Through the darkness of the night went Denise, her grey cloak passing
amid the beech trees like some dim ghost shape that drifts with the
night breeze. She had been restless and distraught all day, her
splendour of peace ruffled, her heart filling with a distrust of the
near future. To begin with, out of the grey fog of the morning had come
the man on the black horse, the man with the red eyes and the insolent
scoffing mouth. Gaillard had made her shudder despite her pride, for she
had learnt to hate the look of such a man before the woods had hidden
her from the world. Feeling a shadow of evil near her, Denise had gone
down to Goldspur after the Gascon and his men had ridden on, and had
found the place deserted, so many silent hovels in a silent landscape.
She had wandered up to the manor house, and found the same silence
there, the same foreshadowings of tragedy.
The rest of the day had dragged slowly for her in the great beech wood,
and she had found her thoughts wandering like children into a forbidden
place. And Denise’s pride would start up after these same thoughts,
seize on them in that little pleasaunce of dreams, drag them forth, and
bar the door. But there was a restless refrain in the mood of the day.
The future seemed to fly open before her eyes like the magic gate of an
enchanted garden, and she had a glimpse of paradise bathed in a mist of
gold. Her thoughts were lured thither, though her pride arose and drove
them back.
With the dusk the spirit of unrest in her had deepened, and she had
seemed to hear voices calling through the twilight of the woods. A
thrush had perched on the topmost bough of a beech tree, and had uttered
his desire, till the plaint had rung and rung into Denise’s heart. She
had tossed her cloak at the bird, but none of the wild things feared
her. And though the dusk fell, the song of the thrush seemed to thrill
through the brown gloom.
Then night had come, and her cell had seemed small and stifling, a vault
for a live soul. She had thrown her grey cloak over her shoulders, and
gone out into the beech wood, following the path that led towards
Goldspur manor. Her brown eyes had more than human vision in the
darkness, and she knew the wood ways even at night. It was as though she
went out to watch over the place, and to dispel the shadow of dread that
had settled over her own heart.
Denise had come to the end of the wood where the grassland swept down
into the valley, when she stopped to listen, putting her hood back so
that she might hear more clearly. Her face was towards Goldspur, and she
merged her body into shadow of the trunk of a great tree. Abruptly out
of the night came the sudden sound of men shouting, a vague clamour that
rose and fell like the noise of a wind through trees. Dots of light
shone out in the darkness, jerking to and fro like sparks blown hither
and thither by the wind.
Denise stood there watching these dots of fire, afraid yet not afraid,
striving to understand what was happening down there in the darkness.
The shouting died down suddenly, to change into the scattered cries of
men running to and fro. The torches tossed this way and that as though
Gaillard’s fellows were hunting for fugitives, calling to one another as
they doubled upon their tracks. One of the torches came some little
distance up the hill towards the beech wood and then halted, and
remained motionless, flaming like the eye of a cyclops.
Denise had drawn back behind the tree, when she heard the sound of
something moving in the darkness. A black shape passed momentarily
between her and the torch burning below upon the hillside. Footsteps
came near to her, the stumbling, irregular, running steps of a man hard
put for breath, and perhaps—for blood. He passed close to her in the
darkness, labouring for breath, and staggering from side to side. She
could still see the moving shadow in the gloom, when it plunged like a
man falling forward over a cliff, and she heard the sound of a body
striking the crisp, dead leaves. Fear was beneath Denise’s feet for the
moment. The man had fallen over the straggling root of a tree, and he
was struggling to rise as Denise came up with him.
He had gained his feet, and stood rocking like a drunken man, trying to
steady himself, and to win forward into the wood. But his legs would not
carry him, and he went swaying as though struck on the chest, to stagger
against Denise before she could avoid him. She felt the hard rings of
his hauberk against her bosom, and to save herself she held the man,
throwing an arm about his body.
Caught thus from behind, he turned his head and looked at her, not
questioning the strangeness of it, being dazed and almost dead with what
had passed. His face was so close to hers that Denise could not but know
him, even in the darkness.
