couple of nicely browned loaves were waiting to be taken out. A meat
pasty that smelled very fragrant had been left on the oven shelf. His
cassock, neatly mended, hung over the back of Father Jude’s oak chair.
Martin could make nothing of these mysteries. The loaves and the pasty
were real enough—so real that he remembered the cup of water and the
crust of bread with which he had broken his fast soon after dawn.
He went and looked into the chapel and the guest-room, but there was no
one there, nor could he see anything moving over the moor. The business
puzzled him completely. It was possible that a servant had been sent
from Paradise; but Paradise was three leagues away, and Martin would
have expected to find a horse or a mule in the stable. Moreover it
occurred to him that some one must have looked into the oven not so very
long ago, lifted out the pasty, and put it on the shelf. The good
creature might be hiding somewhere, but what need was there for such a
game of hide-and-seek?
Martin returned to the cell, set the pasty on the table, took the loaves
out of the oven, and his platter and cup from the shelf. Common sense
suggested that the food was meant to be eaten. He pulled the stool up to
the table, said grace, took the knife from the sheath at his girdle, and
thrust the point of it through the pie-crust.
Then he sat rigid, listening, the blade of his knife still in the pie
and his hand gripping the haft. Some one was singing on the moor among
the yellow gorse and broom. The voice was a girl’s voice, gay and
birdlike and challenging.
Martin sat there with a face like a ghost’s, his heart beating fast, his
eyes staring through the open doorway. For the voice seemed to speak to
him of all that he had sought in the Forest and had not found. It was
youth calling to youth in the spring of the year.
The voice grew fainter and fainter; it seemed to be dying away over the
moor. Martin Valliant’s eyes dilated, his knees shook together. He
started up, knocking over the stool, and rushed out of the cell like a
madman, his eyes full of a fanatical fire.
The voice had ceased singing. He climbed to the place where the wooden
cross stood, and looked fiercely about him. But he saw nothing, nothing
but the gorse and broom and heather. He went down among the green gorse
banks, searched, and found nothing.
Sweat stood on his forehead, and his heart was hammering under his ribs.
Then he crossed himself, fell on his knees, and prayed. The first thing
he did on reaching his cell was to take the loaves and the cooked meat
and throw them into the fire under the oven.
_Chapter VI_
When a man has done what he believes to be a good deed he is flushed for
a while with a happy self-righteousness, and may forget the struggle he
had with his own soul. So it was with Martin Valliant. He had no quarrel
with himself or with his loneliness for the rest of that day. He had won
a victory; he had been tempted of the Devil and had refused the meats
that the Devil had cooked for him.
Strange—this fear of the white body or the lips of a woman, this naïve
cowardice that dares not look into Nature’s eyes. In it one beholds the
despair of saints who see no hope for man save in the crushing of the
body to save the soul. The few struggle toward a cold triumph, maimed,
but half human. With holy ferocity they run about to persuade humanity
that God is without sex. Men may listen to them; the deserts become
filled with monks; Nature is flouted for a while. Then the thing becomes
no more than a rotten shell; men obey their impulses but still wear
their vows; cynicism and a lewd hypocrisy are born; the great realities
are glozed over. Then comes the day when a more youthful and noble
generation wakes to the horror of such a superstition. Gates are torn
off their hinges; walls battered down; the slime and the refuse exposed
to the sunlight. The new generation runs to the woods and the fields
like a flock of children released from some abominable pedantry. They
are no longer afraid. The world grows young and beautiful again. There
is no sin in the sunset, no shame in the singing of birds.
Martin Valliant felt himself uplifted all that day; but the old Pagan
people had gathered out of the woods and were lying hidden in the gorse
and heather. There was Pan with his pipes; there were girls and young
men who had danced in the Bacchic dances; Orpheus with his lute. Even
the pale Christ looked down with compassionate eyes, the Great Lover who
was human till the fanatics covered His face with a veil of lies.
Evening came, and the birds began their singing down in the beech woods
under the hill. They sang their way into Martin Valliant’s heart, made
him hear again the voice of the girl singing on the moor. A great
restlessness assailed him. He went forth and wandered under the stars,
but there was no healing for him in their cold brightness. And that
night he slept like a man in fear of the dawn.
