down with a certain quaint reverence.  The postern stood
open and admonished him.  He passed out down the cliff
stairway to the forest.

An indescribable peace pervaded the woods, a supreme
silence such as the shepherd on the hills knows when the
stars beckon to his soul.  Fulviac walked slowly and
thought the more.  He felt the altitude of the forest
stillness as of miles of luminous, windless æther; he felt the
anguishing pathos of a woman's face; he felt the strangeness
of the new philosophy that appealed to his heart.
Nothing is more fascinating than watching a spiritual
upheaval in one's own soul; watching some great power
breaking up the crust of custom and habit; pondering the
while on the eternal mysteries that baffle reason.

He found Yeoland amid the pines.  She had been to the
forest grave and was returning towards the cliff when the man
met her.  She seemed whiter than was her wont, her dark
eyes looking solemn and shadowy under their sweeping
lashes.  She seemed marvellously fair, marvellously
pure and fragile, as she came towards him under the trees.

Something in Fulviac's look startled her.  Women are
like the sea to the cloudy moods of men, in that they catch
every sun-ray and shadow.  An indefinite something in
the man's manner made her restless and apprehensive.
She went near to him with questioning eyes and laid her
hand upon his arm.

"You have had bad news?"

"Nothing."

"Something has troubled you?"

"Perhaps."

She looked at him pensively, a suspicion of reproach,
pity, and understanding in her eyes.

"Is it remorse, your conscience?"

"My conscience?  Have I had one!"

"You have a strong conscience."

"*Deo gratias*.  Then you have unearthed it, madame."

A vein of infinite bitterness and melancholy seemed to
glimmer in his mood.  It was a moment of self-speculation.
The girl still looked up into his face.

"Why did you kill that woman?"

"Why?"

"Her dead face haunts me, I see it everywhere; there
is some strange shadow over my soul.  O that I could
get her last cry from my ears!"

Fulviac, with a sudden burst of cynicism, broke into
grim laughter, a sound like the rattling of dry bones in a
closet.  The girl shrank away with her lips twitching.

"Why cannot you trust me with the truth?"

"Truth is not always beneficent.  It was a matter of
policy, of diplomacy."

"Why?"

"Discords are bad at the eleventh hour.  That woman
could have half-wrecked our cause.  It was policy to
silence her and the man.  I made sure of it by killing
them."

Yeoland's face had a shadow of repugnance upon it;
her eyes darkened.  The man seemed in a callous, scoffing
humour; it was mere glittering steel over the bitterness
within.

"You will tell me her name?"

"What is it to you?"

"She haunts me."

"Forget her."

"I cannot."

"Have the truth if you will.  She was the wife of the
Lord Flavian of Gambrevault."

The girl stood motionless for a moment; then swayed
away several steps from Fulviac under the trees.  One
hand was at her throat; her voice came in a whisper.

"What did she tell you?"

"Many things."

"Quick, do they touch me?"

Fulviac choked an oath, and played with his sword.

"Then there was some truth in her?" he said.

The girl grew imperious.

"I command you to tell me all."

"Madame, the woman declared you were a traitress, and
that this lordling, this Flavian of Gambrevault, loved you."

"And you killed her----"

"For your sake and the cause.  She might have cast
our Saint out of heaven."

Yeoland went back from him and leant against a tree,
with her hands over her eyes.  Sunlight splashed down upon
her dress; she shivered as in a cold wind, and could not
speak.  Fulviac's voice, level and passionless, questioned
her as she stood and hid her face.

"You let the Lord Flavian escape?"

"I did."

"Have you seen him since?"

"I have."

"Thanks for the truth."

Her responses had come like chords smitten from the
strings of a lute.  She started away from the tree and began
to walk up and down, wringing her hands.  Her face was
like the face of one in torture, and she seemed to struggle
for breath.

"Fulviac, I could not kill the man."

The words came like a wail.

"He was young, and he besought me when your men
were breaking down the gate.  What could I do, what
could I do?  He was young, and I let him go by the
postern and told you a lie.  God help me, I told you a lie."

The man watched her with arms folded.  There was a
look of deep melancholy upon his face, as of one wounded
by the truth.  His voice was sad but resolute.

"And the rest?"

She rallied suddenly and came to him with truth in her
eyes; they were wonderfully piteous and appealing.

"God knows I have been loyal to you.  The man
tempted me, but I withstood him; I kept my loyalty."

"And you told him----?"

"Nothing, nothing; he is as innocent as a child."

Fulviac looked down at her with a great light in his
eyes.  He spoke slowly and with a deeper intonation in
his voice.

"I have dealt with many bad women," he said, "but I
believe you are speaking the truth."

"It is the truth."

"I take it as such; you have been too much a woman."

"Ah, if you could only forgive."

He stepped forward suddenly, took her hands, and looked
down at her with a vast tenderness.

"Little woman, if I told you I loved you, would you
still swear that you have spoken the truth?"

"God judge me, Fulviac, I have been loyal."

A strange light played upon his face.

"And I, ye heavens, have I learnt my lesson in these
later days?  Girl, you are above me as the stars; I may
but kiss your hands, no more.  You are not for worldly
ways, or for me.  Battered, war-worn veteran, I have come
again by the heart of a boy.  Fear me not, little woman,
there is no anger in a great love, only deep grieving and
unalterable honour."





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   XXVI

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It was dawn; mists covered the forest; not a wind stirred
or sobbed amid the boughs.  A vast grey canopy seemed to
tent the world, a mysterious veil that tempered the sun and
spread a spiritual gloom over rock and tree.

The noise of horns played through the misty aisles--horns
many-tongued, faint, clamorous, like the trumpeting
of forest elves.  There was the dull, rhythmic onrush
of many thousand feet, the hurrying, multitudinous tramp
of men marching.  Armour gleamed through the glooms;
casque and bassinet, salade and cap of steel flowed on and
on as phosphorescent ripples on a subterranean stream.
Pike, glaive, gisarme shone like stubble over the forest
slopes.  The sullen tramp of men, the clashing clamour
of arms, the blaring of a solitary clarion, such were songs
of the great pine forest on that July morning.

Yeoland, rebel lady and saint, on a great white horse,
rode at Fulviac's side in full armour, save for her helmet.
Her horse was cased in steel--chamfron, crinet, gorget,
poitrel, croupiere gleaming like burnished silver.  She
made a fine and martial figure enough, a glittering dawn
star for a heroic cause.  About her rode her guard, the
pick of Fulviac's men, some fifty spears in all, masses of
steel, each bearing a scarlet cross blazoned upon his white
jupon.  Nord of the Hammer bore the red banner
worked by the girl's own hands.  They were hardy men
and big of bone, sworn to keep and guard her to the death.

Fulviac and Yeoland rode side by side like brothers in
arms.  All about them were rolling spears and rocking
helmets moving among the myriad trees.  The sound of
arms surged round them like the ominous onrush of a sea.
War followed like a thunder-cloud on their heels.

Fulviac was in great spirits, somewhat solemn and
philosophic, but full of the exultation of a man who feels
his ship surging on the foaming backs of giant billows.
His eyes were proud enough when they scanned the girl
at his side.  His heart thundered an echo to the grim
tramp of his men on the march.

"To-day," he said, making grandiose flourishes with his
sword, "the future unrobes to us.  We plunge like Ulysses
into the unknown.  This is life with a vengeance!"

She had a smile on her lips and a far-away look in her eyes.

"If you love me," she said, "be merciful."

"Ah, you are always a woman."

"There are many women such as I am; there are
many hearts that may be wounded; there are many
children."

He looked at her meditatively, as though her words were
both bitter and sweet in his mouth.

"You must play the philosopher, little woman; remember
that we work for great ends.  I will have mercy when
mercy is expedient.  But we must strike, and strike terror,
we must crush, we must kill."

"Yet be merciful."

"War is no pastime; men grip with gauntlets of iron,
not with velvet gloves.  Fanaticism, hate, revenge,
patriotism, lust of plunder, and the rest, what powers are
these to let loose upon a land!  We have the oppression
of centuries red in our bosoms.  War is no mere subtle
game of chess; the wolf comes from the wilderness; the
vulture swings in the sky.  Fire, death, blood, rapine, and
despair, such are the elements of war."

"I know, I know."

"To purge a field, we burn the crop.  To convert, we
set swords leaping.  To cleanse, we let in the sea.  To
move the fabrics of custom and the past, a man must play
the Hercules.  God crushes great nations to insure the
inevitable evolution of His will.  To move the world, one
must play the god."

It was noon when the vanguard cleared the trees, and
spread rank on rank over the edge of a moor.  A zealous
sun shone overhead, and the world was full of light and
colour, the heather already a blaze of purple, the bracken
still virgin, the dense dark pines richly green against the
white and azure of the sky.

Fulviac, Yeoland, and her guards rode out to a hillock
and took station under the banner of the Cross.  The forest
belched steel; rank on rank swept out with pikes glittering;
shields shone, and colours juggled mosaics haphazard.
Horse and foot rolled out into the sun, and gathered in
masses about the scarlet banner and the girl in her silvery
harness on the great white horse.  The forest shadows
were behind them, they had cast off its cloak; the world
lay bare to their faces; they were hurling their challenge in
the face of Fate.  Every man in the mass might well have
felt the future glowing upon his brain, might well conceive
himself a hero and a patriot.  It was a deep, sonorous shout
that rolled up, when a thousand points of steel smote
upwards to the heavens.  Yeoland, amid her guards, had dim
visions of the power vested in her slender sword.  Where
her banner flew, there brave men would toss their pikes
with a cheer for the charge home.  Where her sword
pointed, a thousand blades would leap to do her bidding.
Even as she pondered these things, the trumpets sounded
and the men of the forest marched on.

Fulviac's plans had been matured but a week.  His
opening of the campaign was briefly as follows.  He was
bearing north-west towards Geraint, and Geraint was to
rise that night, massacre the King's garrison, and come
out to him.  Avalon lay in Fulviac's path.  He was to
smite a blow at it on his march, surprise the place if
possible, and then hold on for Geraint.  The same night,
Gilderoy would rise; the castellan, who was with the
townsfolk, would open the gates of the castle and deliver
up all arms and the siege train that was kept there.  From
Geraint, Fulviac trusted to ride on with a single troop to
take command at Gilderoy, leaving Nord, Prosper, and the
girl Yeoland in command at Geraint.  With his numbers
raised to some twenty thousand men, he would have his
force divided into two bodies--ten thousand at Gilderoy,
ten thousand at Geraint.  These two bodies would sweep
up by forced marches, converge on Gambrevault, crush the
Lord Flavian's small armament, shut him up in his castle.
Assault or leaguer would do the rest.  Meanwhile the
peasantry would rise and flock in to the standard of the people.

Free of the forest, Fulviac sent on a troop of horse
towards Geraint to warn the townsfolk of his advance.
With the main mass of the foot, he held northwards over
hill and dale, and towards evening touched the hem of the
oak woods that wrapped the manor of Avalon.  The place
was but feebly garrisoned, as the Lord Flavian had
withdrawn most of his men to Gambrevault, dreaming little of
the thunder-storm that was shadowing the land.

Fulviac had his plan matured.  Fifty men-at-arms in
red and green, the Gambrevault colours, were to advance
with a forged pennon upon the place, as though sent
as a reinforcement from Gambrevault.  The main body
would follow at a distance and lie ambushed in the woods.
If the ruse answered, and it was an old trick enough, the
barbican and gate could be held till Fulviac came up and
made matters sure.  Thus Avalon would fall, proto-martyr
on the side of feudalism.

Nor were Fulviac's prognostications at fault.  There
were not sixty men in Avalon, and Fulviac's fifty gained
footing in the place and held their ground till the rest
came up.  The affair was over, save for some desultory
slaughter on the turrets, when Fulviac galloped forward
over the meadows with Yeoland and her guard.  The
man kept the girl on the further side of the moat, and
did not suffer her to stumble too suddenly on the realities
of war.  He feared wisely her woman's nature, and did
not desire to overshock her senses.  The butchery was
over when they neared the walls.  They heard certain
promiscuous yelpings, and saw half a dozen men-at-arms,
who had made a last stand on a tower, tumbled headlong
over the battlements into the moat below.  Fulviac did
not suffer the girl to cross the bridge.  What passed
within was hidden by the impenetrable massiveness of the
sullen walls.

Thus Avalon, fair castle of the woods and waters, sent
out her wistful prophecy to the land.  In her towers and
galleries men lay dead, bleak and stiff, contorted into
fantastic attitudes, with pike or sword sucking their vitals.
Blood crept down the stairs; dead men cumbered the beds
and jammed the doors.  There had been much screaming
among the women; even Fulviac's orders could not cool
the passions of the mob; it was well indeed that he kept
Yeoland innocent in the meadows.

Fanaticism, ignorance, lust were loose in Avalon like
evil beasts.  All its fairness was defamed in one short
hour.  Hangings were torn down, furniture wrecked and
shattered, chests and cupboards spoiled of all their
store.  In the chapel, where refugees had fled to the
altar, there had been slaughter, merciless and brutal.
Bertrand, the old knight and seneschal, lay dead on the
altar steps, with a broken sword and fifty rents in his
carcase.  Men were breaking the images, defacing the
frescoes, strewing all the place with blood and riot.  Nord
of the Hammer stood over the cellar door with his great
mace over his shoulder, and kept the men from the wine.
Elsewhere the mob rooted like a herd of swine in the
rich chambers, and worked to the uttermost its swinish will.

When the day was past, Fulviac and his men, as hounds
that have tasted blood, marched on exultantly towards
Geraint.  Night and great silence settled down over
Avalon.  The woods watched like a host of plaintive
mourners over the scene.  The moon rose and shone on
the glimmering mere and swooning lilies, and streamed in
through shattered casements on men sleeping in their
blood, on ruin, and the ghastly shape of death.





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   XXVII

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Gilderoy had risen.

It was midnight.  A great bell boomed and clashed over
the city, with a roar of many voices floating on the wind,
like the sullen thunder of a rising sea.  Torches flashed
and ebbed along the streets, with hundreds of scampering
shadows, and a glinting of steel.  Knots of armed men
hurried towards the great piazza, where, by the City Cross,
Sforza the Gonfaloniere and his senators had gathered
about the red and white Gonfalon of the Commune.  All
the Guild companies were there with their banners and
men-at-arms.  "Fulviac," "Saint Yeoland," "Liberty
and the Commune": such were the watchwords that filled
the mouths of the mob.

Cressets had burst into flame on the castle's towers,
lighting a lurid firmament; while from the steeps of the
city, where stood the palaces of the nobles, smoke and
flame began to rush ominously into the night.  Waves of
hoarse ululations seemed to sweep the city from north,
south, east, and west.  Trumpets were clanging in the
castle, drums beating, fifes braying.  Through the
indescribable chaos the great bell smote on, throbbing through
the minutes like the heart of a god.

It will be remembered that the Lord Flavian was in
Gilderoy for the purchasing of arms.  At midnight you
would have found him in his state bed-chamber in the
abbot's palace, tugging at his hose, fumbling at his points
and doublet, buckling on his sword.  He was hardly awake
with the single taper winking in the gloom.  The shrill
ululations of the mob sounded through the house, with the
clash of swords and the crash of hammers.  The Lord
Flavian craned from the window, saw what he could, heard
much, and wondered if hell had broken loose.

"Fulviac and the Commune!"

"Saint Yeoland!"

"Down with the lords, down with the priests!"

The man at the window heard these cries, and puzzled
them out in his peril.  Certainly he was a lord; therefore
unpopular.  And Yeoland!  Wherefore was that name
sounding on the tongues of brothel-mongers and cooks!
Was he still dreaming?  Certes, these rallying-cries
carried a certain blunt hint, advising him that he would have
to care for his own skin.


Malise, his page, knelt at the door with his ear to the
key-hole.  The boy was in his shirt and breeches, and
trembling like an aspen.  Flavian stood over him.  They
heard a rending sound as of a gate giving, a roar as of
water breaking through a dam, a yelp, a scream or two, a
confused medley of many voices.

Flavian told Malise to open the door and look out into
the gallery.  He did so.  A man, more zealous than the
rest, sprang out of the dark and stabbed at the lad's
throat.  He fell with a whimper.  Flavian plunged his
sword home, dragged Malise within, barred the door again.
Very tenderly he lifted the boy in his arms.  Malise's
hands clung about his lord's neck; he moaned a little, and
was very white.

"Save yourself, messire!"

Flavian bore him towards a door that stood open in
the panelling.  He felt the lad's blood soaking through
his doublet; entreaties were poured into his ears.

"I die, I die; oh, the smart, the burn of it!  Leave
me, messire; let me lie still!"

"Nonsense----"

"It is no use; I have it deep, the man's knife went home."

Flavian felt the lad's hands relax, saw his head droop
on his shoulder.  He turned and put him down on the
bed, and knelt there, while Malise panted and strove to
speak.

"Go--messire."

Flavian was trying to staunch the flow from the boy's
neck with a corner of the sheeting.  His own doublet was
drenched with blood.  In a minute he saw the futility
of such unconscious heroism; the flickering taper by the
bed told that Malise's life would ebb before its own light
would be gutted.  Blows were being dealt upon the door.
Flavian kissed the lad, took the taper, and passed out by the
panel in the wainscotting.

A stairway led him to a little gate that opened on the
abbot's garden.  He more than thought to find the passage
disputed, but the place stretched quiet before him as he
came out with sword drawn.  The scent of the flowers
and fragrant shrubs was heavy on the night air, and the
shouts of the mob sounded over the black roofs, and rang
in his ears with an inspiriting fury.

There was a gate at the far end of the garden, opening
through a stone wall into a narrow alley, and Flavian, as
he scoured the paths, could see pike points bobbing
above the wall, and a flare of torches.  Men were
breaking in even here, and he was caught like a rat in a
corner.  In an angle of the wall he found a big
marrow bed, and crawling under the leaves like a worm, he
smeared dirt over his face and clothes and awaited
developments.  In another minute the garden gate fell
away, and a tatterdemalion rout poured in, strenuous
and frothy as any tavern pack.  They spread over the
garden towards the house, shouting and blaspheming
like a herd of satyrs.  Flavian saw his chance, plunged
from his dark corner, and joined the mob of moving
figures.  Dirty face and dirtier clothes were in kindred
keeping.  He shouted as lustily as any, and by dint of
gradual and discreet circumlocutions, edged to the gate
and escaped into the now-deserted alley.

Running on, he skirted the abbey and came out into
the square that flanked the abbey church, and the great
gate.  A hundred torches seemed moving behind the
abbey windows.  The square teemed and smoked with
riot.  Flavian went into the crowd with drawn sword,
screeching out mob cries like any huckster, smiting men
on the back, laughing and swearing as in excellent
humour.  His gusto saved him.  As he passed through
the mob he saw heads, gory and mangled, dancing upon
pikes; he saw women drunk with beer and violence,
waving a severed foot or hand, kissing men, hugging
each other, mouthing unutterable obscenities in the mad
delirium of the hour.  He saw whelps of boys scrambling
and struggling for some ghastly relic; scavengers and
sweeps dressed up in the habits of the Benedictines they
had slain.  One man carried in his palm an eye that had
been torn from its socket, which he held with a leer in
the faces of his fellows.  Further still, he saw half a dozen
beggars dragging the dead body of a lady over the stones
by cords fastened to the ankles, while dogs worried and
tore at the flesh.  He learnt afterwards that it was the
body of his own cousin, a young girl who had been
lately betrothed.  Last of all, he saw a carcase dangling
from a great iron lamp bracket in the centre of the
square, and understood from the crowd that it was the
body of the abbot, his uncle.  Men and women were
pelting it with offal.

And he, an aristocrat of aristocrats, dirty and dishevelled,
rubbed shoulders with the scourings of the gutter, shouted
their shouts, echoed their exultation.  At first the grim
humour of the thing smote him in grosser farcical fashion;
but the mood was not for long.  He remembered Malise,
whimpering and quivering in his arms; he remembered the
body dragged about the square and worried by dogs; he
remembered the carcase swinging by the rope; he remembered
the dripping heads and the fragments of flesh tossed
about by the maddened and intoxicated mob.  It was then
that his eyes grew hot with shame and his blood ran like
lava through his veins.  It was then that the spirit of a
vampire rushed into his heart, and that he swore great
solemn oaths by all the bones and relics of the saints.  God
give him a hale body out of Gilderoy, and this city scum
should be scourged with iron and roasted by fire.

He got across the square by dint of his noisy hypocrisy,
and turned morosely into a dark alley that led towards the
walls.  Hot-hearted gentleman, the mere panic-stricken
thirst for existence had cooled out of him, and he was in a
fine, rendering passion to his finger-tips, a striding,
blasphemous temper, that longed to take the whole city by the
throat and beat a fist in its bloated face.  He wondered
what had become of his knights, esquires, and men-at-arms.
It was told him in later days how they died fighting in the
abbey refectory, died with the Benedictines at their side,
and a rare barrier of corpses to tell of the swing of their
swords.

Flavian dodged into a dark porch to consider his
circumstances and the baffling influence of the same.  He
had caught enough from the mob to comprehend what had
occurred, and what was to follow.  Certainly for many
months he had heard rumours, but, like other demigods, he
had turned a deaf ear and smiled like a Saturn.  The
largeness of the upheaval stupefied him at first; now, as he
pondered it, it gave a more heroic colour to his passions.

To be free of Gilderoy: that was the necessity.  He
guessed shrewdly enough that the gates would be well
guarded.  And the walls!  He smote his thigh and
remembered where the river coursed round the rocky
foundations, and washed the walls.  A big plunge, a swim, and
he would have liberty enough and to spare.

He set off instanter down alleys and byways, through the
most poverty-stricken quarter of the city.  The place had
a hundred stenches on a hot summer night.  Naturally
enough, such haunts were deserted, save for a few hags
garrulous at the doorways, and a few fragments of dirt,
called by courtesy, children.  The rats had gone
marauding, leaving their offal heaps empty.

Keen as a fox, he threaded on, and came before long to
the walls, a black mass, rising above the hovels packed like
pigsties to the very ramparts.  Avoiding a tower, he held
along a lane that skirted the wall, looking for one of the
many stairways leading to the battlements.  It was here, in
the light of a tavern window, that he came plump upon two
sweaty artisans, rendered somewhat more gross and insolent
by the fumes of liquor.  The men challenged Flavian with
drunken arrogance; they had their password, to the devil.
All the accumulated viciousness of an hour tingled in his
sword arm.  He fell upon the men like a Barak, kicked
one carcase into the gutter, and ran on.

