And an hour before dawn there arrived from the west a body of footsore

miners, armed for the most part with picks, which it appeared they were

skilled in using in a variety of ways. These combined with the

stationarii; for an hour red death swept through hall and court and

chamber, to the tune of the yelling of the human wolf-pack loosed for

blood. At the end of it the barbarians, harried before and behind,

unable to rally, fell into panic and started to flee, laden with what

spoil they could bear away. By dawn what was left of the villa was again

in Roman hands, a wreck mighty in its desolation, epitome of the

splendor that had been and the tragedy that was to come. The pendulum of

Time had started on its inevitable downward course, and where had been

power and grandeur were but the ashes of pomp and pride.

IV

Now, four days after that night when Wardo had betrayed his lord in the

house of Chloris, men coming up from the mine, at sunset when the day's

work was done, were herded by their overseers and guards into the bare

open space at the mouth of the mine. The superintendent came among them,

a grizzled man, hard-faced, as became his lot, and spoke. Beside him was

a slave whom some there recognized as from the villa, travel-stained and

dropping with fatigue, just arrived with letters from his lord.

"An attack hath been made upon the house of our lord by barbarians and

insurgents," said the superintendent, glancing over the tablets he held.

"It was repulsed, but with loss upon both sides. The barbarians came

from the Silva Anderida, and it is thought that they are being

reinforced by others, and will try again. My lord is hard pressed, for

the house is crowded with guests gathered for the marriage feast of our

lady. The attack hath been stubborn beyond belief; the barbarians demand

that one lord Felix, who slew their chief at Anderida, be given up to

them, and this my lord will not do. Also my lord saith that knowledge of

the rich treasure in the house was betrayed to the barbarians by a

drunken slave, and they are hot for plunder. Therefore he hath sent to

me, as the nearest one to afford him help, commanding that I say to you

in his name: Those of you whose crimes are not murder or against

religion shall be returned to the house to take part in its defence, as

many as can be singled out by to-morrow's dawn. For loyal service and

obedience to orders, ye shall receive the freedom of _casarii_ and your

sentence here shall be cancelled. To-night your records shall be looked

up, and to-morrow those of you whose names and numbers are called will

be sent forward as quickly as may be."

Half a hundred voices raised a tired cheer, not so much because their

lord was in danger, as because there was prospect of release. The

nightly rations of black bread and beans were served out. Some men took

their portion to the huts where they slept, as beasts carry food to

their lair; but these were for the most part condemned for murders and

religious crimes and knew that they had no hope of freedom. The majority

gathered in discussion about the fires, always with alert sentries

hovering near at hand. All that night the air throbbed with expectation.

In the first dark hours of morning the blast of a brazen trumpet brought

five hundred men into the open, eager to know their fate. The

superintendent and his assistants appeared with lists of names which

they had worked all night to complete. Men pressed close around him,

eager not to lose a word; the overseers, whips in hand, mingled with the

crowd to check incipient disturbances. A score of mounted guards were

drawn up near by, waiting to escort the detail. Lanterns shone here and

there through the thin gray mist which hung over the broken land.

Nicanor woke at the first brassy blare of the trumpet. His face was keen

with his first conscious thought; there was no doubt that he would be of

those chosen. He made his toilet with a shake of his tunic, and went

outside. Around him, in the semi-darkness, figures were hurrying to

where the superintendent, mounted on a keg, was calling the roll by the

light of a lantern, with his hood pulled well over his face against the

keen air of morning. His harsh voice, shouting names and numbers, rose

above the stir and rustle of excited men.

Three rods from his hut, Nicanor was jostled violently by one who

wheeled with an oath to see who had run against him.

"Have a care, Balbus!" Nicanor said shortly. "What is thy haste? Dost

hope that thou wilt be chosen, man-killer? What wouldst give to be in my

place? For I shall go, having neither religion nor blood upon my head."

Balbus snarled at the taunt. It had been flung at him before, with

variations, until his temper was frayed to breaking-point. From Nicanor

it was not to be endured; for since the day of the rat-fight encounters

between the two had been frequent and bloody, in spite of the guards'

whips. Now jealousy was added to the wrath of Balbus, and with this the

devil in him broke its chains. But after his nature, he was treacherous.

He said nothing, nor gave warning that his anger was more than

skin-deep; and made as though to pass Nicanor and go his way. Nicanor

went on, laughing carelessly. But he was scarcely past when Balbus

wheeled around and struck. There was the glimmer of a blade, a smothered

oath, and that was all. Nicanor turned as though to attack his

assailant, who had sprung back, staggered, pitched forward, and fell,

rolling down the slight declivity. He struggled a moment to rise, and

lay down again, very quiet, and the slope of ground hid him from casual

observation in the camp.

Balbus drove his weapon into the earth to clean it, hid it in his shirt,

and hurried into the crowd of miners, who, as the roll-call progressed,

were being divided into two groups.

"Nimus!" the superintendent called, and a man stepped forward and joined

the smaller group. "Nico! Niger! Nicanor!"

And at this Balbus pressed forward, elbowing to the superintendent's

side.

"Master, the man Nicanor hath been fighting, it would seem, although

with whom I do not know. When I came by, I saw him lying dead upon the

ground by the huts."

"Nonius! Ollus!" cried the overseer, and in the same breath--"When I

have started these I will send men to bury him.--Ossian!"

Shortly after sunrise three hundred and fifty men were started under

escort to their lord's assistance, equipped as well as might be with the

means at hand.

When Nicanor struggled back to consciousness, after unmarked hours, the

noise of the tramping of men had ceased, and again the world was dark.

He tried to move, and a twinge of agony hot as flame shot through him,

shocking him into full wakefulness. He sat upright, wincing with pain,

and slowly felt himself all over. There was blood upon his head, where

he had struck it against a stone in falling, but it was caked and dried.

And his tunic was torn, on the left side, just behind and under the

shoulder. It took him some time to reach around and find the place, for

every movement was slow torture. The cloth at this place was stiff with

what he knew was blood. So, then, this was where the knife of Balbus had

gone home. He wondered if the wound were serious. The stars danced

dizzily before his eyes, and he was faint from loss of blood. But there

was a thing he had to do, a thing which all through unconsciousness had

given him no rest. Across the deeps of night and of oblivion a voice was

calling, and he must follow it while he had life to stand. He got to his

feet and stood swaying uncertainly. By sheer force of will he steadied

himself, and turning his back on the silent settlement, started walking

across the rough and broken country straight eastward toward the road

which led to his heart's desire.

Sometimes he walked; sometimes he fell and lay staring at the high sky

and the wheeling stars, waiting without sound or motion until he could

gather strength to rise. Sometimes he felt his tunic wet with fresh

blood, and could not get at the wound to stanch it, and did not try;

sometimes iron hammers, red-hot, beat upon his temples and left him

blind and reeling with pain. Always one idea possessed him; he must get

to her who called him. She was in danger; he cursed the gods who had

held him back from starting to her rescue with his mates. Time lost--his

chance gone--though he died for it, he would not let himself be beaten

in this by Fate. Every ounce of the dogged sullen strength of him

gathered itself to meet the demands of his stubborn will. And always,

whether he walked in reason or in delirium, his course held eastward,

straight as a homing pigeon for its loft.

In time, when the sun was high, he reached the road which crossed the

Sabrina and led to the moor towns beyond. Here he entered the barge of a

waterman about to leave the bank, and sat waiting to be ferried across,

staring straight before him, with never an answer to the boatman's idle

talk. The boat's nose poked into the further bank, and the boatman

demanded his fare. Nicanor looked at him with eyes glittering with fever

beneath his shaggy thatch of hair, and shook his head mutely, as at one

who spoke an unknown tongue. He got out of the boat and walked up the

road, and the man crossed his fingers in superstitious fright, muttered

a prayer to the river-gods against ill luck, and let him go.

Once started again, Nicanor walked all that day, and at nightfall

reached Corinium, five and twenty miles away. Here his overwrought

strength gave out, and he slept as the dead sleep, in the fields outside

the town. Hours before dawn he woke, haunted by the demon of unrest

which rode him, begged food and a cup of milk at a farmhouse by the

road, and started on again. All that day he walked, a mere machine

dominated by a force which would drive it forward to the very verge of

dissolution; and in the late evening he reached Cunetio. Here he did not

know when he stopped, for he went to sleep on his feet, and woke and

found himself on his back by the roadside, with the sun at high noon.

Desperate for the time he had lost, he hastened on, and in an hour came

upon one of the small stations threaded along the high-roads between

towns which were more than ten Roman miles apart, kept as taverns by

_diversores_ for the entertainment of travellers. There were folk

stopping here, for outside the inn door stood horses, saddled and

tethered. Nicanor selected the animal which best pleased him,--a tall

roan,--mounted, and rode away without so much as a glance behind him for

pursuit.

After that his way was easier. He met people, who stared at him and

sometimes asked questions which he heard himself answering. Dimly,

without at all taking it in, he understood that they were vastly excited

about something, but it was not worth while to ask questions on his own

account. They were mere shadows, without substance, which drifted by and

were forgotten; only he and his desire in all the world were real. So he

reached Calleva, in the open country amid the heather, where he stopped

for an hour for food and to rest his horse. On again then for fifteen

miles, and he rode through the station of Bibracte, and turned aside

into the oak-lined by-road for the last ten miles of his journey--miles

which stretched before him as the most endless of all. Again excitement

burned in his veins like fever; he kicked his horse into a gallop which

more than once threatened life and limb. They pounded up the last slope

which hid the villa from view, spent horse and exhausted man, and gained

the rise. And Nicanor flung the roan back upon its haunches with a jerk

which all but broke its jaw.

"Holy gods!" he muttered; and then--"Holy gods! Am I mad--or do I dream

again?"

The sight burst upon him in all its blinding suddenness and appalling

hideousness,--a smoking ruin where had been the stately mansion of his

lord; blank windows grinning at him like dead, open eyes; the garden of

his dreams desecrated, its wall shattered, lying open, naked and

despoiled, before the world. At the tinge of smoke which hovered like

the breath of death above the place, his horse flung up its head and

snorted. Nicanor lifted his arms to the high heaven which for him was

empty, and brought them slowly down before his face.

"Oh, thou heedless god, whoever thou mayest be that hast done this

thing!" he cried into the bitterness of the desolation before him,

"smite thou me also, for there is naught left for me! The stars fight

against me; I am cursed with unending bitterness, and all that I can do

is of no avail."

The shock was as great as though he saw her whom he sought lying dead

before him. For the first time he faltered, not knowing whither to go or

what to do, not daring to search for what he feared to find. His horse,

standing with legs spread wide and drooping head, heaved a great sob of

exhaustion from its panting flanks. Nicanor, staring ahead of him with

gloomy eyes, roused, picked up his loose reins, and rode down the hill.

At the yawning doorway, where no porter challenged, he swung himself

from the saddle and went into the great central court. Here was grass

uprooted, a fountain wrecked; marble walks were stained with blood and

the marks of feet; plants were torn up and broken. Through empty room

after empty room he hurried,--to hers, his lady's, first of all. And at

the threshold of her bedchamber he stumbled over a body,--Nerissa's, the

old nurse; and behind her lay Mycon, chief of the eunuchs. The room was

in confusion; chests were torn open and their contents rifled; furniture

was upset and hacked. In the bathroom near by, the marble bath, sunken

in the floor, was filled with water, and there were towels and unguents

and perfumes ready at hand. A bronze strigil lay across the threshold,

where it had been dropped in someone's hasty flight.

On from here he went, sick with fear of what might have been, and passed

through other rooms. Here were the same signs of wanton destruction;

mosaic floors cracked and defaced, statues overthrown, hangings torn

down and swaying to the wind in rags. He found other bodies; Hito's

huddled in the violated garden, amid the tangle of wrecked vines and

trampled shrubbery; and those of many slaves. The storerooms had been

looted, and broken amphorae and the remains of food showed where drunken

orgies had been held. In the Hall of Columns every article of gold or

silver had been carried off. Priceless vessels in embossed and enamelled

glass lay shattered into fragments; even some of the bronze lamps were

gone. Velvet covers had been stripped from the couches; the table was

drenched in spilled wine. A bust of the Emperor which had stood on its

marble pedestal at the end of the hall lay upon the floor, mutilated

almost beyond recognition--work of Romans, this, of the insurgents who

refused to acknowledge the divinity of their temporal lord and

sovereign.

Nicanor stood in the doorway, the lone living figure in a great

desolation. All his fears and uncertainties were written in his face.

When had this thing happened? What had become of his lord and his lord's

guests? And his lady, what of her? Had the relief from the mine been in

time, and why were there no signs of them? What had become of the

invaders, and why had all living things so completely disappeared? And

where were the stationarii, that they had not taken possession of the

place in the name of the law?

He went back to those rooms which had been his lady's, torn with bitter

doubt and dread. He walked reverently among the things which had been

hers, as one who treads on holy ground, touching with his hands a chair

over which was flung a rug of snowy furs, as though she had just left

it--a table covered with bottles and perfume pots. And beside the couch

where she had lain he dropped upon his knees and hid his face in the

silken covers.

Heavy footsteps echoed outside in the empty corridor, and Nicanor

started to his feet, a hand on his knife. A man entered, stepping over

Nerissa's body, and stopped short. By his dress, his iron helmet, and

short sword, Nicanor knew him for a stationarius. This one, recovering

from his surprise, advanced quickly.

"So, fellow, I've caught you red-handed!" he cried, and grasped

Nicanor's shoulder. Nicanor winced at the touch, but made no effort to

get away.