Again, it was the birds which troubled him. He woke in the gray of the
morning, to hear their faint orisons filling the valley. He arose, went
to the chapel, and was long at his prayers. Moreover, he chose to fast
that morning, contenting himself with a cup of cold water before he
wandered out over the moor.
Yet in spite of all his carefulness Martin Valliant was not wholly his
own master that morning. He made himself go forward, but a part of his
soul kept looking back. There was a voice, too, that challenged him. “Of
what are you afraid? Why are you trying to escape? A monk is a soldier.
He should fight, and not hide himself.”
This voice would not be silenced. It was like a scourge striking him
continually.
“Go back,” it said; “blind men are afraid of falling.”
At last he obeyed it, vaguely conscious of the nearness of some new
ordeal. He did not guess that the all-wise Mater Mundi had him by the
hand, that he was one of her chosen children. She would try him with
fire, teach him to be great through the power of his own compassion, so
that his soul might burn more gloriously when the purer flame touched
it.
Martin Valliant found the door of his cell standing open, and from
within came the sound of the snapping of dry wood. A girl was kneeling
by the oven, with a fagot lying on the floor at her side, and she was
busy laying the fire for the baking of bread. She was dressed in a gown
of apple green, and from the collar thereof her firm white neck curved
to meet the bronze of her hair. So intent was she on breaking up the
fagot wood and building her fire that she had not discovered the man
standing in the doorway.
Life had never yet posed Martin with such a problem as this. He stood
and stared at the girl, wondering how to begin the attack. Her back was
turned toward him, and the initiative was his.
Then he became inspired. He would assume blindness, deafness, refuse to
recognize her existence. He would not so much as speak to her, and
behold! the problem would solve itself.
Kate Succory turned sharply at the sound of a man’s footsteps. Her
lashes half hid her roguish brown eyes; she held a hazel bough between
her two hands; her green gown, cut low at the throat, showed the upper
curves of her bosom.
She saw Martin Valliant take his Mass-book from the shelf, sit down in
the chair, and begin to read. He was within two yards of her, but for
all the notice he took of her she might have been less than a shadow.
She watched him for some moments and then went calmly on with her work,
breaking the sticks to pieces and feeding the fire. Absolute silence
reigned in the cell, save for the sound of the snapping of wood and the
crackling of the flames in the oven.
Martin’s eyes remained fixed on his book, but he was most acutely
conscious of what was happening so close to him. The situation had taken
on a sudden, unforeseen complexity. He felt himself growing hot about
the face.
Presently the fire appeared to be burning to the girl’s satisfaction.
She rose, went to the larder, brought out the things that she required,
and set them on the table. Then she turned up the sleeves of her gown,
and her arms showed white and shapely.
Martin’s face was growing the color of fire. He tried not to see the
girl, to anchor his whole consciousness to the square of parchment in
front of him. The dilemma shocked him. Was it possible that this
creature in the green gown took his silence to be consenting?
Meanwhile she went on calmly with her work, hardly looking in his
direction, her red lips parting now and again in a smile. Martin raised
his eyes very cautiously and looked at her. The solid and comely reality
of her shape, her purposeful composure, appalled him. This problem would
have to be attacked somehow, desperately, and without delay.
The girl’s intuition forestalled his gathering effort toward revolt.
“It was foolish of you to burn those loaves yesterday.”
He stared at her with sudden, frank astonishment, but said nothing.
“Good food should not be wasted like that. Besides, I had come all that
way to see what a pair of hands might do for you, Father Martin. No
bread could have been cleaner; I always wash before baking.”
Here was an amazing development! The girl was actually scolding him,
reproving him for being wasteful, assuming control of the stores in his
cupboard. He opened his mouth to speak, but again she forestalled him.
“Father Jude was a very careful soul. Rose Lorrimer had no trouble with
him; she wept her eyes out when he had to go back to Paradise. She had
just made him two new shirts. And she did not mind the loneliness up
here, for Father Jude is an old man, and Rose has seen forty——”
Martin Valliant laid his Mass-book on the table. Kate Succory was
talking so calmly and so naturally that he knew she was to be believed;
yet here was a new and astonishing phase of monastic life thrust upon
him without a moment’s warning. Martin was no innocent, though he had
led a sheltered life; he knew that there were monks at Paradise who had
broken their vows. But here was this girl coming all the way from
Paradise village and turning up her sleeves to keep house for him as
though she were doing the most natural thing in the world.