He was soon up a stairway, and on the walls, finding
them absolutely deserted.  The city stretched behind him,
a black chaos, emitting a grim uproar, its dark slopes
chequered here and there with angry flame.  Before him
swept the river, and he heard it swirling amid the reeds.
Further still, meadows lay open to the stars, and in the
distance stood solemn woods and heights, touched with the
silver of the sky.

He moved on to where a loop of the river curled up to
wash the walls.  The water was in full flood at the place,
and he heard it gurgling cheerily against the stones.
Flavian took a last look at Gilderoy, its castle red with
burning cressets, its multitudinous roofs, its uproar like the
noise of a nest of hornets.  He shook his fist over the
city, climbed the battlements, jumped for it, plunged like a
log, came up spluttering to strike out for the further bank.

In the meadows the townsfolk kept horses at graze.
Flavian, aglow to the finger-tips, with water squelching
from his shoes, caught a cob that was hobbled in a field
hard by the river.  He unhobbled the beast, hung on by
the mane, mounted, and set off bare-back for the road to
Gambrevault.





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   XXVIII

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Dawn climbing red over pinewoods piled on the hills;
dawn optimistic yet ominous, harbinger of war and such
perils as set the heart leaping and the blood afire; dawn
that cried unto the world, "Better one burst of heroism
and then the grave, than a miserable monotony of nothingness,
a domestic surfeiting of the senses with a wife and a
fat larder."

Out of the east climbed the man on the stolen horse,
riding out of the dawn with the lurid phantasms of the
night still running riot in his brain.  No sleep had
smoothed the crumpled page, or touched the memory with
unguent to assuage the smart.  Maledictions, vengeances,
prophecies of fire and sword rushed with the red dawn over
the hills.

With forty miles behind him, he came on his jaded,
sweaty beast towards his own castle of Gambrevault,
forded his own stream, saw his mills gushing foam, heard
the thunder of the weir.  How eternally peaceful
everything seemed in the dewy amber light of the dawn!
Away rolled the downs, billows of glorious green, into the
west.  Gambrevault's towers rose against the blue; he
saw the camp in the meadows; his own banner blowing to
the breeze.

The meadows that morning were quiet as a graveyard,
as the Lord Flavian rode through to the great gate of
Gambrevault.  Soldiers idling about, stiffened up, saluted,
stared in astonishment at the grim, morose-faced man, who
rode by on a foundered horse, looking neither to the right
hand nor the left.  He cut something of a figure, as though
he had been in a tavern brawl, and had spent the night
snoring in a cow-house.  Yet there was an indescribable
power and dignity in the tatterdemalion rider for all his
tumbled look.  The compressed lips, knotted brow,
smouldering eyes spoke of phenomenal emotions, phenomenal
passions.  Not a man cheered, and the silence was
yet more eloquent than clamour.  He rode in by the great
gate, and parrying the blank glances and interrogations of his
knights, called for two esquires, and withdrew to his own
state rooms.

His first trouble was to acknowledge such necessities
as hunger and cleanliness.  He contrived to compass both
at once, eating ravenously even while he was in the bath.
His next command was for his harness, and his esquires
armed him, agog for news, even waxing inquisitive, to be
snubbed for their pains.

"Assemble my knights and gentlemen in the great hall,"
ran his order, and after praying awhile in his own private
oratory, he passed down to join the assemblage, solemn
and soul-burdened as a young Jove.

There is a certain vain satisfaction in being the possessor
of some phenomenal piece of news, wherewith to astonish
a circle of friends.  The dramatic person blurts it out like
a stage duke; the real epicure lets it filter through his
teeth in fragments, watching with a twinkling satisfaction
its effect upon his hearers.  The Lord Flavian's revelations
that morning were deliberate and gradual, leisurely in the
extreme.  Many a man waxes flippant or cynical when his
feelings are deep and sincere, and he is disinclined to bare
his heart to the world.  Flavian addressed his assembled
knights with a certain stinted and pedantic courtliness;
when they had warmed to his level, then he could indulge
his sympathies to the full.  The atmosphere about those
who wait to hear our experiences or opinions is often like
cold water, somewhat repellent till the first plunge has been
tried.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I regret to inform you that
the Abbot Porphyry, my uncle, is numbered with the saints."

So much for the first confession; it elicited a
sympathetic murmur from those assembled, a very proper and
respectable expression of feeling, but nothing passionate.

"I also have to inform you, with much Christian resignation,
that Sir Jordan and Sir Kay, Malise, my page, and
some twenty men-at-arms are in all human probability dead."

This time some glimmer of light pervaded the hall.
There was still mystification, silence, and an exchanging
of glances.

"Finally, gentlemen, I may confess to you that a great
insurrection is afoot in the land; that Gilderoy has
declared against the King and the nobility; that the scum
of a populace has made a great massacre of the magnates;
that I, gentlemen, by the grace of God, have escaped to
preach to you of these things."

A chorus of grim ejaculations came from the knights
and the captains assembled.  Astonishment, and emotions
more durable, showed on every face.  Flavian gained heat,
and let his tongue have liberty; at the end of ten minutes
of fervid oratory, the men were as wise as their lord and
every wit as vicious.  Gilderoy had signalised her rising
in blood; mob rule had been proclaimed; the peasantry
and townsfolk had thrown down the glove to the nobles.
These were bleak, plain facts, that touched to the quick
the men who stood gathered in the great hall of
Gambrevault.  Not a sword was in its scabbard when Modred's
deep voice gave the cry--

"God and St. Philip--for the King."

Then like a powder bag flung into a fire came the news
of the storming and wrecking of Avalon.  A single
man-at-arms had escaped the slaughter, escaped by crawling down
an offal shoot and hiding till the rebels evacuated the place
and marched under cover of night for Geraint.  The man
had crept out and fled on foot from the stricken place for
Gambrevault.  It was a tramp of ten leagues, but he had
stuck to it through the night like a Trojan, and, knowing
the road well, had reached Gambrevault before the sun was
at noon.  They brought him before Flavian and the rest,
fagged to the fifth toe, and hardly able to stand.  He told
the whole tale, as much as he knew of it, in a blunt yet
dazed way.  His senses appeared numbed by the deeds that
had been done that night.

Flavian leant back in his escutcheoned chair, and gnawed
at his lip.  This last thrust had gone home more keenly
than the rest.  That castle of lilies, Avalon the fair, was
but a friend of wood and stone, yet a friend having
wondrous hold upon his heart.  He had been born there, and
under the shadows of its towers his mother had taken her
last sacrament.  Men can love a tree, a cottage, a stream;
Flavian loved Avalon as being the temple of the unutterable
memories of the past.  Desolation and ruin!  Bertrand, his
old master at arms, slain!  He sprang up like an Achilles
with the ghost of Patroclus haunting his soul.

"Gentlemen, shall these things pass?  Hear me, God
and the world, hear my oath sworn in this my castle of
Gambrevault.  May I never rest till these things are
reprieved in blood, till there are too few men to bury the
dead.  Though my walls fall, and my towers totter, though
I win ruin and a grave, I swear by the Sacrament to do such
deeds as shall ring and resound in history."

So they went all of them together, and swore by the
body and blood of the Lord to take such vengeance as
the sword alone can give to the hot passions of mankind.

That noon there was much stir and life in Gambrevault.
The camp hummed like a wasp's nest when violence
threatens; the men were ready to run to arms on the
first sounding of the trumpet.  Armourers and farriers
were at work.  Flavian had sent out two companies of
light horse to reconnoitre towards Gilderoy and Geraint.
They had orders not to draw rein till they had sure view
of such rebel voices as were on the march; to hang on the
horizon; to watch and follow; to send gallopers to
Gambrevault; on no account to give battle.  Companies were
despatched to drive in the cattle from the hills, and to
bring in fodder.  The Gambrevault mills were emptied of
flour, and burnt to the ground, in view of their being of
use to the rebels in case of a siege.  Certain cottages and
outhouses under the castle walls were demolished to leave
no cover for an attacking force.  The cats, tribocs,
catapults, and bombards upon the battlements were overhauled,
and cleared for a siege.

Towards evening, human wreckage began to drift in
from the country, bearing lamentable witness to the
thoroughness of Fulviac's incendiarism.  Gambrevault might
have stood for heaven by the strange scattering of folk who
came to seek its sanctuary.  Fire and sword were abroad
with a vengeance; cottars, borderers, and villains had risen
in the night; treachery had drawn its poniard; even the
hound had snapped at its master's hand.

Many pathetic figures passed under the great arch of
Gambrevault gate that day.  First a knight came in on
horseback, a baby in his arms, and a woman clinging
behind him, sole relics of a home.  Margaret, the
grey-haired countess of St. Anne's, was brought in on a litter
by a few faithful men-at-arms; her husband and her two
sons were dead.  Young Prosper of Fountains came in on
a pony; the lad wept like a girl when questioned, and told
of a mother and a sire butchered, a home sacked and burnt.
There were stern faces in Gambrevault that day, and looks
more eloquent than words.  "Verily," said Flavian to
Modred the Strong, "we shall have need of our swords,
and God grant that we use them to good purpose."

So night drew near, and still no riders had come from
the companies that had ridden out to reconnoitre towards
Gilderoy and Geraint.  Flavian had had a hundred duties on
his hands: exercising his courtesy to the refugees, condoling,
reassuring; inspecting the defences and the siege train;
superintending the victualling of the place.  He had
ordered his troops under arms in the meadows, and had
spoken to them of what had passed at Gilderoy, and what
might be looked for in the future.  There seemed no lack
of loyalty on their part.  Flavian had ever been a
magnanimous and a generous overlord, glad to be merciful, and
no libertine at the expense of his underlings.  His
feudatories were bound to him by ties more strong than mere
legalities.  They cheered him loudly enough as he rode
along the lines in full armour, with fifty knights following
as his guard.

Night came.  Outposts had been pushed forward to the
woods, and a strong picket held the ford across the river.
On the battlements guards went to and fro, and clarions
parcelled out the night, and rang the changes.  In the east
there was a faint yellowish light in the sky, a distant glare
as of a fire many miles away.  In the camp men were
ready to fly to arms at the first thunder of war over the
hills.

Flavian held a council in the great hall, a council
attended by all his knights and captains.  They had a great
map spread upon the table, a chart of the demesnes of
Gambrevault and Avalon, and the surrounding country.
Their conjectures turned on the possible intentions of the
rebels, whether they would venture on a campaign in the
open, or lie snug within walls and indulge in raids and
forays.  And then--as to the loyalty of their own troops?
On this point Flavian was dogmatic, having a generous
and over-boyish heart, not quick to credit others with
treachery.

"I would take oath for my own men," he said; "their
fathers have served my fathers; I have never played the
tyrant; there is every reason to trust their loyalty."

An old knight, Sir Tristram, had taken a goodly share in
the debate, a veteran from the barons' wars, and a man of
honest experience, no mere pantaloon.  His grey beard
swept down upon his cuirass; his deep-set eyes were full
of intelligence under his bushy brows; the hands that
were laid upon the table were clawed and deformed by gout.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I have not the fitness and
youth of many of you, but I can lay claim to some
wisdom in war.  To my liege lord, whom, sirs, I honour as a
man of soul, I would address two proverbs.  First, despise
not, sire, your enemies."

Modred laughed in his black beard.

"Reverence the scum of Gilderoy?"

"Ha, man, if we are well advised, these folk have been
breathed upon by fanaticism.  I tell you, I have seen a
meanly-born crowd make a very stubborn day of it with
some of the best troops that ever saw service.  Secondly,
sire, I would say to you, turn off your mercenaries if the
sky looks black; never trust your neck to paid men when
any great peril threatens."

Flavian, out of his good sense, agreed with Tristram.

"Your words are weighty," he said.  "So long as we are
campaigning, I will pay them well and keep them.  If
it comes to a siege, I will have no hired bravos in
Gambrevault.  And now, gentlemen, it is late; get what sleep
you may, for who knows what may come with the morrow.
Modred and Geoffrey, I leave to you the visiting of the
outposts to-night.  Order up my lutists and flute-players; I
shall not sleep without a song."

He passed alone to the outer battlements, and let the
night expand about his soul, the stars touch his
meditations.  From the minstrels' gallery in the hall came the
wail of viols, the voices of flute, dulcimer and bassoon
keeping a mellow under-chant.  He heard the sea upon
the rocks, saw it glimmering dimly to end in a fringe of foam.

So his thoughts soared to the face of one woman in the
world, the golden Eve peering out of Paradise, whose
soul seemed to ebb and flow like the moan of the distant
music.  He fell into deep forecastings of the future.
He remembered her words to him, her mysterious warnings,
her inexplicable inconsistencies, her appeal to war.
Gilderoy had taught him much, and some measure of
truth shone like a dawn spear in the east.  A gulf of
war and vengeance stretched from his feet.  Yet he let
his soul circle like a golden moth about the woman's
beauty, while the wail of the viols stole out upon his ears.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXIX`:

.. class:: center large

   XXIX

.. vspace:: 2

Little store of sleep had the Lord of Gambrevault that
night.  War with all its echoing prophecies played through
his thought as a storm wind through the rotting casements
of a ruin.  He beheld the high hills red with beacons, the
valleys filled with the surging steel of battle.  Gilderoy
and its terrors flamed through his brain.  Above all, like
the moon from a cloud shone the face of Yeoland, the
Madonna of the Forest.

He was up and armed before dawn, and on the topmost
battlements, eager for the day.  The sun came with
splendour out of the east, hurling a golden net over the
woods piled upon the hills.  Mists moved from off the
sea, that shimmered opalescent towards the dawn.  Brine
laded the breeze.  The waves were scalloped amber and
purple, fringed with foam about the agate cliffs.

The hours were void to the man till riders should come
in with tidings of how the revolt sped at Gilderoy and
Geraint.  The prophetic hints that had been tossed to
him from the tongues of the mob had served to discover
to him his own invidious fame.  Gambrevault, on its
rocky headland, stood, the strongest castle in the south, a
black mass looming athwart the perilous path of war.
The rebels would smite at it.  Of that its lord was
assured.

At noon he attended mass in the chapel, with all his
knights, solacing his impatience with the purer aspirations
of the soul.  It was even as he left the chapel that Sir
Modred met him, telling how a galloper had left the
woods and was cantering over the meadows towards the
headland.  The man was soon under the arch of the great
gate, his sweating horse smiting fire from the stones,
dropping foam from his black muzzle.  The rider was
Godamar, Flavian's favourite esquire, a ruddy youth, with the
heart of a Jonathan.

Modred brought him to the banqueting-hall, where
Flavian awaited him in full harness, two trumpeters at his
back.

"Sire, Geraint has risen."

"Ha!"

"They are marching on Gambrevault."

"Your news, on with it."

Godamar told how the troop had neared Geraint at eve
and camped in the wood over night.  At dawn they had
reconnoitred the town, and seen, to their credit, black
columns of "foot" pouring out by all the gates.  The
Gambrevault company had fallen back upon the woods
unseen, and had watched the Gerainters massing in the
city meadows about a red banner and one in armour upon
a white horse.  Godamar had lain low in a thicket and
watched the rebels march by in the valley.  They had
passed between two hundred paces of him, and he swore
by Roland the Paladin that it was a woman who rode the
great white horse.

Flavian had listened to the man with a golden flux of
fancy that had divined something of the esquire's meaning.

"Godamar," he said.

"Sire?"

"You rode with me that day when we tracked a certain
lady from Cambremont glade towards the pine forest."

"Sire, you forestall me in thought."

"So?"

"I could even swear upon my sword that it is Yeoland
of Cambremont who rides with the Gerainters."

Flavian coloured and commended him.  Godamar ran on.

"I threaded the thicket, sire, made a detour, galloped
hard and rejoined our company.  The Gerainters were
blind as bats; they had never a scout to serve them.  We
kept under cover and watched their march.  They came
due west in three columns, one following the other.  Six
miles from Geraint, Longsword gave me a spare horse and
sent me spurring to bring you the news."

Flavian stroked his chin and brooded.

"Their numbers?" he asked anon.

"Ten thousand men, sire, we guessed it such."

Before Godamar had ended his despatch, a second
galloper came in breathless from Gilderoy.  He had left
Fulviac's rebels massing in the meadows beyond the river,
and had kept cover long enough to see the foremost
column wheel westwards and take the road for
Gambrevault.  The scout numbered the Gilderoy force at
anything between eight and twelve thousand pikes.  Fulviac
had been on the march three hours.

The Lord of Avalon stood forward in the oriel in the
full light of the sun.  Sea, hill, and woodland stretched
before him under a peerless sky.  There was the scent of
brine in the breeze, the banner of youth was ablaze upon
the hills.  A red heart beat under his shimmering cuirass,
red blood flushed his brain.  It was a season of romance
and of lusty daring, an hour when his manhood shone
bright as his burnished sword.

Thoughts were tumbling, moving over his mind like
water over a wheel.  Geraint stood ten leagues from
Gambrevault, Gilderoy thirteen.  The Geraint forces had
been on the march six hours or more, the men of Gilderoy
only three.  Hence, by all the craft of Araby, they of Geraint
were three hours and three leagues to the fore.  Bad
generalship without doubt, but vastly prophetic to the man
figuring in the oriel, his fingers drumming on the stone
sill.

Strategy stirred in him, and waxed like a dragon created
from some magic crystal into the might of deeds.  The
Lord of Gambrevault caught the strong smile of chivalry.
A great venture burnt upon his sword.  It was no
uncertain voice that rang through the hall of Gambrevault.

"Gentlemen, to horse!  Trumpets, blow the sally!  Let
every man who can ride, mount and follow me to-day.
Blow, trumpets, blow!"

The brazen throats brayed from the walls, their shrill
scream echoing and echoing amid the distant hills.  Their
message was like the plunging of a boulder into a pool,
smiting to foam and clamour the camp in the meadows.
Swords were girded on, spears plucked from the sods,
horses saddled and bridled in grim haste.  In one short,
stirring hour Flavian rode out from Gambrevault with
twelve hundred steel-clad riders at his back.  Those on
the walls watched this mass of fire and colour
thundering over the meadows, splashing through the ford,
smoking away to the east with trumpets clanging, banneroles
adance.  There was to be great work done that day.
The sentinels on the walls gossiped together, and swore by
their lord as he had been the King.

Gambrevault and its towers sank back against the skyline,
its banner waving heavily above the keep.  Flavian's
mass of knights and men-at-arms held over the eastern
downs that rolled greenly above the black cliffs and the
blue mosaics of the sea.  A brisk breeze laughed in their
faces, setting plumes nodding, banneroles and pensils aslant.
Their spears rose like the slim masts of many sloops in a
harbour.  The sun shone, the green woods beckoned to
the glittering mass with its forest of rolling spears.

Flavian's pride whimpered as he rode in the van with
Modred, Godamar, who bore the banner of Gambrevault,
and Merlion d'Or, his herald.  The man felt like a Zeus
with a thunderbolt poised in his hand.  A word, the flash
of a sword, the cry of a trumpet, and all this splendid
torrent of steel would leap and thunder to work his will.
The star of chivalry shone bright in the heavens.  As
for this woman on the white horse, the Madonna of the
Pine Forest, God and the saints, he would charge the
whole world, hell and its legions, to win so rich a prize.

Turning northwards, with scouts scattered in the far
van, they drew to wilder regions where the dark and
saturnine outposts of the great pine forest stood solemn upon
the hills.  Dusky were the thickets against the sapphire
sky, the cloud banners trailing in the breeze.  The very
valleys breathed of battle and sudden peril of the sword.
Rounding a wood, they saw riders flash over the brow of a
hill and come towards them at a gallop.  The men drew
rein before the great company of spears.  Their leader
saluted his lord, and glanced round grimly upon the sea of
steel dwindling over the green slopes.

"Sire, we are well-fortuned."

"Say on."

"Ten thousand rebels from Geraint are on the march
two miles away.  Godamar has given you the news.  We
are on the crest of the wave."

Flavian tightened his baldric.

"Good ground to the east, Longsword?"

"Excellent for 'horse,' sire."

"To our advantage?"

"Half a mile further towards Geraint there lies a grass
valley, a league long, four furlongs from wood to wood.
The rebels will march through it, or I am a dotard.
There stands your chance, sire.  We can roll down on
them like a torrent."

Flavian took time by the throat, and called on his man
of the tabard.

"Make me this proclamation," quoth he: "'Gentlemen
of Gambrevault, strike for King and chivalry.  Let
vengeance dye your swords.  As for the lady riding upon
the white horse, mark you, sirs, let her be as the Virgin out
of heaven.  We ride to take her and her banner.  For
the rest, no quarter and no prisoners.  We will teach this
mob the art of war.'"

The man of the tabard proclaimed it as he was bidden.
The iron ranks thundered to him like billows foaming about
a rock.  Modred claimed silence with uplifted sword.

"Enough, gentlemen, enough.  No bellowing.  Muzzle
your temper.  We make our spring in silence, that we
may claw the harder."

A line of hills lay before them, heights crowned with
black pine woods, save for one bare ridge like a great
scimitar carving the sky.  Flavian advanced his companies
up the slopes, halted them in a broad hollow under the
brow of the hill.  A last galloper had ridden in with hot
tidings of the rebels.  The Lord of Gambrevault, with Sir
Modred and Longsword, cantered on to reconnoitre.  They
drew to a thicket of gnarled hollies on the hilltop, and
looked down upon a long grass valley bounded north and
south by woods.

Half a mile away came the rebel vanguard, a black mass
of footmen plodding uphill, their pikes and bills shining in
the sun.  Pennons and gonfalons danced here and there,
while in the thick of the column flew the red banner of the
Forest, girt about by the spears of Yeoland's guard.  She
could be seen on her white horse in the midst of the press.
The Gerainters were split into three columns, the second
column half a mile behind the first, the third somewhat
closer upon the second.  They were marching without
outriders, as though thoroughly assured of their own safety.

Modred chuckled grimly through his black beard, and
smote his thigh.

"Fools, fools!"

"Devilish generalship," quoth Longsword under his
beaver.  "We can crush their van like a wheatfield before
the rest can come up.  What say you, sire, fewtre spears,
and at them?"

Flavian had already turned his horse.

"No sounding of trumpets, sirs," he said; "we will
deal only with their van.  Call up our companies.  God
and St. Philip for Gambrevault!"

Over the bare ridge, with its barriers of sun-steeped
trees, steel shivered and spears bristled, rank on rank, wave
on wave.  With a massed rhythm of hoofs, the flood
crested the hill, plunged down at a gallop with fewtred
spears.  Knee to knee, flank to flank, a thousand streaks
of steel deluged the hillside.  Their trumpets throated now
the charge; the iron ranks clashed and thundered, rocked
on with a rush of glittering shields.