"There is no need of that," he said quietly. "I am my lord's man, slave

in this house until a month ago." His collar of brass, with its graven

name, bore evidence to his words. "I pray you tell me of what hath

happened here, and of my lord, and his--his people."

"That is another matter," said the stationarius, and let him go. "I

thought thee of those roving reavers who have plagued us day and night.

Thou hast indeed been out of the world not to know these things. Three

nights ago this happened. We were sent down from Calleva as soon as the

word was brought, but when we arrived the mischief had been done. The

lords had fled; the barbarians were in possession, and wallowing in the

havoc they had wrought. We gave them battle; in the midst of it came

your lord's men from the mines, whom also he had sent for. The

barbarians fled with what booty they could gather. Now the place is

patrolled by stationarii. We have been burying bodies and saving what

property we might, until your lord shall give command concerning it."

"And my lord?" Nicanor asked. "Whither hath he fled?"

"It is said to Londinium," the soldier answered. "Thence to Rutupiae to

take ship for Gaul. But of this I know not the truth. We are directed to

send in our reports to his house in Londinium; that is all that hath

been told us."

"Then have I no time to lose," said Nicanor.

Forthwith he remounted and rode eastward from the villa into the

deepening dusk. He turned into the Noviomagus road which led northward

to Londinium, down which he had been brought a prisoner so long a time

before, when first he had entered into his slaveship. And here he saw

that his lord's mansion had not been the only place to suffer.

For he found himself in the very track of the barbarians as they had

spread out of the Silva Anderida, through a neck of which, fifteen miles

ahead, the road passed. An acrid smell of smoke hung heavy in the

twilight; when he reached the station of Noviomagus he found it all in

flames, with dark figures which ran wildly in and out against the

glare. Here he changed his exhausted horse for a riderless gray which

came snorting with terror out of the smoke and gloom, ready to welcome a

master's hand and voice. He caught it, left the good roan by the

roadside, and hastened on. He met and passed people on the road fleeing

from burning houses and wrecked homes; in his ears were the crackle of

flames and the wailing of women who mourned their dead. From small

hamlets scattered in the country, folk were seeking refuge in the larger

towns. Yet when he had passed these heedless, scattered groups, he rode

almost alone.

All through the scented night he rode, and the round yellow moon rode

with him. Strange things were happening beneath that moon; in the

crucible of destiny a new land was forming, a new order of things was

rising on the ashes of the old. Change, long germinating in hidden

depths, was in the air, blowing warm with the breath of the South; in

the earth, stirring with the first quickening of Spring; in the hearts

and minds of men. And it was in Nicanor's heart as he rode fast through

the night, fostered in his long season of darkness, unconscious, and

inevitable as the changes which were taking place around him.

Ahead of him the great road stretched white in the moonlight, a broad

ribbon which lost itself among hills and in the shadows of trees. In his

ears was the thunder of his horse's feet, pounding insistent clamor into

the quiet of the night; the wind of the speed of his going swept cool

against his face. The night was gray around him, a velvet moon-steeped

darkness, odorous with the fragrance of breaking earth. Far away the

deep-throated bay of a dog rose and died across the world. A bell note,

thinned by distance to a faint dream-sound, stole over silent hill and

valley; peace seemed to wrap the world around as in a cloister garden.

Yet not so many miles away were blazing fires, and red wounds, and the

black and bitter death of a battle lost. With every mile the scene

unrolled itself before him; off in the wide rolling country, which

stretched on either hand, lights twinkled here and yonder, wakeful eyes

of watchfulness among the hills. He passed pale glimmering bogs where by

day lonely herons brooded, and wide barren heaths over which the road

led straight as an arrow's flight.

And as the miles reeled away under him his excitement began to mount

with the sweep of his horse's stride. The exultation of rapid motion

mingled with the rising fever of his wound; he wished to shout aloud, to

sing. Vague forms seemed to slip by him in the shadows; in every bush

beside the road he saw white faces lurking. Strange and half-formed

impressions haunted him, of bearded men passing, who sometimes spoke an

unknown tongue and sometimes vanished silently as ghosts. Later, he

could not tell if he had seen them or if it had been but his fevered

dreams; for always when he forced himself to rouse and look about him

sanely, the road reached before him white and deserted.

All sense of pain left him, even all consciousness of the horse that he

bestrode. He seemed floating miraculously through air, and was aware of

vague surprise that he did not fall. He could not stop; an iron weight

upon his shoulders crushed him to the earth, but at the same time a

force against which he could not struggle drove him on. He became

possessed of the idea that again he was working in the mines, under the

overseer's lash; the sound of his horse's feet merged imperceptibly into

the tapping of the picks, hideously loud, and the maddening rhythm of

the sound pounded his brain into bruised torpor. Then he knew that he

was on fire; from head to foot he burned, parched as a soul in hell.

Balls of flame danced before his eyes; while he looked upon them they

turned to faces grinning from out a blood-red mist. The faces drew

closer and melted into one face, Varia's face, as he had seen it last,

white, with scarlet lips and flaming poppies upon either temple.

Then the mist in his eyes cleared suddenly, and he saw the figure below

the face, wreathed in a floating web of moonlight through which white

limbs gleamed, with dusky hair that streamed behind it in a cloud; saw

that it was flying from him upon a great white horse. And as it fled it

looked back at him with laughing eyes which yet were Varia's eyes; and

in its hand it bore a wan pale flame which was his soul, the essence of

the genius in him which was his life. At once he knew the figure to be

Life and Love, and all that men strive for and hold most dear; and all

his being leaped to the fierce desire for conquest, and he shouted in

triumph and pursued. But as fast as the good gray went, with ears laid

back and neck outstretched and body flattened to its desperate headlong

stride, that great white horse went faster, bearing ever just beyond his

reach the slim figure, veiled in misty moonbeams, that laughed into his

eyes yet fled from his embraces.

He laughed aloud in answer, caught up in the whirlwind of his furious

speed; heaven and earth held nothing but the divine frenzy of his

desire. Fire coursed through his veins; the chase was Life itself,

full-blooded, reckless, exultant and sublime, rioting gloriously with

untamed passion. He was a god, all-conquering in the fierce pride of his

lusty youth and strength; Life was his, and Love was his, if he could

seize them. Now the gray's head was at the white horse's shoulder; now

he bent forward, laughing his hot triumph into those eyes which were

Varia's eyes, his arm outstretched to grasp the mist-veiled figure that

leaned away from him, flying from him yet ready to yield in his clasp,

with the pale flame wavering in one hand and a white arm raised to ward

him off. He had no eyes for the road ahead; a stride, and the prize

would be in his eager arms. Ahead was the darkness of the great wood; a

stride, and he was within its shadow. The moon was blotted out by the

high blackness of trees; and in a heart-beat with its light were gone the

white horse and the slim rider with its veil of gauze--gone like a

wreath of smoke or a dream which is lost in darkness. He reeled in his

saddle under the shock of it, and cried aloud in his disappointment;

baffled, he thought that he had lost his quarry among the trees. The

gray thundered on, with the reins hanging loose upon its neck, through

the damp silence of the wood, where night hung heavy, and out into the

open, where again the road gleamed white and empty beneath the moon.

And then the moon was gone, and light went out of the world, and he knew

himself for a soul cast into outer darkness. His mind was blank; he knew

not whether he lived or died, nor did he care. He lived in a nebulous

void of gray unconsciousness, horribly empty of all thought and all

sensation.

So he would have ridden, blindly, until his horse fell or he was

halted. But through sheer exhaustion his fever burned itself out, and

left him sane once more, and clinging to his horse's neck. His strength

was gone; he was dazed and drunken. He came to himself abruptly, like a

man starting from uneasy sleep, and stared about him, not knowing even

how far he had been carried. He was on the break of the slope leading

down to the marsh-ford, and the lights of Thorney glinted over the water

in his eyes.

V

His horse stumbled, and he pulled it up with an oath. Now he was vividly

conscious, every nerve strung taut, every sense alert, as a man will

sometimes oddly waken from heavy slumber. They went down the slope at a

lurching gallop, along the road churned into mire by the passing of many

carts, and splashed into the muddy waters of the ford. And on the

further bank the good gray stumbled again, tried gallantly to regain its

stride, and came crashing to the ground with a coughing groan and a long

sickening stagger. But Nicanor had saved himself from a falling horse

before. He was on his feet almost as the beast was down, reeling with

sheer weakness, but recovering with dogged persistence. He left the

horse dying at the water's edge, and started running up the street which

led across the island from ford to ford, and his black shadow raced

beside him in the moonlight.

At the low cabin next to the house of Chloris he stopped and pounded on

the door.

"Who comes?" cried a great voice within.

"It is I, Nicanor! Let me in!" said Nicanor, huskily, out of a throat

parched and stiff, and still pounded.

The door opened with a rasping of bolts. The bulk of Nicodemus appeared,

half undressed, his single eye glinting under its furze of brow.

"Thou, lad? In the name of the goddess mothers, what dost thou here at

this hour? Not drunk again? Ha, so! Easy!"

Nicanor, with a hoarse and empty laugh, staggered forward even as his

spent steed had done, and Nicodemus caught him and lowered him to the

floor. He sat quite helpless, fully conscious, yet with the strength of

his limbs gone from him for the moment utterly.

Nicodemus shouted for Myleia. She came, unkempt and kindly; between them

the two got Nicanor to his feet and helped him to a bunk. A lodger,

wakened by the noise, thrust out a tousled head, saw only a drunken

wayfarer, and went to sleep again, all undisturbed. But at this point

Nicanor resisted.

"Nay, not yet! I have first a thing to do.--Nico, hath there been

trouble of sorts on Thorney these last three days?"

Nicodemus shook his great sides with laughter.

"Trouble? Yea, verily! Thorney hath been hopping to a mad dance these

days, promise you!"

"And thou hast been dancing with the maddest," said Myleia, a hand upon

his shoulder. "What quarrel is it of thine, my big ugly bear? Some day

thou'lt be brought home to me dead, or else be haled away to be sold as

slave."

"Never fear it, jewel of my heart," Nicodemus said tenderly. "Now see we

to this battered one. See, here be a bruise upon his skull the bigness

of a duck's egg. Get my shears, sweeting, and I'll clip this lion's mane

of hair. It will lighten his head that that silver tongue of his may

wag the better."

"No, you will not!" said Nicanor. "Give me wine and let my hair alone.

Man, I tell you I've no time to lose. What happened here?"

"Out of the calm came forth a thunderbolt," said Nicodemus, watching as

Myleia brought a bowl of water, with cloths and soothing herbs. She

thrust the bowl into his hands, and he stood, great and hairy and

patient, holding it for her while she cut away Nicanor's tunic, where it

had stuck fast to the wound, and washed away the clotted blood and

grime. "But not so long ago as thou hast said. Yester eve comes a cloud

of dust over the hill by the marshes, and in the cloud as strange a

sight as man may see. Chariots, with horses smoking in the traces, lords

on horseback, slaves and rabble, all flying from the gods know what. A

tall man, very pale, with a mouth set like the jaws of a trap; a younger

one, to whom all turned for command and advice; a woman lovely as--er,

that is to say, fair enough to please a taste not over-critical as mine,

very pale, with red lips and the eyes of a little child in trouble. They

stopped here, even at this house, it being nearest, and bought food and

wine, resting for a time, for the woman was as one half dead from

weariness. Then went they on once more, and took the road for Londinium.

I made as much as five and twenty--"

Nicanor raised his head, and his eyes were full of a weary triumph.

"Nico, that pale lord is my lord, and that fair lady my lady, and I must

follow them even across to Gaul."

"What use?" said Nicodemus. "They will not stay their passage for thee.

Tarry rather with us, and be healed. In the wink of a cat's eye I'll

have that collar from off thy throat, and no man be the wiser. We have

no son, this old woman of mine and I; stay thou and be son to us. Thy

lord will not miss thee, having other matters in his head. And it is

long since we heard word from thee, lad."

"I had thought the girl would have told thee," Nicanor said. "And

she--where is she?"

"Eh? What she?" Nicodemus asked blankly, and Myleia paused to listen.

"A girl, Eldris by name, half a Briton, I think, who escaped from my

lord's house. I told her to come hither, that thou wouldst give her

shelter until I could come. Hath she not been here?"

"Never hath such an one darkened these doors of mine," said Nicodemus,

and Myleia nodded, adding quickly:

"Nay, or I should know!"

"She hath likely been captured and returned," Nicanor said, and let the

subject drop.

In spite of all they could say to him, he borrowed a horse from

Nicodemus, and at dawn set forth for Londinium, haggard and stubborn and

ridden by haunting desire which would not let him rest. And toward

evening he returned, and in his face was written failure. What he told

them gave no clew to that which all men could read in him.

"My lord and his family sailed yester eve for Gaul. A ship was on the

point of starting, and they were taken on board. This I learned from a

waterman at the quays, who had helped to load their goods. And I know

beyond doubt that they are gone, and that they will not return

hither.... Now I am weary and would rest."

His voice was utterly dead, without life or spirit. Nicodemus, pierced

by a glimmer of strange knowledge, laid a hand upon his shoulder. Very

dearly he loved his shaggy teller of tales, even though he knew that

whether he loved or not was small matter to his idol. His voice lowered

to a husky growl of tenderness.

"Son, is all well with thee?"

A spasm, swift and sharp, passed over Nicanor's face, and was gone like

a shadow. His eyes flinched as though a hand had touched a raw and

quivering nerve.

"Nay," he answered, very quietly. "It is not well."

