A man’s chivalry must have a queen to crown it with the crown of a high
purpose, and Aymery had no will to forget Denise, nor the mystical
beauty of her womanhood. The thought of her drew him as the Holy City
drew those who had taken the cross. Since he was to be made a knight,
she should bless his arms for him, and serve as a Lady who looked at him
out of Heaven. Thus Aymery went riding southwards in the July heat,
saying his prayers devoutly at dawn and at sunset, bathing his body when
he found clear water; and filling his soul with the thought of Denise.
He had broken himself to the belief that she was lost to the world,
though he was still troubled as to the happenings that had driven her
from Goldspur. Denise’s silence seemed sacred to him, and her
unapproachableness made his love the greater. Now, like a man who has
found a good excuse, he returned again to win a glimpse of her face.
Late on the afternoon of the first day Aymery turned aside from the road
under the shade of an oak tree to rest his horse. Below him stretched a
deep valley with the road running through it like a white thread; the
place seemed very desolate, while on the farther side of the valley the
woods came down close to the road. The day was full of a shimmer of
gold, and no mowers had come to mow the summer grass.
As Aymery sat there under the shade of the tree, he saw a man in a blue
surcoat riding a grey horse along the road below. Aymery had hardly set
eyes on him when he saw the man halt, and remain motionless under the
July sun that glittered on him and showed that he was armed. A woman had
come out from the woods close to the road, a woman with black hair and a
scarlet tunic that shone up against the green. What was passing between
them Aymery could not tell, but he saw the woman disappear into the
woods and the man on the grey horse follow her.
Some time had passed, and Aymery’s thoughts had flown elsewhere, when a
cry rose out of the summer silence, held a moment, and then died down.
Presently he saw a grey horse and a rider in blue reappear out of the
woods with another horse and rider beside him. The second man wore
green, and carried a plain, black shield.
Aymery saw them ride away westwards into the golden light that covered
the woods and the valley. The way they rode seemed strange to him, for
the horses went shoulder to shoulder, and one arm of the man in green
lay about the body of the rider in blue. He was puzzled moreover by the
thought of the woman in the red tunic, and the cry that he had heard,
and it crossed his mind that there had been foul play yonder.
When he had mounted and come down to the place where the blue knight had
turned aside, Aymery turned aside also into the woods. A little way in,
under the trees where a bank rose covered with bracken, he found a track
that had been trampled leading to a place where someone seemed to have
lain. But he saw nothing else beyond the tree boles, the cool green
foliage, and the bracken splashed here and there with sunlight. When he
called, no voice answered him, so he rode out of the wood and went his
way. Yet there was more in the wood than he had seen, nor did he guess
that he would meet again with the rider on the grey horse.
On the evening of the second day Aymery came to the hills by Montifeld,
and saw the Senlac uplands smitten by the evening light. Beyond
Watlingtun he found a man mowing grass beside the road, and stopped to
question him concerning Denise. The man pointed towards Mountjoye Hill,
for they could see from where they stood the thatched roof of the cell
above the thorn hedge.
“The Virgin’s cell is yonder, lording,” he said, thinking perhaps that
Aymery rode thither to be cured of some wound, and that he would be
disappointed, for the Lady of Healing had worked no cures since they had
brought her to the Abbey lands.
Denise was at her prayers, kneeling on the threshold with the door of
the cell wide open, when she heard the trampling of Aymery’s horse, a
sound from the outer world that made her heart stand still and listen.
There was a minute’s silence before she heard the latch of the gate
lifted, and someone moving through the unmown grass.
“Aymery! Lord!”
He saw the wave of colour go over her face, for he had come upon her
suddenly as she knelt there upon the threshold. The rush of blood from
the heart died down again. She looked at him, and prayed that he should
not see that she was trembling.
Denise rose up from her knees as though the sound of her own voice had
broken some spell. A kind of dumb discomfiture possessed them both.
Aymery, with the sunlight shining on his battle harness, felt challenged
by his own silence. The words he had meant to utter stuck in his throat,
for that wave of redness over the woman’s face had somehow made him feel
ungenerous and a coward. What right had he to come galloping into her
life again, when they had put a day of dreams behind them?