“Aymery!”
Her voice set his dull brain thrilling.
“Denise!”
She kept her arm about him, for there was nothing else for her to do,
and he would have fallen had she not held him. Aymery’s face was as
white as linen, and she could feel him quivering as he stood.
“Peter of Savoy’s men, we were caught yonder, Grimbald and I.”
He spoke in jerks, and tried to stand apart from her, as though one
purpose had carried him so far, and as though the same purpose dominated
him still.
“I want breath, that is all; they pressed us hard, there, at Goldspur;
we broke through, and I ran for the hills. You must go, Denise,
to-night; make for one of the coast towns. I can look to myself.”
He was at the end of his strength, however, for all his hardihood, with
a sword cut through the shoulder, an arrow broken in his thigh. Denise
could see nothing of all this, but she knew that he could hardly stand.
Moreover, he had struggled up into the wood to warn her, and her heart
was the heart of a woman though the people called her a saint.
Looking back over her shoulder she saw tongues of yellow flame rising
from Goldspur in the valley. Gaillard’s men had set fire to the place.
The glow from it caught Aymery’s eyes as he stood, swaying at the knees,
great sickness upon him, even his wrath feeble in him because of his
wounds and his weariness.
“They have lit me a torch to travel by,” he said bitterly.
Denise was shading her eyes with her hand. She turned swiftly upon
Aymery, for she had seen mounted men moving on the hillside between her,
and the burning house.
“Lord,” she said simply, “yesterday, you were afraid for my sake;
to-night, it is I who fear.”
Her eyes met his, and held them. The secret thoughts of the day no
longer had their half treacherous significance. Denise had no thought of
self in her that moment; the succouring hands hid the dull radiance of
the heart beneath.
“To-night you must rest and sleep.”
He looked at her, as though trying to understand. The darkness began to
deepen about him, and he felt cold, and numb to the core.
“I can crawl to cover. If you could bring me wine and food, and a little
linen——”
She went close to him suddenly, and passed her hands over his hauberk.
Touch told her the whole truth. She had no false shame to make her weak
and careful.
“Wounds, and you would have hidden them!”
“A little blood, nothing more. Let me lie here, Denise.”
“To die,” and her voice had a deep, quiet passion in it; “lord, would
you choose death for a piece of pride! Come, I know the ways.”
She put an arm about him, as though she was stronger than Aymery that
night, and had the will and courage to do for him what he, in his full
strength, would have done for her. Suffering and sickness sweep the
small prides of life aside. The heart of a woman is as elemental, then,
as the wind or the sea.
“Lean on me.”
He looked at her half rebelliously, and then hung his head, and obeyed.
How great his need was became apparent before they had reached the
clearing amid the beech trees. The man stumbled and faltered at every
step, his head fell forward, he muttered incoherently, like one in the
heat of a fever. Denise felt his weight bearing more heavily upon her
arm. His head drooped, and rested upon her shoulder. Before they reached
the wattle gate of the garden the conscious life was out of him, and
Denise, borne down like a vine-ladened sapling bent by the wind, let the
man slip from her gently to the ground.
She stood irresolute a moment, then stooping and putting her two hands
under his shoulders, she found that she could drag him slowly up the
stone path into her cell. Once within she closed the door, and slipping
off her cloak, she covered the slit of a window with it. There was a
little earthen lamp in the cell, and Denise sought and found it in the
darkness, also tinder, flint, and steel. Yet her hands shook so with her
labour of bearing up under Aymery’s weight, that it was a minute or more
before she had the lamp burning.
Setting it upon a stone sconce in the wall, she bent over Aymery, the
light of the lamp making his face seem white as the face of the dead.
Her brown eyes grew frightened at the sight of his wounds, and at the
way he lay so quiet, and so still. But there was something greater than
fear in Denise’s heart that night. In a corner of the cell were some
rough boards covered with dry bracken, a coarse white sheet, and a
coverlet of wool. Denise, putting her arms once more under the man’s
body, half dragged and half lifted him to her own rough bed.