He wandered out, in time, away from their anxious questionings, across

the marsh-ford, and toward the gray hills which rolled away to east and

west, where the noise of the traffic could not follow. He threw himself

upon the ground and stared upward at the gray misty skies, where no blue

showed through and where black dots of birds went sailing. Here was the

ground of his boyhood dreams,--he knew it with a tinge of

bitterness,--dreams that had ended always under gray skies, upon the

bleak hills of the uplands. Here, where the full shy heart of him had

first known the secret of its power in those long-gone boyhood days, he

had entered upon his heritage, thinking only of its joy, knowing nothing

of its pain. And here he had returned. Then he had seen himself a

soaring lark, singing out its life in pure joy and triumph in a fair

world of dreams and sunshine. Now he knew that the lark was caged,

doomed to beat its wings forever against bars stronger than iron, that

the dreams were shattered and the world was dark. His life was empty;

he had lost all, a slave without a master, a singer whose song was

stilled. His face, unchanging, stared at the changeless sky; he lay

stolid and motionless, and aching with dumb loneliness. Out of all the

world he knew himself alone, set apart from his kind by that heritage

which his ardent youth had thought all joy; alien, with his world not

the world of those around him, and his way the way of loneliness.

In time, Nature had her way with him, and he slept, alone upon the

hillside, in the dead slumber of exhaustion. The world thundered on

around him; the web of Life unrolled endlessly from the distaff of the

Second Fate; and he slept on, unheeding.

VI

In the late afternoon, when gray shadows were stealing westward over the

quiet hills, came Eldris along the road toward Thorney, with an empty

basket on her arm. She looked younger, rounder, better fed; her eyes

were darkly blue and full of light, her skin as white as milk. Coming up

a slight rise of ground, she saw the long figure lying against the

hillside but a short distance away, and recognized it and stopped short,

turning white, with a hand against her heart, all unprepared for what

she had yearned to see. She went to him swiftly, and knelt beside him as

he slept.

"Thank God! He hath returned--he is alive and well!" she whispered. "I

had feared--oh, I know not what I feared! How hath he escaped? Ay me,

but he is changed! There is that in his face which was not there before,

and there is something gone from it. So thin he is--sure he hath been

ill."

She hung over him in rapt absorption of tenderness; she listened to his

slow and heavy breathing; she longed to draw his rough black head into

her arms. Yet she dared scarcely touch him, since even in sleep he was

still too much his own; rosy and shy she leaned above him, her face

transfigured. They were alone in the world, with gray empty skies above

them and gray silent hills rolling upon either hand.

With one finger she touched a lock of his hair, rough and matted, and

dearer to her than all silken tresses; and he lay as one dead, very far

from her. She whispered his name, but not for him to hear; at the

deepness of his slumber she became emboldened. She stroked the hair from

his forehead with mother-tender hands; her eyes brooded over him. He was

her god; out of his strength he had saved her when she was helpless, so

she murmured, ready, womanlike, to glorify; now he lay broken at her

feet, with lean lithe limbs relaxed, with lids down-dropped over the

gray sombre eyes which never had looked love into her eyes, with lips

still grim and set even in the unconsciousness of sleep. She bent her

head and with her lips touched the hair that she had smoothed. He

stirred, and she started, a guilty thing, crimsoned with shame; but he

did not wake. Her ears caught a word, as though in sleep he had felt a

warm presence near him.

"Beloved!"

And for a name she listened hungrily, but none came. Who had found a

place in that deep stern heart of his?--so she asked herself with a

small inward twinge of an emotion new and strange. For whom had his keen

eyes softened? Who had listened thralled to the silver speech which was

all his? Who had known the strength of his arms? Who had found the spell

which would soothe his savage moods to stillness and unloose the

flood-gates of his magic? Whose was the name so sacred that even in

sleep his lips could guard it?

"That is what he wants," she murmured; "some one to love him, to

understand and comfort when he is so black and bitter, and I think it is

what he hath never found. Ah, pray God he may find that one!"

Because she loved, it was given her to understand. And, understanding,

she caught a glimpse of the tragedy of the loneliness in which those

souls must wander whose world is not the world of everyday life and love

and death. Quick tears dimmed her eyes, of pity because she understood;

and one fell warm on the quiet face at her knee.

Nicanor opened his eyes, without moving, but Eldris saw, and sat

stiffened with fear, self-betrayed in her swift flush. He raised himself

on an elbow and looked at her, smiling slightly.

"Thou?" he said, with no surprise in his voice, as though he had thought

of nothing but to find her there. "I thought Nicodemus said thou hadst

not come."

"I did not go to him," said Eldris. "I was at another house a little

while. Now I am taken care of by the priests of Saint Peter's."

Nicanor nodded. His eyes had not left her face.

"Perhaps that is best. Why dost thou weep?"

Eldris flushed again. But his gray eyes were inexorable; they dragged

truth from her in spite of all her will.

"I--thou wert sleeping, and I thought thee ill, and I--was sorry."

"I am not ill," he answered, and his voice was gentle. "But let us speak

of thee. Now I have come, not so soon as I had thought to come. It was

not mine to say what I should do."

[Illustration: "The sight burst upon him in all its hideousness,--where

had been the stately mansion of his lord."]

"You mean--?" Eldris said quickly. "Tell me of it. Tell me all of it, I

pray you!"

Nicanor's eyes changed with the quick sweet smile which at rare times

had power to lighten his face as a shaft of sunshine lights a

thundercloud.

"All?" he repeated indulgently. "So, then, this is the tale."

He sat rocking gently back and forth, hands clasped about his knees,

looking not at her at all, but away over the billowing hills.

"When thou hadst slipped away from the door of that torture room, I and

Hito amused ourselves. And when our game was ended, he had no thought of

thee nor thy escape; me it was upon whom all his loving care was

centred. So it was commanded that I be taken to the lowest dungeon cell,

there to meditate upon the sins which were mine.... I think that in all

the world no man knows darkness as do I. Night is not dark; it hath the

silver stars above it, and in the world the red earth-stars of men. But

I was in darkness which was the darkness of the grave made manifest; it

pressed upon mine eyes like leaden weights, and numbed my brain, and was

a cloak which smothered me. What hours rolled on I knew not. I was fed

or I starved; all was one. There was no time, there was no life, there

was no death; there was but a naked soul sitting in still darkness. Five

paces is my cell from wall to wall; shoulder high above the floor is a

jutting stone. I doubt not that it is red with blood, since each time I

passed, it scored me if I had not care."

Her shiver brought his glance back to her; with a smile he woke to

recollection of her presence.

"I cry not thy sympathy, sweet sister; for there were times, and these

were many, when the door of that dungeon opened wide, and Hito himself

could not take from me my freedom. When I was back upon the moors with

shepherds, who listened while I spoke; when I was by the camp-fires of

Thorney in the Fords and men left their business at my word; and there

was no darkness then in all the world. Back on the hills, where the

clouds sweep free and the wind calls; back in the press of life, amid

the crowding feet of men; back in the Garden of Lost Dreams, where

flowers bloomed and grass was green and tender, and brown birds sang of

love and life and freedom. And Hito, fond fool, rubbed his hands and

thought he held me caged!"

He was very far from her again, in his own strange world; and she sat

and watched him, her soul in her shining eyes, if he had but seen it,

and knew she could not enter with him. He spoke more quickly; his voice

fell to a deeper note, and in it was a mystery at which Eldris caught

her breath.

"And out of the darkness there came a Tale to me, and thereafter there

was light. And the tale is not yet ended--but it grows, it grows! Night

and day it rings within my head; always it is with me, mine and mine

only. But there is that in it which eludes me, which I seek and cannot

find. And until I find it, the tale is not yet done. And it is of a

Child, a Babe who lay within his mother's arms and smiled at all the

world."

Eldris started, and her eyes, fixed upon his face, widened and filled

with light. And again at her motion Nicanor came back to her. He looked

at her, and his own eyes were as she had seen them once before, when

upon a day she had told him that the name men called him was the

silver-tongued.

"Once thou didst tell that tale to me," he said, "and day or night it

hath never left me since. When it is ended, and I have found this thing

I seek, then I'll tell it thee."

He took up his speech again, and she hung upon his words, unafraid to

watch him since his eyes were turned from her.

"So there was a gray rat within this my dungeon cell; and at such times

when the light faded and I was back therein, I coaxed and fed him, and

taught him how to fight. Eh, he was a gallant beast, and his scar is yet

upon my hand. He, my gaunt gray rat, and this little Christ of thine

were all that kept my brain from madness those days when I sat in

darkness. And in time, I, with others, was sent off to the mines, and

there we labored until word came that men were needed to help our lord,

who was attacked in his household by barbarians. But I was left behind

when these were started, wounded by one with whom I had a quarrel about

this same gray rat. When I reached our lord's house, it was empty,

sacked and spoiled, and stationarii patrolled it. So I came onward to

Londinium and here again was I left behind. Our lord hath left the

country, and we are free to live or die as we may. I had no plan for

thee when I bade thee to come hither, for there was no time for planning

with Hito's jaws agape for thee." He rose to his feet and stood looking

down upon her. "Now we be both alone, and there is but one thing for it

that I can see. Thou must come with me. I cannot promise thee ease nor

even safety, but what I have, thou shalt have also."

"With thee!" Eldris repeated below her breath, and turned her face from

him. It flushed and was radiant; love brimmed over in her eyes. Was she

the one who might find her place in that stern, deep heart of his,--she

who might learn the spell which would soothe those bitter moods of his

to stillness? Her eyes glowed and drooped. And then, slowly, across her

face there fell a shadow, and the shadow was of the cross. She knew

nothing of evasion; as her heart, so her lips spoke.

"With thee!" she breathed again. A sob caught her throat. In her turn

she rose and faced him. "Ah, I would so gladly--so gladly! But--I can go

with thee in but one way, and that way as thy wife."

Nicanor looked at her.

"Why, thou knowest that may not be," he said gently, yet with some

surprise. "I am a slave, and a slave hath no rights before the law, nor

to lawful marriage. It is the law. But come thou!"

Eldris turned white.

"I am Christian!" she said painfully, "and that thing I may not do.

Father Ambrose teacheth that Christ hath forbidden."

"I did not make the law," said Nicanor. "Could I do so, I'd give thee

gladly the name of wife. But even thus, more of honor I could not give

thee. It is not what I wish to do, but what I must do." He took her face

between his hands. "Child, the law is made, not by man, but by men; and

it is not for man only, but for men. Were it not found good by men, it

could not be. And the law, in its wisdom, saith that a slave is a beast,

a thing without rights; and I am a slave. There is no law which could

marry me to thee.... I cannot give thee marriage,--I, a slave."

"And I, a Christian, cannot go without," said Eldris, very low. Two

tears rolled from beneath her wan closed lids. Nicanor bent his tall

head and kissed them away, with what tenderness a brother might give a

sister dearly loved. But with sudden wild sobbing Eldris flung up her

arms and clasped his neck, and hid her face against him.

"Oh, I would go with thee!" she wept. "Heart of my heart, I would follow

to the world's end, wherever thy path might lead me. I love thee,

Nicanor, oh, my man of the silver tongue! and I shall love thee even

till I die. But go with thee I may not--I dare not! Is this right? Were

thy law and my religion made for this, to wreak such woe upon those who

follow them? It is cruel,--it is more cruel than death, and I would to

God that I were dead!"

Nicanor stood a moment silent, stroking her dark hair gently.

"No man would hold thee less worthy, since the case is as it must be.

Never have I heard of slaves who took thy view of this. All thy life

shalt thou have honor and protection. Were it in my power to mend

matters, and I did not, the fault would then lie with me. As it is, it

is no man's fault, and we have the right to make the best we may of it."

She shook her head, struggling with her tears. His tone changed; it

deepened and thrilled until she thrilled with it; in it she heard the

concentration of all loneliness and all bitterness.

"Come to me, Eldris, for I need thee sorely! All my life have I gone

chained, desiring what I could not win, longing for what lay beyond me.

Must it be so again? Once one said: 'Seek thou the sanctuary while yet

there may be time; and when thou art entered in all else shall be as

nothing, for there thou shalt have peace.' Then I did not understand;

now know I too well. That is what all my life I have never found, though

I have sought in many places, and for a weary while. Therefore pray your

God to pity me and all who are as I, for I am ridden by ten thousand

devils--a flame consumes me which I cannot quench. An ambition is not

all a blessing to him who hath it! Oh, the dreams that were mine, which

the high gods gave to me, and which are gone,--gone as the smoke goes

and shall never come again! The glimpse I have had of a world that

should be mine and never can be mine hath shown me all that I have lost.

I beat my hands against the bars, and what doth it avail? I am a

slave--a slave was I born and a slave shall I die. There is beauty in

the world, and I may not see it; there is knowledge in the world, and I

may not share it; and my soul is sick with longing for what all men may

have but I. There is a thing within me which cries panting for release,

and rends me because I know not how to set it free. It is agony and

delight, pain and joy beyond all naming; and once I thought it only joy.

Thus ever hath it been: what I have thought would bring me peace hath

brought me pain, and pain that I know not what I have done to deserve.

It was not thus when I lived a brute's life among the brutes in far,

gray, northern hills; there was I content, not knowing that I wanted

something more. Now have I stretched my hands out to a star, and found

it so far beyond my reach that for me its light is lost in darkness

which will never lift. Yet the star is shining,--but not for me."

The torrent of his speech checked. His voice dropped from the strain of

its hoarse passion. He gathered her two hands closer on his breast.

"We be two outcasts, thou and I!--thou shunning, I shunned. Yet we still

have each the other. Now do I come seeking the sanctuary of thy love,

thy balm and healing for the hands and heart I have beaten against my

bars. Wilt thou deny? Must I be turned away? Eldris, come!"