As dust rolling before a March wind, so the horsemen
of Gambrevault poured down on the horde of wavering
pikes.  The storm had come sudden as thunder out of a
summer sky.  Before the hurtling impact of that bolt of
war, the palsied ranks of foot crumbled like rotten timber.
The Gerainters were too massed and too amazed to
squander or give ground, to stem with bill and bow the
rolling torrent of death.  They were rent and trampled,
trodden like straw under the stupendous avalanche of steel
that crushed and pulverised with ponderous and invincible
might.

"God and Gambrevault, kill, kill!"

Such was the death-cry thundered out over the rebel
van.  The column broke, burst into infinite chaos.
Yeoland's guards alone stood firm, a tough core of oak
amid rotten tinder.  Over the trampled wreckage the
fight swirled and eddied, circling about the knot of steel
where the red banner flapped in the vortex of the storm.

Yeoland sat dazed on her white horse, as one in the
grip of some terrific dream.  Nord was at her side,
snarling, snapping his jaw like a wolf, his great iron
mace poised over his shoulder.  The red banner flapped
prophetic above their heads.  Around them the fight
gathered, a whirlwind of contorted figures and stabbing
steel.

Yeoland's eyes were on one figure in the press, a man
straddling a big bay horse, smiting double-handed with
his sword, his red plume jerking in the hot rush of the
fight.  She saw horse and man go down before him;
saw him buffet his way onward like a galley ploughing
against wind and wave.  His leaping sword and tossing
plume came steady and strenuous through the girdle of
death.

Fear, pride, a hundred battling passions played like the
battle through the woman's mobile brain.  She watched
the man under the red plume with an intensity of feeling
that made her blind to all else for the moment.  Love
seemed to struggle towards her in bright harness through
the fight.  She saw the last rank of the human rampart
pierced.  The man on the bay horse came out before her
like some warrior out of an old epic.

None save Nord stood between them, shaggy and grim
as a great Norse Thor.  She watched the iron mace
swing, saw it fall and smite wide.  Flavian stood in the
stirrups, both hands to the hilt, his horse's muzzle rammed
against the opposing brute's chest.  The blow fell, a
great cut laid in with all the culminating courage of an
hour.  The sword slashed Nord's gorget, buried its blade
in the bull-like neck.  He clutched at his throat, toppled,
slid out of the saddle and rolled under his horse's hoofs.

.. _`"THE SWORD SLASHED NORD'S GORGET, BURIED ITS BLADE IN THE BULL-LIKE NECK."`:

.. figure:: images/img-202.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: "THE SWORD SLASHED NORD'S GORGET, BURIED ITS BLADE IN THE BULL-LIKE NECK."

   "THE SWORD SLASHED NORD'S GORGET, BURIED ITS BLADE IN THE BULL-LIKE NECK."

The man's hand snatched at the girl's bridle; he
dragged her and her horse out of the press.  She had a
confused vision of carnage, of stabbing swords and
trampling hoofs.  She saw her banner-bearer fall forward on his
horse's neck, thrust through with a sword, while Modred
seized the banner staff from his impotent hand.  The
rebel column had deliquesced and vanished.  In its stead
she was girdled by grim and exultant horsemen whose
swords flashed in the sun.

Trumpets blew the retreat.  A thousand glittering
riders swarmed about her and the knight with the red
plume.  She had his words confusedly in her ears, strong,
passionate words, heroic, yet utterly tender.  They rode
uphill together amid the clangour of his men.  In a
minute they had won the ridge, and were swinging down
the further slope with their faces towards Gambrevault.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXX`:

.. class:: center large

   XXX

.. vspace:: 2

Paris and Helen have been dead centuries, yet in that
universal world of the mind they still live, young and glorious
as when the Grecian galleys ploughed foam through the blue
Ægean.  The world loves a lover.  Troilus stages our own
emotions for us in godlier wise than we poor realists can
hope to do.  We owe an eternal gratitude to those who
have stood for love in history.  All men might well desire
to play the Tristan to Iseult of the Irish eyes.  We forget
Gemma Donati, and follow with Dante's wistful idealism
the gleaming figure of Beatrice in Paradise.

Now the Lord Flavian was one of those happy persons
who seem to stumble into heaven either by prodigious
instinct or remarkable good-fortune.  God gives to many
men gold; to others intellect; to some truth; to few, a
human echo, a harmony in the spirit, the right woman in
the world.  Many of us are such unstable folk that we
vibrate vastly to a beautiful face and hail heaven in a pair
of violet eyes.  The chance is that such a business turns
out miserably.  It is a wise rule to search the world through
to find your Beatrice, or bide celibate to the end.  Happy
is the man whose instinctive choice is ratified by all the
wisest poetry of heaven.  Happy is he who finds a ruby as
he rakes the ephemeral flower-gardens of life, a gem eternally
bright and beautiful, durable, unchanging, flashing light ever
into the soul.  It is given to few to love wisely, to love
utterly, to love till death.

That summer day Flavian saw life at its zenith, as he
rode through the woods on the way to Gambrevault.  The
horse had dropped to a trot, and the man had taken off his
helmet and hung it at his saddle-bow.  He was still red
from the mêlée; his eyes were bright and triumphant.
The girl at his side looked at him half-timidly, a tremor
upon her lip, her glances clouded.  The terrific action of
the last hour still seemed to weigh upon her senses, and she
seemed fated to be the sport of contending sentiments.  No
sooner had she struggled to some level of saintliness than
love rushed in with burning wings, and lo, all the tinsel of
her religion fell away, and she was a mere Eve, a child
of Nature.

Flavian watched her with the tenderness of a strong
man, who is ready to give his life for the woman he
serves.  Love seemed to rise from her and play upon him
like perfume from a bowl of violets; her eyes transfigured
him, and he longed to touch her hair.

"At last."

"Lord?"

"Treat me as a man, I hate that epithet."

"You are a great signor."

"What are titles, testaments, etiquettes to us!  I am
only great so long as you trust and honour me."

"Your power might appear precarious."

"As you will."

"Yet war is loose!"

He looked round upon the sea of men that rolled on
every hand.

"And war at its worst.  I have seen enough in three
days to make me loathe your partisans and their principles."

"Perhaps."

"It is a wicked and inhuman business."

"What are you going to do with me?" she said.

"Remove you from the hands of butchers and offal-mongers;
put you like a pearl in a casket in my own
castle of Gambrevault."

"You incur the greater peril."

"Have I not told you that no woman loves a coward?"

She was silent awhile, with her eyes wistful and
melancholy, as though some spiritual conflict were passing in her
mind.  Bitterness escaped in the man's words for all his
tenderness and chivalry.  He needed an answer.  Anon
she capitulated and appeared to surrender herself absolutely
to circumstance.  She began to tell Flavian of her
adoption by Fulviac, of her vision in the ruined chapel, of the
part assigned to her as a woman ordained by heaven.  He
heard her in silence, finding quaint pleasure in listening to
her voice, having never heard her talk at such length
before.  Her voice's modulations, its pathos, its many tones,
were more subtle to him than any music, and seemed to
steep in oblivion the grim realities of the last few days.
He watched the play of thought upon her face, sun and
shadow, calm and unrest.  He began to comprehend the
discords he had flung into her life; she was no longer a
riddle to him; her confessions portrayed her soul in warm
and delicate colouring--colouring pathetic and heroically
pure.  He had a glorious sense of joy in an instinctive
conviction that this girl was worthy of all the highest
chivalry a man's heart can conceive of.

Though he had a strong suspicion that he could
humanise her Madonna for her, he refrained from argument,
refrained from dilating on the iniquities her so-called crusades
had already perpetrated.  Moreover, the girl had opened
her heart to him with a delicious and innocent ingenuousness.
He felt that the hour had blessed him sufficiently;
that personalities would be gross and impertinent in the
light of that sympathy that seemed suddenly to have
enveloped them like a golden cloud.  The girl appeared to have
surrendered herself spiritually into his keeping, not sorry
in measure that a strong destiny had decided her doubts
for her.  They were to let political considerations and the
ephemeral turmoils of the times sink under their feet.  It
was sufficient for them to be but a man and a woman, to
forget the forbidden fruit, and the serpent and his lore.
God walked the world; they were not ashamed to hear
His voice.

So they came with their glittering horde of horsemen
to Gambrevault, and rode over the green downs with
towers beckoning from the blue.  The Gilderoy forces
were still miles away, and could not have threatened the
retreat on Gambrevault had they been wise as to the
event.  Yeoland rode close at Flavian's side.  He touched
her hand, looked in her eyes, saw the colour stream to her
cheeks, knew that she no longer was his enemy.

"Yonder stands Gambrevault," were his words; "its
walls shall bulwark you against the world.  Trust me and
my eternal faith to you.  I shall see God more clearly for
looking in your eyes."

He lodged her in a chamber in the keep, a room that
had been his mother's and still held the furniture, books,
and music she had used.  Its window looked out on the
castle garden, and over the double line of walls to the
meadows and woods beyond.  Maud, the castellan's wife,
was bidden to wait upon her.  Flavian gave her the keys
of his mother's chests, where silks, samites, sarcenets galore,
lace and all manner of golden fripperies, were stored.  The
ewers of the room were of silver, its hangings of violet
cloth, its bed inlaid with ivory and hung with purple velvet.
It had a shelf full of beautifully illumined books, a prayer-desk
and a small altar, a harp, a lute, an embroidery frame,
and numberless curios.  Thus by the might of the sword
Yeoland was installed in the great castle of Gambrevault.

So Duessa and Balthasar were dead.  The girl had told
Flavian what had passed in Sforza's palace; the news
shocked him more than he would have dreamed.  The
dead wound us with their unapproachableness and the
mute pathos of their pale, imagined faces.  They are
like our own sins that stare at us from the night sky,
irrevocable and beyond us for ever.  Flavian ordered
tapers to be burnt and masses said in the castle chapel
for the souls of these two unfortunates.  He himself
spent more than an hour in silent prayer before he
confessed, received penance and absolution.

That evening, at Flavian's prayer, Yeoland came down
to meet him in the castle garden, with the castellan's two
girls to serve her as maids of honour.  She had put aside
her armour, and was clad in a jacket of violet cloth,
fitting close to the figure, and a skirt of light blue silk.
In the old yew walk, stately and solemn, amid the bright
parterres and stone urns gushing colour, the two children
slipped away and left Yeoland and the man alone.

She seemed to have lost much of her restraint, much
of her independence, of her reserve, in a few short hours.
Her mood inclined towards silence and a certain delightful
solemnity such as a lover loves.  Her eyes met the
man's with a rare trust; her hands went into his with all
the ideal faith he had forecast in his dreams.

They stood together under the yews, full of youth and
innocent joy of soul, timid, happily sad, content to be
mere children.  Flavian touched her hands as he would
have touched a lily.  She seemed too wonderful, too pure,
too transcendent to be fingered.  A supreme, a godly
timidity possessed him; he had such love in his heart as
only the strong and the pure can know, such love as
makes a man a saint unto himself, a being wrapped round
with the rarest chivalry of heaven.

Their words were very simple and infrequent.

"I have been thinking," said the girl.

"Yes?"

"How war seems ever in the world."

"How else should I have won you?"

She sighed and looked up over his shoulder at the
sunlight glimmering gold through the yews.

"I have been thinking how I bring you infinite peril.
They will not lose me easily.  What if I bring you to
ruin?"

"I take everything to myself."

"They believe me a saint."

"And I!"

"My conscience will reproach me, but now----"

"Well?"

"I am too happy to remember."

Their eyes met and flashed all the unutterable truths
of the soul.  Flavian kissed her hand.

"Forget it all," he said, "save the words I spoke to you
over that forest grave.  Whatever doom may come upon
me, though death frown, I care not; all the sky is at
sunset, all the world is full of song.  I could meet God
to-morrow with a smile, since you have shown me all
your heart."

From a little stone pavilion hidden by laurels the
voices of flutes and viols swirled out upon the air.  The
west grew faint, and twilight increased; night kissed
and closed the azure eyes of the day.  Under the yew
boughs, Flavian and Yeoland walked hand in hand; the
music spoke for them; the night made their faces pale
and spiritual under the trees.  They said little; a tremor
of the fingers, a glance, a sigh were enough.  When the
west had faded, and the last primrose streak was gone,
Flavian kissed the girl's lips and sent her back to the two
children, who were curled on a bench by the laurels,
listening sleepily to the music of flute and viol.

The man's soul was too scintillant and joyous to shun
the stars.  He passed up on to the battlements, and
listened to the long surge of the summer sea.

And as he paced the battlements that night, he saw red,
impish specks of flame start out against the black
background of the night.  They were the rebel watchfires
burning on the hills, sinister eyes, red with the distant
prophecy of war.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXXI`:

.. class:: center large

   XXXI

.. vspace:: 2

It would be difficult to describe the thundercloud of
thought that came down upon Fulviac's face when news
was brought him of the capture of the girl Yeoland and the
decimation of the vanguard from Geraint.  There was
something even Satanic upon his face for the moment.  He
was not a pleasant person when roused, and roused he was
that day like any ogre.  His tongue ran through the whole
gamut of blasphemy before he recovered a finer dignity and
relapsed into a grim reserve.  His men spoke to him with
great suavity.  He had decreed that Nord of the Hammer
should be hanged for negligence, but the decree was
unnecessary, since Flavian's sword had already settled the
matter.

The Gilderoy forces therefore turned northwards, with
their great baggage and siege train, and in due course came
upon the Gerainters bivouacking on the ridge where the
battle had taken place.  The green slopes were specked
with dark motionless figures, dead horses, and the
wreckage of war.  Men were burying the dead upon the
battlefield.  Yeoland's guard had been slaughtered almost to a
man; and the whole affair had damped very considerably
the ardour of certain of the less trustworthy levies.

But Fulviac was not the man to sit and snivel over a
defeat; he knew well enough that he had good men behind
him, tough fighting stuff, fired by fanaticism and a long
sense of wrong.  He harangued his whole force, black-guarded
with his lion's roar those concerned in the march
from Geraint, treating them to such a scourging with
words that they snarled and clamoured to be led on at once
to prove their mettle.  Their leaders had been at fault,
nor did Fulviac keep their spirits cooling in the wind.
The power of his own personality was great, and he had
twenty thousand men at his back, who knew that to fail
meant death and torture.  They had received a check from
the Lord of Gambrevault; it was absolutely essential to
the cause that they should wipe out the defeat, recapture
their Saint and sacred banner, crush Gambrevault once and
for ever.  To this strenuous tune they marched on
towards the sea, and that night lit their fires on the hills
that ringed Gambrevault on the north.

As the sun climbed up and spread a curtain of gold over
down and upland, those on the walls of Gambrevault saw
steel glinting on the hills, the pikes and casques of Fulviac's
horde.  Yeoland saw them from her casement, as she stood
and combed her hair.  Flavian, watching with certain
knights on the keep, confronted the event with a merry
smile.  The shimmering line of silver on the hills had
broadened to a darker band, splashed lavishly with steel.
The rebel host was coming on in a half moon, with each
horn to the sea.  Its centre held towards the ford and the
dismantled Gambrevault mills, positions strongly held on
the southern bank by a redoubt and stockaded trenches.

The criticisms delivered by those watching from the
keep were various and forcible.

"By Jeremy--a rare mob!"

"Let them grip at Gambrevault," said Modred, "and
they shall clutch at a cactus.  Look at that long baggage
train in the rear.  Damn them, I guess they have the
siege train from Gilderoy."

"We shall sweat a trifle."

Quoth Tristram, "They have little time to spare for a
leaguer, rotting in trenches, if they are to make the
country rise.  They'll not leaguer us."

Flavian watched the advance under his hand.

"Fortunately or unfortunately, gentlemen," he said,
"we have taken their Saint, their oracle, and their sacred
banner.  I imagine they will do their best to dispossess us.
It is time we made for the meadows; I reckon we shall
have hot work to-day."

When leaving the keep, Flavian crossed the castle
garden, and caught under the tunnel of yews the flutter of a
woman's gown.  Sunlight glimmered through and wove a
shimmering network in the air.  Green and violet swept
the stones; a white face shone in the shadows.

He went to her and kissed her hands.  His eyes were
brave and joyous as she looked into them, and there was
no shadow of fear upon his face.  Trumpets were blowing
in the meadows, piercing the confused hum of men running
to arms.

"War, ever war!"

"You are sad?"

"Fulviac has the whole kingdom at his back."

"If he led the world, I should not waver."

"With me it is different; I am a woman and you know
my heart."

"So well that I seek to know nothing else in the world,
I desire no greater wisdom than my love.  You are with
me, and my heart sings.  No harm can come to you
whatever doom may fall on Gambrevault."

"Think you my thoughts are all of my own safety?"

"Ah, golden one, never fear for me.  What is life? a
little joy, a little pain, and then eternity.  I would
rather have an hour's glory in the sun than fifty years
of grey monotony.  It is something to fight, and even
to die, for the love of a woman.  There is no shadow
over my soul."

There was a great heroism in his voice, and her eyes
caught the light from his.  She touched his cuirass with
her slim white fingers.

"God keep you!"

"Ha, I do not smell of earth to-day, nor dream of
requiems."

"No, you will come back to me."

"Give me your scarf."

She took the green silk and knotted it about his arm;
a rich colour shone in her cheeks, her eyes were warm
and wonderfully luminous.

"God keep you!"

So he kissed her lips and left her.

The rebel horde had rolled down in their thousands
from the hills.  Flavian saw their black masses moving
from the woods, as he rode down from the great gate.
It was evident to him that Fulviac would try and force
the ford and win his way to the open meadows beyond.
The river ran fast with a deep but narrow channel, and
there was only one other ford some nine miles upstream.
His own men were under arms in the meadows.  With
his knights round him, Flavian rode down to the redoubt
and trenches by the river-bank, packed as they already
were with archers and men-at-arms.  He was loudly
cheered as he reined in and scanned the rebel columns
moving over the downs.

Fulviac had ridden forward with a company of spears
to reconnoitre.  He saw the captured banner of The
Maid hoisted derisively on Gambrevault keep; he saw
the redoubt and the stockades covering the ford; the
foot massed in the meadows; Flavian's mounted men-at-arms
drawn up under the castle walls.  Sforza and several
captains of note were with Fulviac.  The man was in a
grim mood, a slashing Titanic humour.  The passage of
the river was to be forced, Flavian's men engaged in the
meadows.  He would drive them into Gambrevault before
nightfall.  Then they would cast their leaguer, bring up
the siege train taken from Gilderoy, and batter at
Gambrevault till they could storm the place.

Early in the day Fulviac detached a body of two
thousand men under Colgran, a noted free-lance, to march
upstream, cross by the upper ford, and threaten Flavian
on the flank.  The fighting began at ten of the clock,
when Fulviac's bowmen scattered along the river and
opened fire upon the stockades.  Flavian's archers and
arbalisters responded.  A body of five thousand rebels advanced
with great mantlets upon wheels to the northern bank and
entrenched themselves there.  A second body, with waggons
laden with timber and several flat-bottomed boats, poured
down to the river a mile higher up, and began to throw
a rough, raft-like bridge across the stream.  At half-past
ten masses of men-at-arms splashed through the water at
the ford, under cover of a hot fire from the archers lining
the bank, and began an assault upon the redoubt and the
stockades.

By twelve o'clock the bridge higher up the stream had
been completed, and a glittering line of pikes poured across,
to be met on the southern bank by Geoffrey Longsword
and a body of men-at-arms.  It was hand to hand, and
hot and strenuous as could be.  Men grappled, stabbed,
hacked, bellowed like a herd of bulls.  Flavian had
reinforced the defenders of the ford, who still held Fulviac at
bay, despite a heavy archery fire and the almost continuous
assaults poured against the stockades.  Yet by one o'clock
Fulviac's levies had forced the passage of the bridge and
gained footing on the southern bank.  Longsword's men,
outnumbered and repulsed, were falling back before the
black masses of foot that now poured into the meadows.

The situation was critical enough, as Flavian had long
seen, as he galloped hotly from point to point.  Fulviac's
rebels had shown more valour than he had ever prophesied.
Flavian packed all his remaining foot into the trenches, and
putting himself at the head of his knights and mounted
men-at-arms, rode down to charge the troops who had
crossed by the pontoons.  Here chivalry availed him to the
full.  By a succession of tremendous rushes, he drove the
rebels back into the river, did much merciless slaughter, cut
the ropes that held the bridge to the southern bank, so that
the whole structure veered downstream.  The peril seemed
past, when he was startled by the cry that the redoubt had
been carried, and that Fulviac held the ford.

Looking south, he saw the truth with his own eyes.  His
troops were falling back in disorder upon Gambrevault,
followed by an ever-growing mass, that swarmed exultantly
into the meadows.  The last and successful assault had
been led by Fulviac in person.  Flavian had to grip the
truth.  The rebels outnumbered him by more than five to
one; and he had underrated their discipline and fighting
spirit.  He was wiser before the sun went down.

"Come, gentlemen, we shall beat them yet."

"Shall we charge them, sire?"

"Blow bugles, follow me, sirs; I am in no mood for defeat."

That afternoon there was grim work in the Gambrevault
meadows.  Five times Flavian charged Fulviac's columns,
hurling them back towards the river, only to be repulsed in
turn by the fresh masses that poured over by the ford.  He
made much slaughter, lost many good men in the mad,
whirling mêlées.  Desperate heroism inspired on either
hand.  Once he stood in great peril of his own life,
having been unhorsed and surrounded by a mob of rebel pikes.
He was saved by the devotion and heroism of Modred and
his household knights.  With the chivalry of a Galahad, he
did all that a man could to keep the field.  Colgran's flanking
column appeared over the downs, and Fulviac had his whole
host on the southern bank of the river.  The masses advanced
like one man, pennons flying, trumpets clanging.  Flavian
would have charged again, but for the vehement dissuasion
of certain of his elder knights.  He contented himself with
covering the retreat of his foot, while the great gate of
Gambrevault opened its black maw to take them in.  Many
of his mercenaries had deserted to the rebels.  So stubborn
and bloody had been the day, that he had lost close upon half
his force by death and desertion; no quarter had been given
on either side.  He heard the surging shouts of exultation
from the meadows, as he rode sullen and wearied into
Gambrevault.  The great gates thundered to, the portcullises
rattled down.  Fulviac had his man shut up in Gambrevault.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXXII`:

.. class:: center large

   XXXII

.. vspace:: 2

The leaguer was drawn that night about the towers of
Gambrevault, and the castle stood clasped betwixt the
watch-fires and the sea.  Fulviac's rebels, toiling from
evening until dawn, banked and staked a rampart to close
the headland.  From the north alone could Gambrevault
be approached, precipices plunging south, east, and west
to front the sea.  Athwart the grassy isthmus Fulviac drew
his works, running from cliff to cliff, brown earth-banks
bristling with timber.  Mortars, bombards, basilics, and
great catapults had been brought from Gilderoy to batter
the walls.  Redoubts, covered by strong mantlets, were
established in the meadows.  Several small war galleys
guarded the castle on the side of the sea.