And like a man who would be honest, he stumbled to the blunt
perfunctoriness of a boy going down on his knees in a church. There was
something to be gone through with, and the sooner the better, since he
had begun so clumsily. Many women would have misunderstood the mood in
him. Denise understood it, perhaps more clearly than Aymery himself.
“Yes?”
Her eyes questioned him, more than her voice. Aymery put his shield
before him as he knelt.
“I have been with Earl Simon,” he said, looking at his shield. “It is to
be the sword on the shoulder, and a pair of spurs.”
He spoke, with a slight shrug of the shoulders, a man ill at ease under
his own eyes, even though self-consciousness was not part of his normal
nature. Denise’s heart had dropped to a steadier rhythm. The quicker wit
of the woman has always the advantage of the man.
“Earl Simon gave me some days, to keep vigils, wash, and be cleansed. I
would have my arms blessed also, they will serve in a good cause.”
He drew out his sword, set it point downwards in the grass, and looked
at it, and not at Denise.
She had her two hands over her bosom, and seemed to draw several breaths
before she could speak.
“There is the Abbot Reginald.”
“Should I ride forty miles to be blessed by Reginald of Brecon? Here are
my sword and shield. Bless them, or they shall go unblessed.”
She looked at him, recoiling upon the consciousness of all that had
happened to her since the days at Goldspur.
“I?”
“You can bless them, Denise. Who better?”
The fog in the air between them thinned and vanished. But neither Aymery
nor Denise noticed its passing. Life, and the infinite earnestness
thereof had both their hearts in thrall.
“Is it so great a thing to ask, Denise?”
He was looking at her steadily now, the self-consciousness had slipped
from him.
“Lord, if my blessing were but worthy.”
“Need you ask that!”
“It is I who ask it of my own heart,” she answered.
He flung out his arms suddenly, and his face blazed up at her.
“For England, for the land, not for me alone, Denise. Mother of God—I
will have no other. Am I not wise as to my own desire?”
His ardour caught her spirit and sent it soaring above the earth as a
wind blows a half-dead beacon into flame. The miserable self-fear, the
consciousness of coming shame fell away from her like a ragged garment.
She was the Denise of the woods again, with miraculous eyes and hands.
“Give them to me.”
She stretched out her arms, took his shield, held it to her bosom, and
spoke words over it that Aymery could not hear. Yet how much love and
how much supplication there were in those words of hers, the heart of a
woman alone could tell. She took his sword also, kissed the cross
thereof, and held it on high.
“Break not, fail not. Keep troth, rust never.”
She gave him the sword again, and Aymery kissed it, and knelt awhile
with bowed head, as though in prayer. Then he rose up out of the grass,
holding the cross of the sword before his eyes.
“I would keep my vigil here,” he said. “Yonder where there is a thicket
of young oaks. Before dawn, I shall be gone.”
Denise’s face was still transfigured. The realisation of her earthliness
had not returned as yet.
“God guard you in the wars,” she said to him.
Aymery lifted his head, and for a moment they looked into each other’s
eyes. Then he turned from her as though his own heart bade him go. And
it seemed to each that they had snatched a moment of joy from that
half-closed hand of life that holds more pain than gladness.
There were some children standing staring at his horse when Aymery came
out from the wicket in the hedge of thorns. He paid no heed to them
however, and taking his horse by the bridle, led him to the oak thicket
on the hillside below Virgin’s Croft. The children ran away into the
town, and told their mothers that they had seen a knight come out of St.
Denise’s gate with a naked sword over his shoulder. The children’s
tale-bearing caused some tattle in the Abbey town, and the Abbey
servants heard it.
Thus these two, soldier and saint, passed the night within call of one
another; Aymery kneeling bareheaded under the stars, with sword and
shield before him; Denise pitiably wakeful in her cell, conscious of the
darkness, and of that shadow of darkness that grew each day more heavy
about her heart. She prayed for Aymery that night, prayed for herself,
and against the future that she dreaded. They were so near to each
other, and yet so utterly apart. It seemed to Denise that night that she
had fled to this place of refuge, only to meet the greater bitterness
and shame.