"Oh!" cried Eldris, her heart in her stricken voice. Long she looked at

him, with eyes drowned in tears and lips quivering, all her struggle in

her torn face. But suddenly she drew her hands from his, and slipped to

her knees before him, and hid her face in shaking fingers.

"Oh, God!" she prayed,--and once Nicanor had heard words babbling so

from a man upon the rack who never knew that he had talked aloud,--"keep

me from going with him! I want to so--oh, I want to so! Make me

strong--never let me yield to what is sin! Keep me from going with him!

I love him so that I would sin for him! Dear Jesus Lord, keep me from

doing that! But make me strong very quickly, or I must go--how can I

stay when he so sorely needs me? Oh, God, God, God, I could comfort him

so well! We cannot help it, neither he nor I. Nay, I will not weaken,--I

will be strong, quite strong,--but in pity Thou must help a little too!

I love Thee and the little Jesus, but I love him more--oh, nay--not

more! I did not mean it!" She raised her streaming face, turning at the

last from the Power whence no help came, to the human strength beside

her. "Oh, beloved, help me, for I cannot fight alone!"

So, at the need of one soul, into the world another soul was born, and

the long travail of spirit rending flesh was ended.

"Dear heart, be strong!--thy will shall be my will. If it be sin to

thee, thou shalt not sin through me!" Nicanor said, and knelt beside

her.

Nerveless and shaken with strangling sobs, she crept into the shelter of

his arms, trusting him wholly now that his word was hers, pleading

unconsciously that he save her from herself and from him. He lifted her

to her feet, soothing her with touch and voice, forgetting himself in

her distress. Her religious scruples he could not comprehend; the gods

of religion were to be invoked when one wanted material benefits from

them, not held as mentors to dictate one's course in life. But since she

had such scruples, and since he was learning new, strange tolerance for

and sympathy with others, it was not his to blame her for them; rather

to remember that though they might be nothing to him, they were all to

her, and were therefore not to be held lightly. So, because he was

slowly gaining the strength to think of others before himself,--and of

strength this is the surest test,--and because the tenderness of a

strong man is greater than all the tenderness of a woman, he soothed her

and brought her peace; and, it may be, in bringing it he found a measure

of it himself. She was very dear to him,--dear as one might be who was

not enshrined above all her kind forever. Heart and soul he was

another's, for all time and all eternity; yet life was his to live and

to make the best of it, even though there was a locked and guarded

chamber in it of which the key was lost....

Hand in hand they walked homeward in the faint twilight glow. He left

her at the church gate, and himself turned away, back toward the house

of Nicodemus, walking with bent head and broad shoulders bowed. But his

face was not all sombre; something of the courage he had given her

remained to him, and his eyes were softened with the new tenderness

which still lived. For it is one of the compensations as well as of the

penalties of life, that what one gives, one shall get again.

At the threshold sudden distaste seized him; after what he had been

through, the thought of the well-meaning, brutish chatter of Nicodemus

and his wife was not to be endured. He turned back again and went as far

from them as he could get, down to the river-ford. Here he sat upon the

beach, away from the passing of the people; and the waters rippled at

his feet. The west had cleared; overhead the faint rose of the sky was

paling, but across the broad river was splashed a pastel of orange and

blue and crimson; and the red, misty ball of the sun was dipping below

the world's dark rim.

"This is love also," Nicanor said aloud, as though one had been by to

hear him. "As she loveth me, so I love. There is love of a man for a

maid, and of husband for wife; and there is love of sire for child, and

of a friend for a friend, and of these all are different. Yet it is all

one love, touching life on every side.... Why, then, it takes in all the

world!"

His voice changed and rang with quick and startled exultation.

"Gods of my fathers! I have found it--I have found that thing I sought!

It is love, not fear, nor wrath, nor power, that gave that little Child

his power! And because it takes in all the world, this little One of

whom men tell hath this love, then, for all the world. Now this is

strange! Oh, Little Brother, I have found my tale, and it shall be

greater than any tale that I have made before!"

His eyes deepened and flashed to the quick surge of power which shook

him; now well and truly should all men name him Nicanor of the silver

tongue. He was a slave, yet men should bow before him. No iron bars

might longer hold him down; Fate, that mocking Fate of his, could no

longer keep him chained. But over all the triumph in his face there grew

also the old awe as in those days of boyhood, long ago, when first he

knew himself for but the tool with which the work was wrought. His face

changed and grew longing; his keen eyes dimmed. Quite suddenly he rose

to his knees, kneeling as he had seen Eldris kneel, and clasped his

hands as Eldris had clasped hers.

"Oh, Little Brother of the World, if thou lovest all men, love me also,

for I have no one else. When I have sought love, it hath ever turned

from me, prospering nothing. But since it seemeth that all men must love

something, woman, or fame, or gold, it may be that it is not for me to

love one woman only, but all men. If it be that I must choose, I will

lose love of woman, and love of friend, and love of child; I will live

alone to the end of my days, if but this soul of mine, which singeth in

my loneliness, may return to me and my lips be no longer dumb. Love hath

chained them; let now love set them free. And this my tale shall be

strong as the wind that calls across the hills, and pure as flame, and

great as love which takes in all the world, to the end that it may be

worthy. Mine it is, and mine only; I made it, and it is blood of my

blood and flesh of my flesh, and none may take it from me. Yet it is

all, and I am naught but the voice which speaks."

His voice sank. He sat in silence, looking beyond the sunset, his hands

about his knees.

So slowly the waters closed over the sun, and the day died, and the

shadow of night descended upon Thorney.

VII

Old oaks caught the sunlight in their reaching hands and dropped it down

to earth in flakes of gold; beech and larch and linden reared their tall

heads above the road, and vines clung to them in woven tapestries of

living green. There opened from this road dim forest aisles, veiled in

dusk in which sunbeams quivered, paths of mystery, winding toward

strange twilight worlds where wild wood-creatures wandered. Warm

earth-scents drenched the air; soft sibilant whisperings stirred

overhead, and hidden birds chattered in the leafage.

Here Nicanor sat in the dusk and gold of the forest's afternoon, his

back against a gray tree-trunk, his hands about his knees. Hither every

day he wandered, drinking new life from Earth's brown bosom, with idle

hands and weaving brain. Here, where he had lost his vision, he was

drawn back as by enchantment. He wished to dream again; to conjure forth

the flying figure from the void into which it had vanished. To him it

was more real than reality; for want of the substance he strove to keep

the shadow in his heart.

In the spirit he roamed world-wide, with the narrow life of Thorney, its

petty din and traffic, fallen away from him and forgotten utterly.

Always his wandering ended in a garden, whose every path of dusky green

he knew by heart, where one waited for him in the still evening light.

In the flesh he lived with Nicodemus and Myleia, letting himself be

waited on, worried over, caressed, to their affectionate hearts'

content. No mood of his was too wayward for their sympathy; when at

nightfall, after long hours of brooding, he would chant strange tales by

some crowded camp-fire, than theirs were no voices quicker in wonder and

applause. That they understood not half of what he said mattered nothing

to their fondness; yet to Nicanor it was this one thing which mattered

all. Nor were they the only ones who listened and loved his words. Many

a fretting soul he lulled to quiet by his magic; to many he gave

pleasure whose pleasures were all too few. Once he had scorned them,

these simple children of plain and forest, whose emotions he could mould

as a potter moulds his clay; in his high pride he had thought that these

were not the worlds he was born to conquer. Now he loved them; to bring

a moment's brightness into some gray life, a moment's forgetfulness of

pain to one who suffered--this it was his to do. For, as once he had

thought to move the hearts of kings with his power, so now he knew that

a king's heart is no more than man's heart, and only he may move the one

who can move the other. And every heart that he won he laid in spirit at

the feet of his lost lady, who had taught him the Master-word of the

tongue of men and angels, without which faith and hope can profit

nothing, nor can any heart be won.

A thicket of briars and underbrush hid him from the road. For drowsy

hours he had looked through his tangled lattice upon the life that went

up and down the highway, himself unseen,--a pedler, bent under the

weight of the pack upon his shoulders, making wry faces at his blistered

feet; a farmer, mounted on his clumsy two-wheeled cart, returning from

the markets of Londinium; a chariot, gay with paint and gilding, with

two young nobles arguing over the races at Uriconium; and between all

these, long intervals of sun-steeped stillness, when the world drowsed

and insects shrilled in the untrod grasses.

Later there came northward toward Londinium a funeral train, on the way

to the cemeteries that lined the road outside the town, weaving in and

out among the checkered shadows, stately and slow and solemn in its pomp

of death. There was a bier, draped with a pall of sable velvet, and

drawn by four white horses, pacing slow. Slaves and clients went on foot

before and behind it; and beside it there walked a man, tall and of

lordly bearing. His hand rested on the bier's edge; his face, bowed upon

his breast, was scored with sorrow. There was dust upon the richness of

his mourning cloak; and dust also on the plumed trappings of the horses,

and the garments and the sandals of the slaves. This pilgrimage of love

and sorrow had been no easy one, nor short. Nicanor, peering through the

brambles at the sombre train, read the story in the man's face, where

tragedy sat frozen. At once his mind's eyes saw, beneath the embroidered

pall, a fair dead face, great eyes closed, and lashes drooping on a

marble cheek, two hands folded on a pulseless breast. In a heart-beat it

was as though a veil had lifted, and he probed the depths of one phase

of the world's tragedy; through one man's sorrow he looked into the

sorrows of all men. By his own pain he felt himself made kin to all

those thousands of the earth who knew pain also. The feeling lasted but

a moment, and was gone, leaving him with hushed breath and shining eyes.

"Here have I found another chord of life to play on," he said softly.

"And when it is touched there is no human heart but must answer. So thou

also hast lost her, O friend! And yet, perhaps, after all, thou art

happier than I. There are things worse than death, as I have found. At

least ... she is all thine!"

When the turn of the afternoon had come, and while he lay watching gnats

dancing in a shaft of golden light that fell athwart the trees, his ears

caught voices from the road, and the click of a horse's feet against a

stone. A woman laughed; and again he parted the brambles and looked out.

The road was splashed with sunshine and shadowed by the trees which

arched above it and hid the sky. Down it, with faces turned from

Thorney, two came toward him,--a girl, sitting sideways on a great bay

horse, leaning to the man who walked beside it. She was fair, with long

hair lying in a golden sheen upon her crimson mantle. She rode steadying

herself to the horse's stride with a hand upon the man's shoulder. He,

tall, fair also of hair and skin, with blue eyes laughing under flaxen

brows, in a brown leathern jacket and brazen cap which caught the sun in

small sliding gleams of light, led the horse by its bridle and looked up

at her as she talked. Down the green forest way they came in the mellow

shade and sunshine, fair as gods, radiant in their youth and life and

happiness, with eyes for nothing, ears for nothing, save each other.

"It is Wardo!" said Nicanor, in surprise. "Sure I had thought him on the

way to Gaul."

He pressed through the thicket and stepped into the road. Wardo saw him,

and dropped the bridle with an exclamation, and ran forward.

"Thou!" he cried, and fell upon Nicanor in a storm of joy. "Thou great

rascal, I had thought thee dead. Where hast been that thou didst not

seek me? When didst leave the mines? Hast heard of what befell our lord?

Oh, I have hungered for thee, to tell thee the good fortune which is

mine!"

The horse came up to them, with the girl in the crimson mantle sitting

stately on its back. Her eyes were blue and shining; her cheeks were

flushed with the rose of life. Nicanor smiled at her and at his friend.

"So, Sada?" he said, with a note in his voice which neither caught. "All

is then as it should be?"

"Ay, promise you that!" said Wardo, a hand on the girl's knee. She

smiled down into his eyes. "She is mine now. This day did I take the

gold to Chloris, and the cage-door opened, and my bird was free. My bird

now, and no other man's."

"Thine!" she murmured, radiant.

"When our lord departed for Gaul, I was left behind in the confusion."

So Wardo told his tale. "Well, perhaps I need not have been, had not the

gods willed it so. Therefore I was my own man, and could not be held to

account for it, since my lord ran away from me, not I from him. So I

joined those East Saxons who are moving down upon us from the Fens, and

henceforth my lot is cast with them. For some of these I repaired

swords, bucklers, what not, since my old trade is not lost to me, and

for my work they gave me gold--ay, much gold. And with the gold I bought

Sada. Now we go forth to seek our nest; where, we care not. She is mine,

and I am free. Ye holy gods, but it is fine for a man to own himself and

call none other lord! No man ever more shall hold me slave to him.

Henceforth we be rovers, this star of my life and I. Come thou with us,

friend! If thou stay here, thou'lt be held no better than _erro_, a

landless, masterless wanderer, who is fair game for the law and for all

men. Had my lord stayed, thou knowest that I too should have remained

faithful. He being gone, we must fend for ourselves as best we may."

Nicanor shook his head.

"Nay, I stay here. Go thou thy way, and may thy faring prosper. Now tell

of our lord and his escape."

Wardo laughed.

"Ho, there was work which thou shouldst have seen!" He told of Wulf, and

of the fighting which was done within the villa; of the flight from the

house, the long ride by cart-track and highway to Calleva, with his lady

crouched in front of him and her hair blowing over his hands. And here

Nicanor broke in.

"Thou there with her, and I--Tell me, man, was she hurt or frightened?

Did she swoon or weep?"