Nor was this labour permitted to pass unrebuked before
the leaguered folk upon the headland.  There were sallies,
assaults, bloody tussles in the trenches, skirmishes upon
the causeway.  Yet these fiercenesses brought no flattering
boon to the besieged.  The knights and men-at-arms were
masterful enough with an open field to serve them, but
behind their barricades Fulviac's rebels held the advantage.
The command went forth from Modred the seneschal that
there were to be no more sorties delivered against the
trenches.

On the second day of the leaguer the cannonade began.
Bombard and mortar belched flame and smoke; the huge
catapults strove with their gigantic arms; arbalisters
wound their windlasses behind the ramparts.  Shot
screamed and hurtled, crashed and thundered against the
walls, bringing down mortar and masonry in rattling
showers.  The battlements of Gambrevault spouted flame;
archers plied their bows in bartisan and turret.  A shroud
of dust and smoke swirled about the place, the chaotic
clamour of the siege sending the gulls wheeling and
wailing from the cliffs.

On the very second day Flavian was brought low by a
shot hurling a fragment of masonry upon his thigh and
bruising it to the bone.  Stiff and faint, he was laid abed
in his own state room, unable to stir for the twinging
tendons, loth enough to lie idle.  Modred, bluff, lusty smiter,
took the command from him, and walked the walls.  Hourly
he came in to his lord's chamber to tell of the cannonade
and the state of the castle.  Even Flavian from his
cushions could see that the man's black face looked grim
and sinister.

"How do they vex us?" was his question, as the
thunder came to them from the meadows.

Modred clinked his heels against the wainscotting of
the window seat, and strove to sweeten his looks.  He was
not a man given to blandishing the truth.

"Their damned bombards are too heavy for us.  We are dumb."

"Impossible!"

"Sire, we shall have to hold Gambrevault by the sword."

The man on the bed started up on his elbow, only to
fall back again with a spasmodic twitching of the forehead.

"And our bombards?" he asked.

"Are toppled off their trunnions."

"Ha!"

"For the rest, sire, I have ordered our men to keep
cover.  The bowmen shoot passably.  The outer
battlements are swept."

"And the walls?"

Modred grimaced and stroked his beard.

"There are cracks in the gate-house," quoth he, "that
I could lay my fist in."

What goodlier fortune for a man than to lie bruised
when Love bears to him the bowl of dreams!  What
softer balm than the touch of a woman's hand!  What
more subtle music than her voice!  The girl Yeoland had
betrayed a new wilfulness to the world, in that she now
claimed as her guerdon the care of the man's heart.  She
was in and about his room, a shadow moving in the
sunlight, a shaft of youth, supple and very tender.  Her eyes
had a rarer lustre, her face more of the dawn tint of the
rose.  Love stirred within her soul like the sound of angels
psaltering on the golden battlements of heaven.

As she sat often beside him, Flavian won the whole
romance from her, gradual as glistening threads of silk
drawn from a scarlet purse.  She waxed very solemn over
her tale, was timid at times, and exceeding sorrowful for
all her passion.  Some shadowy fear seemed to companion
her beside the couch, some wraith prophetic of a tragic
end.  She loved the man, yet feared her love, even as it
had been a sword shimmering above his head.  Peril
compassed them like an angry sea; she heard the bombards
thundering in the meadows.

"Ah, sire," she said to him one morning, as she thrust
the flowers she had gathered in the garden into a brazen
bowl, "I am heavy at heart.  Who shall pity me?"

He turned towards her on his cushions with a smile that
was not prophetic of the tomb.

"Do I weary you?"

"Ah no, not that."

"Why then are you sad?"

She held up a white hand in the gloom of the room,
her hair falling like a black cloud upon her bosom.

"Listen," she said to him.

"I am not deaf."

"The thunder of war."

"Well, well, my heart, should I fear it?"

"It is I who fear."

"Ah," he said, taking her hand into his bosom, "put
such fears far from you.  We shall not end this year in dust."

A week passed and the man was on the walls again,
bold and ruddy as a youthful Jove.  Seven days had gone,
swelling with their hours the great concourse in the
meadows.  Pikes had sprouted on the hills like glistening
corn, to roll and merge into the girding barrier of
steel.  The disloyal south had gathered to Fulviac before
Gambrevault like dust in a dry corner in the month of
March.  A great host teemed betwixt the river and the
cliffs.  Through all, the rack and thunder of the siege
went on, drowning the sea's voice, flinging a storm-cloud
over the stubborn walls.  In Gambrevault men looked
grim, and muttered of succour and the armies of the King.

Yet Flavian was content.  He had taken a transcendent
spirit into his soul; he lived to music; drank love and
chivalry like nectar from the gods.  The woman's
nearness made each hour a chalice of gold.  He possessed her
red heart, looked deep into her eyes, put her slim hands
into his bosom.  Her voice haunted him like music out
of heaven.  He was a dreamer, a Lotos-eater, whose brain
seemed laden with all the perfumes of the East.  Ready
was he to drain the purple wine of life even to the dregs,
and to find death in the cup if the Fates so willed it.

And Fulviac?

War had held a poniard at his throat, turning him to the
truth with the threat of steel.  Grim and implacable, he
stalked the meadows, bending his brows upon the towers
of Gambrevault.  This girl of the woods was no more a
dream to him, but supple love, ardent flesh, blood-red
reality.  Lean, leering thoughts taunted the lascivious fears
within his brain.  His moods were silent yet tempestuous.
Gambrevault mocked him.  Vengeance burnt in his palm
like a globe of molten iron.

His dogged temper roused his captains to strenuous
debate.  Fifty thousand men were idle before the place, and
the siege dragged like a homily.  Their insinuations were
strong and strident.  The countryside was emptying its
broad larder; Malgo and Godamar of the Fens were
marching from east and west.  Ten thousand men could
leaguer Gambrevault.  It behoved Fulviac to pluck up
his spears and march on Lauretia, proud city of the King.

For a season Fulviac was stubborn as Gambrevault
itself.  His yellow eyes glittered, and he tossed back his
lion's mane from off his forehead.

"Till the place is ours," so ran his dogma, "I stir never
a foot.  See to it, sirs, we will put these skulkers to the
sword."

His captains were strenuous in retort.

"You mar the cause," said Sforza over the council-board,
thin-lipped and subtle.

"Give me ten thousand men," quoth Colgran the free-lance,
"by my bones I will take the place and bring the
Maid out scatheless."

Prosper the Priest put in his plea.

"You are our torch," he said, "our beacon.  Malgo is
on the march; Godamar has massed behind the creeks of
Thorney Isle.  The country waits for you.  Leave
Gambrevault to Colgran."

And again the free-lance made his oath.

"Give me ten thousand men," quoth he, "by Peter's
blood the place shall tumble in a month."

That same evening, as a last justification of his stubborn
will, Fulviac sent forward a trumpeter under a white flag
to parley with the besieged.  The herald's company drew
to the walls as the sun sank over the sea, setting the
black towers in a splendour as of fire.  Fulviac's troops
were under arms in the meadows, their pikes glittering with
sinister meaning into the purple of the coming night.  The
Lord of Gambrevault, in full harness, met the white flag,
his knights round him, a crescent of steel.

Fulviac's trumpeter proclaimed his terms.  They were
insolently simple, surrender absolute with the mere blessings
of life and limb, a dungeon for the lords, a proffer of
traitorous service to the men.  Yeoland the Saint was to
be sent forth scatheless.  The castle was to be garrisoned
and held by the rebels.

Flavian laughed at the bluff insolence of the demand.

"Ha, sirs," he said, "we are the King's men here.
Get you gone before my gate.  Say to yonder traitor in the
meadows, 'We quail not before scullions and at the frowns
of cooks.'"

Thus, under the red canopy of the warring west, ended
the parley at the gate of Gambrevault.  The white flag
tripped back behind the trenches; the castle trumpets blew
a fanfare to grace its flight.  Yeoland the Saint heard it,
and her lamp of hope burnt dim.

That night Fulviac paced the meadows, his eyes scanning
the black mass upon the cliffs.  Dark as was his humour,
reason ruled him at the climax, powerful to extort the
truth.  Primæval instincts were strong in him, yet he put
them back that hour out of his heart.  Robust and vigorous,
he trampled passion under foot.  At dawn his orders
went forth to the captains and the council.

"Colgran shall command.  Ten thousand men shall
serve him.  Let him storm the place, grant no terms,
spare Yeoland the Maid alone.  Let him butcher the
garrison, and let the ruin rot.  When all have been put to
the sword, let him march and join me before the city of
Lauretia."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXXIII`:

.. class:: center large

   XXXIII

.. vspace:: 2

So Fulviac with his host passed northwards from Gambrevault,
leaving Colgran and his ten thousand to guard the
trenches.  Flavian saw the black columns curl away over
the green slopes, their pikes glittering against the blue
fringe of the horizon, their banners blowing to the breeze.
The red pavilion stood no longer in the meadows; the
man on the black horse rode no more behind the barricades.
Ominous was the marching of the host over the hills, a
prophecy of many battles before the King's men could
succour Gambrevault.

The gate-house stood in ruins, a shattered pile of
masonry barriering the causeway from the meadows.  The
outer curtain wall on the north had been pierced between
two towers; the stone-work crumbled fast, opening a
gradual breach to the rebel sea dammed behind the trenches.
The battlements were rent and ruinous; many a turret
gaped and tottered.  Still the bombards thundered, hurling
their salvos of shot against the place, belching flame even
through the night, while the arms of the great slings toiled
like giant hands in the dark.

As for the girl Yeoland, her joy was dim and flickering,
mocked with constant prophecies of woe.  The sounds of
the siege haunted her perpetually.  Shafts wailed and
whistled, bombards roared, the walls reeked and cracked.
A corner in the garden under the yew walk was the single
nook left her open to the blue hope of heaven.  The
clamour of the leaguer woke a hundred echoes in her
heart.  Above all shone the man's strong face and
passionate eyes; above the moon, the stars, the blue vault of
day, death spread his sable wings, a cloud of gloom.

On the sixteenth day of the siege, Colgran made an
assault in force upon the ruins of the gate-house.  Despite
its chaotic state, Flavian clung to the ruin, and held the
stormers at bay.  Thrice Colgran's rebels advanced to the
attack, and came hand-to-hand with the defenders over the
crumbling piles of stone; thrice they were beaten back and
driven to retreat upon their trenches.  Colgran renounced
the gate-house as impregnable; the slings and bombards
were turned upon the outer wall to widen the breach
already made therein.

It was plain enough even to Yeoland that the siege was
bearing slowly yet surely against Gambrevault.  More
than half a month had passed, and still no succouring
spears shone upon the hills, no sail upon the sea.  Poor
food and summer heat, the crowding of the garrison had
opened a gate to fever and disease.  She saw the stern and
moody faces of the soldiery, their loyalty that took fresh
and hectic fire from the courage of their lord.  She saw
the broken walls and ruined battlements, and heard the
rebels shouting in their trenches.

As the man's peril grew more real and significant, a
fear more vehement entered into her heart.  Sleep left
her; she began to look white and weary, with dark
shadows under her eyes.  The man's warm youth accused
her like a tree that should soon be smitten by the axe.
His fine heroism was a veritable scourge, making the
future full of discords, a charnel-house glimmering with
bleached bones.  She began to know how closely their
lives were mingled, even as wine in a cup of gold.  He
was lord and husband to her in the spirit.  Her red heart
quaked for him like the shivering petals of an autumn rose.

On the day of the assault upon the gate-house, he
came back to her wounded in the arm and shoulder.  He
was faint, but brave and even merry.  She would suffer
none to come in to him, as he sat in a carved chair in her
room that opened on the garden.  The sight of blood
when harness and gamboison were taken from the caked
wounds quickened her fears into a fever of self-torture.
She bathed the wounds and dressed them with fragrant
oil and linen.  Twilight filled the room, and it was not
till her tears fell upon his hand that the man found that
she was weeping.

He drew her towards him with sudden great tenderness,
as she knelt and looked into his face.  Her eyes swam
with tears, her lips quivered.

"My life, why do you weep?"

She started away from him with sudden strength, and
stood by the window, trembling.

"Give me my armour and my banner," she said; "let
me ride to the trenches and barter terms by my surrender.
Sire, let me go, let me go."

He looked at her sadly under his brows, with forehead
wrinkled.

"You would leave me?"

"Ah yes, to save you from the sword.  Is it easy for
me to ask you this?"

"You crave more than I can give."

"No, no."

"I cannot surrender you."

"And for love, you would doom all Gambrevault!"

"Ah!" he cried, "I am wounded, and you would
wound me the more."

She gave a whimper of pain, ran to him, and crept into
his arms.  As her sobs shook her, he bent many times and
kissed her hair.

"Weep not for me," he said; "even when the end
comes no harm can touch you.  I cannot parley with
these wolves; there are women and children under my
roof; should I open my gates to a savage mob?"

"This is your doom," she said to him.

"I take it, child, from heaven."

She wept no more, for a richer heroism took fire within
her heart.  She knelt to the man while he held her
face betwixt his hands, bent over her, and kissed her
forehead.

"Courage, courage, what is death!"

"My God, to lose you."

"There, am I not flesh and blood?  God knows, I
would rather have death than give you to these vultures."

She knelt before him with her face transfigured.

"And death, death can touch me also."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXXIV`:

.. class:: center large

   XXXIV

.. vspace:: 2

August came in with storm and rain, and a dreary wind
blew from the south-west, huddling masses of cloud over
a spiritless sky.  Southwards, the sea tumbled, a grey
expanse edged with foam, its great breakers booming
dismally upon the cliffs.  The wind swept over
Gambrevault, moaning and wailing over battlement and tower,
driving the rain in drifting sheets.  The bombards still
belched and smoked under their penthouses, and the arms
of the catapults rose and fell against the sullen sky.

The eighteenth night of the siege came out of the east
like a thunder bank, and the grey shivering ghost of the
day fled over the western hills.  When darkness had fallen,
the walls of Gambrevault were invisible from the trenches.
Here and there a light shone out like a spark in tinder;
the sky above was black as a cavern, unbroken by the
crack or cranny of a star.

Flavian, fully armed, kept watch upon the breach with
a strong company of men-at-arms.  He had taken the ugly
measure of the night to heart, and had prepared accordingly.
Under the shelter of the wall men slept, wrapped in their
cloaks, with their weapons lying by them.  The sentinels
had been doubled on the battlements, though little could
be seen in the blank murk, and even the keep had to be
looked for before its mass disjointed itself from the
background of the night.

It was treacherous weather, and just the season for an
adventurous enemy to creep from the trenches and attempt
to rush the breach.  Flavian leant upon his long sword,
and brooded.  The black ends of the broken wall stood up
hugely on either hand; rubble and fallen masonry paved
the breach, and a rough rampart of debris had been piled
along the summit.  Around him shone the dull armour of
his men, as they stood on guard in the rain.

The storm deadened soul and body, yet kept Flavian
vigilant with its boisterous laughter, a sound that might
stifle the tramp of stormers pouring to the breach.  He
was not lonely, for a lover can do without the confidences
of others, when he has a woman to speak with in his heart.
In fancy he can lavish the infinite tenderness of the soul,
caress, quarrel, kiss, comfort, with all the idealisms of the
imagination.  The spirit lips we touch are sweeter and
more red than those in the flesh.  To the true man love is
the grandest asceticism the world can produce.

Flavian's figure straightened suddenly as it leant bowed
in thought upon the sword.  He was alert and vigilant,
staring into darkness that baffled vision and hid the
unknown.  A dull, characterless sound was in the air.
Whether it was the wind, the sea, or something more sinister,
he could not tell.  Calling one of his knights to his
side, they stood together listening on the wreckage of the
wall.

A vague clink, clink, came in discord to the wind, a
sound that suggested the cautious moving of armed men.
A hoarse voice was growling warily in the distance, as
though giving orders.  The shrilling noise of steel grew
more obvious each moment; the black void below appeared
to grow full of movement, to swirl and eddy like a lagoon,
whose muddy waters are disturbed by some huge reptile at
night.  The sudden hoarse cries of sentinels rose from the
walls.  Feet stumbled on the debris at the base of the
breach; stormers were on the threshold of Gambrevault.

A trumpet blared in the entry; the guard closed up on
the rampart; sleeping men started from the shadows of the
wall, seized sword and shield as the trumpets' bray rang in
their ears.  Colgran's stormers, discovered in their purpose,
cast caution to the winds, and sent up a shout that should
have wakened all Gambrevault.

In the darkness and the driving rain, neither party could
see much of the other.  The stormers came climbing blindly
up the pile of wreckage in serried masses.  Flavian and
his knights, who held the rampart, big men and large-hearted,
smote at the black tide of bodies that rolled to their
swords.  It was grim work in the dark.  It was no sleepy,
disorderly rabble that held the breach, but a tense line of
steel, that stemmed the assault like a wall.  The stormers
pushed up and up, to break and deliquesce before those
terrible swords.  Modred's deep voice sounded through the
din, as he smote with his great axe, blows that would have
shaken an oak.  There was little shouting; it was
breathless work, done in earnest.  Colgran's men showed pluck,
fought well, left a rampart of dead to their credit, a
squirming, oozing barrier, but came no nearer forcing the breach.

They had lost the propitious moment, and the whole
garrison was under arms, ready to repulse the attacks made
at other points.  Scaling ladders had been jerked forward
and reared against the walls; men swarmed up, but the
rebels gained no lasting foothold on the battlements.  They
were beaten back, their ladders hurled down, masonry
toppled upon the mass below.  Many a man lay with neck
or back broken in the confused tangle of humanity at the
foot of the castle.

Colgran ordered up fresh troops.  It was his policy to
wear out the garrison by sheer importunity and the stress
of numbers.  He could afford to lose some hundred men;
every score were precious now to Flavian.  It was a
system of counter barter in blood, till the weaker vessel ran
dry.  The Lord of Gambrevault understood this rough
philosophy well enough, and husbanded his resources.  He
could not gamble with death, and so changed his men when
the opportunity offered, to give breathing space to all.
Conscious of the strong stimulus of personal heroism, he
kept to the breach himself, and fought on through every
assault with Modred's great axe swinging at his side.  He
owed his life more than once to those gorilla-like arms
and that crescent of steel.

In the outer court, certain of the women folk with
Yeoland dealt out wine and food, and tended the wounded.  In
the chapel, tapers glimmered, lighting the frescoes and the
saints, the priest chanting at the altar, the women and
children who knelt in the shadowy aisles praying for those
who fought upon the walls.  Panic hovered over the pale
faces, the fear, the shivering, weeping, pleading figures.
There was little heroism in Gambrevault chapel, save the
heroism of supplication.  While swords tossed and men
groped for each other in the wind and rain, old Peter the
cellarer lay drunk in a wine bin, and lame Joan, who tended
the linen, was snivelling in the chapel and fingering the gold
angels sewn up in her tunic.

Five times did Colgran's men assault the breach that
night, each repulse leaving its husks on the bloody
wreckage, its red libations to the swords of Gambrevault.  The
last and toughest tussle came during the grey prologue
before dawn.  The place was so packed with the dead and
stricken, that it was well-nigh impassable.  For some
minutes the struggle hung precariously on the summit of
the pass, but with the dawn the peril dwindled and elapsed.
The stormers revolted from the shambles; they had fought
their fill; had done enough for honour; were sick and
weary.  No taunt, command, or imprecation could keep
them longer in that gate of death.  Colgran's rebels
retreated on their trenches.

And with the dawn Flavian looked round upon the
breach, and saw all the horror of the place in one brief
moment.  Cloven faces, hacked bodies, distortions,
tortures, blood everywhere.  He looked round over his own
men; saw their meagre ranks, their weariness, their wounds,
their exultation that lapsed silently into a kind of desperate
awe.  Some tried to cheer him, and at the sound he felt an
unutterable melancholy descend upon his soul.  The men
were like so many sickly ghosts, a wan and battered flock,
a ragged remnant.  He saw the whole truth in a moment,
as a man sees life, death, and eternity pass before him in
the flashing wisdom of a single thought.

And this was war, this cataclysm of insatiate wrath!
His men were too few, too bustled, to hold the breach
against such another storm.  His trumpets blared the
retreat, a grim and tragic fanfare.  They dragged out their
wounded, abandoned the pile of rubbish for which they had
fought, and withdrew sullenly within the inner walls.
Colgran, though repulsed, had taken the outer ward of
Gambrevault.

As one stumbling from a dream, Flavian found himself
in the castle garden.  The place was full of the freshness
that follows rain; and it was not till the scent of flowers
met him like an odour of peace, that he marked that the
sky was blue and the dawn like saffron.  The storm-clouds
had gone, and the wind was a mere breeze, a moist breath
from the west, bearing a curious contrast to the furious
temper of the night.

Flavian, looking like a white-faced debauchee, limped
through the court, and climbed the stairway of the keep
to the banqueting hall and his own state chambers.
Several of his knights followed him at a distance and in
silence.  He felt sick as a dog, and burdened with
unutterable care, that weighed upon him like a prophecy.  He
had held the breach against heavy odds, and he was brooding
over the cost.  There was honour in the sheer physical
heroism of the deed; but he had lost old friends and
tried servants, had sacrificed his outer walls; there was
little cause for exultation in the main.

He stumbled into the banqueting hall like a man into a
tavern.

"Wine, wine, for the love of God."

A slim figure in green came out from the oriel, and a
pair of dark eyes quivered over the man's grey face and
blood-stained armour.  The girl's hands went out to him,
and she seemed like a child roused in the night from the
influence of some evil dream.

"You are wounded."

She took him by the arm and shoulder, and was able to
force him into a chair, so limp, so impotent, was he for the
moment.  His face had the uncanny pallor of one who was
about to faint; his eyes stared at her in a dazed and wistful
way.

"My God, you are not going to die!"

He shook his head, smiled weakly, and groped for her
hand.  She broke away, brought wine, and began to
trickle it between his lips.  Several of his knights came
in, and looked on awkwardly from the doorway at the
girl leaning over the man's chair, with her arm under his
head.  Yeoland caught sight of them, coloured and called
them forward.

The man's faintness had passed.  He saw Modred and
beckoned him to his chair.

"Take her away," in a whisper.