He floundered in the depths of his own simplicity.
“Who sent you here, child?” he asked her bluntly.
Kate’s brown eyes met his.
“I just mounted the gray donkey and came. No one could have bidden me
sweep your hearth for you. Rose Lorrimer was hearth-ward to Father Jude,
and before Father Jude Father Nicholas was here, and old Marjory cared
for him; but she was not old Marjory then.”
She laughed, and began to mold the dough into shape, her arms all white
with flour.
“Rose took Father Jude’s sheets away with her, but if we can come by
some good linen I will soon have things as they should be. Of course, if
I do not please you——”
She gave him a quick, sidelong glance, her teeth showing between her red
lips.
Martin Valliant had gone as white as the dough she was kneading. His
knees were trembling. He could not escape from the knowledge of her
green gown, her shining hair, and the sleekness of her skin. And her
voice was very pleasant, with a sly lilt of playfulness and of youth in
its tones.
He gripped the arms of his chair and stood up.
“My child—” he began.
She gave him the full, challenging frankness of her brown eyes, and
Martin knew that he could not pretend that she was a child.
“It is very lonely here,” she said, looking at her hands, “and a man
cannot do a woman’s work. Rose told me that travelers passed no more
than once a month. And—and I——”
He pushed his chair back, and groped with one hand for the cross that
hung at his girdle.
“It is not good that you should be here.”
He saw her head droop a little. Her hands rested on the table. He strove
with himself, and went on.
“But I thank you, my sister. What I bear must be borne for the sake of
the vows I have taken. When I kneel in the chapel, you shall be in my
prayers.”
All the sly, provoking roguery had gone from her face. She did not speak
for a moment, did not move. Then she lifted her head and looked at him,
and her brown eyes were like the eyes of an animal in pain.
“I am not a bad woman, Father Martin, not evil at heart. But——”
She caught her breath, and pressed her hands to her breasts.
“Yes, I will go.”
She turned suddenly and walked straight out of the cell into the glare
of the sunlight. And Martin Valliant stood biting the sleeve of his
frock, and thinking of the look her brown eyes had given him.
_Chapter VII_
Kate Succory went no farther than the nearest cluster of gorse on the
slope of the moor. She threw herself face downwards on a patch of short,
sweet turf, where rabbits had been feeding, and plucked at the grass
with her fingers, twisting her body to and fro with the lithe and supple
movements of a restless animal. Her hair came loose, and she shook it
down upon her shoulders.
There was rebellion in her eyes.
“He is a good man. Why should he not have what other men crave for? And
I love him. There is not a man so tall and fine in all the Forest.”
She rested her elbows on the ground and her chin in her two hands, and
stared at the gorse bushes.
“Geraint would not have hesitated. Pah! that black rat! How the girls
would laugh at me! I don’t care. Why did God make him a priest?”
She frowned fiercely and bit at her lower lip, the elemental passion in
her refusing to be dominated by the rules of the Church.
“He is a good man. No; I will not go away. Priestcraft is all wrong. The
Lollards say so; I could argue it out with him. As if living down there
in a priory made men good! Bah! what nonsense! Father Geraint is a black
villain, and the rest of them are not much better. I wonder if he
knows?”
A note of tenderness sounded in the turmoil of her brooding. She smiled
and caressed the grass, stroking it with her open hand.
“Perhaps it would hurt him if he knew. And he was as frightened of me as
though I had walked naked into the cell! Oh, my heart!”
Martin Valliant had been praying, little guessing that the days would
come when he would trust to his own heart, and not be forever falling on
his knees and asking strength from God. He had thrown Kate’s unbaked
loaves into the fire, and made a meal from the scraps he had found in
the cupboard. But he was in no mood to sit still and think. Father
Jude’s spade offered itself as an honest companion, and Martin went
forth into the garden to dig.
He had not turned two spadefuls of soil when Kate Succory began singing.
She was sitting hidden by the gorse, her arms hugging her knees, and her
voice had no note of wayward exultation. It was as though she sang to
herself plaintively, like a bird bewailing its lost mate.
Martin frowned, and stood listening, but her singing did not die away
into the distance as he had expected. She was hidden somewhere, and her
voice remained to trouble him.