"How could I see?" said Wardo. "I stood, and she kneeled before me. And

little did I care whether she wept or swooned, when the grays were

plunging like to tear my arms from my body, and it was all I could do to

keep upon two wheels. There went my lord ahead, and here pounded I

after, and alongside rode my lord Marius, watching his wife and itching

to be back and have it out with those reavers. I saw it in his eye. Eh,

that was a wild night. We made the Bibracte road, and doubled back

eastward, and so rode for Londinium. But at the second miliarium from

Bibracte the grays gave out. So my lord Marius took my lady upon his

saddle, and they all went on, bidding me follow as soon as might be. But

by the grace of the gods, I was too late. When I reached the port, my

lord and his people had set sail for Gaul. Well, then, if thou wilt not

come with us, when things be settled, and a man may know better what to

look for, I shall come and seek thee, and we will have a talk over old

days together, and spill a drop or so to Bacchus. Until then, comrade o'

mine, farewell."

They grasped hands, and Sada smiled a farewell at Nicanor. The two went

on, then, and left him standing there, and he watched them pass away

into the glinting light and shade until Sada's crimson mantle was lost

in the green gloom of trees. He took his slow way back toward Thorney,

musing as he walked.

"This day mine eyes have looked on life and death, and all that death

mourns and life clamors is Love, Love, and again Love. Strange that

something all men must love, who cannot live for themselves alone, no

matter how they try."

He came down from his dreams at the stepping-stones of the marsh-ford,

to find himself all but overrunning a child who stood upon the bank and

wept because he feared to cross--a small atom of a man, with little

tunic torn and puckered face of woe. At sight of Nicanor he ran, and

flung himself against his legs, with the sure confidence of babyhood in

all the new, strange world, and clamored to be taken home.

Nicanor stooped to him with a laugh, recognizing him as the son of one

Julius the Tungrian, a field-hand belonging to the farmer Medor, whose

estate lay between the hills a half-mile from Thorney.

"How now, manling? Why these tears at thy first venture into the world?

How didst stray so far from mother's skirts? Dost wish to go home?"

"Ay, home!" wept young Julius. "Thou wilt take me home!"

"Come, then," said Nicanor, and swung him to his shoulder, and turned

back from the ford to the road again.

It came upon him then that this was the first time that ever he had held

a child in his arms. Always before had children run from him, learning,

like their elders, to shun him: now he knew why. The softness of the

round little body thrilled him oddly; the touch of the clinging hands,

the baby weight upon his shoulder, called into life emotions such as he

had never thought to know. A child, a little living child, her child and

his.... The thought stirred him suddenly to his soul; and with the

thought a fresh bit of the Scroll of Life unrolled before his

eyes,--that Scroll which slowly he was learning how to read. His heart

caught another phase of the old experience of the world, the high pride

and joy of fatherhood. Again, as once before, he got a flash of new,

strange light into the hearts and minds of all the world of men, as with

the parting of a veil; found a new chord under his hand to be struck

into pulsing life. All unaware that on a day his lady had said, "His son

could I love, and be proud that he was mine," he marvelled at himself

and at his feeling, and still more at the little one that had such power

to wake it.

He reached the farm of Medor, and stopped at the cabin of Julius, whom

he knew, which stood at the edge of the estate. Through the open doorway

he could see, in the obscurity of the one poor room within, a woman's

figure, bending to rub her man's back, bruised and raw from the harness

of the plough, with ointment of herbs--a nightly proceeding regular as

the evening meal. When she had done, he would take his turn in rubbing

her; since it was not enough for women to be the bearers of children,

but also they must be hewers of wood and drawers of water as well. She

rose to straighten herself from her task, and saw the tall figure coming

doorward, with the little one crowing upon his shoulder. At her

exclamation, Julius, rugged and mossed as a sturdy hemlock, came to the

threshold to look over her shoulder, stripped to the waist, his neck and

arms shining with the grease.

"Here is thy son, O Kalia!" said Nicanor, halting. "He was by Thorney,

weeping because the world was not large enough for his adventure."

The mother received her son with tender welcome, but he held his arms

out to Nicanor, whimpering to be taken back.

"He runs away to play with boys while I am in the field, the wicked

one!" she said.

Julius looked down at her and at his boy with proud eyes. When he was

drunk he would beat his wife, but she loved him because he loved their

child. Nicanor looked at the three.

"He is worth having," he said, very soberly, nor thought that his words

might sound strange to them. He smiled at the boy, and left them, with

the mother's thanks following him.

And Julius, watching him across the field toward the road, said:

"Mark you how the boy hath taken to him? Dost remember, before he went

away from Thorney, how children ran from him, and even folk feared him

and his gall-tipped tongue?"

"I remember," Kalia answered. "Even I have punished the child by saying,

'The black man Nicanor will get thee if thou stop not thy crying,' until

for very fear he ceased. Never have I seen one so changed as he.

Juncina, the fish-wife, with whom I spoke but yesterday on Thorney,

saith that each day he goeth to lame Gallus, the blacksmith's son, who

is dying of a fever, and telleth him tales until the little one sleeps.

And when folk give him money for his tales, he will take it, though he

never asketh it, and of it he will give half to those three old men whom

each day he tendeth. It is not so long since he hath been back on

Thorney, yet even so all men wonder at the change in him. Verily, I

think that he must be in love."

"That is ever all you women think of!" Julius grumbled. "Were you to

have your way of it, it would be love that worketh all the miracles,

cureth all the illnesses, taketh the place of all the gods. Now come and

rub; I am sore in every joint and sinew."

Nicanor went home in a brown study, seeing never Kalia's broad, homely

face, untidy wisps of hair, brown bosom covered by her coarse gray

kerchief, but that face, young and fair and tender, which in his dreams

had become mingled with that Other Woman's face with holy eyes, who was

the Virgin Mother of all love. When he thought of this one, it was to

think of the other, no longer woman merely, but idealized and uplifted

into all that he could imagine of purity, a something too fine for

earth. In place of humble Kalia, he pictured that fair patrician face as

his soul's eyes saw it, glorified with the mother-love upon it, brooding

over a round little head in the hollow of her breast. Holy gods, the

maddening, sweet mockery of it! He shook himself as one who throws off a

weight upon him, and turned in at the house of Nicodemus, whistling,

with aching throat and sombre eyes of pain.

It was later than he had thought, and the evening meal was over. This

troubled him not at all, for in that house he was sovereign lord, and

knew his power. Myleia and her ursine spouse served him quite as though

they had been his slaves. A roasted pigeon hot from the coals, beans

cooked in oil with garlic, a cake of barley-bread baked in the ashes,

honey, and a pitcher of wine--no lord could have fared better than their

idol.

Nicodemus carried an empty platter to Myleia in the kitchen, showing it

to her with immense pride.

"He hath eaten all!" he rumbled in a rasping whisper. "The first time

these three weeks. Come! that is doing better. We'll have him around

yet, my girl--this spoiled baby of ours."

"Who spoileth him?" she retorted, pinching his ear gently. "Thou art

worse over him than a mother whose babe hath cut its first tooth. Thou

art foolish in thine old age, my great ugly bear."

"Soul of my heart, a man must find something to be foolish over!" he

declared, vastly pleased. "And it is high time I left off being foolish

over thee. Eh, sweeting, what sayest thou?"

He ruffled her hair with his great hand. Nicanor looked in upon them

from the threshold.

"At it again, thou old lion and his mate? Thou also!" he said, and

smiled at them. "I go down to the ford--there be a party of men riding

over the hill. Wilt come, Nico?"

The two went forth into the evening, leaving Myleia to watch them with

fond eyes of pride from the low doorway.

Along the street people had begun to gather, with more of curiosity to

see what might be seen than of apprehension. Woodmen with bundles of

fagots on their shoulders, fishermen with strings of fish, itinerant

wine-sellers rattling strings of horn cups, with skins of cheap red

wine, vendors of the black sticky sweetmeats made of the blood of beeves

mixed with rice and honey,--all these ceased to cry custom for their

evening trade in interest at the arrival of the strangers. It was long

since such a crowd had descended upon Thorney; trade might be improving.

Women, ragged, with more ragged children clinging to their skirts, came

from the fisher-huts upon the beach to gaze across the marsh.

And across the ford, on the crest of the long gentle rise of hill over

which the straight road ran, came riding a troop of horsemen,

carelessly, without order, in a tangle of waving spears and gleaming

helmets. No merchants or townsfolk were these; and a tingle went through

the crowd at the sight of weapons. Those were days when none knew what

to expect from hour to hour. The on-comers cantered down the hill and

into the waters of the marsh-ford; and it could be seen that they were

for the most part fair-skinned, and every man bore a round buckler of

bullock's hide upon his arm. At once a whisper flew from end to end of

Thorney:

"These be Saxons!"

The name had become a word with which to conjure. The crowd upon the

beach increased. Nicanor and Nicodemus stood in the forefront of it and

watched.

The leaders of the party--an old man with white drifting beard and hot

blue eyes, and a young one, with tanned face and brown, curling

hair--rode out upon the shingle with stern faces set straight ahead.

Those behind them were more free and easy as to bearing; a man leaned

from his saddle to scoop up water in his hand; there was joking in low

tones, and deep-throated laughter. As they drew nearer to the people,

waiting silent, it could be seen that they had with them a prisoner in

their midst, bound upon his horse and wounded; and at sight of him a

murmur fluttered through the crowd. For he went in the dress of a Roman

noble, torn and stained with blood, his head sunk forward on his breast,

his right arm in a sling--a pitiful object, were there those to pity.

With the crowd Nicanor and Nicodemus followed the Saxons as they rode

along the main street. Questions flew from mouth to mouth:

"Who is this lord, their prisoner? Whither take they him? How did they

capture him? For what come they here?" But to these no man could give an

answer.

VIII

Thereafter Fate, the grim, smiling goddess, took into her own hand the

shuttle of Destiny and sent it flying fast rough the warp and woof of

Life. For when they came to the river's brink, the tide was in, and the

waters of Tamesis, too deep to ford with safety since the moon was full,

swirled past them in their swift rush from the sea.

The Saxons halted on the beach, dismounting, while the leaders

conferred, and the prisoner drooped pallid in their midst; and the men

of Thorney seized upon their chance for trade. An hundred mouths to feed

was a boon not to be despised in those lean days. There sprang up a

horde of wine-sellers, men with poultry, with produce, and with meats.

The two leaders rode away to seek an inn, each attended by a servant. A

fire was kindled on the beach, where in other days so many fires had

blazed; for a brief while Thorney took on a semblance of its former

thriving self. Mingled with the sounds of trade and barter there was

heard the dry, thin rattle of a sistrum from a temple of Isis where

priests and worshippers were gathered for hidden rites; the voices of

men singing, the neighing of horses.

Here, on the river side of Thorney, the beach was wider than upon the

marsh side. The houses grouped themselves in black, irregular masses

behind this beach; and to the west, a short distance from the water's

edge, rose the low stone wall which bounded the land of the Christian

church. Fishermen's huts were crowded at the foot of this wall; and

along the sand were strewn rotting spars and timbers, and there were

boats drawn out of reach of the tide. Old houses, wrecked by fire and

time, leaned their tottering walls above the alleys at strange angles,

settling slowly into the ruin of age. The round moon hung stately, low

in the eastern sky, drowning in radiance the garish glare of flames;

houses stood out sharp-cut against its light, and strange shadows flung

across the crooked cobbled streets. A broad path of silver glinted on

the inky waters of the river. The smell of fish and tar rose strong

above all other scents.

The Saxons, hungry and weary from their march, ate hugely and drank

deep. Horns of mead and beer were drained and filled; white wine was as

good as red. They talked with the men of Thorney, in strange Latin, with

much gesticulation and interpolation of Saxon words. Among the many

figures on the beach, black in the mingled light of moon and flame, was

ceaseless motion, kaleidoscopic and bewildering. Thorney woke to a lusty

gayety, born of deep drinking; of recklessness, even, such as she had

known rarely since the old days of the legions. Laughter became louder;

quarrels, short and fierce, arose as hot blood mounted with the fumes of

wine. Into the air there crept a tension, the intangible effluvium of

excitement which precedes the arousing of the crowd. Quite suddenly the

spirits of people were raised to fever pitch; the boisterous vigor of

the Saxons was infectious.

Nicanor soon lost sight of Nicodemus. He stood among the people,

regarding the scene with eyes of detachment. As always in a crowd, an

odd sense of impersonality possessed him, of aloofness; in it he was

forgetful of his own presence, of his own corporeality; became as a Mind

seeking out its own. Here and there he was recalled by a man's greeting;

here and there also a woman spoke. Everywhere he was hailed cheerily, as

one comrade by another. Jests were passed to him, for which he gave as

good as he got. There was that in their intercourse with him which

proved him one of themselves, an intimate sharer in their pleasures,

their sorrows, their lives. Yet he was the man who not so many years

before had in this place been baited as men bait a bear--the surlier,

the better sport.

A red-lipped flower-girl, on the way home from her day's business in

Londinium with her basket of remaining blossoms, was pressed against his

shoulder in the outer edge of the crowd that watched the Saxons feed, as

boys gather to see the wild beasts of the arena tear their meat. She

turned, saw him, and laughed with gay raillery.

"Couldst even thou, O Silver-tongued, make of these great guzzling

cattle a tale?"

He looked at her with quick artist joy in the vivid color and effect of

her,--red lips, cheeks as brilliant as her roses, black eyes, midnight

hair in which a crimson flower was tangled. In her laughing glance, her

care-free joyous innocence, he caught a hint, gone as swiftly as it

come, of that Other who held his soul. Now he understood the heart and

inmost meaning of it; it was the all-compelling Womanhood, the sacred

spark, guarded and precious, which set men's hearts aflame; and for him,

henceforth, because of that one, it made all women sacred. He answered

her, banter for banter.

"What would the world be without cattle, O Flower-maiden? And why not a

tale? There is a tale in all things, if one but look to find it--in

every bud and leaf and flower--in these Saxons--in thee, little sister

to the rose!"

