Holy Guard towered on its great headland as on an island, fronting the
surges of the sea. The abbey held the last outjutting of the coast on
the side of the province of the Seven Streams. To the south, washing the
inner surface of the cliff, the great Gloire came flowing fast, filling
the deep craggy valley from shore to shore, swirling under the thousand
shadows of its ancient trees.
Holy Guard, piled height on height on its lofty rock, looked over the
river mouth where it met the sea. At low tide the headland was
surrounded with sands, great golden lawns where purple cloud-shadows
raced and played. Beyond were the white-edged breakers and the silvery
azure of the sea. Myrtles mantled the rock even to where the spray might
fall. From the cliffs and the wild marshes east of Holy Guard the hills
rose up, sombre with black oak, pine, and yew. Southwards in clean
weather could be seen the peaks of the great White Mountains that parted
the Crescent from the Christian Cross.
Holy Guard—black, desolate, and mysterious—had received Rosamunde
within its walls. The place was as rugged as the rocks beneath, swept by
the sea wind, bleached by the spray. Its gold cross on the chapel spire
seemed to glitter over a savage void poised betwixt the clouds and the
wild depths beneath. Chasm and valley plunged to the waters. The great
forests rolled to mimic the sea.
The Abbess Joan was an austere woman and pitiless, hard of feature as a
granite image. She had suffered much in her early youth, had grown the
more bitter amid cloistered gloom. The nuns of Holy Guard were grey and
rough, shackled by a discipline that coarsened the soul. For them no
orchards bloomed, no broad valleys were gilded with easy corn. No music,
rich and deep, wreathed round pillar and under painted vault garlands of
song and of sacred sound. Holy Guard was dumb, solemn, and saturnine.
Its life was as death, its joy worse than sorrow.
As for Rosamunde, full of a passionate misery, she had entered its gate
dreaming of chants and the throbbing of bells. She had pictured
cloisters full of golden light, gardens where angels might have tended
the flowers. Her heart was heavy, yearning for peace, and that infinite
calm the world had not given.
Holy Guard might have served a demon, by the fierce and pitiless humour
of its heart. Its nuns were as mutes, rough, raw-boned, and sullen.
Rosamunde, with her rich soul, was as a queen in a charnel house, mocked
by mere skeletons. The Abbess had received her, portioned her a cell,
given her a black gown in place of the blue. She had solemnised her
novitiate in the cold grey chapel, whose walls seemed to shut out the
warmth of heaven. Toil and travail became her lot. She laboured with the
rest in the sour, stony garden, washed the linen, drew water at the
well. Her white hands grew rough and red apace; her cheeks became
hollow, her bright eyes dim. There were fasts and vigils, penitences
galore. The nuns’ tongues were bridled save for one hour in the day, and
no laughter or joy ever echoed through Holy Guard.
Rosamunde had sought peace there; she discovered shame and bitterness of
spirit. Her ways were not the ways of those about her, for these ashy
people had forgotten the world with its throes of passion, its pathos,
its tears. There were no humble poor to need their alms, no sick and
palsied to be cheered and fed. Their creed was narrow and selfish as
their lives. The sea and the wilderness hemmed them in; they had grown
hard and savage, coarse beyond belief.
A great change came over Rosamunde’s heart those months. She began to
think much of Tristan and the love he had shown her, how she had tried
him and found him a man. These new thoughts solaced her those winter
months as she toiled at the well-winch or dug in the garden. Hallowed by
memory, Tristan’s face had lost its ugliness, gained even a rough beauty
as the past sped back. She recalled his great strength, his manliness
and honour. Even in the incredulous deeps of her heart, she began to
believe that she would have found a finer haven within Tristan’s arms
than in the wind-swept towers and courts of Holy Guard.
The change was very subtle that worked in her that winter. She
disbelieved her own heart at times, scoffed at her imaginings, yet found
that they remained. Her mood towards Samson had altered also. It was as
the melting of a dream for the passionate reality of life, a fancy that
seemed as frail as a spider’s gossamer hung with dew. She had worshipped
Samson in her impulsive way, even because he had bulked a god among men,
a martyr and a prophet.
Moreover, she had been lonely, lonely to death those years in Joyous
Vale, and had yearned for the love that had never come. Ronan, her
husband, had sickened her soul with his feeble body, his pusillanimous
mind. Out of the bitterness of solitude she had conceived romance, and
cheated her heart with vain imaginings. Now in Holy Guard she had come
by the truth, that a woman’s brain was but the vassal of her heart.
Before long she began to curse the day when she had abandoned Tristan
for the cloisters of Holy Guard. She had found no comfort within its
walls, and though her heart cried out there was no one to comfort her,
no one to speak with concerning the past. The place seemed full of
desolation and death and the voice of the wind. She yearned for liberty,
even for the troublous and sinful lap of the world. Life, desperate and
bitter though it might prove, was fairer far than a living grave.
One evening she stood and watched the sun sinking over the sea as she
leant against the parapet of the topmost platform of the place, with the
chapel behind her, dark and dim, the cliffs plunging sheer to the sands
beneath. Holy Guard was built wall on wall upon the rock, its towers and
roofs climbing the rugged slopes. Thus from its heights Rosamunde
watched the fires dwindle, the red glow elapse. Blue gloom descended and
overarched the sea. The wind gathered and moaned as the stars began to
shine in the darkening sky.