He began to dig with fierce determination, jaw set, eyes staring at the
brown soil. And presently he stopped, and lifted up his head like a
rabbit that has crouched hidden in a tuft of grass. What a chance for a
jester to have thrown a clod at him! The girl’s singing had ceased.
Martin breathed hard, and lifted up his spade for a stroke, but the
silence had fooled him.
“The moon shone full on my window
When Jock came down through the wood,
And I felt the wind in the trees blow
The springtime into my blood.”
She gave the words with a kind of passionate recklessness, and all her
youth seemed to thrill in her throat. Martin bowed his head and went on
digging as though by sheer physical effort he could save himself from
being a man.
Presently he found himself up against the hedge, with no more ground
that he could attack with the spade. The hedge was in leaf, and hid the
open moor from him. He fancied he heard some one moving on the other
side of the green wall.
“Martin—Martin Valliant.”
He started to walk toward the chapel, but the voice followed him along
the hedge.
“Do not be angry with me, Martin Valliant; I want to speak with you. You
are a good man and to be trusted; I am a grown woman and no fool.”
Martin hesitated.
“What would you say to me?”
“Many things. I have the wit to know that all is not well with the
world. We are heretics, Father Martin, heretics in our hearts. We—in
Paradise—no longer believe what the monks teach us, for they are bad
men, who laugh in their sleeves at God.”
Martin’s eyes hardened.
“Such words should not come from your lips, child.”
She laughed recklessly.
“I speak of what I see. Is Father Geraint a holy man? Do the brothers
keep their vows? And why should they—when they are but men? It is all a
great mockery. And why did they send you away to this solitary place?”
He did not answer her at once, and his face was sad.
“No, it is no mockery,” he said at last, “nor is life easy for those who
strive toward holiness. Get you gone, Kate. I will keep my faith with
God.”
He could hear her plucking at the hedge with her fingers.
“I do not please you,” she said sullenly.
“God forgive you,” he answered her. “You are to me but a brown bird or a
child. Shall I offend against God, and you, and my own soul because
other men are base? No; and I will prove my faith.”
She heard him go to the cell, and a sudden awe of him awoke in her
heart. She went and hid in the gorse and waited, expecting some strange
and violent thing to happen. Presently she saw him come forth carrying
an oak stool, a length of rope, and a knife. He went straight toward the
great wooden cross on its mound, and for a moment panic seized her.
Martin Valliant was going to hang himself!
She crouched, watching him, ready to rush out and strive with him for
his life. She saw Martin set the oak stool at the foot of the cross,
stand on it, cut the rope into two pieces, and fasten them to the two
arms of the cross. He made a loop of each, and turning his back to the
beam, thrust his hands through the loops. Then she understood.
Martin Valliant had only to thrust the stool away or take his feet from
it, and he would hang by the arms—crucified. And that was what he did.
He raised himself by drawing on the ropes, lifted his feet from the oak
stool, and let himself drop so that he hung by the arms.
Kate knelt there, her arms folded across her bosom. Her brown eyes had
grown big and solemn, more like the eyes of a child. She looked at
Martin Valliant, and her awe of him was mingled with a strange, choking
tenderness.
How long would he hang there? How long would he endure? He had only to
place his feet upon the oak stool in order to rest himself to show some
mercy to his body. But the soul of the man welcomed pain. His eyes
looked steadily toward the sea with an obstinate tranquillity that made
her marvel at his patience.
The day was far spent and the sun low in the west, and as the sun sank
lower it fell behind the cross and showed like a halo about Martin
Valliant’s head. The glare was in Kate’s eyes, so that the cross and the
man hanging upon it were no more than a black outline.
How long would he endure? How would it end?
And then, of a sudden, the eyes of her soul were opened. She was no
longer the laughing wench in love with the shape of a man. She saw
something noble hanging there against the sunset, a figure that was like
the figure of the Christ.
She flung herself on her face, and wept for Martin and her own heart.
There was no escape from the truth. It was she who had crucified him,
put him to this torment.
The sun had touched the hills and there was a wonderful golden radiance
covering the earth as she rose up with wet eyes, and hastened toward the
cross. She went on her knees, kissed the man’s feet, and wiped away the
mark of her kisses with her hair.
“I will go,” she said, bowing her head. “If I have sinned against your
holiness, Martin Valliant, forgive me—because I love you.”