"That is pretty," she cried, dimpling. "Here is a bloom in payment; once

it was as fragrant as thy words. May they never lose sweetness like a

flower which fadeth!"

Reaching up, she thrust a flower behind his ear, as a young fop of the

nobility would wear it, and sprang away into the crowd laughing.

"The wish of innocence should be good omen; the gods grant it!" said

Nicanor. He pushed onward through the press to get a nearer view of the

Saxons; and heard as he came a great voice shouting a rhythmic chant.

Over the shoulders of those in front he could see a ring of Saxons

surrounding the man who sang. As they listened they drank, and as they

drank grew more emphatic in applause. The singer was a bull-chested

fellow, purple-faced with his exertions. He swung his sword, he roared,

he heaved himself upon his toes; and Nicanor, fellow-craftsman and maker

of words, eyed him and smiled a smile of pity.

The shouting ceased; the man cast himself upon the ground and called for

wine. Nicanor touched upon the shoulder one whose face showed that he

understood the words.

"Friend, who is this dainty warbler, and what the burden of his song?"

"Who he is I know not," said the man, with a grunt of laughter. "What he

sang was the greatness of his people, and their skill in war. Tell thou

them a tale, Nicanor; these Saxons will listen all day to tales, and

give good silver to the teller."

Nicanor shook his head.

"Nay; perhaps they understand not Latin over well, and I had rather that

they understood than that they gave me silver. Now what are they going

to do?"

Two men dragged the prisoner forward into the circle of the firelight.

He was afoot, but the hand free of the sling was bound to his body. That

the poor wretch knew what they would do with him was plain; he cringed,

and cast hunted glances around the ring of fire-lit, curious faces.

"I am Felix of Anderida, a Roman lord!" he cried in a high voice, his

pale eyes wide with fear. "If there be any Roman among ye who will free

me from these Saxon wolves, I will give him gold as much as his back may

carry!"

A Saxon raised his hand and smote the lord upon the mouth, so that blood

began to trickle down his chin.

"Cease thy bleating, thou white-eyed sheep!" he growled in Latin.

"That is not right, to strike a man unarmed and bound," said the man

beside Nicanor. "I think our backs could carry a goodly sum of gold, eh,

friend? These fellows be half drunken; it should not be difficult to

get him free of them, and after, make him pay. I am of the collegium of

smiths in Londinium, and I see many of my fellows here who would stand

with me. Also, we could summon the militarii unto us and let them settle

the matter; it is not lawful that these Saxons make away with a Roman

after this fashion."

"I can hold them, if thou canst summon thy fellows quickly," said

Nicanor. His tone was quite assured. "But it must be done at once,

before they have worked themselves up to mischief over him."

"Do thou so then, and I will shake a staff aloft when he is safe," said

the man, and slipped away among the people.

Before Nicanor could make his way through to confront the Saxons, who

were preparing for brutal sport with their prisoner, the horses of the

two chieftains broke through the ring and the riders dismounted in the

open space. The lord Felix twisted away from those who held him and ran

to the younger chief.

"Call thy fellows from me!" he cried. "Each time when thou art not by

they seek to torture me for their sport."

The brown-haired leader folded his arms across his chest and looked down

upon his prisoner. He spoke, in Latin sufficiently fluent.

"Hast thou forgotten that I am Ceawlin, son of that Evor whom thou hast

slain, and that my foot is upon thy neck and thy blood shall be let out

in payment for my sire his blood? How then shouldst thou say what may or

may not be done with thee, thou little toad?"

It was then that Nicanor came into the torchlit ring, walking

carelessly, a song upon his lips. He stopped where the light fell

fullest on him, facing the chieftains, shapely as a young pagan god in

the strength and flower of his manhood, the red rose behind his ear. The

speech of Ceawlin broke and stopped; his gaze fastened upon the intruder

with the swift recognition of one strong man for another.

"Who is this man?" he said sharply. None answered; his own people did

not know, and no one else seemed ready to stand sponsor. Ceawlin spoke

again. "Who art thou, fellow? Art thou also of the Welsh?"

For as Briton was the Roman word, so Welsh, or waelisc, a foreigner, was

the Saxon word, meaning merely one who was not of Teuton race, and given

to those nations which spoke the Latin tongue.

"I am a Briton," said Nicanor. "Men call me the teller of tales, and I

am come to buy from thee thy prisoner. What price wilt thou put upon

him, O son of Evor?"

"How knowest thou me?" Ceawlin asked doubtfully. His voice became

angered. "What price, quotha! No price that thou canst pay, sir teller

of tales!"

"So? Didst ever hear of that ancient sea-king who put too high a price

upon his spoils?" said Nicanor, with a laugh, choosing simple words that

all might understand. Before Ceawlin had time to speak he swung around

upon the listening men, standing tall in the ruddy light, his head

thrown back to shake the hair from his eyes. "Listen, O friends, for it

is a good tale, such as ye know how to love. Five black ships,

dragon-prowed, rode out of the night, upon the black seas, upon the

foam. Long were they, and lean, and swift as the vertragus, the hound

that outspeeds the hart. Winds roared behind them; great birds swooped

through the storm across their way; great waves rushed under them as

they rode with rocking spars. Spray swept across the faces of those who

manned them, as the hair of a woman sweeps across her lover's face;

crashing they reeled through lifting seas, and swam to the crests of

curling billows rimmed with pale fire, and the thunder of their going

outroared the clamoring storm. Know ye the yell of the wind in the

straining cordage, the heave and fall of the plunging deck beneath your

feet? Know ye the sting of brine upon your lips, and the savor of the

salt winds in your lungs, O ye sons of Evor?"

A deep breath went through the circle, as though a breath from the outer

seas had filled men's nostrils. Ceawlin licked his lips as though he had

thought to find them stiff with salt.

"Ay--we know!" he said deeply, his eyes alight. "Hast thou then been

also upon the seas?"

Nicanor laughed low.

"Nay, never I!" he said. "But I see that ye do know."

"Go on!" spoke a voice, impatient, from the circle.

They were his, every man, and he knew it. In his first words he had

struck the chord which answered true in them, these lawless sea-rovers;

they were his to play upon as a musician on his lyre. The sure instinct

of his art taught him to tell of those things which they themselves knew

best, which were nearest to them, to their own lives. The ring held

silent, awaiting his next word, bearded men who leaned upon their spears

and iron swords, and listened. They had eyes for none other than he,

this tall youth with the black hair and the eyes of steel, who stood

before them in his careless pose of triumph, with his red rose thrust

behind his ear; who knew what they knew, felt what they had felt, made

them see what he saw, and held them in the hollow of his hand. Caught up

in his swift imagery, even they forgot their prisoner, who, it seemed,

was further to one side, less in evidence among his guards. By now the

Romans had drawn closer to the ring of Saxons, so that there was one

dense crowd about the open space--much narrowed now--where the

chieftains and Nicanor stood.

Not for nothing had he listened to the talk of the deep-sea fishermen

and the whalers who frequented Thorney, and stored in his memory all

that they could give him. In his tale was the clamor of the wild north

wind, the scream of wheeling gulls, the groan of straining timbers, the

rush of bubbling foam beneath sharp prows. He told of swift battle

fought over heaving waters, whose jaws yawned for their dead; and men

hung upon his words. He told of the red medley of the fight; of the

heavy fall and sullen splash of bodies into the grave which waited; of

ships that grappled in their death-throes like wrestling men and sank

locked in their grim embrace; of defeat and triumph, of high courage of

men who lost, and the higher courage of mercy of men who won; and men's

faces grew eager, who themselves had lived through scenes such as these,

and themselves had watched the death of gallant ships.

Nicanor glanced over the ring and saw that the prisoner had disappeared,

leaving not a ripple in the crowd to mark his trail. The absorbed faces

of his hearers, and the sense of what was being done behind their backs,

seized him, and he smothered a laugh. His voice flowed on, deep-toned,

vibrant, working his magic upon them, talking against time.

Somewhere in the outskirts of the crowd a horse neighed loudly; there

was a flurry among those people nearest the sound, and high over men's

heads a staff was shaken. Nicanor's speech broke midway; this was the

signal, and he no longer cared whether or not he held them. In that

instant the spell was snapped; men stirred and whispered. And suddenly a

shout of warning and anger went up--

"The prisoner! The prisoner hath gone!"

Forgotten were the tale and its teller; the inner group of Saxons surged

into commotion and uproar. There was a rising storm of assertion and

denial. Ceawlin strode to Nicanor, his link armor clashing softly as he

moved.

"Now do I believe that thou hast had to do with this!" he cried in ready

anger.

Nicanor laughed.

"Perhaps after all it had been better if thou hadst paid the price, lord

Saxon!"

Swift words sprang to Ceawlin's lips, but the elder leader ran to them,

shouting something in his own tongue. Ceawlin turned to answer, and

Nicanor slipped away.

Face to face he came with a woman seldom seen beyond her jealous doors;

a fat and shapeless bunch of garments topped by thin hair streaked with

ruddy dye, a high white marble brow, an old face deeply lined. The woman

was looking at him keenly, with boring vulture eyes. She spoke swiftly,

in a voice clear-toned and silvery as a bell.

"I heard thee speak.... Once, long years ago, stood I in this place and

heard a boy speak, an elfin, wolf-eyed child, who came out of the night

and spoke with an un-childish tongue. Often since have I thought of him

and the power within him, for though I was young in years yet was I old

in knowledge, and I knew that never had I seen one like him. Into his

hand I put a piece of silver, and I think it was the first that ever he

had touched. Art thou that child?"

"Ay," said Nicanor. "That child was I. So it was thou who first didst

teach me that silver could pay for souls." He thrust a hand into the

pouch that hung at his belt and drew forth a broad piece of silver,

holding it to her. "But I think it must be clean silver that pays for

mine, O Chloris."

The woman flinched oddly. Both had forgotten the rising tide of

excitement around them.

"Nay," she said. "I will not have it back. Canst not leave me the

thought that there was one gift which I gave honestly--or is it with

thee as ever with stony-hearted youth, swift to condemn, slow to

understand?"

"Why should I condemn thee?" said Nicanor. "That is not mine to do until

in me is nothing to condemn. Nay, rather could I pity thee."

The heavy lids opened slightly over Chloris's eyes.

"And wherefore?" she asked with a hard note in her flute-like voice. "If

I pity not myself, why shouldst thou pity? Am I not loved, and have I

not loved greatly? Have I not riches beyond thine imaginings?"

Nicanor laughed low and softly, his keen eyes on the old face.

"Love thou hast never known, O Chloris," he said gently. "In all thy

long life of wanton ease, thy long life in which children might have

leaned upon thy knees and children's voices might have called thee

blessed, love thou hast never known. Who could not pity this? Or thy

name would not be upon the lips of men in the market-place. When men

love, think you they make common talk of what they love? When women

love, keep they not themselves pure for love's pure sake? Ay, truly I

could pity thee, because some day thou wilt so pity thyself, in spite of

thy riches beyond mine imaginings. That is all."

"Thou art over strange," said Chloris. "And I would I had not spoken

with thee. After all, what doth it matter? There is always the end, when

darkness comes and the wax is wiped clean."

"Is there?" said Nicanor. "Is there an end to anything upon the earth?"

"Now thou art foolish," said Chloris. Her eyes were unchanged, but her

voice was angry. "In truth there is an end, and the end is--death." She

spoke with the deep-rooted and universal distaste of all Romans to the

direct reference to death. "Must not all things be gathered to the

shades? And is not that the end of them?"

"Believe it, then, for so long as thou canst, for thou wilt be the

happier for believing," said Nicanor. "And if some day it come to pass

that thou dost believe differently, remember then what others have

found, that only love can save thee--the love which thou hast never

known. Were it not wise, O Chloris, to seek it while yet there may be

time?" He paused, and his eyes forgot her. "I am seeking now," he said

below his breath, and turned away from her into the crowd.

Chloris looked after him a moment with lids half dropped over her

changeless eyes.

"The breath of the gods hath breathed upon him, and he understands. Oh,

ay! he understands." She laughed, a silver tinkle which was not wholly

mirth. "Will it ever come to pass that Chloris, the greatly loving, will

rejoice to know that there is one who pities her? We shall see!"

But meanwhile affairs had changed on Thorney, even during the moments of

Nicanor's speech with Chloris. The throng upon the beach, no longer

orderly, was heaving with excitement. The Saxons, spreading in all

directions to search for their prisoner, were in no mood to care what

offence they gave. They plucked brands from the fire, using them as

torches, and started for the village, while men and women retreated

before them, not knowing how far trouble might ensue. But before they

reached the village, a body of militarii, hastily summoned, came forth

from between the houses to meet them. The officer commanding them sprang

upon a pile of lumber, shouting to the Saxons, who halted, as it were

irresolute.

"While ye remain in this province it is right that ye should obey its

laws! If this Roman whom ye have taken hath committed crime against your

laws or ours, let him be tried by these laws. Otherwise will we not give

him up to you. He is a freeborn Roman, and is not to be done away with

as a slave. If ye make oath to grant him trial, we will deliver him unto

you."

Ceawlin, the hot-headed young chieftain, pulled his long sword from its

bronze sheath, pointing with it to the figure upon the lumber-pile. His

face flamed with red rage; he shook his sword and shouted to his men

behind him. There was a rush; before the Romans could prevent, a score

of Saxons had leaped upon the pile, dragging down him who spoke; and the

first blood on Thorney had been shed. It was the signal; like warring

currents of the sea the two forces clashed. The beach was alive with

figures, struggling, shouting, or swaying in deadly silence in each

other's grip. Light flickered snakelike along uplifted blades which shot

above the sea of heads. It was a fight hand to hand, primitive, blind

with insensate rage, ever-smouldering, which wanted but the spark of

excuse to flame into the full flare of battle. The resistance of the

militarii was speedily overcome; outnumbered, lacking their leader, they

broke and fled. The Saxons, with shouts of triumph, gave chase over the

stony beach into the streets of the island, bent on the recapture of

their prisoner, and on wreaking vengeance upon those who had dared

oppose them.