Yeoland heard the words, started round, and clung to
his hand.  There was a strange look upon her face.
Flavian spoke slowly to her.

"Girl, I am not a savoury object, fresh from the
carnage of a breach.  Leave me to my surgeon.  I would
only save you pain.  As for dying, I feel like an Adam.
Go to your room, child; I will be with you before long."

She held both his hands, looked in his eyes a moment,
then turned away with Modred and left him.  She was
very pale, and there was a tremor about her lips.

Irrelevant harness soon surrendered to skilled fingers.
No great evil had been done, thanks to the fine temper
of Flavian's armour; the few gashes, washed, oiled, and
dressed, left him not seriously the worse for the night's
tussle.  Wine and food recovered his manhood.  He was
barbered, perfumed, dressed, and turned out by his
servants, a very handsome fellow, with a fine pallor and
a pathetic limp.

His first care was to see his own men attended to, the
wounded properly bestowed, a good supply of food and
wine dealt out.  He had a brave word and a smile for
all.  As he passed, he found Father Julian the priest
administering the Host to those whose dim eyes were
closing upon earth and sky.

Modred, that iron man, who never seemed weary, was
stalking the battlements, and getting the place prepared
for the next storm that should break.  Flavian renounced
responsibilities for the moment, and crossed the garden to
Yeoland's room.  He entered quietly, looked about him,
saw a figure prostrate on the cushions of the window seat.

He crossed the room very quickly, knelt down and
touched the girl's hair.  Her face was hidden in the
cushions.  She turned slowly on her side, and looked at
him with a wan, pitiful stare; her eyes were timid, but
empty of tears.

"Ah, girl, what troubles you?"

She did not look at him, though he held her hands.

"Are you angry with me?"

"No, no."

"What is it, then?"

She spoke very slowly, in a suppressed and toneless voice.

"Will you tell me the truth?"

He watched her as though she were a saint.

"I have had a horrible thought in my heart, and it has
wounded me to death."

"Tell it me, tell it me."

"That you had repented all----"

"Repented!"

"Of all the ruin I am bringing upon you; that you were
beginning to think----"

He gave a deep cry.

"You believed that!"

She lay back on the cushions with a great sigh.  Flavian
had his arms about her, as he bent over her till their lips
nearly touched.

"How could you fear!"

"I am so much a woman."

"Yes----"

"And something is all the world to me, even though----"

"Well?"

"I would die happy."

He understood her whole heart, and kissed her lips.

"Little woman, I had come here to this room to ask
you one thing more.  You can guess it."

"Ah----"

"Father Julian."

She drew his head down upon her shoulder, and he knelt
a long while in silence, with her bosom rising and falling
under his cheek.

"I am happy," he said at last; "child-wife, child-husband,
let us go hand in hand into heaven."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXXV`:

.. class:: center large

   XXXV

.. vspace:: 2

So with Colgran and his rebels beating at the inner gate,
Flavian of Gambrevault took Yeoland to wife, and was
married that same eve by Father Julian in the castle
chapel.  There was pathetic cynicism in the service,
celebrating as it did the temporal blending of two bodies
who bade fair by their destinies to return speedily to dust.
The chant might have served as a requiem, or a dirge for
the fall of the mighty.  It was a tragic scene, a solemn
ceremony, attended by grim-faced men in plated steel, by
frightened women and sickly children.  Famine, disease,
and death headed the procession, jigged with the torches,
danced like skeletons about a bier.  Trumpets and cannon
gave an epithalamium; bones might have been scattered
in lieu of flowers, and wounds espoused in place of favours.
For a marriage pageant war pointed to the grinning
corpses in the breach and the clotted ruins.  It was such
a ceremony that might have appealed to a Stoic, or to a
Marius brooding amid the ruins of Carthage.

Peril chastens the brave, and death is as wine to the
heart of the saint.  Even as the sky seems of purer crystal
before a storm, so the soul pinions to a more luminous
heroism when the mortal tragedy of life nears the
"explicit."  As the martyrs exulted in their spiritual
triumph, or as Pico of Mirandola beheld transcendent
visions on his bed of death, when the Golden Lilies of
France waved into luckless Florence, so Flavian and
Yeoland his wife took to their hearts a true bridal beauty.

When the door was closed on them that night, a
mysterious cavern, a spiritual shrine of gold, came down
as from heaven to cover their souls.  They had no need
of the subtleties of earth, of music and of colour, of
flowers, or scent, or song.  They were the world, the sky,
the sea, the infinite.  Imperishable atoms from the alembic
of God, they fused soul with soul, became as one fair gem
that wakes a thousand lustres in its sapphire unity.  To
such a festival bring no fauns and dryads, no lewd and
supple goddess, no Orphean flute.  Rather, let Christ hold
forth His wounded hands, and let the wings of angels
glimmer like snow over the alchemy of souls.

Flavian knelt beside the bed and prayed.  He had the
girl's hand in his, and her dark hair swept in masses over
the pillow, framing her spiritual face as a dark cloud holds
the moon.  Her bed-gown was of the whitest lace and
linen, like foam bounding the violet coverlet that swept
to her bosom.  The light from the single lamp burnt
steadily in her great dark eyes.

Flavian lifted up his face from the coverlet and looked
long at her.

"Dear heart, have no fear of me," he said.

She smiled wonderfully, and read all the fine philosophy
of his soul.

"God be thanked, you are a good man."

"Ah, child, you are so wonderful that I dare not touch
you; I have such grand awe in my heart that even your
breath upon my face makes me bow down as though an
angel touched my forehead."

"All good and great love is of heaven."

"Pure as the lilies in the courts of God.  Every
fragment of you is like to me as a pearl from the lips of
angels; your flesh is of silver, your bosom as snow from
Lebanon, girded with the gold of truth.  Oh, second
Adam, thanks be to thee for thy philosophy."

She put out her hands and touched his hair; their eyes
were like sea and sky in summer, tranquil, tender, and
unshadowed.

"I love you for this purity, ah, more and more than I
can tell."

"True love is ever pure."

"And for me, such love as yours.  Never to see the
wolfish stare, the flushed forehead, and the loosened lip;
never to feel the burning breath.  God indeed be thanked
for this."

"Have no fear of me."

"Ah, like a white gull into a blue sky, like water into a
crystal bowl, I give myself into your arms."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXXVI`:

.. class:: center large

   XXXVI

.. vspace:: 2

A week had passed, and the Gambrevault trumpets blew
the last rally; her drums rumbled on the battlements of
the keep where the women and children had been gathered,
a dumb, panic-ridden flock, huddled together like sheep in
a pen.  The great banner flapped above their heads with a
solemn and sinuous benediction.  The sun was spreading
on the sea a golden track towards the west, and the shouts
of the besiegers rose from the courts.

On the stairs and in the banqueting hall the last
remnant of the garrison had gathered, half-starved men,
silent and grim as death, game to the last finger.  They
handled their swords and waited, moving restlessly to
and fro like caged leopards.  They knew what was to
come, and hungered to have it over and done with.  It
was the waiting that made them curse in undertones.
A few were at prayer on the stone steps.  Father Julian
stood with his crucifix at the top of the stairway, and began
to chant the "Miserere"; some few voices followed him.

In the inner court Colgran's men surged in their
hundreds like an impatient sea.  They had trampled down the
garden, overthrown the urns and statues, pulped the
flowers under their feet.  On the outer walls archers
marked every window of the keep.  In the inner court
cannoneers were training the gaping muzzle of a bombard
against the gate.  A sullen and perpetual clamour sounded
round the grey walls, like the roar of breakers about a
headland.

Flavian stood on the dais of the banqueting hall and
listened to the voices of the mob without.  Yeoland,
in the harness Fulviac had given her, held at his side.
The man's beaver was up, and he looked pale, but calm
and resolute as a Greek god.  That morning his own
armour, blazoned with the Gambrevault arms, had disappeared
from his bed-side, a suit of plain black harness
left in its stead.  No amount of interrogation, no
command, had been able to wring a word from his
knights or esquires.  So he wore the black armour now
perforce, and prepared to fight his last fight like a
gentleman and a Christian.

Yeoland's hand rested in his, and they stood side by
side like two children, looking into each other's eyes.
There was no fear on the girl's face, nothing but a calm
resolve to be worthy of the hour and of her love, that
buoyed her like a martyr.  The man's glances were
very sad, and she knew well what was in his heart when
he looked at her.  They had taken their vows, vows that
bound them not to survive each other.

"Are you afraid, little wife?"

"No, I am content."

"Strange that we should come to this.  My heart
grieves for you."

"Never grieve for me; I do not fear the unknown."

"We shall go out hand in hand."

"To the shore of that eternal sea; and I feel no wind,
and hear no moaning of the bar."

"The stars are above us."

"Eternity."

"No mere glittering void."

"But the face of God."

A cannon thundered; a sudden, sullen roar followed,
a din of clashing swords, the noise of men struggling in
the toils.

"They have broken in."

Flavian's grasp tightened on her wrist; his face was
rigid, his eyes stern.

"Be strong," he said.

"I am not afraid."

"The Virgin bless you."

The uproar increased below.  The rebels were storming
the stairway; they came up and up like a rising tide in the
mazes of a cavern.  A wave of struggling figures surged
into the hall: men, cursing, stabbing, hewing, writhing on
the floor, a tangle of humanity.  Flavian's knights in the
hall ranged themselves to hold the door.

It was then that Flavian saw his own state armour
doing duty in the press, its blazonings marking out
the wearer to the swords of Colgran's men.  It was
Godamar, Flavian's esquire, who had stolen his lord's
harness, and now fought in it to decoy death, and
perhaps save his master.  The mute heroism of the deed
drew Flavian from the dais.

"I would speak with Godamar," he said.

"Do not leave me."

"Ah! dear heart; when the last wave gathers I shall be
at your side."

Yeoland, with her poniard bare in her hand, stood and
watched the tragic despair of that last fight, the struggling
press of figures at the door--the few holding for a while
a mob at bay.  Her eyes followed the man in the black
harness; she saw him before the tossing thicket of pikes
and partisans; she saw his sword dealing out death in
that Gehenna of blasphemy and blood.

A crash of shattered glass came unheard in the uproar.
Men had planted ladders against the wall, and broken in by
the oriel; one after another they sprang down into the hall.
The first crept round by the wainscotting, climbed the dais,
seized Yeoland from behind, and held her fast.

As by instinct the poniard had been pointed at her own
throat; the thing was twisted out of her hand, and tossed
away along the floor.  She struggled with the man in a
kind of frenzy, but his brute strength was too stiff and stark
for her.  Even above the moil and din Flavian heard her
cry to him, turned, sprang back, to be met by the men who
had entered by the oriel.  They hemmed him round and
hewed at him, as he charged like a boar at bay.  One, two
were down.  Swords rang on his harness.  A fellow dodged
in from behind and stabbed at him under the arm.  Yeoland
saw the black figure reel, recover itself, reel again, as
a partisan crashed through his vizor.  His sword clattered
to the floor.  So Colgran's men cut the Lord Flavian down
in the sight of his young wife.

The scene appeared to transfer itself to an infinite
distance; a mist came before the girl's eyes; the uproar
seemed far, faint, and unreal.  She tried to cry out, but no
voice came; she strove to move, but her limbs seemed as
stone.  A sound like the surging of a sea sobbed in her
ears, and she had a confused vision of men being hunted
down and stabbed in the corners of the hall.  A mob of
wolf-like beings moved before her, cursing, cheering,
brandishing smoking steel.  She felt herself lifted from her feet,
and carried breast-high in a man's arms.  Then oblivion
swept over her brain.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXXVII`:

.. class:: center large

   PART IV

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center large

   XXXVII

.. vspace:: 2

Fortune had not blessed the cause of the people with that
torrential triumph toiled for by their captains.  The flood
of war had risen, had overwhelmed tall castles and goodly
cities, yet there were heights that had baulked its frothy
turmoil, mountains that had hurled it back upon the valleys.
Victory was like a sphere of glass tossed amid the foam of
two contending torrents.

In the west, Sir Simon of Imbrecour, that old leopard
wise in war, had raised the royal banner at his castle of
Avray.  The nobles of the western marches had joined
him to a spear; many a lusty company had ridden in, to
toss sword and shield in faith to the King.  From his castle
of Avray Sir Simon had marched south with the flower of
the western knighthood at his heels.  He had caught Malgo
on the march from Conan, even as his columns were
defiling from the mountains.  Sir Simon had leapt upon the
wild hillsmen and rebel levies like the fierce and shaggy
veteran that he was.  A splendid audacity had given the
day as by honour to the royal arms.  Malgo's troops had
been scattered to the winds, and he himself taken and
beheaded on the field under the black banner of the house of
Imbrecour.

In the east, Godamar the free-lance lay with his troops
in Thorney Isle, closed in and leaguered by the warlike
Abbot of Rocroy.  The churchman had seized the dyke-ways
of the fens, and had hemmed the rebels behind the
wild morasses.  As for the eastern folk, they were poor
gizardless creatures; having faced about, they had declared
for the King, and left Godamar to rot within the fens.
The free-lance had enough ado to keep the abbot out.  His
marching to join Fulviac was an idle and strategetical
dream.

Last of all, the barons of the north--fierce, rugged
autocrats, had gathered their half-barbarous retainers, and were
marching on Lauretia to uphold the King.  They were
grim folk, flint and iron, nurtured amid the mountains and
the wild woods of the north.  They marched south like
Winter, black and pitiless, prophetic of storm-winds, sleet,
and snow.  Some forty thousand men had gathered round
the banner of Sir Morolt of Gorm and Regis, and, like the
Goths pouring into Italy, they rolled down upon the
luxurious provinces of the south.

Fortune had decreed that about Lauretia, the city of the
King, the vultures of war should wet their talons.  It was
a rich region, gemmed thick with sapphire meres set in
deep emerald woods.  Lauretia, like a golden courtesan, lay
with her white limbs cushioned amid gorgeous flowers.
Her bosom was full of odours and of music; her lap littered
with the fragrant herbs of love.  No perils, save those
of moonlit passion, had ever threatened her.  Thus it
befell that when the storm-clouds gathered, she cowered
trembling on her ivory couch, the purple wine of pleasure
soaking her sinful feet.

In a broad valley, five leagues south of the city, Fulviac's
rebels fought their first great fight with Richard of the Iron
Hand.  A warrior's battle, rank to rank and sword to sword,
the fight had burnt to the embers before the cressets were
red in the west.  Fulviac had headed the last charge that
had broken the royal line, and rolled the shattered host
northwards under the cloak of night.  Dawn had found
Fulviac marching upon Lauretia, eager to let loose the lusts
of war upon that rich city of sin.  He was within three
leagues of the place, when a jaded rider overtook him, to
tell of Malgo's death and of the battle in the west.  Yet
another league towards the city his outriders came galloping
back with the news that the northern barons had marched
in and joined the King.  Outnumbered, and threatened on
the flank, Fulviac turned tail and held south again, trusting
to meet Godamar marching from the fens.

He needed the shoulders of an Atlas those September
days, for rumour burdened him with tidings that were
ominous and heavy.  Godamar lay impotent, hedged in
the morasses; Malgo was dead, his mountaineers scattered.
Sir Simon of Imbrecour was leading in the western lords
to swell the following of the King.  Vengeance gathered
hotly on the rebel rear, as Fulviac retreated by forced
marches towards the south.

It was at St. Gore, a red-roofed town packed on a
hill, amid tall, dreaming woods, that Colgran, with the
ten thousand who had leaguered Gambrevault, drew to the
main host again.  Fulviac had quartered a portion of his
troops in the town, and had camped the rest in the
meadows without the crumbling, lichen-grown walls.  He
had halted but for a night on the retreat from Lauretia,
and had taken a brief breath in the moil and sweat of the
march.  His banner had been set up in the market-square
before a rickety hostel of antique tone and temper.  His
guards lounged on the benches under the vines; his
captains drank in the low-ceilinged rooms, swore and argued
over the rough tables.

It was evening when Colgran's vanguard entered the
town by the western gate.  His men had tramped all day
in the sun, and were parched and weary.  None the less,
they stiffened their loins, and footed it through the streets
with a veteran swagger to show their mettle.  Fulviac
came out and stood in the wooden gallery of the inn,
watching them defile into the market-square.  They tossed
their pikes to him as they poured by, and called on him by
name--

"Fulviac, Fulviac!"

He was glad enough of their coming, for he needed
men, and the rough forest levies were in Colgran's ranks.
Ten thousand pikes and brown bills to bristle up against
the King's squadrons!  There was strength in the glitter
and the rolling dust of the columns.  Yet before all, the
man's tawny eyes watched for a red banner, and a woman
in armour upon a white horse, Yeoland, wife of Flavian
of Gambrevault.

In due season he saw her, a pale, spiritless woman, wan
and haggard, thin of neck and dark of eye.  The bloom
seemed to have fallen from her as from the crushed petals
of a rose.  The red banner, borne by a man upon a black
horse, danced listlessly upon its staff.  She rode with slack
bridle, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left,
but into the vague distance as into the night of the past.

Around her tramped Colgran's pikemen in jerkins of
leather and caps of steel.  The woman moved with them
as though they were so many substanceless ghosts, stalking
like shadows down the highway of death.  Her face was
bloodless, bleached by grievous apathy and chill pride.  The
bronzed faces round her were dim and unreal, a mob of
masks, void of life and meaning.  Sorrow had robed her
in silent snow.  The present was no more propitious to
her than a winter forest howling under the moon.

Before the hostelry the column came to a halt with
grounded pikes.  The woman on the white horse stirred
from her stupor, looked up, and saw Fulviac.  He was
standing with slouched shoulders in the gallery above her,
his hands gripping the wooden rail.  Their eyes met in
a sudden mesmeric stare that brought badges of red to
the girl's white cheeks.  There was the look upon his
face that she had known of old, when perilous care
weighed heavy upon his stubborn shoulders.  His eyes
bewildered her.  They had a light in them that spoke
neither of anger nor reproach, yet a look such as Arthur
might have cast upon fallen Guinivere.

They took her from her horse, and led her mute and
passive into the steel-thronged inn.  Up a winding stair
she was brought into a sombre room whose latticed
casements looked towards the west.  By an open window
stood Fulviac, chin on chest, his huge hands clasped
behind his back.  Colgran, in dusky harness, was speaking
to him in his rough, incisive jargon.  The woman knew
that the words concerned her heart.  At a gesture from
Fulviac, the free-lance cast a fierce glance at her, and
retreated.

The man did not move from the window, but stood
staring in morose silence at the reddening west.  Hunched
shoulders and bowed head gave a certain powerful pathos
to the figure statuesque and silent against the crimson
curtain of the sky.  The very air of the room seemed
burdened and saturated with the gloomy melancholy of
the man's mood.  War, with its thousand horrors,
furrowed his brow and bowed his great shoulders beneath
its bloody yoke.  Her woman's instinct told her that he
was lonely, for the soul that had ministered to him breathed
for him no more.

He turned on her suddenly with a terse greeting that
startled her thoughts like doves in a pine wood.

"Welcome to you, Lady of Gambrevault."

There was a bluff bitterness in his voice that forewarned
her of his ample wisdom.  Colgran had surrendered her,
heart and tragedy in one, to Fulviac's mercy.  A looming
cloud of passion shadowed the man's face, making him
seem gaunt and rough to her for the moment.  She remembered
him standing over Duessa's body in Sforza's palace at
Gilderoy.  Life had too little promise for her to engender
fear of any man, even of Fulviac at his worst.

"I trust, Madame Yeoland, that you are merry?"

The taunt touched her, yet she answered him listlessly
enough.

"Do what you will; scoff if it pleases you."

Fulviac shrugged his shoulders, and tossed his lion's mane
from his broad forehead.

"It is a grim world this," he said; "when thrones
burn, should we seek to quench them with our tears!
Whose was the fault that God made you too much a
woman?  Red heart, heart of the rose, a traitorous
comrade art thou, and an easy foe."

She had no answer on her lips, and he turned and
paced the room before her, darting swift glances into her
face.

"So they killed him?" he said, more quietly anon;
"poor child, forget him, it was the fate of war.  Even to
the grave he took the love I might never wear."

She shuddered and hid her face.

"Fulviac, have pity!"

"Pity?"

"This is a judgment, God help my soul!"

"A judgment?"

"For serving my own heart before the Virgin's words."

The man stopped suddenly in his stride, and looked at
her as though her words had touched him like a bolt
betwixt the jointings of his harness.  There was still the
morose frown upon his face, the half closure of the lids
over the tawny eyes.  He gripped his chin with one of
his bony hands, and turned his great beak of a nose upwards
with a gesture of self-scorn.

"Since the damned chicanery of chance so wills it," he
said, "I will confess to you, that my confession may ease
your conscience.  The Madonna in that forest chapel was
framed of flesh and blood."

"Fulviac!"

"Of flesh and blood, my innocent, tricked out to work
my holy will.  We needed a Saint, we cleansers of Christendom;
ha, noble justiciaries that we are.  Well, well, the
Virgin served us, and tripped back to a warm nest at
Gilderoy, reincarnated by high heaven."

Yeoland stood motionless in the shadows of the room,
like one striving to reason amid the rush of many thoughts.
She showed no wrath at her betrayal; her pale soul was
too white for scarlet passion.  The significance of life had
vanished in a void of gloom.  She stood like Hero striving
to catch her lover's voice above the moan of the sea.

Fulviac unbuckled his sword and threw it with a crash
upon the table.  He thrust his arms above his head,
stretched his strong sinews, took deep breaths into his
knotted throat.

"The truth is out," he said to her; "come, madame,
confess to me in turn."

Yeoland faced him with quivering lips, and a tense
straining of her fingers.

"What have I to tell?" she asked.

"Nothing?"

"Save that I loved the Lord Flavian, and that he is dead."

"Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

"Ah, you are avenged," she said, "you have crushed my
heart; may the thought comfort you."

Her parched apathy seemed to elapse of a sudden, and
she lost her calmness in an outburst of passion.  She was
athirst for solitude, to be cloistered from the rough cavil of
the world.  Colour glowed upon her sunken cheeks as she
stretched out her arms to the man with a piteous vehemence.

"Fulviac----"

"Girl."

"Ah, for God's love, end now this mockery.  Take
this armour from me, for it burns my bosom.  Let me go,
that I may hide my wounds in peace."

"Peace!" he said, with a twinge of scorn.

"Fulviac, can you not pity me?  I am broken and
bruised, men stare and jeer.  Oh, my God, only to be out
of sight and alone!"

The man stood by the window looking out into the sky
with lowering brows.  The west burnt red above the
house-tops; from the street came the noise of men marching.

