Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: Cover]
[Illustration: "FLAVIAN OF GAMBREVAULT STOOD BOUND BEFORE HER."]
LOVE
AMONG THE RUINS
BY
WARWICK DEEPING
AUTHOR OF "UTHER AND IGRAINE"
Grim work, sirs; what would you!
War is the devil.
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY W. BENDA_
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1904
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY
THE OUTLOOK COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1904.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co. -- Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
TO
MY MOTHER AND FATHER
WITH ALL LOVE AND GRATITUDE
PART I
I
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 aether 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'?"
II
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."
III
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 primaeval 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."
IV
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!'"
V
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."
VI
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
primaeval 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."
VII
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?"