IX

That night, in the house of Juncina the fish-wife, kneeled Eldris at the

window of the loft where she slept, looking out upon the house-tops with

her shoulders gleaming white through her loosened hair. Through the

window moonlight drifted, showing the squalor of the loft, and the bed

where Sosia, the daughter of Juncina, lay asleep.

Into the night she murmured love-words, happy in her dreaming, calling

to her love across the darkness.

"Is he in the wine-shop of Nicodemus, or is he in the moonlight by the

fords, telling his tales to those who crowd around him? Doth he think of

me, whose thoughts are all of him? Or have I angered him

over-deeply?--for never have I seen him since that day I said him nay.

Ah, Nicanor, was it love that said thee nay? This hour might I have been

lying in his arms, Love's happy handmaid--so happy! What if I had

yielded? I so want his love! What would God care? Mary, Mother, keep me

from these thoughts! I would that I could see him now--this same moon

doth shine upon him somewhere. Thou old moon, how many maids hast thou

looked down on since the beginning of the world, who have kneeled at

windows, and thought of a man, and been foolish?"

Sosia, in the bed, awoke, turned on her back, and raised herself upon an

elbow, showing her flat and heavy face above the blanket pulled to her

chin. She spoke drowsily, in a voice thick with sleep:

"Hath the moon bewitched thee quite? In truth I think thee off thy wits

with love. All these nights hast thou been foolish, and waked me from my

sleep. Wilt not come to bed, thou cruel girl?"

Reluctantly Eldris undressed and got into bed beside Sosia, who slept

again, heavily, with stertorous breathings. The night breeze blew

freshly in the window; from the village dogs barked, and the distant

voices of men reached her. Somewhere in that press was he, in the midst

of the tide of hurrying life; and her heart went out to him.

So she slept, deeply. Once or twice she tried to waken, as one strives

to rouse from dreams; but the black swoon of sleep held her fast; body

and soul she was drowned in the soundless depths of oblivion. But

suddenly she was awake, startled, and somewhat dazed. Her first thought

was wonder as to what had waked her; her next, that it was not so late

as she had thought, for the noise at the ford still continued. More, it

seemed increased. And even in the first moment of full consciousness

which followed her waking daze, a sound grew out of all the noises of

the village; a long mellow note, like the note of a deep-toned

hunting-horn, vibrant yet steady, filling every cranny of the air. At

once she knew it was this that had awakened her. It hung a moment,

sweet, unearthly, haunting; and dropped back into an outburst of fierce

clamor that leaped at it as hounds leap at a stag. Eldris put out her

hand and shook Sosia.

"Sosia--waken! Dost hear that strange sound? What is it? Never have I

heard such a sound before."

She scrambled out of bed and went to the window, her feet shining white

on the rough floor. She saw other faces appear at other windows and at

doorways of dim hovels; there came black figures of men from lanes

between the houses, running from the river-ford. The sharp clatter of

the feet of a galloping horse clashed for a moment through other sounds.

"It is but a drunken brawl," said Sosia, sitting on the bed, a blanket

about her bare shoulders. Her tone was indifferent; drunken brawls were

no new things on Thorney. "Come back to bed."

"I think that something hath happened," said Eldris, and started to

dress. "Dress thyself quickly, Sosia, and let us go out to see. It is

not so late--the moon hath not left the window." This was true, although

the wide pool of light upon the floor had narrowed to a silver bar.

But the room was lighted suddenly by a ruddy glare which leaped into it

from without; a gust of voices swept beneath the window like the rising

of a wind; there came the sound of many feet, as though a crowd had

gathered before the house; cries, and the rattle of weapons. Again

Eldris ran to the window. She cried over her shoulder in a frightened

voice:

"Oh, blessed Peter! there be armed men entering all the houses in the

lane! Haste thee, Sosia--let them not find thee naked here. I will go

down and see--"

Below, the voice of Juncina cried:

"We harbor no fugitive here, I tell thee! Here be none but I and my two

maids!"

Eldris, climbing down the ladder with hasty feet, saw that the room,

fogged with gray smoke, was filled with half a score of men; saw Juncina

struggling in a corner, held by two; saw others overturning the scanty

furniture, slashing with their swords at fish-nets and bedding,

thrusting their torches into every nook and corner. She would have

stumbled up the ladder again out of their sight, but a shout told her

that she was seen. A great fellow seized her, dragging her from the

ladder; in his grasp she fluttered like a rag caught in a briar. Another

pulled her from him; she was in the midst of mail-clad forms that

towered over her, drink-flushed faces, brutal with greed, that leered

down upon her, hairy hands that grasped at her. Her captor she eluded,

and another, her breath coming in dry sobs of terror; at her desperate

doublings, like a frightened hare, their shouts of laughter told that

the sport was very well to their liking. The doorway, close at hand,

broken open and unguarded, offered a chance. She darted through it into

the night, into another world of terror, in which sinister sounds met

her on every side.

In a blind panic of fright she ran, thinking at every step to feel a

heavy hand upon her; in the narrow lane she ran, jostled by those who

fled beside her. Flames from burning houses threw their glare over

fights which occurred in every street and lane, in which wounded men and

dying crawled from beneath the feet of combatants into the shelter of

black doorways. A band of horsemen galloped up the lane, overriding

those who crossed their path, with shouts of "Death to Britons!"

Eldris saw them coming; saw the mouth of an alley black on one side, a

slit between houses scarce wide enough for a horseman to ride through.

She dived into it, stumbling now and again into the gutter which

channelled it. She began to sob with fright and exhaustion as she ran.

"Lord, let me find him, or I die of fear! He will save me--with him

shall I be safe. Take me to him--let me find him, for my love is

stronger than am I." Fear swept her from all the rationalities to which

she had clung; out of the tumult and the terror in which she struggled,

love rose like a wave and claimed her--the passion which was stronger

than she. God was very strong, without doubt; but without doubt also He

had many souls to guard that night, and it was the strength of a man's

arm she wanted.

So she reached the end of the alley where it opened into the street of

the fords, and crouched behind the elbow of a rambling wall, looking out

warily, a hunted thing, to see if further faring might be safe.

The broad paved street was lighted by flames from a house blazing

fiercely opposite her; and figures ran to and fro before it like imps

gone mad. Other figures there were also, which lay very still upon the

roadway in the crimson light, with their black shadows crouched behind

them. There was a rending crackle from the heart of the fire, and

shrieks and shouting from those around it; and under it all the dull

roar from all Thorney which never ceased. And quite suddenly Eldris knew

that she was listening to a sound that came out of the din around her,

the sound of men's voices, singing in unison. In that hour and place it

was to her more dreadful, more a thing of terror, than even the cries

which it was drowning. The voices came nearer; and at that in them, for

all her fear, the blood thrilled through her to her finger-tips.

For in them was the very spirit of the fight, of lust and blood and

fierce exultant triumph; barbaric and pagan, they were reckless with a

pitiless pride which feared neither gods nor men nor devils. Eldris

crouched closer against the sheltering wall as though it had been a

sentient thing to aid her. So she saw a line of men, on foot,

approaching; and the line reached from side to side of the wide street.

Each man walked with arms across his fellows' shoulders; and their song

kept time with their swift marching feet. The red light of the burning

houses fell upon them, on their reckless faces, and glinted on their

shirts of link-mail which clashed as they moved, on their crested caps

of metal, and on the weapons which hung at their sides. They swept all

before them as they came; plunderers left their work of outrage and

slaughter and fell in with them, taking up their song. The first line

passed; and Eldris saw the reason of their triumph. For those in the

rear dragged with them a prisoner, a small man, battered and bloody,

with one arm hanging in a torn sling. She could not see his face, but

her heart turned to water within her. The song sickened her with an

overpowering sense of her own weakness against all that it signified of

brutal male strength; it dominated her, and before it she shrank and

shivered. But now her terror was not all for herself alone, but for that

one who might be also in their hands, prisoner to them even as was this

poor puppet prisoner. She started up, with a cry which was drowned in

the rhythm of the terrible song as ever the cries of women have been

drowned in the song of the fighting, and fell back in a huddle against

the wall, with her face hidden on her knees, sobbing:

"Christ--oh, Christ, save him! Mary, save him, or let me die with him!"

When she found her way back to life, Thorney was wrapped in silence and

illimitable gloom. The light of the burning houses had died; the shouts

of men and shrieks of women and the fierce song of the Saxons had

ceased. Yet there were other sounds which grew out of the darkness as

she listened; a thin far wailing, like the ghost of grief, and close at

hand a man's deep voice, very low, broken by sobbing.

"Soul of my heart, where art thou! All the night I have searched and

cannot find thee, dead nor living. The curse of all evil be upon these

Saxon swine! They have slain her--my woman!--and she is dead! No more

will she lie beside me when the dark swims in the hut.--O light of my

life, could I but hear thee call me once again thy great ugly bear! Eh,

thy bear is a sad bear this night, my lamb!"

Eldris stumbled to her feet, covering her ears with her hands. She also

was seeking and could not find. She started running from the dreadful

sobbing voice, picking her way as best she might in the wreck and ruin

of the Saxons' trail.

Long she searched, and everywhere met others, also seeking, and yet

others who had found what they had lost. Torches flashed in and out like

fireflies among the darkened lanes; from houses left unscathed came the

wailing of women who had brought home their dead. The air was heavy with

smoke, so that the eyes smarted and the throat stung.

Into the face of every man who passed her she looked with eager eyes of

hope. Every man's body that lay in street or lane she hovered over with

caught breath and eyes of fear, nerving herself to stoop, to turn the

dead weight that settled sullenly into itself as her hands left it; to

scan the face by the light of her flaring torch. And the light showed

her as ghastly as what she looked on; black hair streaming like smoke

behind her, eyes wide with fear, pinched face glimmering pallid. No

joyful handmaiden of Love looked she, going to love's embraces, rather a

wild thing, terror-ridden, possessed wholly by the frenzy of her love.

Strange faces she looked on in her search among the living and the dead;

bearded faces, boyish faces, but never that face she sought.

To a dead man's side she flitted, like a spirit of the night; and on her

knees, holding her torch to a face with light staring eyes and open jaws

that seemed still to shriek a last despairing curse at her, she caught

her breath with a stifled scream. For the shock of thick hair, cut below

the ears, was black and coarse; and the half-naked body, from which the

tunic had been stripped, was long and lean. The torchlight cast quick

shadows upon the fearful face; and sometimes to her eyes it was the face

of her love, who had died terribly, and sometimes it was the face of a

stranger. She began to shake.

"I cannot tell--oh, God, I cannot tell!" she wailed. "Is my mind gone,

that I should not know thee? I must know--how can I go further until I

know?"

With wild eyes she looked about her. She was in the open space of the

market-place,--alone, save for the thing at her feet, and for other

things huddled here and there around her,--a silent battleground from

which the hosts had departed. The carcass of a horse lay near, and her

torch struck points of light from the metal of its trappings. A dog ran

by her on padding feet, its fangs dripping, its tail between its legs.

Eldris thrust the torch into the earth, that it might stand erect. She

knelt beside that silent screaming figure, and the light flashed from

the white bared teeth of the open mouth, and showed dark smears of blood

upon the face. She laid her hand on the shoulder, and the clammy cold of

the dead flesh sent a spasm of sickness through her.

"If it is thou I will kiss thee," she moaned. "I will lie upon thy

breast and put my mouth to that mouth of thine. And I must find

out--what if I should pass and leave thee here? God give me strength--I

must find out! Whose own mother could know him so?"

She wiped blood from the face with the skirt of her tunic; she forced

the stiffened jaws together, so that the horror took again the likeness

to a human face; while her breath whistled in sobbing gasps and her

flesh crept and crawled with horror. She bent and peered into the poor

face that no longer seemed to scream at her, holding the jaws shut with

tense and shaking hands. And then she sat back upon her heels with a

strangled sob of relief and nerves far overwrought, wiping her hands

furiously upon her skirt and crying:

"It is not thou! Dear Christ in heaven! it is not thou! How thou wilt

laugh when I tell thee, beloved--when I tell thee that a dead man

screamed at me and I thought him thee! How thou wilt laugh--and I shall

laugh with thee!"

Sobbing, she began to laugh, a laughter strange and cracked like the

laugh of a very old woman, that mounted high and higher, welling from

her throat as blood wells from a wound; and rocked herself to and fro

and stared into the face of the dead stranger with wide eyes of

unreason....

She took her torch and fled on, and the face that she had left behind

seemed to scream its mockery with open jaws through the darkness after

her.

X

Nicanor was half way up the beach when the stationarius went down and

his men fell upon the Saxons. Instantly, nothing loath, he found himself

in the midst of the fighting. He was unarmed, save for his knife; so

that his first thought was to get within the length of the long swords

of those attacking him, since at close range, these, built for

thrusting, were as good as useless. This was not easy to do, for the

Saxons, despite their bulk, were light upon their feet, and wary to keep

their opponents at sufficient distance. But twice he did it, each time

forcing his adversary to leave his sword-play and take to his dagger,

the terrible seaxa which had won for the Saxons their name.