"Do not kill yourself," he said with laconic brevity.

"Why do you say that?"

"There is truth in the suspicion."

"Ah, what is life to me!"

"We Christians still have need of you."

The man's seeming scorn scourged her anguish to a
shrill despair.  The hot blood swept more swiftly through
her worn, white body.

"Cursed be your ambition," she said to him; "must you
torture me before the world?"

"Perhaps."

"I renounce this lying part."

"As you will, madame; it will only make you look the
greater fool."

"Ah, you are brutal."

He turned to her with the look of one enduring
unuttered anguish in the spirit.  His strong pride throttled
passion, twisting his rough face into tragic ugliness.

"No, believe it not," he said; "I desire even for your
heart's sake that you should make the best of an evil
fortune.  Learn to smile again; pretend to a zest in life.
I have fathomed hell in my grim years, and my words are
true.  Time loves youth and recovers its sorrow.  Know
this and ponder it: 'tis better to play the hypocrite than to
suffer the world to chuckle over one's tears."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXXVIII`:

.. class:: center large

   XXXVIII

.. vspace:: 2

The royal host had massed about the walls of Lauretia,
and marched southwards to surprise Fulviac at St. Gore.
Half the chivalry of the land had gathered under the
standard of the King.  Sir Simon of Imbrecour had come
in from the west with ten thousand spears and five thousand
bowmen.  The Northerners under Morolt boasted
themselves twoscore thousand men, and there were the loyal
levies of the midland provinces to march under "The
Golden Sun" upon the south.  Never had such panoply
of war glittered through the listening woods.  Their march
was as the onrush of a rippling sea; the noise of their
trumpets as the cry of a tempest over towering trees.

Chivalry, golden champion of beauty, had much to
avenge, much to expurgate.  The peasant folk had plunged
the land into ruin and red war.  Castles smoked under the
summer sky; the noble dead lay unburied in the high places
of pride.  To the wolf cry of the people there could be no
answer save the hiss of the sword.  Before the high altar
at Lauretia, the King had sworn on relics and the
Scriptures, to deal such vengeance as should leave the land
cowering for centuries in terror of his name.

Southwards from St. Gore there stretched for some
fifteen leagues the province of La Belle Forêt, a region
of rich valleys and romantic woods, green and quiet under
the tranquil sky.  Its towns were mere gardens, smothered
deep in flowers, full of cedars and fair cypresses.  Its
people were simple, happy, and devout.  War had not set
foot there for two generations, and the land overflowed
with the good things of life.  Its vineyards purpled the
valleys; its pastures harboured much cattle.  Its houses
were filled with rich furniture and silks, chests laden
with cloth of gold, caskets of gems, ambries packed with
silver plate.  The good folk of La Belle Forêt had held
aloof from the revolt.  Peace-loving and content in their
opulence, they had no fondness for anarchy and war.

It was into this fair province that Fulviac led his arms
on the march south for Gilderoy and the great forest by
the sea.  Belle Forêt, neutral and luxurious, was spoil for
the spoiler, stuff for the sword.  Plundering, marauding,
burning, butchering, Fulviac's rebels poured through like
a host of Huns.  Strength promised licence; there was
little asceticism in the cause, though the sacred banner
flew in the van with an unction that was truly pharisaical.
From that flood of war, the provincials fled as from a
plague.  It was Fulviac's policy to devastate the land, to
hinder the march of the royal host.  Desolation spread
like winter over the fields; Fulviac's ravagers left ruin
and despair and a great silence to mark their track.

The march became a bloody parable before three days
had passed.  Fulviac had taken burning faggots upon his
back, and the iron collar of war weighed heavy on him
that autumn season.  It was a grim moral and a terrible.
He had called up fiends from hell, and their antics mocked
him.  Storm as he would, even his strong wrath was like
fire licking at granite.  Death taunted him, and Murder
rode as a witness at his side.  The mob of mad humanity
was like a ravenous sea, hungry, pitiless, and insatiate.
Even his stout heart was shocked by the bestial passions
war had roused.  His men were mutinous to all restraint.
Fight they would when he should marshal them; but for
their lusts they claimed a wolf-like and delirious liberty.

Yeoland the Saint rode on her white horse through La
Belle Forêt, like a pale ghost dazed by the human miseries
of war.  A captive, she had surrendered herself to Fate;
her heart was as a sea-bird wearied by long buffetings in
the wind.  There was no desire in her for life, no spark of
passion, no hope save for the sounding of a convent bell.
She imagined calmly the face of death.  Her grave
stretched green and quiet to her fancy, under some forest tree.

Even her hebetude of soul gave way at last before the
horrors of that bloody march.  She saw towns smouldering
and flames licking the night sky, heard walls crack
and roofs fall with a roar and an uprushing of fire.  She
saw the peasant folk crouching white and stupefied about
their ruined homes.  She heard the cry of the children, the
wailing of women, the cracked voices of old men cursing
Fulviac as he rode by.  She saw the crops burnt in the
fields; cattle slaughtered and their carcases left to rot in
the sun.

The deeds of those grim days moved in her brain with
a vividness that never abated.  War with all its ruthlessness,
its devilry, its riotous horror, burnt in upon her soul.
The plash of blood, the ruin, the despair, appalled her till
she yearned and hungered for the end.  Life seemed to
have become a hideous purgatory, flaming and shrieking
under the stars.

She appealed to Fulviac with the vehemence of despair.
The man was obdurate and moody, burdened by the
knowledge that these horrors were beyond him.  His
very impotence was bitterness itself to his strong spirit.
In the silent passion of his shame, he buckled a sullen
scorn about his manhood, scoffed and mocked when the
woman pleaded.  He was like a Titan struggling in the
toils of Fate, flinging forth scorn to mask his anguish.
He had let war loose upon the land, and the riot mocked
him like a turbulent sea.

One noon they rode together through a town that had
closed its gates to them, and had been taken by assault.
On the hills around stood the solemn woods watching
in silence the scene beneath.  Corpses stiffened in the
gutters; children shrieked in burning attics.  By the cross
in the market-square soldiers were staving in wine casks,
the split lees mingling with the blood upon the cobbles.
Ruffians rioted in the streets.  Lust and violence were
loose like wolves.

Fulviac clattered through the place with Yeoland and
his guards, a tower of steel amid the reeking ruins.  He
looked neither to the right hand nor the left, but rode with
set jaw and sullen visage for the southern gate, and the
green quiet of the fields.  His tawny eyes smouldered
under his casque; his mouth was as stone, stern yet
sorrowful.  He spoke never a word, as though his
thoughts were too grim for the girl's ears.

Yeoland rode at his side in silence, shivering in thought
at the scenes that had passed before her eyes.  She was as
a lily whose pure petals quailed before the sprinkling plash
of blood.  Her soul was of too delicate a texture for the
rude blasts of war.

She turned on Fulviac anon, and taunted him out of the
fulness of her scorn.

"This is your crusade for justice," she said to him;
"ah, there is a curse upon us.  You have let fiends loose."

He did not retort to her for the moment, but rode
gazing into the gilded glories of the woods.  Even earth's
peace was bitter to him at that season, but bitterer far was
the woman's scorn.

"War is war," he said to her at last; "we cannot leave
the King fat larders."

"And all this butchery, this ruin?"

"Blame war for it."

"And brutal men."

"Mark you," he said to her, with some deepening of
his voice, "I am no god; I cannot make angels of devils.
The sea has risen, can I cork it in a bottle, or tie the
storm wind up in a sack?  Give me my due.  I am human,
not a demi-god."

She understood his mood, and pitied him in measure,
for he had a burden on his soul sufficient for a Hercules.
His men were half mutinous; they would fight for him,
but he could not stem their lusts.  He was as a stout ship
borne upon the backs of riotous waves.

"Well would it have been," she said, "if you had never
raised this storm."

"It is easy to be wise at the eleventh hour," he answered her.

"Can you not stay it even now?"

"Woman, can I stem the sea!"

"The blood of thousands dyes your hands."

He twisted in the saddle as though her words gored him
to the quick.  His face twitched, his eyes glittered.

"My God, keep silence!"

"Fulviac."

"Taunt me no longer.  Have I not half hell boiling in
my heart?"

Thus Fulviac and his rebels passed on spoiling towards
Gilderoy and the sea, where Sforza lay camped with forces
gathered from the south.  The great forest beckoned them;
they knew its trammels, and hoped for strategies therein.
Like a vast web of gloom it proffered harbour to the wolves
of war, for they feared the open, and the vengeful onrush
of the royal chivalry.

Meanwhile, the armies of the King came down upon
Belle Forêt, a great horde of steel.  From its black ashes
the country welcomed them with the dumb lips of death.
Ruin and slaughter appealed them on the march; the
smoke of war ascended to their nostrils.  Fierce was the
cry for vengeance in the ranks, as the host poured on like
a golden dawn treading on the dark heels of night.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XXXIX`:

.. class:: center large

   XXXIX

.. vspace:: 2

In a cave whose narrow mouth cut a rough cameo from
the snow and azure of the sky, a man lay sleeping upon a
bed of heather.  The surge of the sea rose from the
bastions of the cliff, where foam glittered and swirled over
the black rocks that thrust their dripping brows above the
tide.  Gulls were winging over the waves, whose green
crests shone brilliant under the sun.  On a distant
headland, bleak and sombre, the towers of a castle broke the
turquoise crescent of the heavens.

In one corner of the cave a feeble fire flickered, the
smoke therefrom curling along the roof to vanish in a
thin blue plume of vapour.  Beside the bed lay a pile of
armour, with a broken casque like a cleft skull to crown
it.  Dried herbs and a loaf of rye bread lay on a flat
boulder near the fire.  The figure on the heather was
covered by a stained yet gorgeously blazoned surcoat,
that seemed an incongruous quilt for such a couch.  Near
the cave's entry a great axe glittered on the floor, an axe
whose notched edge had tested the metal of many a bassinet.

Down a rough path cut in the face of the cliff scrambled
a gaunt, hollow-chested figure, doubleted in soiled scarlet,
battered shoes on feet, a black beard bristling on the
stubborn chin.  A red cloth was bound about the man's head.
He breathed hard as he clambered down the cliff, as though
winded by fast running.  Sweat stood on his forehead.
Beneath him ran the sea, a pit of foam, swirling and
muttering amid the rocks.

He reached the entry of the cave and dived therein like
a fox into an "earth."  Standing by the bed, he looked for
a moment at the unconscious figure with the air of one
unwilling to wake a weary comrade from his sleep.  At
last he went down on his knees by the heather, and
touched the sleeping man's cheek with the gentle gesture
of a woman.  The figure stirred at the touch; two thin
hands groped over the green and azure quilt.  The kneeling
man gripped them in his great brown paws, and held
them fast.

"Modred."

The voice was toneless, husky, and without spirit.

"Sire."

"Ah, these waking moments.  It had been better if
you had let me rot in Gambrevault."

"Courage, sire, you wake to a better fortune."

"There is new life in your voice."

"The King has come at last."

The man on the heather raised himself upon one elbow.
His face looked grey and starved in the half gloom of the
cave.  He lifted up one hand with a gesture of joy.

"The King!"

Modred of the black beard smiled at him like a father.
His hands trembled as he put the man back gently on the
heather, and smoothed the coverlet.

"Lie still, sire."

"Ah, this is life, once more."

"Patience, patience.  Let us have no woman's moods,
no raptures.  Ha, I am a tyrannous dog.  Did I drag you
for dead out of Gambrevault to let you break your heart
over Richard of Lauretia!  Lie quiet, sire; you have no
strength to gamble with as yet."

The man on the heather reached out again for Modred's hand.

"The rough dog should have been born a woman," he
said to him.

Modred laughed.

"There is a great heart under that hairy chest of yours."

The moist mutterings of the sea came up to them from
the rocky shore beneath.  Clouds in white masses pressed
athwart the arch of day.  Modred, seated on a boulder
beside the bed, eyed the prostrate figure thereon with a gaunt
and tender pity.  He was a stark man and strenuous, yet
warm of heart for all his bull's strength and steely sinew.
Youth lay at his feet, thin and impotent, a white willow
wand quivering beside a black and knotty oak.

Modred rose up and stood by the opening of the cave,
his broad shoulders well-nigh filling the entry as he looked
out over the sea.  Far over the amethystine waters, a
hundred pearl-white sails glimmered beyond the cliffs of
Gambrevault.  The sun smote on gilded prow and blazoned
bulwark, and upon a thousand streamers tonguing to the
breeze.

Modred stretched out his great arms and smiled, a grim
shimmer of joy over his ruffian's face.  Standing at the
mouth of the cave, he began to speak to the man couched
in the inner gloom.

"Yonder, beyond Gambrevault," he said, "I see a hundred
sails treading towards us over the sea.  They are the
King's ships: God cherish them; their bulwarks gleam in
the sun."

Flavian twisted restlessly amid the heather.

"A grand sight, old friend."

Modred stood silent, fingering his chin.  His voice
broke forth again with a bluff exultation that seemed to
echo the roar of the waves.

"St. Philip, that is well."

"More ships?"

"Nay, sire, they raise the royal banner on the keep of
Gambrevault.  I see spears shine.  Listen to the shouting.
The King's men hold the headland."

This time the voice from the cave was less eager,
and tinged with pain.

"Modred, old friend, I lie here like a stone while the
trumpets call to me."

"Sire, say not so."

"Ah, for an hour's youth again, one day in the sun,
one moment under the moon."

"Sire, I would change with you if God would grant it me."

"Bless you, old friend; I would not grant it you if I
were God."

A trumpet cried to them from the cliff, sudden, shrill,
and imperious.  Modred, leaning against the rock with his
hand over his eyes, started from the cave, and began to
climb the path.  He muttered and swore into his beard as
he ascended, queer oaths, spasmodic and fantastic.  His
black eyes were hazy for the moment.  Contemptuous
and fervid, he brushed the tears away with a great brown hand.

On the green downs above him rolling to the peerless
sky, he saw armour gleam and banners blush.  A fanfare
of trumpets rolled over the sea.  It was Richard the King.

Modred bent at the royal stirrup, and kissed the jewelled
hand.  Above him a keen, steely-eyed visage looked out
from beneath a gold-crowned bassinet.  It was the face of
a soldier and a tyrant, handsome, haughty, yet opulently
gracious.  The red lips curled under the black tusks of
the long moustache.  The big, clean-shaven jaw was a
promontory of marble thrust forth imperiously over the
world.

"Well, man, what of our warden?"

Modred crossed himself, pointed to the cliff, muttered a
few words into the King's ear.

"So," came the terse response, "that was an evil
fortune.  So splendid a youth, a bright beam of chivalry.
Come, lead me to him."

The royal statue of steel dismounted and stalked down
with knights and heralds towards the cliff.  Leaning upon
Modred's shoulder, Richard of the Iron Hand trod the
rough path leading to the little cave.  He bowed his
golden crown at the entry, stooped like a suppliant, stood
before the Lord Flavian's bed.

The gloom troubled him for a moment.  Anon, he saw
the recumbent figure on the heather, the pile of harness,
the brown loaf, and the meagre fire.  He throned himself
on the boulder beside the bed, and laid a white hand on
the sick man's shoulder.

"Lie still," he said, as Flavian turned to rise; "to-day,
my lord, we can forego ceremony."

Courtesy is the golden crown of power, forged from a
poet's song, and the wisdom of the gods.  The royal
favour donned its robe of red that day, proffered its
gracious signet to the lips of praise, held forth the sceptre
of a radiant pity.  Even the iron of truth becomes as
silver on the lips of kings.  Justice herself flatters, when
ranged in simple white before a royal throne.

"My Lord of Gambrevault," quoth Richard of the Iron
Hand, "be it known to you that your stout walls have
saved my kingdom.  You held the barbican of loyalty till
true friends rallied to the country's citadel.  Bravely have
you sounded your clarions in the gate of fame.  My lord,
I give to you the gratitude of a king."

Flattery strutted in the cave, gathering her robes with
jewelled hand, gorgeous as an Eastern queen.  Concerning
the fate of a certain rebel Saint, the royal pardon
waxed patriarchal in laconic phrases.

"Say no more, my lord; the boon is yours.  Have I
not a noble woman queening it beside me on my throne,
flinging the beams of her bright eyes through all my life?
This quest shall be heralded to the host; I will offer
gold for the damsel's capture.  Take this ring from me, no
pledge as betwixt Jews, but as a talisman of good to come."

So spoke the royal gratitude.  When the King had
gone, Modred returned to carry his lord heavenwards to
the meadows.  He found him prone upon the heather,
covering his eyes with his thin hands as the western
sunlight streaked the gloom.

"Sire," said Modred, kneeling down beside the bed.

The effigy on the heather stirred itself and reached out a
hand into Modred's bosom.

"Man, man, I am in great darkness of soul.  Who shall
comfort me!"

Modred bent to him, laid a great palm on the white forehead.

"Courage, sire, courage."

"Ah, the pity of it, to lie here like a log when swords
ring and peril threatens her."

"Sire, we shall win her back again."

"My God, only to touch her hands once more, to feel
the warmth of her pure bosom, and the thrill of her rich hair."

"We shall win her, sire.  Doubt it not."

"All life is a doubt."

"Before God, I swear it!"

"Modred!"

"Before God, I swear it!"

He sprang up, thrust out his arms till the sinews
cracked, filled his great chest with the breath of the sea.
Suddenly he stopped, strained at a rock lying at the cave's
mouth, lifted it, and hurled it from him, saw it smite
foam from the water beneath.

"Fate, take my gauge," he cried, with a fierce glorying
in his strength; "come, sire, put your hands about my
neck.  I will bear you to your castle of Gambrevault."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XL`:

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   XL

.. vspace:: 2

Fulviac and his rebels had plunged into the great pine
forest for refuge from the multitudinous glitter of the royal
spears.  The wilderness engulfed them, throwing wide its
sable gates to take the war wolves in.  The trees moaned
like tall sibyls burdened with prophetic woe.  The gold
had long fallen from the gorse; the heather's purple hills
were dim.  Mystery abode there; a sound as of tragedy
rose with the hoarse piping of the autumn wind.

From the north and from the west the royal "arms"
had drawn as a glittering net towards the sea of pines.
A myriad splendid warriors streaked the wilds, like rich
rods flowering at some magic trumpet cry.  The King's
host swept the hills, their banners blazing towards the
solemn woods.  Gambrevault was theirs, and Avalon of
the Mere.  Morolt's northerners had marched upon
Geraint, to find it a dead city, empty of life and of human
sound.  Only Gilderoy stood out for Fulviac.  The King
had failed to leaguer it as yet, for reasons cherished in his
cunning brain.

Some twoscore thousand men had marched with Fulviac
into the forest's sanctuary.  Over the hills the royal horse
had pressed them hard, cutting down stragglers, hanging on
their rear.  Fulviac's host was a horde of "foot"; he had
not a thousand riders to hurl against the chivalry of the
King.  On the bold, bleak uplands of the north and west
the royal horsemen would have whelmed him like a sea.
Necessity turned strategist at that hour.  Fulviac and his
rebels poured with their stagnant columns into the wilds.

The thickets teemed with steel; the myriad pike points
glittered like silver moths through the dense green gloom.
Once more the great cliff echoed to the clangour of war
and the sword.  Fulviac had drawn thither and camped
his men upon the heights, and under the shadow of its
mighty walls.  Watch-fires smoked on the hills.  Every
alley had its sentinel, a net of steel thrown forth to await
the coming of the King.  Fulviac had gathered his cubs
into this lair, trusting to trammel the nobles in the
labyrinths of the forest.  It was a forlorn hope, the cunning
purpose of despair.  The spoilers of Belle Forêt were wise
in their generation; little mercy would they win from the
Iron Hand of Richard of Lauretia.

Like a pale pearl set in ebony, Yeoland the Saint had
been established again in her bower of stone.  The room
was even as she had left it that misty summer dawn.
Prayer-desk, lute, and crucifix were there, mute relics of
a passionate past.  How much had befallen her in those
packed weeks of peril; how great a guerdon of woe had
been lavished on her heart!  Love was as the last streak
of gold in a fading west; only the stars recalled the
unwavering lamps of heaven.

The cliff-room and its relics tortured her very soul.
She would glance at the Sebastian of the casement, and
remember with a shuddering rush of woe the man in
whose arms she had slumbered as a wife.  Death had
deified him in her heart.  She remembered his grey eyes,
his splendid youth, his passion, his pure chivalry.  He
gazed down on her like a dream hero from a gloom of
dusky gold.  The bitter ecstasy of the past spoke to her
only of the infinite beneficence of death.  The grave
yearned for her, and she had no hope to live.

Those drear days she saw little of Fulviac.  The man
seemed to shirk her pale, sad face and brooding eyes.
Her grief stung him more fiercely than all the flames
nurtured in the glowing pit of war.  Moreover, he was
cumbered with the imminent peril of his cause, and the
facing of a stormy fortune.  His one hope lay in some
great battle in the woods, where the King's mailed chivalry
would be cumbered by the trees.  He made many a feint
to tempt the nobles to this wild tussle.  The cliff stood as
adamant, a vast bulwark to uphold the rebels.  Yet
Nature threatened him with other arguments.  His stores
were meagre, his mouths many.  Victory and starvation
dangled upon the opposing beams of Fate.

If Fulviac feared procrastination, Richard of Lauretia
favoured the same.  Wise sluggard that he was, he curbed
the vengeance of his clamorous soldiery, content to
temporise with the inevitable trend of fortune.  His light horse
scoured the country, garnering food and forage from the fat
lands north of Geraint.  Time fought for him, and the
starving wolves were trapped.  Sufficient was it that he
held his crescent of steel upon the hills, leaving unguarded
the barren wilds that rolled on Gilderoy towards the east.

A week passed, dull and lustreless.  The forest waved
dark and solemn under the autumn sky; no torrents of steel
gushed from its sable gates; no glittering squadrons plunged
into its shadows.  The King's men lay warm about their
watch-fires on the hills, fattening on good food, tingling for
the trumpet cry that should herald the advance.  Richard
of the Iron Hand smiled and passed the hours at chess in
his great pavilion pitched on the slopes towards Geraint.
Simon of Imbrecour held the southern marches; Morolt
and his northerners guarded the west.

It was grey weather, sullen and storm-laden, eerie of
voice.  The Black Wild tossed like a sombre sea over hill
and valley, its spires rocking under the scurrying sky, its
myriad galleries shrill with the cry of the wind.  There
was no rest there, no breathless silence under the frail moon.
The trees moaned like a vast choir wailing the downfall of
a god.  The wild seemed full of death, and of the dead, as
though the souls of those slaughtered in the war screamed
about Fulviac's lair.  The sentinels, grey figures in a
sombre atmosphere, watched white-faced in the thickets.
The clarions of the storm might mask the onrush of the
royal chivalry.