He looked down at her and smiled, though his arms felt as though they
were being torn from their sockets.
“Who am I that I should forgive you, sister? Sometimes it is good to
suffer. Go back to Paradise.”
She rose up and left him, running wildly down the long slope of the
moor, not daring to let herself look back.
“He shall suffer no more for my sake,” she kept saying to herself, and
all the while she was weeping and wishing herself dead.
_Chapter VIII_
Roger Bland, my Lord of Troy, rode back from hunting in the Forest. Dan
Love, his huntsman, had sent word that morning that he had found the
slot of a hart down by Darvel’s Holt, and that the beast lay close in
one of the thickets. My Lord of Troy had gone out with his hounds and
gentlemen, hunted the hart, and slain him. He was riding home in the
cool of the evening, the sunlight shining on his doublet of green cloth
of gold, its slashed sleeves puffed with crimson, as though striped with
blood.
Troy Castle loomed up above at the top of a steep and grassy hill,
throwing a huge shadow across the valley. It was the crown of Roger
Bland’s pride, the sign and symbol of his greatness, for the Lord of
Troy was a new man, a shrewd hound who had lapped up the blood of the
old nobles butchered in the wars of Lancaster and York. Richard
Crookback had been well served by Roger Bland. The fellow was a brain,
an ear, a creature of the closet, bold in betraying, cautious in risking
his own soul.
Yet the Lord of Troy had a presence, a certain lean dignity. His face
narrowed to a long, outjutting chin. His mouth was very small, his pale
eyes set somewhat close together. The man’s nostrils were cruel, his
forehead high and serene. When he spoke it was with a dry and playful
shrewdness; he could be very debonair; his tongue wore silk; there was
nothing of the butcher about him.
Roger Bland was a man of the new age, half merchant, half scholar, with
some of the pride of a prince. He had caught the spirit of the Italians.
Subtlety pleased him; he despised the stupid English bull. And up in
Troy Castle he lived magnificently, and kept a quiet eye on the country
for leagues around, a hawk ready to pounce on any stir or trouble in the
land. And the Forest hated him with an exceeding bitter hatred, for it
had suffered grimly at his hands, seeing that it had chosen to wear the
Red Rose when the White had proved more fortunate. The Lord of Troy had
ridden into it, and left great silences behind him. There were houses
empty and ruinous, and no man dared go near them. There were people who
had fled across the sea. There were graves in the Forest, shallow holes
in the earth into which bodies had been tumbled and left hidden in the
green glooms.
As Roger Bland’s black horse lifted him out of the valley a man came
down to meet him along the steep road that climbed the hill. It was
Noble Vance, the Forest Warden, a thick, coarse stub of a man who
dressed to his own red color. The Forest folk feared him, and mocked at
his parents who had christened him so sententiously. “Noble, forsooth!”
He wore a doublet of scarlet and hose of green. His red hat looked as
big as the wheel of a cart, and the face under it was the color of raw
meat, and all black about the jowl.
He swept his hat to the Lord of Troy.
“My lord has had good sport,” and he nodded toward the hart lying across
the back of a horse.
“Excellent, Master Vance.”
“There is other game, my lord, beyond the purlieus. I have ridden over
to speak to you.”
Roger Bland glanced back over either shoulder.
“A good gossip, my friend——”
“As you say, sir, a good gossip——”
“Is best kept for the closet, and a cup of wine. Ride here beside me.
Yes, we have made an excellent day of it; we turned that beast out by
Darvel’s Holt and ran him three miles. I love a beast with a good heart,
Vance, and a man who fights to the death.”
The Forest Warden grinned.
“Such men are growing scarce, my lord, in these parts. A few green
youngsters perhaps, and an old badger or two deep down in their earths.”
“Like old Jack Falconer, I shall draw that badger some day.”
Trumpets sounded as they crossed the bridge over the dry moat, for my
Lord of Troy had a love of ceremony and spacious, opulent magnificence.
The guards at the gate-house presented their pikes. In the main court
grooms and servants came hurrying in my lord’s livery of silver and
green. A page stood uncovered beside Roger Bland’s horse, with a cup of
wine ready on a silver salver.
My lord waved him aside.
“Bring two cups, child, to my closet, and let it be known that I am not
to be troubled. Now, Master Vance.”