He went into battle joyously, cool-eyed, alert, heart and soul in the

work ahead; yet ever with that other self within him, which stood apart

as a spectator in the arena, and watched through the smoke and crimson

light of battle the faces of those who fought,--the fierce delight of

one, the black hate of another, red wounds, and the swift black swoop of

Death. His heart sang its high song of triumph which his lips would fain

have echoed, of thanksgiving in the clean strength of his manhood, in

the power of his arm, which could uphold his own before all men. He

stooped to catch a sword from one who needed it no longer; and heard the

soft clashing of links of mail beside him and felt the breath of a great

horse that stirred his hair. Above him the voice of Ceawlin cried:

"Thou tale-teller, thee I seek! This is thy work--that dead-eyed toad is

gone, but it is thou shalt pay the price for him!"

He straightened up, the sword in hand, a laugh upon his lips; and a bolt

of red fire entered into his side and seared him to the vitals. He fell;

and the horse's tread jarred him and shook the world as it passed,

spurred by its mail-clad rider with the blood-tinged spear.

At first he fought to keep his hold on consciousness; knew that the

fight surged over and around him, but with those who fought he seemed

suddenly to have no part nor lot. They faded into spectres, beings

somehow set apart from him, in whose affairs he no longer had concern.

He lay quiet, his eyes closed, the red flower behind his ear, the red

flower of his life staining the trampled sands on which he lay. Quite

suddenly he drifted into a gray empty world of twilight, in which he

wandered seeking for what he did not know. He became aware, presently,

that on the other side of this world, at the end of the road of Time,

there was a little narrow door which would lead him into his Garden of

Lost Dreams, and he thought that if he might reach it, all would be very

well with him. But across the world, from out the twilight, there

appeared a tiny point of light, ever growing, ever brighter. It came

upon him as a rolling ball of fire, and he turned and would have fled

from it; but it enveloped him in rose-red light that burned and

blinded, and he knew that it was Pain. It lapped over him like water; it

shrivelled him, soul and body; it entered into the marrow of his bones

and twisted him in every joint and sinew. And suddenly he found his soul

following the fight into the streets of Thorney; he was plunged amid the

slaughter, in the smoke of burning houses. Yet through it all he knew,

with strange inner knowledge drawn from the deeps below consciousness,

that his soul was in his body, lying quiet on the sands in the dark and

moonlight, and that the fight had passed him by.

Out of the flame-shot darkness of his oblivion a sound came to him; and

the devil-lights that danced before his eyes ceased their wheeling to

listen--a bell, deep-throated, majestic, that tolled once, and out of

its sonorous, slow throbbing that lingered in the air, a voice intoning.

"_Ave Maria, gratia plena._"

The bell-note boomed again.

"_Benedicta tu in mulieribus._"

Again the heavy clanging shook the air.

"_Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis,

Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae!_"

The voice drifted from him; yet the air seemed alive with the vibrations

of the words. "_Ora pro nobis!_" Who was the Mary full of grace who

could pray for one, to whom one could call as men called upon the gods?

Who but the Mother of Jesus, the Little Brother of the World, sweet

comrade of his black and bitter hour? He smiled as one who hears names

well known and well beloved. "_Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae!_" Who was

that mortal one for whom priests prayed in the silence before the

dawning, for whom the hour of death was striking in the tolling of the

bell? "In the hour of our death"--not one death only was prayed for, but

all deaths. But then the words took upon themselves new and startling

meaning. He knew that the hour had struck for him also in the great

bell's voice; was that prayer for his death among all others--for his,

the pagan's? With sudden lonely longing he wished it might be so, as one

who starts upon a journey wishes for a friendly voice, a handclasp, for

farewell. Would Mary pray for him; would the Little Brother bring him

solace as in that bitter time before? If this were so, could not one go

down into death, as one had gone through life, with a song upon his

lips? What, after all, was death? For the first time the question of

Life was launched at him from the vastness of infinity; and he, poor

atom of mortality, with his bright tongue and his groping heart, his

longings, his hopes and fears and ignorances, was called upon to answer.

Was it full of terrors, the terrors at which men hinted and dared not

speak? He knew that he was not afraid. Was it lonely? He did not feel

alone.

But his thoughts were fluttering from him like birds rising from the

grass; slowly darkness closed above him, in which he struggled as a

drowning man to keep his head above the waters. Again he stood upon the

edge of the gray twilight land, and saw that something was coming to

him--a mist of light, cool and pure as pearl. It grew, and out of it

there looked down on him a face, young and fair and tender, with holy

eyes. It was the face of his lost Lady, yet her face transfigured as his

eyes had never seen it,--the same and not the same. The mist grew

brighter and he saw that in her arms there lay a babe that leaned its

head against her breast and smiled at all the world. At once he knew

them for his Dream made manifest, and his face lightened to adoration.

"O Best Beloved!" he whispered, "how mine eyes have hungered for thee in

the dark days that are gone over! My lips would sing unto thee even as

my heart is singing, but my tongue is black within my throat. I have

found that who would seek for peace must pass through pain, and when

pain hath ended, peace shall come. When therefore it cometh to my body,

as it hath come upon my soul, then I shall sing my song to thee,--my

song, which thou and little Jesus did teach me how to make, I will sing

to-morrow when the moon shines on the fountains, in the garden."

His voice died; he saw his Lady lean to him from her mist of rose and

pearl; cool as the dews of morning he felt her hand upon his head. Very

softly then his fever left him; love's touch soothed the red flame of

pain that ate his life away, as in the long ago love's touch had stilled

the bitter soul within him. He smiled happily, for that soul's pain and

body's pain had brought heart's peace. With no surprise, he knew that he

had found the answer.

"I think it is the door of the garden," he said clearly.

X

A keen sweet wind blew over the world, first pure breath of the coming

day, driving before it the reek of smoke and blood and death which

hovered over Thorney as a pall. A tinge of gray light diffused itself

like mist through the darkness; in this mist the forms of people

wandered like dim restless ghosts seeking the graves from which the

night had called them. Out of the stillness which had succeeded to the

turmoil of the night, cocks began to crow, a homely sound, as though

this dawning held no difference from the peaceful morn of yesterday. The

ripples of the river woke, gurgling like a happy child that laughs

itself out of dreams.

Eldris came out upon the beach from between the rows of tottering

houses. She cast away her torch and stretched her hands to the east,

where momently the earth was turning from black to gray, steeped in a

haze as of twilight, the strange half-light of dawn.

"O day, come swiftly and give me back my own! I shall put my hands upon

his breast and say, 'Take me, for I am all, all thine and love's, and

where thou goest there will I go also, for my God is love. I am only

woman, and weak and very weary, and I love thee. Ah, dear God! I would

leave heaven and all the angels for thine arms!' And he will take me in

his arms, and I shall fear nothing any more. O day, come swiftly!"

Along the beach she hastened, light-footed, and came to the lumber-pile,

with no more than a glance for the Roman soldier who lay upon it, his

duty done. And so, behind the lumber-pile, with but a strip of gray sand

between his bed and the broad river, she found him, with the dawn-light

upon his face.

As once before she had gone to him and knelt beside him as he slept, so

she thought to go to him again. But this time she would not fear to wake

him, for he, her lord, had called her, and her delight was to obey. She

had come to yield herself his, body and soul forever, and in her face

the bridal joy outshone the bridal terror. She would do this and that;

thought to play with her joy to taste the sweetness of its savor; but

suddenly all her thought was lost in the flood of love triumphant which

rose to overwhelm her. She ran forward, her arms outflung to him,

crying:

"Beloved, wake, for I am come to thee! All my soul is a flame of fire,

and the fire is love which blindeth me to all in earth and heaven save

only thee. Wilt thou not wake and take me?" On her knees she threw

herself beside him.

But he did not move, nor did he speak in answer.

And even in the moment of her exaltation, Eldris understood. Her words

broke; an instant she knelt with arms outstretched above him; she ceased

to breathe, and her face froze into lines of stone. But suddenly she

gave a cry, loud and sharp, and her hands fell upon him. Her eyes awoke

into living terror; with desperate fingers she strove to turn his face

further to the light. At the weight of him she shook and shuddered; she

had felt that horrible dead weight before, that sullen settling into

itself of his bulk as her hands left it. In the gray light of the slow

dawning she turned his face toward her, gray, and smiling, and still.

She looked down upon him and put her hands to her throat.

"I am glad, ay, glad, that thy mouth is not open and screaming at me!"

she said aloud, in a dead voice.

The sense of her words smote her, and she closed her eyes with a

long-drawn whispering moan.

Again she looked at him, scarcely believing; and once more the flood

overwhelmed her. She wrung her hands and brought them down before her

face.

"Oh, God, is this Thy punishment for that I said my God was love? Very

well--punish Thou me, then--what canst Thou do that matters now?"

Her voice faltered; she lowered her hands to stroke the hair from his

pale forehead. She sat upon the sands and drew his heavy head to her

knees, and her voice sank to the crooning of a woman with her man-child

that is dead.

"I am too late--too late--too late! In mine ears was the wailing of the

women in empty houses--how knew I that my voice must cry among them? My

love, that liest so quiet at my knee, thou art gone very far from me,

and all my tears and pleading may not call thee back. O pale lips sealed

forever, all thy magic dumb within thee, give me of thy power that I may

mourn my love! O wandering feet that have strayed in lands of bright

enchantment, thou walkest in the dim paths of the twilight places, and

I would that my feet might follow! O strong hands that have wrought the

work of men, why dost thou not answer to the clinging of my fingers? O

heart that camest through bitter waters, was it good to rest? I and old

Sorrow walk hand in hand; for the red flower of my lover's life which is

withered here, we shall cover him with lilies. The young men and the

maidens shall walk softly; the old shall mourn him saying 'Eheu! it is

not well for the young to go before us.' And I--what is there that I may

say? Dead--dead--dead--and my heart is breaking--Ah! bitter woe is mine!

O ye Elder Gods, would ye have been more kind than the One who hath torn

him from me?"

She bent over him so that her tears fell warm upon his face and the veil

of her hair shrouded him; she kissed his lips as though she would

breathe her own life into him.

"This my bridal kiss I give thee, O Nicanor, O my dear!--here on thy

mouth, and thou canst never know--God have pity!--thou canst never know!

Thy lips are cold--so cold--thou art all cold, and even my bosom may not

warm thee. My love, who didst die with a flower in thy hair and a smile

upon thy lips, why is thy face so bright with triumph? Peace lieth upon

thee as a garment.... O Nicanor, Nicanor, give me of thy peace!"

There fell a voice upon her weeping:

"My daughter, what dost thou here?"

Thin-faced Father Ambrose stood before her, very gentle, very old, from

Saint Peter's Church within the wall. On his arm he bore a basket filled

with simple dressings; his brown frock, up-kilted, was stained with

blood and mire. Perhaps all night he had done his work of mercy among

the dying and the dead.

"I have found him!" said Eldris. She swept back her hair with one arm,

showing her sorrow.

The priest knelt, touching here and there with skilful fingers.

"Is it not he whom men called Nicanor? Nay, daughter, weep not so

bitterly! Is it not the death he would have chosen, being man? We have

heard of him; we have seen that his power he hath striven to use for

good, so that many loved him; we have thought that in God's own time the

light would come upon him and he should be baptized into the Faith."

But Eldris broke in fiercely:

"Ye have heard--ye have seen--ye have thought--but can ye give him back

to me? I knew not your God was a cruel God; ye have taught that He is

the Father of all mercy and all love. What mercy is there in this that

He hath done? I am Christian, for I wished to seek love from that God

that is thy God; and this my love did I try to make Christian also. But

since God hath done this thing unto him and me, I am glad that he was

not Christian and hath not gone to God!"

Father Ambrose looked down upon her, smiling, and his face was holy.

"I think he was a better Christian than art thou, dear child, even

though he did not know it. Can one be Christian, for all he cries 'God,

God!' if he have not Christ within his heart as well as on his lips?

What is a Christian, save one who dealeth gently, liveth cleanly, giveth

of himself? And such an one, I think, whether he professeth all gods or

no god, will our Father call 'my son.' Long have I lived, and very much

have I seen, and I think that this is so."

He paused. Eldris's sobbing alone made answer.

"Daughter, thou sayest thou art glad he hath not gone to God. Loving

him, wouldst thou not rather think of him with God than wandering lonely

in the outer darkness?"

But Eldris flung out her hands with a bitter cry.

"Nay--nay--oh, Lord Christ, not that! I cannot bear to think he wanders

lonely, as all his life he hath been lonely--anything but that! What

have I said--what have I done! Oh, father, father, he must not be

lonely! Pray thou that God will take him, even though he did not know!

Dear God, let him into heaven--do not Thou be angered because he did not

know! Mary Mother, pity him and let him not be lonely any more!"

She stretched her hands in desolate appeal over the still face at her

knee. Father Ambrose gathered them into his.

"God hath taken him, dear child," he said gently. "Out of his darkness

hath he entered into light; and I think that it is well with him."

A long time he looked down at the face that smiled in answer; at the

long lithe limbs whose strength was dust. From his basket he took a cup,

and went aside and filled it with water from the river, and offered it

to God. Returning, he knelt, and with the water signed the cross on the

pale forehead and the broad pulseless breast.

"So sign I and seal I thee with the Cross of Christ, that in His mercy

thy Lord may receive thy soul. 'Peace I leave with you, my peace I give

unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.'" He

raised his hand, and Eldris dropped her face to the rough black hair

and sobbed. "The Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make His face

shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee. The Lord lift up His

countenance upon thee and give thee peace."

His gentle voice ceased, and a moment the earth hung silent, awaiting

the mystery of the dawn. Then the red misty sun shot up over the hills

on the east of Thorney, and the bright new day was come.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's Nicanor - Teller of Tales, by C. Bryson Taylor