Through the black and ruined land came Tristan and his men, marching
where the rivers ran, that they might not tread ankle deep in ashes, nor
be choked and blinded by the dust and smoke. Ruin was everywhere, black,
saturnine, and solemn. A strange silence hung upon the world, where the
charred trees still stood with their hands outstretched to the rainless
sky. Many lay fallen like the dead upon a battlefield. The wind had
passed, the storm blasts moaned no more.
As Tristan rode through the desolate woods, he bowed down his head, and
was heavy of heart. He had loved these children of the forest, these
scorched martyrs stricken in the rising of the sap. No more would their
banners blow with the march of spring. And yet the dead trees were but
outlined against the deeper gold of memory, a melancholy afterglow,
weird yet tender. The savage in him was inert awhile. Childhood and
youth came back, his mother’s face and Rosamunde’s sad eyes, the golden
glimmer of his sister’s hair. Rosamunde, Rosamunde! What of the red rose
plucked from the snowy towers of Joyous Vale? For the moment he forgot
the grim, grinding present, the ten thousand iron men who drove clouds
of dust from the ashes under their horses’ feet.
Towards evening they saw a river gleaming below them in a valley,
shining like silver set in ebony, as it coursed through the blackened
country. Tristan, drawing rein with the Duchess upon the brow of a hill,
hardly knew the valley, so great was the change the flames had worked.
The river parted about an island, foaming over the rocks that thrust
their black snouts above the surface. The island itself was green and
untouched, girded by the water from the dead wild around.
Tristan pointed Blanche and his captains to it with his sword. There was
a strange light upon his face, even as the light upon the face of a
crusader who beheld the Holy City shining under the blue arch of heaven.
“Behold Jocelyn’s hermitage,” he said to them. “Columbe my sister lies
buried under yonder cedar.”
Blanche, weary despite the strength of her strenuous soul, strove to
calm for the moment the passion of a man who had lived as in a furnace
those many months.
“Tristan,” she answered him, with a hand on his bridle, “is it not
enough that you have conquered? Shall not your sister rest in peace?”
The expression of the man’s face changed again as suddenly as the
surface of a darkened mirror. The old fanatical and sullen gloom rushed
back.
“What is victory,” he said, “but the power to punish, to crush the adder
under the heel. My sister shall rest in no hidden grave. By my soul, I
have sworn it; in Agravale I will build her tomb.”
There could be no debate with such a man as this, whose spirit flamed
like a torch in a wind. Tristan dismounted on the brow of the hill, bade
them bring forward the wooden coffin that had carried Jocelyn from the
town of Marvail. The blazoned banner covered the shell. Tristan, with
his own hands, flung the “Golden Keys” aside, ungirded the lid, bade his
men lift the Bishop out.
Jocelyn stood there, a lean, cringing figure, with the pride gone from
his hollow-cheeked face. His eyes roved over the blackened country, the
sepulchral trees, the brown, scorched grass. He seemed dizzy in the sun,
looking more like some starved ascetic than the plump prelate who had
ruled Agravale. Tristan ordered wine to be brought, and Jocelyn drank
greedily from the flask, his head shaking as with an old man’s palsy.
The red wine ran down his chin, stained his tunic, soaked the dead grass
at his feet.
Tristan stood above him with drawn sword.
“Seest thou yonder island?” he said.
Jocelyn followed with his eyes the pointing sword.
“Yonder,” said the knight, “yonder is your forest hermitage, Bishop,
where Pandart kept house for those whom you cherished. Stir your wits,
man; is your memory so slow?”
Jocelyn winced; his lip quivered; there was a moist mist over his eyes.
“God judge me, I know not the place,” he said. “Your words are
meaningless, sinner that I am.”
Again Tristan’s sword touched the Bishop’s shoulder; the man squirmed
under it like a frightened dog.
“Ogier is no name to you? Come, priest, look into my eyes.”
“Ogier, by God’s light, I know no such name.”
“Nor Rosamunde, Lady of Joyous Vale, nor even Columbe whom ye did to
death? Lie not to me, Jocelyn of Agravale, for you know my face; I am
that Tristan who served in your guard. It was I who slew Ogier in yonder
woods, and set the Lady Rosamunde safe in Holy Guard. It is my sister
who lies dead under yonder cedar. Tell me, by God, whether you deserve
not death.”