Yeoland the Saint lay full length upon a carved settle
before a dying fire.  She was listening to the wind as it
roared over the cliff, amid the shrill clamour of the trees.
It was such an eve as when Flavian had rattled at the
postern to offer her love, and a throne at Avalon.  She had
spoken of war, and war had sundered them, given death to
desire, and a tomb to hope.  The glow of the fire played
upon the girl's face and shone in her brooding eyes.  Night
was falling, and the gloom increased.

She heard footsteps in the gallery, the clangour of a
scabbard against the rock.  The door swung back, and Fulviac
stood in the entry, clad in full harness save for his casque.
There were deep furrows upon his forehead.  His lids
looked heavy from lack of sleep, and his eyes were bloodshot.
The tinge of grey in his tawny hair had increased
to a web of silver.

He came in without a word, set his hands on the back
of the settle, and stared at the fire.  Yeoland had started
up; she sat huddled in the angle, looking in his face with
a mute surmise.  Fulviac's face was sorrowful, yet strong
as steel; the lips were firm, the eyes sullen and sad.  He
was as a man who stared ruin betwixt the brows, nor
quailed from the scrutiny though death stood ready on
the threshold.

"Cloak yourself," he said to her at last; "be speedy;
buckle this purse to your girdle."

She sprang up as the leather pouch rattled on the settle,
and stood facing Fulviac with her back to the fire.

"Whither do we ride?"

"I send you under escort to Gilderoy."

"And you?"

He smiled, tightened his sword belt with a vicious
gesture, and still stared at the hearth.

"My lot lies here," he said to her; "I meet my doom
alone.  What need to drag you deeper into the dark?"

She understood him on the instant, and the black thoughts
moving in his mind.  Disasters thickened about the cliff;
perils were clamorous as the wind-rocked trees.  Fulviac
feared the worst; she knew that from his face.

"You send me to Gilderoy?" she said.

"I have so determined it."

"And why?"

"Need you doubt my discretion?"

The flames flashed and gleamed upon his breastplate,
and deepened the shadows upon his face.  His eyes were
sorrowful, yet full of a strenuous fire.

"The sky darkens," he said to her, "and the King's
hosts watch the forest.  I had thought to draw them into
the wilds, but the fox of Lauretia has smelt a snare.  Our
stores lessen; we are in the last trench."

She moved away into a dark corner of the room, raised
the carved lid of a chest, and began to draw clothes
therefrom, fingering them listlessly, as though her thoughts
wavered.  Fulviac leant with folded arms upon the settle,
seemed even oblivious of her presence under the burden of
his fate.

"Fulviac," she said at last, glancing at him over a
drooping shoulder.

He turned his head and looked at her.

"Must I go then to Gilderoy?"

"The road is open," he answered, with no obvious
kindling of his sympathy; "there will be bloody work here
anon; you will be safer behind stone walls."

"And the King?" she asked him.

He straightened suddenly, like a man tossing some great
burden from off his soul.

"Ha, girl! are you blind as to what shall follow?
Richard of the Iron Hand waits for us with fivescore
thousand men.  We shall fight--by God, yes!--and make a
bloody end; there will be much slaughter and work for the
sword.  The King will crush us as a falling rock crushes
a scorpion.  There will be no mercy.  Death waits.  Put
on that cloak of thine."

She stood motionless a moment, listening to the moaning
of the wind.  The man's grim spirit troubled her.
She remembered that he had bulwarked her in her homeless
days, had dealt her much pity out of his rugged heart.
He was alone now, and shadowed by death.  Thus it
befell that she cast the cloak aside upon the bed, and stood
forward with quivering lips before the fire.

"Fulviac."

"Little sister."

"Ah!  God pardon me; I have been a weak and graceless
friend.  You have been good to me, beyond my gratitude.
The past has gone for ever; what is left to me
now?  Shall I not meet death at your side?"

He stood back from her, looking in her eyes, breathing
hard, combating his own heart.  He loved the girl in his
fierce, staunch way; she was the one light left him in the
gathering gloom.  Now death offered him her soul.  He
tottered, stretched out his hands to her, snatched them back
with a great burst of pride.

"No, this cannot be."

"Ah!"

"I have dared the storm; alone will I fall beneath its
vengeance.  You shall go this night to Gilderoy."

She thrust out her hands to him, but he turned away his face.

"Ah! little sister, this war was conceived for God, but
the devil leavened it.  I have gambled with fire, and the
ashes return upon my head.  I give you life; 'tis little I
may give.  Come now, obey me, these are my last words."

She turned from him very quietly in the shadow,
hiding her face with her arm.  Picking up her cloak, she
drew it slowly about her shoulders, Fulviac watching her,
a pillar of steel.

"They wait for you in the forest," he said; "go down
the stair.  Colgran rides with you to Gilderoy.  He is
to be trusted."

She drooped her head, staggered to the door, darted back
again with a low cry and a gush of tears.

"Fulviac."

"Little woman."

"God keep you!  Kiss me, this once."

He bent to her, touched her forehead with his lips, thrust
her again towards the door.

"Go, my child."

And she went forth slowly from him, weeping, into the night.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XLI`:

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   XLI

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The prophecies of the King proved the power of their
pinions before fourteen suns had passed over the Black
Wild's heart.  Richard of Lauretia had plotted to starve
Fulviac into giving him battle, or into a retreat from the
forest upon Gilderoy.  The royal prognostications were
pitiless and unflinching as candescent steel.  It was no
mere battle-ground that he sought, but rather an
amphitheatre where he might martyr the rebel host like a mob
of revolted slaves.

Whatever tidings may have muttered on the breeze,
riders came in hotly to the royal pavilion towards the
noon of the fourteenth day.  There was soon much stir
on the hills hard by Geraint.  Knights and nobles
thronged the royal tent, captains clanged shoulders,
gallopers rode south and west with fiery despatches to
Morolt and Sir Simon of Imbrecour.  Battle breathed
in the wind.  Before night came, the King's pavilion
had vanished from the hills; his columns were winding
round the northern hem of the forest, to strike the road
that ran from Geraint to Gilderoy.

The royal scouts and rangers had not played their
master false.  A river of steel was curling through the
black depths of the wild, threading the valleys towards
the east.  The King's scouts had caught the glimmer of
armour sifting through the trees.  They had slunk about
the rebel host for days while they lay camped in their
thousands about the cliff.  Colgran and his small company
had passed through unheeded, but they were up like hawks
when the whole host moved.

That midnight Fulviac's columns rolled from the outstanding
thickets of the wild, and held in serried masses
for the road to Gilderoy.  The King's procrastination had
launched them on this last desperate venture.  They
would have starved in the forest as Fulviac had foreseen;
their hopes lay in reaching Gilderoy, which was well
victualled, throwing themselves therein, making what terms
they could, or die fighting behind its walls.  Thus under
cover of night they slipped from the forest, trusting to
leave the King's men guarding an empty lair.

The brisk forethought of Richard of Lauretia had
out-gamed the rebels, however, in the hazardous moves of war.
They were answering to his opening like wild duck paddling
towards a decoy.  Ten miles west of Gilderoy there
stretched a valley, walled southwards by tall heights, banded
through the centre by the river Tamar.  At its eastern
extremity a line of hills rolled down to touch the river.
The road from Geraint ran through the valley, hugging
the southern bank of the river after crossing it westwards
by a fortified bridge.  Fulviac and his host would follow
that road, marching betwixt the river and the hills.  It
was in this valley that Richard of Lauretia had conceived
the hurtling climax of the war.

Forewarned in season, Sir Simon of Imbrecour and
his bristling squadrons were riding through the night on
Gilderoy, shaping a crescent course towards the east.
Morolt and the giants of the north were striding in his
track, skirting the southern spires of the forest, to press
level with the rebel march, screened by the hills.  The
King and his Lauretians came down from Geraint.
They were to seize the bridge across the Tamar, pour
over, and close the rebels on the rear.

It was near dawn when Fulviac's columns struck the
highroad from Geraint, and entered the valley where the Tamar
shimmered towards Gilderoy.  Mist covered the world,
shot through with the gold threads of the dawn.  The
river gleamed and murmured fitfully in the meadows;
the southern heights glittered in the growing day; the
purple slopes of the Black Wild had melted dimly into the
west.

The mist stood dense in the flats where the Geraint
road bridged the river.  The northern slopes seemed
steeped in vapoury desolation, the road winding into a
waste of green.  Fulviac and his men marched on, chuckling
as they thought of the royal troops watching the empty
alleys of the forest.  Fulviac took no care to secure the
bridge across the Tamar.  With the line of hills before
them breasted, they would see the spires of Gilderoy,
glittering athwart the dawn.

The columns were well in the lap of the valley before
two light horsemen came galloping in from the far van,
calling on Fulviac, who rode under the red banner, that
the road to Gilderoy had been seized.  Fulviac and
Sforza rode forward with a squadron of horse to
reconnoitre.  As they advanced at a canter, the mists cleared
from the skirts of the encircling hills.  Far to the east,
on the green slopes that rolled towards the Tamar, they
saw the sun smite upon a thousand points of steel.
Pennons danced in the shimmering atmosphere, shields flickered,
armour shone.  A torrent of gems seemed poured from the
dawn's lap upon the emerald bosoms of the hills.  They were
the glittering horsemen of Sir Simon of Imbrecour, who had
ridden out of the night and seized on the road to Gilderoy.

Fulviac halted his company, and standing in the stirrups,
scanned the hillside under his hand.  He frowned, thrust
forth his chin, turned on Sforza who rode at his side.

"Trapped," he said with a twist of the lip; "Dick of
the Iron Hand has fooled us.  'Twas done cunningly,
though it brings us to a parlous passage.  They hold the road."

The Gonfaloniere tugged at his ragged beard, and looked
white under the arch of his open salade.

"Better advance on them," he said; "I would give good
gold to be safe in the streets of Gilderoy."

Fulviac sneered, and shook his head.

"There are ten thousand spears on yonder slopes, the
lustiest blood in the land.  Count their banners and their
pennons, the stuff tells an honest tale.  Pah, they would
drive our rapscallions into the river.  Send back and bid our
banners halt."

They wheeled and cantered towards the long black
columns plodding through the meadows.  Far to the west
over the green plain they saw spears flash against the sun,
a glimmering tide spreading from the river.  The
Lauretians had crossed the bridge and were hurrying on the
rebels' heels.  Fulviac's trumpets sounded the halt.  He
thundered his orders to his captains, bade them mass their
men in the meadows, and hedge their pikes for the crash
of battle.

A shout reached him from his squadrons of horse who
had marched on the southern wing.  They were pointing
to the heights with sword and spear.  Fulviac reined round,
rode forward to some rising ground, and looked southwards
under his hand.  The heights bounding the valley shone
with steel.  A myriad glistening stars shimmered under the
sun.  Morolt's northerners had shown their shields; the
hills bristled with their bills and spears.

Fulviac shrugged his shoulders, lowered his beaver, and
rode back towards his men.  He saw Yeoland the Saint's
red banner waving above the dusky squares.  He remembered
the girl's pale face and the hands that had toyed with
the gilded silks in the dark chamber upon the cliff.  Though
the sun shone and the earth glistened, he knew in his heart
that he should see that face no more.

Richard of Lauretia had forged his crescent of steel.
South, east, and west the royal trumpets sounded;
northwards ran the Tamar, closing the meadows.  Fulviac and
his men were trapped in the green valley.  A golden girdle
of chivalry hemmed the mob in the lap of the emerald
meadows.  All about them blazed the panoply of war.

Fulviac, pessimist that he was, took to his heart that
hour the lofty tranquillity of a Scandinavian hero.  His
courage was of that stout, sea-buffeting fibre that stiffened
its beams against the tide of defeat.  He set forth his shield,
tossed up his sword, rode through the ranks with the spirit
of a Roland.  Life leapt the stronger in him at the
challenge of the Black Raven of death.  His captains could
have sworn that he looked for victory in the moil, so bluff
and strenuous was his mood that day.

Sforza came cringing to him, glib-lipped and haggard,
to speak of a parley.  Fulviac shook his shield in the man's
white face, set his ruffians to dig trenches in the meadows,
and to range the waggons as a barricade.

"Parley, forsooth," quoth he; "talk no more to me of
parleys when I have twoscore thousand smiters at my back.
Let Dick of the Iron Hand come down to us with the
sword.  Ha, sirs, are we stuffed with hay!  We will rattle
the royal bones and make them dance a fandango to the devil."

His spirit diffused itself through the ranks of the rough
soldiery.  They cheered wheresoever he went, kindling
their courage like a torch, and tossed their pikes to him
with strenuous insolence.

"My children," he would roar to them as he passed,
"the day has come, we have drawn these skulkers to a
tussle.  See to it, sirs, let us maul these velvet gentlemen,
these squires of the cushion.  By the Lord, we will feast
anon in Gilderoy, and rifle the King's baggage."

As for Richard of the Iron Hand, he was content to
claim the arduous blessings of the day.  He held his men
in leash upon the hills, resting them and their horses after
the marchings of the night.  Wine was served out;
clarions and sackbuts sounded through the ranks; the King
made his nobles a rich feast in his pavilion pitched by Sir
Morolt's banner.  As the day drew on, he thrust strong
outposts towards the meadows, ordered his troops to sleep
through the long night under arms.  Their watch-fires
gemmed a lurid bow under the sky, with Tamar stringing
it, a chord of silver.  In the meadows the rebel masses
lay a black pool of gloom under the stars.

Fulviac sat alone in his tent at midnight, his drawn
sword across his knees.  His captains had left him, some
to watch, others to sleep on the grass in their armour,
Sforza the Gonfaloniere to sneak in the dark to the King's
lines.  Silence covered the valley, save for the voices of
the sentinels and the sound of the royal trumpets blowing
the changes on the hills.  Their watch-fires hung athwart
the sky like a chain of flashing rubies.

Fulviac sat motionless as a statue, staring out into the
night.  Death, like a grey wraith, stood beside his chair;
the unknown, a black and unsailed sea, stretched calm and
imageless beneath his feet.  Life and the ambition thereof
tottered and crumbled like a quaking ruin.  Love quenched
her torch of gold.  The man saw the stars above him,
heard in the silence of thought a thousand worlds surging
through the infinitudes of the heavens.  What then was
this mortal pillar of clay, that it should grudge its dust to
the womb of the world?

And ambition?  He thought of Yeoland and her wounded
heart; of Gambrevault and Avalon; of La Belle Forêt
smoking amid its ruins.  He had torched fame through the land,
and painted his prowess in symbols of fire.  Now that death
challenged him on the strand of the unknown, should he,
Fulviac, fear the unsailed sea!

His heart glowed in him with a transcendent insolence.
Lifting his sword, he pressed the cold steel to his lips,
brandished it in the faces of the stars.  Then, with a
laugh, he lay down upon a pile of straw and slept.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XLII`:

.. class:: center large

   XLII

.. vspace:: 2

Dawn rolled out of the east, red and riotous, its crimson
spears streaming towards the zenith.  Over the far towers
of Gilderoy swept a roseate and golden mist, over the
pine-strewn heights, over Tamar silvering the valley.  A wind
piped hoarsely through the thickets, like a shrill prelude to
the organ-throated roar of war.

The landscape shimmered in the broadening light, green
tapestries arabesqued with gold.  To the east, Sir Simon's
multitudinous squadrons ran like rare terraces of flowers,
dusted with the scintillant dew of steel.  Westwards
dwindled the long ranks of the Lauretians.  On the
heights, Morolt's shields flickered in the sun.  About a
hillock in the valley, the rebel host stood massed in a great
circle, a whorl of helmets, bills, and pikes; Fulviac's red
pavilion starred the centre like the red roof of a church
rising above a town.

On the southern heights, Richard of Lauretia had
watched the dawn rise behind the towers of Gilderoy.
He was on horseback, in full panoply of war, his gorgeous
harness and trappings dazzling the sun.  Knights, nobles,
trumpeters were round him, a splendid pool of chivalry,
while east and west stretched the ranks of the grim and
gigantic soldiery of the north.

Hard by the royal standard with its Sun of Gold, a
corpse dangled from the branch of a great fir.  It swayed
slightly in the wind, black and sinister against the gilded
curtain of the dawn.  It was the body of Sforza the
adventurer from the south, Gonfaloniere of Gilderoy,
whom the King had hanged to grace his double treachery.

As the light increased, sweeping along the glittering
frieze of war, Morolt of Gorm and Regis stood forward
before the King.  He was a lean man, tall and vigorous
as a bow of steel, his black eyes darting fire under his
thatch of close-cropped hair.  The nobles had put him
forward that morning as a man born to claim a boon upon
the brink of battle.  Fierce and virile, he bared his sword
to the sun, and pointed with mailed hand to the rebel host
in the valley.

"Sire, a boon for your loyal servants."

The King's face was as a mask of steel heated to white
heat, ardent and pitiless.  He had the spoilers of his
kingdom under his heel, and was not the man to flinch at
vengeance.

"Say on, Morolt, what would ye?"

"We are men, sire, and these wolves have slaughtered
our kinsfolk."

"Am I held to be a lamb, sirs!"

A rough laugh eddied up.  Morolt shook his sword.

"Give them into our hand, sire," he said; "there shall
be no need of ropes and dungeons."

The iron men cheered him.  Richard the King lifted
up his baton; his strong voice swept far in the hush of the
dawn.

"Sirs," he said to them, "take the Black Leopard of
Imbrecour for your pattern, rend and slay, let none escape
you.  Every man of my host wears a white cross on his
sword arm.  Let that badge only stay your vengeance.
As for these whelps of treason, they have butchered our
children, shamed our women, clawed and torn at their
King's throne.  To-day who thinks of mercy!  Go down,
sirs, to the slaughter."

A roar of joy rose from those rough warriors; they
tossed their swords, gripped hands and embraced, called on
the saints to serve them.  Strong passions were loose,
steaming like the incense of sacked cities into heaven.
There was much to avenge, much to expurgate.  That
day their swords were to drink blood; that day they were
to crush and kill.

In the valley, Fulviac's huge coil of humanity lay sullen
and silent, watching the spears upon the hills.  Their
russets and sables contrasted with the gorgeous colouring
of the feudalists.  The one shone like a garden; the other
resembled a field lying fallow.  The romance and pomp
of war gathered to pour down upon the squalid realism of
mob tyranny.  Beauty and the beast, knight and scullion
faced each other on the stage that morning.

Gallopers were riding east and west bearing the King's
commands to Sire Julian, Duke of Layonne, who headed
the Lauretians, and to Simon of Imbrecour upon the hills.
The King would not tempt the moil that day, but left the
sweat and thunder of it to his captains, content to play the
Cæsar on the southern heights.  His commands had gone
forth to the host.  The first assault was to be made by
twenty thousand northmen under Morolt, and a like force
under Julian of Layonne.  The whole crescent of steel
was to contract upon the meadows, and consolidate its iron
wall about Fulviac and his rebels.  Simon of Imbrecour
was to leash his chivalry from the first rush of the fight.
His knights should ride in when the rebel ranks were broken.

An hour before noon, the royal trumpets blew the
advance, and a great shout surged through the shimmering
ranks.

"Advance, Black Leopard of Imbrecour."

"Advance, Golden Sun of Lauretia."

"Advance, Grey Wolf of the North."

With clarions and fifes playing, drums beating, banners
blowing, the whole host closed its semilune of steel upon
the dusky mass in the meadows.  The northerners were
chanting an old Norse ballad, a grim, ice-bound song of the
sea and the shriek of the sword.  Sir Simon's spears were
rolling over the green slopes, their trumpets and bugles
blowing merrily.  From the west, the Lauretians were
coming up with their pikes dancing in the sun.  The
thunder of the advance seemed to shake the hills.

Fulviac watched the feudalists from beneath his banner
in the meadows.  His captains were round him, grim men
and silent, girding their spirits for the prick of battle.

"By St. Peter," said the man under the red flag,
"these fireflies come on passably.  A fair host and a
splendid.  If their courage suits their panoply, we shall have
hot work to-day."

"Faith," quoth Colgran, who had returned from
Gilderoy, "I would rather sweep a flower-garden than a
muck-heap.  We are good for twice their number, massed as we
are like rocks upon a sea-shore."

"To your posts, sirs," were Fulviac's last words to
them; "whether we fall or conquer, what matters it if we
die like men!"

Billows of red, green, and blue, dusted with silver,
Morolt and his Berserkers rolled to the charge.  They
had cast aside their pikes, and taken to shield and axe, such
axes as had warred in the far past for the faith of Odin.
Fulviac's rebels had massed their spears into a hedge of
steel, and though Morolt's men came down at a run, the
spear points stemmed the onrush like a wall.

Despite this avalanche of iron, the rebel ring stove off
the tide of war.  They were stout churls and hardy,
these peasant plunderers; death admonished them; despair
tightened their sinews and propped up their shields.
The shimmering flood swirled on their spear points like
tawny billows tossing round a rock.  It lapped and eddied,
rushed up in spray, seeking an inlet, yet finding none.
The Lauretian feudatories had swarmed to the charge.
Fulviac withstood them, and held their panoply at bay.

Richard the King watched the battle from the southern
heights.  He saw Morolt's men roll down, saw the fight
seethe and glitter, swirl in a wild vortex round the rebel
spears.  The war wolves gathered, the tempest waxed,
and still the black ring held.  Like steel upon a granite
rock the onslaughts sparked on it, but clove no breach.
Under the late noon sun the valley reeked with dust and
din.  The royal host was as a dragon of gold, gnashing
and writhing about an iron tower.

It was then that the King smote his thigh, plucked off
his signet, sent it by Bertrand his herald to Sir Simon and
his knights.

"Go down at the gallop," ran the royal bidding, "cleave
me this rock, and splinter it to dust.  Spare neither man nor
horse.  Cleave in or perish."

The black banner of Imbrecour flapped forth; the
trumpets clamoured.  Sir Simon's knights might well
have graced Boiardo's page, and girded Albracca with
their stalwart spears.  They tightened girths, set shields
for the charge, and rode down nobly to avenge or fall.

As a great ship sails to break a harbour boom, so did
the squadrons of the King crash down with fewtred spears
on Fulviac's host.  They rode with the wind, leaping
and thundering like an iron flood.  No slackening was
there, no wavering of this ponderous bolt.  It rushed
like a huge rock down a mountain's flank, smoking and
hurtling on the wall of spears.