An eternal melancholy seemed to cover the world. The clouds lost their
crimson shrouds, grew grey and colourless, hurried fast before the wind.
There were tears in Rosamunde’s eyes as she gazed towards the sea, for
she was growing old and her youth was flying; soon she would be as these
nuns, haggard, hard-featured, cold of eye. Her heart cried out for some
great love. Lacking such love, what was life worth that she should
strive to husband it? Even God seemed far from her on that lonely crag,
and Christ’s face was dark within the walls of Holy Guard.
As she stood brooding, gazing out towards the sea, where the breakers
foamed dimly under the deepening night, Julia, Mistress of the Novices,
passed by from the chapel with a chain lamp swinging in her hand. It was
contrary to the rules for nuns to loiter; when not at work or in chapel
or refectory, they were packed in their cells to pray and meditate.
Sister Julia was a woman of obscure birth, a coarse, brown-faced scold
with the tongue of a Xanthippe. She took much pride in her post as
Mistress of the Novices, since she could often hector women of nobler
birth. Feminine malice was alive in Holy Guard. Rosamunde had been
subjected to a goodly share thereof by reason of her estate and the mere
insolence of beauty.
Thus the sister accosted her with no great kindness, glad of an excuse
to use her tongue.
“Laggard, to your cell. Draw water for penance on the morrow. You are
too often idle for so young a wench.”
Rosamunde turned to her with a look of appeal. There were still tears
upon her cheeks, and even for the sympathy of this round-backed scold
she would have given much, so lonely was she.
“I go, sister,” she said. “I was but watching the sun go down, thinking
of the years that have gone over my head.”
Julia sneered, and tilted her nose. It was well known in Holy Guard that
Rosamunde had been of noble birth. The woman, grained with the
hypocritic egotism of that narrow life, had created Rosamunde’s downfall
with sisterly relish.
“Leave the past alone, girl,” she said, with a tightening of her mouth;
“it was none too clean and godly, I warrant. I saw court life in
Agravale before I found Our Lady here.”
“Who would doubt it?” said Rosamunde, with a tinge of scorn.
“Mortify your pride, my wench; we suffer no fire-flies in Holy Guard.”
“Nor any charity,” said Rosamunde, turning on her heel.
Drawing her gown about her—for the wind was keen—she passed from the
terrace down the broad stairway to the lower platform of the abbey.
Seeking her cell down gloomy passage-ways and galleries, she sat down on
the wood, straw-palleted bed, miserable at heart, cold in body. The blue
gloom of the night showed through a chink in the wall, a single star
glimmering through with silver irony. The wind whistled into the cell as
into the narrow throat of an empty tomb.
Yet while Rosamunde was moping in Holy Guard, grieving for liberty and
that love she had lost to the world, Tristan won fame in the Seven
Streams as a bold smiter and a hardy knight.
The fierce tune in the man’s brain had grown more strident in the winter
weather. “Columbe and vengeance,” cried a voice, grim and relentless,
deep and unceasing. He lived, prayed, dreamt for revenge. Strong and
terrible in the fanaticism of his strength, he galloped like a madman
over hill and dale. Nothing was too hard for him, nothing impossible.
His sword played like lightning through the wilds, for battle and action
seemed to ease his soul. He was a man whose heart was filled with fire,
before whose eyes swept a mist of blood. Night and noon, Columbe his
dead sister seemed to stand and gaze upon his face, and ever he would
fancy that he heard her voice amid the rain pelt and the howling wind.
Samson had marched out to drive the scattered garrisons Jocelyn had left
from the strong places of the Seven Streams. Tristan was Samson’s Talus,
his man of iron with the iron flail. Taking Tor’s Tower as their
fountain-head, they had pushed their forays south and east, smiting
sudden blows out of the dark. It was a war of outposts, of scattered
sieges, of ambushes in the woods. Honour fell to the swift and the
desperate; strength and subtlety went hand in hand.
In such a war as this Tristan grew terrible, a man without pity, one who
never tired. Samson had given him two hundred spears, and many of
Blanche’s best knights were content to serve him. The man with the red
shield and the sable pennon became the scourge and terror of Jocelyn’s
men. Tristan struck mightily and with furious swiftness. One night he
fell upon Sanguelac, a strong place towards the border, scaled the wall
alone, for the ladder broke behind him. He sprang down into the court,
slew with his axe six men who held the gate, let his own knights in. The
place expiated Ronan’s town with death and fire.
The following night he fell upon Merdin, a hill tower some seven leagues
away. Though an outpost from Sanguelac, its garrison knew nothing of
their fellows’ fate. They were drinking and dicing when Tristan’s men
broke in. Such deeds as these spread terror and panic through the
breadth of the land, for Tristan came like a storm-wind through the
wilds or like an eagle out of the blue.
As for Blanche the Duchess, proud lady that she was, her eyes kindled at
the noise of Tristan’s deeds. Often she rode with him on raid and foray,
content to share the grim chaos of such a war. Was he not a man after
her own heart, knighted by the stroke of her own sword? Her face would
flush when she heard the sound of Tristan’s trumpet over the moors.
Her men whispered together over their camp fires; they loved their
Duchess, were fierce and jealous for her honour. Yet there was not a man
in their iron ranks who loved not Tristan and swore by his sword. He was
a soldiers’ man, fearless and hardy, one who could sleep in mud and
scale a tower. “Sanguelac,” “Merdin,” these were his watchwords. The
black eagle should lead them towards the south.