At last the dawn came, and with it the sound of a horse moving over the
grass. She heard Aymery come riding up to the hedge of thorns. She saw
his sword flash out against the dawn as he stood in the stirrups and
called her name.
“Denise, Denise!”
“God keep you,” she answered him in her heart.
He went away into the world at a gallop, as though it was easier to
leave her thus in the gold and green of a summer morning.
Aymery had been gone but half an hour when a monk and two lay brethren
came hurrying over Mountjoye Hill. Their figures looked dark, intent,
outlined against the virginal clearness of the dawn. The monk was Dom
Silvius, and his eyes were sharp and watchful.
He came alone to Denise’s cell, leaving the two lay brothers at the gate
in the hedge. Denise was washing her neck and bosom; she had closed the
door, and suffered Silvius to speak to her from without. She soon learnt
that he had heard of Aymery’s coming, and that he desired to discover
the reason thereof.
“It was one who rode here, Father, to have his arms blessed. He is on
the eve of knighthood, and kept his vigil in the wood, yonder.”
Silvius’s face was very astute, he stroked his chin and considered.
There was nothing of the dreamer about him that morning.
“And the offering, Sister, the offering?”
Denise did not choose to understand.
“What offering, Father?”
“That which the man left, for the blessing.”
“He left no offering with me,” she said.
“No gift, Sister, nothing out of gratitude for the blessing?”
“No.”
“Not even a ring or a piece of money?”
“Nothing.”
Silvius’s face condemned such vagrant meanness. He hid his vexation, and
spoke softly, remembering that he was dealing with a certain sensitive
thing called woman.
“Sister,” said he. “Perhaps the man was poor. We grudge nothing to those
who are blessed with poverty. But an offering should always be made,
even though it be but the half of an apple. God loves not niggardliness,
my sister, and I would not have our good Lord, St. Martin, offended.”
Denise could not see Silvius because of the closed door, but there was
something in his voice that made her see him as a sharp-faced, shrewd,
insinuating figure hiding covetousness under the cloak of humility.
“I asked for nothing, Father,” she said.
Silvius’s face was very cunning.
“True, my Sister, we do not barter with our own souls. But there are the
poor to be remembered, the fabric of the church, the glory of St.
Martin. There is no shame in holding out the hand for these.”
Denise’s hands were fastening her tunic. And in the darkness of the cell
she seemed to understand suddenly, as one comes by the understanding of
the deeper things of life in the midst of some great sorrow, the reason
of their eagerness to win her to the Abbey. The realisation of it was
like the discovery of simony and self-seeking in the character of one
beloved. She stood motionless, staring at the door beyond which Silvius
listened. And the day seemed bitter and sordid to her after the night of
Aymery’s vigil.
“Such things as I receive,” she said, “shall be laid before the altar,”
and from that moment she felt that she hated Silvius because she had
seen the motives that moved his soul.
“That is well, Sister,” he answered her. “St. Martin is generous to all
who give.”
The almoner went away grumbling to himself, disgusted as any Jew that a
man who had benefited should have left nothing in return.
“The woman needs more shrewdness,” he thought. “Nor have we had any
marvel from her yet to open the people’s hearts, and purses. God grant
that we have not made an indifferent bargain. We are losing rental, and
giving food and gear,” and he returned in a temper, and thought
mercenary thoughts all through Matins in the Abbey Church. For to
Silvius his “house” was a great treasure-chest to be guarded, and
enriched.
Denise was glad when Silvius had gone, and though she strove to put the
sneering suspicions from her, they remained like dead trees, white and
ugly in the green of a living wood. To count the money in the alms-box,
to clutch at the offering, with the prayer hardly gone from the mouth!
It was not in her soul to suffer such a traffic.
The day seemed very grey to her, though the sun was shining, because of
that other thing that haunted her more than the thought of Dom Silvius’s
keenness. She felt more and more that the virtue had gone out of her,
and that the Lord of the Abbey would have no miracles to bring him
treasure. If this thing were to mature, what then would follow? She shut
the eyes of her soul to it, and tried to think of that night in May as
but the memory of an evil dream.