The corn was scythed and trodden under foot.  Ranks
rocked and broke like earth before a storm-scourged sea.
The spears of Imbrecour flashed on, smote and sucked
vengeance, cleaving a breach into the core of war.  The
knights slew, took scarlet for their colour, and made
the moment murderous with steel.  Into the breach the
King's wolves followed them; Morolt's grim axemen
stumbled in, rending and hurling the black mass to shreds.
Battle became butchery.  The day was won.

What boots it to chronicle the scene that travelled as
a forest fire in the track of Sir Simon's chivalry?  The
iron hand of the King closed upon the wrecked victims
in the valley.  Knight and noble trampled the peasantry;
rapine and lust were put to the sword.  The Blatant
Beast was slain by the spear of Romance.  The boor and
the demagogue were trodden as straw before the threshing-floor
of vengeance.  The fields were a shroud of scarlet;
Tamar ran like wine; thorn and bramble were fruited
red with blood.  On the heights the tall pines waved
over the splendid masque of death.

It was late in the day when Morolt and his hillsmen,
with certain of Sir Simon's knights, forced their way
through the wreckage of the fight, to the hillock where
stood the banner of the Saint.  South, east, and west the
rout bubbled into the twilight, a riot of slaughter
seething to the distant woods.  About Yeoland's banner had
gathered the last of the Forest brotherhood, grey wolves
red to the throat with battle.  Sullen and indomitable,
they had gathered in a dusky knot of steel as the day sped
into the kindling west.  Even Morolt's fierce followers
stood still, like hounds that had brought the boar to bay.
Simon of Imbrecour spurred out before the spears, lifted
a shattered sword, and called on Fulviac by name.

"Traitor, we challenge ye."

A burly figure in harness of a reddish hue towered up
beneath the fringe of the banner of the Saint.  He carried
an axe slanted over his shoulder, as he stood half a head
above the tallest of his men.  As Sir Simon challenged
him, he lifted his salade, and bared his face to the war dogs
who hemmed him in.

"Black Leopard of the West, we meet again."

The Lord of Imbrecour peered at him keenly from
under his vizor.

"Come, sirs, and end it," quoth the man in red, "buffet
for buffet, and sword to sword.  I fling ye a gauge to
death and the devil.  Come, sirs, let us end it; I bide
my time."

Morolt sprang forward with sword aloft.

"Traitor and rebel, I have seen your face before."

Fulviac laughed, a brave burst of scorn.  He tossed his
axe to them, and spread his arms.

"Ha, Morolt, I have foined with ye of old.  Saints and
martyrs, have I avenged myself upon the lap-dogs of the
court!  Here will we fight our last battle.  Bury me, sirs,
as Fulk of Argentin, the King's brother, whom men
thought dead these seven years."

A sudden silence hovered above that remnant of a beaten
host.  The red banner drooped, hung down about its staff.
Morolt, uttering a strange cry, smote his bosom with his
iron hand.  Old Simon crossed himself, turned back and
rode thence slowly from the field.

Morolt's voice, gruff and husky, sounded the charge.
When he and his war dogs had made an end, they took
Fulviac's head and bore it wrapped in Yeoland's banner to
the King.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XLIII`:

.. class:: center large

   XLIII

.. vspace:: 2

Under the starry pall of night, the last cry of the clarion
of tragedy sounded over wood and meadow.  Gilderoy,
proud city of the south, had closed her gates against the
royal host, wise at the eleventh hour as to the measure of
the King's mercy.  The wreckage from the battle in the
valley had washed on Tamar's bosom past the walls,
corpses jostling each other in the stream of death.
Vultures had hovered in the azure sky.  There was no doom
for Gilderoy save the doom of the sword.

The moon rose red amid a whorl of dusky clouds, veiled
as with scarlet for the last orgies of war.  Gilderoy had
been carried by assault.  Morolt's barbarians were pouring
through the streets; the gates yawned towards the night;
bells boomed and clashed.  The townsfolk were scurrying
like rats for the great square where the remnant of the
garrison had barricaded the entries, gathering for a
death-struggle under the umbrage of the cathedral towers.

Richard the King had ridden into Gilderoy by the
northern gate with Sir Simon of Imbrecour and a strong
guard of knights and men-at-arms.  Fulviac's head danced
on a spear beside the Golden Banner of Lauretia.  The
citadel had opened its gates to Sire Julian of Layonne.  In
the square before the ruined abbey of the Benedictines the
King and his nobles gathered to await the judgment of
the hour.

A great bell boomed through the night, a deep panting
sound in the warm gloom.  Torrents of steel clashed
through the narrow streets, gleaming under the torch flare,
bubbling towards the last rampart of revolt.  From the
cathedral square arose a wild, whimpering outcry, the
wailing of women mingling with the hoarse clamour of the
last assault.

Word was brought to the King by one of Morolt's
esquires, that the townsfolk were holding the great square
behind their barricades, and pouring a hot fire from the
houses upon his troops.  Morolt desired the King's ring
and his commands before taking to the resource of the
sword.  Richard of the Iron Hand was in no mood for
mercy.  His decree went forth from before the gate of the
ruined abbey.

"Consider no church as a sanctuary.  Fire the houses
about the square.  Gilderoy shall burn."

The city's doom was sealed by those iron words.  The
torch took up the handiwork of the sword.  A gradual
glow began to rise above the house-tops; smoke billowed
up, black and voluminous, dusted with a myriad ruddy
stars.  Flames rose from casement and from gable, from
chimney, spirelet, roof, and tower.  The houses were faced
with wood, dry as tinder, crisp for the torch as a
summer-bleached prairie.  The flames ran like a red flood from
roof to roof, with a roar as from huge reptiles battling in a
burning pit.  The great square, with the glittering
pinnacles of its cathedral, was girded in with fire and sword.

Men were stabbing and hewing upon the barricades
where Morolt's feudatories had stormed up from the
gloom of the streets.  Beneath the light of the burning
houses, swords were tossed, the dead forgotten and trodden
under foot.  It was not long before the barriers were
carried by assault and the avengers of Belle Forêt poured
pitiless into the great square.

The citizens of Gilderoy had packed their women and
children into the sanctuary of the cathedral choir.  They
were penned there amid the gorgeous gildings of the place,
a shivering flock swarming in the frescoed chapels, huddled
beneath the painted figures of the saints.  The glow of
the burning city beat in through the jewelled glass, building
the huge aisles in a glittering cavern windowed with living
gems.  Darkness and dawn struggled and fought under the
thundering vaults.  From without came the wild babel, the
hoarse death-moan of a people.

In the great square the fight went on, a ruthless mêlée,
strong and terrible.  Gilderoy had slaughtered her noblesse.
She made expiation for the deed that night with the heart's
blood of her children.  Vengeance and despair grappled
and swayed in that great pit of death.  The blazing streets
walled in a red inferno, where passions ran like Satanic
wine.  Gilderoy, proud city of the south, quivered and
expired beneath the iron gauntlet of the King.

Modred of Gambrevault moved through the press with
Morolt of the North fighting at his side.  They had a
common quest that night, a common watchword, chastening
the vengeance of their men.

"Seek the Saint.  Save Yeoland of Gambrevault."

It was as a hoarse shout, feeble and futile amid the bluster
of a storm.  What hope was there for this pale-faced
Madonna amid the burning wreck of Gilderoy?  She was
as a lily in a flaming forest.  Modred sought for her with
voice and sword, thinking of Flavian and the vow upon the
cliff.  Though the city lightened, black Modred's heart
was steeped in gloom.  Death and despair seemed armed
against his hope.

On the eastern quarter a little court stood back from the
great square.  A fountain played in the centre, the
water-jet, thrown from a mermaid's bosom, sparkling like a plume
of gems.  The walls of the court were streaked with flame,
its casements tawny with yellow light.  The breath of the
place was as the breath of a furnace; a quaking crowd
filled it, driven to bay by the swords shining in the square.

Modred was a tall man, a pine standing amid hollies.
Staring into the murk of the court wreathed round with a
garland of fire, he saw, above the heads of the crowd, a
woman standing on the steps of the fountain, leaning
against the brim of the basin.  Her hair blew loose from
under her open bassinet; her white face like a flower was
turned mutely to the night.  A cuirass glimmered under
her cloud of hair.  Modred, when he saw her, sent up a
shout like that of a wrecked mariner sighting a sail over
tumbling waves.  He tossed his sword, charged forward
into the court, began to buffet his way towards the figure
by the fountain.

A knot of soldiery, taking his shout as a rallying cry,
stormed after him into the court.  There was a great crush
in the entry, men tumbling in, and using their swords as
poniards.  The townsfolk were scattered like blown leaves
towards the burning houses.  In the hot turmoil of the
moment the girl was swept from the fountain steps, and
carried by a struggling bunch of figures towards a corner
of the court.  Modred lost sight of her for the moment, as
he ploughed forward through the press.

Flames were rushing from casement and from roof; the
breath of the place was as the breath of a burning desert.
The Gilderoy rebels pent in the court were being put to
the sword.  Through the swirl of the struggle Yeoland's
bassinet shone out again.  Modred saw her standing alone,
shading her face with her hands like some wild, desperate
thing, knowing not whither to escape.  He pushed on,
calling her by name.  Before he could reach her the
gabled front of a house undermined by the fire lurched
forward, tottered, and came down with a roar.

A blazing brand struck Modred on the helmet.  He
staggered, beheld a shower of sparks, felt a scorching wind
upon his face.  The stones were littered with crackling
woodwork, glowing timber, reeking tiles.  He was stunned
for a moment as by the blow of a mace.  Flames were
leaping heavenwards from the houses, wiping out the mild
faces of the stars with their ruthless hands.

With a great cry Modred had started forward like a
charging bull.  He dragged aside the smouldering wreckage
of gable and roof, tore the rafters aside, nor heeded the
heat, for his harness helped him.  His great body quivered
as he drew the girl out and lifted her from the stones.  Her
green kirtle was alight, and with the strong instinct of the
moment he ran with her to the fountain and plunged her
bodily in the broad basin.

Panting, he bore her across the great square in his arms.
Yeoland was making a little moaning whimper, but for all
else lay quiet as a half-dead bird.  Modred dared not look
into her face; the scent of her scorched hair beat up into
his nostrils.  He ground his teeth and cursed Fate as he ran.
Was it for this that they had bulwarked Gambrevault?





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XLIV`:

.. class:: center large

   XLIV

.. vspace:: 2

Autumn had cast her scarlet girdle about Avalon; the
woods were aflame with the splendours of the dying year.
The oaks stood pavilions of green and gold; the beeches
domes of burnished bronze; from their silver stems, birches
fountained forth showers of amber.  It was a season of
crystal skies, of cloud galleons, bulwarked with gold, sailing
the wine-red west.  Wild Autumn wandered in the ruined
woods, her long hair streaking the gilded gloom, her voice
elfin under the stars.  Even as she passed, the crisp leaves
swirled and fell, a pall for the dying year.

Avalon slumbered amid her lilies and the painted woods,
gorgeous as rare tapestries, curtaining her meadows.  Her
mere laughed and glimmered amid the flags and lily leaves,
and lapped at the lichened bases of her towers.  Avalon
had arisen from her desolation.  No longer were her
chambers void, her gates broken, her courts the haunt of
death.  The bat and the screech-owl had fled from her
towers.  She had lifted up her face to the dawn, like a
mourner who turns from the grave to gaze again upon
the golden face of joy.

Time with his scythe of silver rested on the hills.  The
black dragon of war had crawled sated to the labyrinths of
the past; the red throne of ambition had been consumed
by fire.  Peace came forth with her white-faced choir,
swinging their golden censers, shedding a purple perfume
of hope over the blackened land.  The death wolves had
slunk to the wilds, the vultures had soared from the fields.
A splendid calm had descended upon the land, a silence
as of heaven after the hideous masque of war.  The
cloud-wrack and thunder had passed from the sky.  Men heard
again the voice of God.

Six weeks had gone since the sacking of Gilderoy, and
dead Duessa's bower in Avalon had been garnished for a
second mistress.  A white rose lurked in a whorl of green.
The oriel, with its re-jewelled glass, looked out upon the
transient splendours of the woods.  Tapestry clothed the
walls, showing knights and maidens wandering through
flowering meads.  Rare furniture had been taken from the
wrecked palaces of Gilderoy and given to the Lord Flavian
by the King.

That autumntide Modred played seneschal in Avalon.
He had cleansed and regarnished the castle by his lord's
command, and garrisoned it with men taken from the
King's own guard.  Moreover, in Gilderoy he had found
an old man groping miserlike amid the ruins, filthy and
querulous.  The pantaloon when challenged had confessed
to the name of Aurelius, and the profession of Medicine
by royal patent in that city.  The townsfolk had spared
his pompous neck for the sake of the benefits of his craft.
From the fat, proud, prosperous worthy he had cringed
into a wrinkled, flap-cheeked beggar.  Him Modred had
caught like a veritable pearl from the gutter, and brought
with other household perquisites into Avalon.

In this rich refuge Aurelius awoke as from an unsavoury
and penurious dream.  He regained some of his plump, sage
swagger, his rotund phraseology, his autocratic dogmatism
in matters Æsculapian.  The atmosphere of Avalon agreed
with his gullet.  Above all things, he was held to be a man
of tact.

In dead Duessa's bower there still hung her mirror of
steel, whose sheeny surface had often answered to her
languorous eyes and moon-white face.  Duessa's hair had
glimmered before this good friend's flattery.  Gems,
necklet, broideries, and tiars had sunk deep into its magic
memory.  The mirror could have told truths and expounded
philosophies, had there been some Merlin to conjure with
the past.

Aurelius of Gilderoy played the necromancer under
more rational auspices.  He was a benignant soul, subtle,
sympathetic to the brink of dotage.  His professional hint
was that dead Duessa's mirror should be exiled from the
bower of Avalon.  The oracle spoke with much beneficence
as to the delusions of the sick, and the demoniac
influence of melancholy upon the brain.  Yet his wisdom
was withstood in the very quarter where he had trusted to
find obedience and understanding.  Dead Duessa's mirror
still hung in the Lady Yeoland's bower.

One calm evening, when the west stood a great arch of
ruddy gold, a slim girl knelt in the oriel with her face
buried in her hands.  She was clad in a gown of peacock
blue, fitting close to her slight figure, and girded about the
hips with a girdle of green leather.  Her black hair poured
upon her shoulders, clouding her face, yet leaving bare the
base of her white neck where it curved from her pearly
shoulders.  She drooped her head as she knelt before the
casement, where the light entered to her, azure and green,
vermilion and purple, silver and rose.

Anon she rose softly, turned towards the mirror hanging
on the wall, gazed into its depths with a species of
bewitched fear.  One glance given, she turned away with
a shudder, hid her face in her hands, walked the room in
a mute frenzy of self-horror.  Presently she knelt again
before the window-seat, struggled in prayer, turning her face
piteously to an open casement where the golden woods
stood under the red wand of the west.  The light waned a
little.  She rose up again from her knees, shook her hair
forward so that it bathed her face, trod slowly towards the
mirror, stared at herself therein.

The crystal bowl was broken, the ivory throne
dishonoured!  The blush of the rose had faded, the gleam of
the opal fallen to dust.  Youth and its sapphire shield had
passed into the gloom of dreams.  The stars and the moon
were magical no more.

She wavered away from the window to a dark corner,
hid her face in the arras.  The same wild cry rang like a
piteous requiem through her brain.  The man lived and
loved her, and she had come to this!  Burning Gilderoy
had stolen her beauty, made her a mockery of her very self.
God, that Fate should compel her to lift her scars to the
eyes of love!

In the gathering dusk, she went again to the mirror,
peered therein, with strained eyes and a tremor of the lip.
The twilight softened somewhat the bitterness of truth.
She shook her hair forward, saw her eyes gleam, fingered
her white throat, and smiled a little.  Presently she lit a
taper, held it with wavering hand, peered at the steel panel
once again.  She cried out, jerked away, and crushed the
frail light under her foot.

Darkness increased, seeming to clothe her misery.  She
wandered through the room, twisting her black hair about
her wrist, moaning and darting piteous glances into the
gloom.  Once she took a poniard from a table, fingered
the point, pressed her hand over her heart, threw the knife
away with a gesture of despair.  On the morrow the man
would come to her.  What would she see in those grey
eyes of his?  Horror and loathing, ah God, not that!

Anon she grew calmer and less distressed, prayed
awhile, lit a lamp, delved in an ambry built in the wall.
That night her hands worked zealously, while the moon
shimmered on the mere, setting silver wrinkles on its agate
face.  The woods were still and solemn as death, deep
with the voiceless sympathy of the hour.  Black lace hung
upon Yeoland's hands; the sable thread ran through and
through; her white fingers quivered in the light of the lamp.

Her few hours of sleep that night were wild and feverish,
smitten through with piteous dreams.  On the morrow she
bound a black fillet about her brows, and let the dusky
mask of lace fall over face and bosom.  She prayed a long
while before her crucifix, but she did not gaze again into
dead Duessa's mirror.

That same evening Modred the seneschal blasphemed
Aurelius in the garden of Avalon.  The man of the sword
was in no easy humour; his convictions emerged from his
hairy mouth with a vigour that was not considerate.

"Dotard, you have no more wit than a pelican."

"My lord, I embrace truth."

"Damn truth; what eyes have you for a goodly close!"

Aurelius spread his hands with the air of a martyr.

"The physician, my lord," he said, "should ever deserve
the confidence of his patron."

For retort, Modred shouldered him into the thick of a
rose bush.

"Pedant," quoth he, "crab-apple, say a word on this
matter, and I will drown you in the moat."

Aurelius gathered his robes and still ruffled it like an
autocrat.

"Barbarity, sir, is the argument of fools."

"Bag of bones, rot in your wrinkled hide, keep your
froth for sick children."

"Sir!"

"You have as much soul as a rat in a sewer.  Come,
list to me, breathe a word of this, and I'll starve you in
our topmost turret.  Leave truth alone, gaffer, with your
rheumy, broken-kneed wisdom.  You have no wit in these
matters, no, not a crust.  Blurt a word, and I pack you
off to grovel in Gilderoy."

The man of physic shrugged his shoulders, seemed
grieved and incredulous, prepared to wash his hands of the
whole business.

"Have your way, my lord; you are too hot-blooded for
me; I will meddle no further."

"Ha, Master Gallipot, you shall acknowledge anon
that I have a soul."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`XLV`:

.. class:: center large

   XLV

.. vspace:: 2

Trumpets were blowing in Avalon of the Twelve
Towers, echoing through the valley where the sun shone
upon the woods, the sere leaves glittering like golden
byzants as they fell.  The sky was a clear canopy, drawn as
blue silk from height to height, tenting the green meadows.
Avalon's towers rose black and strong above the sheen of
her quiet waters.

From Gambrevault came the Lord Flavian to claim his
wife once more.  Through the brief days of autumn
Aurelius of Gilderoy had decreed him an exile from the
Isle of Orchards, pleading for the girl's frail breath and her
lily soul that might fade if set too soon in the noon of love.
In Gambrevault the Lord Flavian had moped like a prisoned
falcon, listening to the far cry of the war, hungry for
the touch of a woman's hand.  Modred had snatched the
Madonna of the Pine Forest from burning Gilderoy.  She
had been throned at last above the tides of violence and
wrong.

That day the Lord Flavian rode in state for Avalon,
even as an Arthurian, prince coming with splendour from
some high-souled quest.  The woods had blazoned their
banners for his march.  Trumpets hailed him from the
towers and battlements.  The sun, like a great patriarch,
smoothed his gold beard and beamed upon the world.

Over the bridge and beneath the gate, Modred led his
master's horse.  The garrison had gathered in the central
court; they tossed their swords, and cheered for
Gambrevault.  Trumpets set the wild woods wailing.  Bombards
thundered from the towers.

In the court, amid the panoply of arms, Flavian
dismounted, took Modred's hand, leant upon the great man's
shoulder.

"Old friend, is she well?"

"Ah, sire, youth turns to youth."

"Let my minstrels play below the stair some old song
of Tristan and Iseult.  And now I go to her.  Lead on."

In dead Duessa's bower a drooping figure knelt before a
crucifix in prayer.  Foreshadowings of misery and woe
were stirring in the woman's heart.  She had heard the
bray of trumpets on the towers, the thunder of cannon, the
shouts of strong men cheering in the court.  She heard lute,
viol, and flute strike up from afar a mournful melody sweet
with an antique woe.

Time seemed to crawl like a wounded snake in the
grass.  The figures on the arras gestured and grimaced;
the jewelled glass in the oriel burnt in through the dark
lattice of her veil.  She heard footsteps on the stairs;
Modred's deep voice, joyous and strangely tender.  A hand
fumbled at the latch.  Starting up, she ran towards the
shadows, and hid her face in the folds of the arras.

The door had closed and all was silent.

"Yeoland."

The cry smote through her like joy barbed with bitterness.
She shuddered and caught her breath, swayed as she
stood with the arras hiding her face.

"Wife, wife."

With sudden strength, compelling herself, she peered
round, and saw a figure standing in the shadow, a man with
white face turned towards the light, his hands stretched out
like a little child's.  She stood motionless, breathing fast
with short, convulsive breaths, her lips quivering beneath
her veil.

"I am here," she said to him, husky, tremulous, and faint.

"Yeoland."

"Ah!"

"I hear your voice; come near to me."

She wavered forward three steps into the room, stood
staring strangely at the figure by the door.

"Yeoland, are you near?"

"My God!"

"I give myself to you, a broken man.  Ah, where are
your hands?"

Sudden comprehension seized her; she went very near
to him, gazing in his face.

"Speak."

"Wife, I shall never see the sky again, nor watch the
stars at night, nor the moon, nor the sea.  I shall never
look on Avalon, her green woods and her lilies, and her
sleeping mere.  I shall never behold your face again.  I am
blind, I am blind."

She gave a great cry, tore the veil from her face, and
cast it far from her.

"Husband, I come to you."

His hands were groping in the dark, groping like souls
that sought the light.  She went near him, weeping, caught
his fingers, kissed them with her lips.  The man's arms
circled her; she hung therein, and buried her head in his
bosom.

.. _`"HIS HANDS WERE GROPING IN THE DARK."`:

.. figure:: images/img-294.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: "HIS HANDS WERE GROPING IN THE DARK."

   "HIS HANDS WERE GROPING IN THE DARK."

"My love, my own."

"I am blind; your hair bathes my face."

"Ah, you are blind, mine eyes are yours, and I your
wife will be your sun.  No more pain shall compass you;
there shall be no more grieving, no more tears."

"Yeoland."

"Husband."

"God in heaven, I give Thee thanks for this."

.. vspace:: 6

.. pgfooter::