Jocelyn bowed his shoulders beneath the words as a slave stoops from the
hissing lash. He clutched his bosom, choked, fell prone, grovelled at
Tristan’s feet. But in Tristan’s heart there was no glimmer of pity.
“Strip him, sirs,” were his words to his men. “When ye have scourged him
down to the island, set him in his priest’s robes by my sister’s grave.
Guard him there till I shall come.”
Samson’s old followers broke their ranks, stripped Jocelyn naked,
unbuckled their belts, and drove him down towards the river. Whimpering,
grovelling, he took his chastisement, spurned and scorned, the creature
of Fate. They dragged him over the rocks in the bed of the river, robed
him in the state robes they had taken from his tent, and bound him to
the cedar tree in the garden. Such was the pilgrimage he made that day
to the grave of Columbe, Tristan’s sister.
Not till evening had come did Tristan enter upon the fulfilling of the
vow that he had sworn before Rosamunde over Columbe’s grave. His men
were camped about the island and under the branches of the spectral
trees. The west was an open gate of gold, the dead forest wreathed in
rivers of mist. The island, with the dark foliage of its trees and
shrubs, lay like some dusky emerald sewn on the bosom of a sable robe.
Blanche the Duchess’s pavilion had been pitched on the stretch of grass
before the house. Tristan had sought solitude in the room where
Rosamunde had been lodged in the summer months that were gone. He passed
an hour alone in that chamber, pacing from wall to wall, thinking of the
task that lay before him. Never did his heart flinch more than from that
ordeal of death, the opening of his sister’s grave. He had searched the
room, and had discovered in a cupboard an old robe of Rosamunde’s, even
the very one she had worn the night the Papists ravaged Ronan’s town.
Tristan took it, pressed the hem to his lips. The robe should cover
Columbe’s body, love’s robe for a lost love.
Night came, and torches were kindled. Tristan, stern and white of face,
knelt down and prayed, and passed out from the house. In her pavilion he
found Blanche seated in state, her coronet circling her silvery hair,
her knights round her as for some solemn council. The garden was
thronged with armed men, their helmets gleaming in the light of the
torches.
Tristan stood alone before the Duchess’s tent, and bent the knee to her
as one who serves.
“Madame,” he said, in the hearing of all, “I go to uncover my sister’s
grave.”
“Sir Tristan,” she answered him with steady voice, “God comfort you in
this your hour of trial. We would not gape nor gaze on your grief. Sirs,
stand by me; let no man move save Sir Tristan gives him word.”
The light in the west still wavered through the gloom. To the north rose
the dome of the great cedar, its green boughs sweeping even to the
ground. It stood like a green temple built by Nature for the kindly
shading of a woodland grave. Tristan kissed the Duchess’s hand, and
chose ten of Samson’s men who had served him of old in the Seven
Streams.
Hid by the cypresses that closed the hollow, they passed with two
torches under the cedar. By the dark trunk stood Jocelyn of Agravale,
clad in his pontificals as Tristan had ordered. The men went to work on
the grass mound. Near by lay the two coffins side by side, the Banner of
the Golden Keys covering the larger. While five men opened Columbe’s
grave, the rest dug a fresh trench under the cedar.
Tristan stood by the mound and watched their labours, the torchlight
playing upon his face, wreathing grim shadows about his figure. There
was a terrible calm in the eyes that never wavered under the arch of the
casque. Soon the soiled fold of a gown came to light, then a little
hand, frail and wasted. Soon they had taken Columbe from the grave,
after covering the face that Tristan might not see it. The man shaded
his eyes with his great forearm as they laid the body in the coffin, and
bade one of the soldiers cut from her head a long lock of her golden
hair. Soiled with earth as it was, he laid the lock upon his lips,
knotted it with hand and teeth about his arm. He had taken the silver
snake from off his wrist and tossed the bracelet into the coffin, which
he bade the men cover with Rosamunde’s robe.
Not one of those who laboured had spoken. In silence the whole host
stood to arms as the moon came up over the blackened hills. Yet when
Columbe was borne from under the cedar, a hundred trumpets challenged
the night, their wild clamour echoing amid the woods.
When the second grave lay deep under the tree, Tristan, striding to the
trunk of the cedar, ordered the torches to be brought near.
“Bishop,” he said, “chant your own death Mass, even a Mass for her whom
Ogier slew.”
No mercy did they show to Jocelyn that night. When they had made an end,
they laid him in the coffin, covered it with the Sacred Banner, and
lowered the whole into the open grave.