A red, wintry dawn was in the east when Denise stood ready for her
flight from the Abbey lands, her rabbit-skin cloak about her, and the
hood drawn over her head. She had knotted the money that Reginald had
given her into a corner of her under tunic, and the food that she had
saved from yesterday she carried wrapped in a clean cloth. Denise had
thought of seeking Grimbald, but her heart had failed her at the thought
of meeting the familiar faces of the people who had looked upon her as
something superhumanly pure and wonderful. The passion that obsessed her
for the moment was the passion to escape from the inquisitive eyes of
those who knew her, and to slip away into the world where she would be
nothing more than a mere woman.
A robin twittered on the thorn hedge as she left the cell and, crossing
the grass, went out by the wicket gate. The land was white with hoar
frost, each twig and blade beautiful to behold, and the arch of the east
red with an angry dawn. The hills looked big and blue, and very sombre,
and in the north the sky had an opaqueness as of coming snow.
The brittle silence of a frosty morning seemed unbroken as yet, and
Denise, after looking half fearfully about her, came out from the shadow
of the thorn hedge, and walked quickly in the direction of the road. She
would be away and over the Abbey bounds before anyone knew in the town
that she had gone. Reaching the road, she climbed down the path into it,
for the road ran in a hollow there. A bramble had caught the latchet of
her shoe and pulled it loose, and Denise bent down to refasten it,
putting the cloth with the food on the bank beside her.
Now Dom Silvius’s treachery had betrayed her to the people, and Denise,
as she fastened her shoe-latchet, was startled by a shrill, gaggling
laugh that seemed to rise out of the ground close to her. The banks on
either side of the road were covered with furze bushes, and a number of
these bushes were suddenly endowed with the miraculous power of
movement. They rose up from where they had grown, and came jigging down
the steep banks into the road.
Moreover these same furze bushes burst into loud laughter, and began to
crow with exultation.
“A miracle, a miracle!”
“St. Denise has worked a wonder, at last!”
“Holy virgin, see how the bushes dance!”
Denise stood still at the foot of the bank, and the furze bushes came
jigging round her like mummers in a mask. Flapping skirts and shuffling
feet gave a human undercurrent to the green swirl of the furze. Now and
again she saw a red, triumphant face, or a pair of brown arms holding a
bough, while the frolic went on with giggles and little screams of
laughter. Then, at a given shout from one of them, these women of the
winter dawn flung their furze boughs upon Denise, as the Sabines threw
their shields upon Tarpeia.
The thorns were as nothing compared with that circle of coarse and
jeering faces that stood revealed. Old hags with white hair, skinny
arms, and flat bosoms; women in their prime, rough and buxom, with hard
features and loud mouths; young girls, whose tongues were pert and
insolent. Bridget, the smith’s wife, led this wolf pack, like a hungry
and red-eyed dam.
Denise’s face was bleeding, but she did not flinch now that her pride
had been driven against the pricks. She looked round at the women,
holding her head high, although they had beaten her across the face. And
for the moment the women hung back from her as she pushed the furze
boughs aside, and made as though to pass on without answering a word.
Bridget, the smith’s wife, stood in her path. She flung up her head and
laughed like a great raw-boned mare, and an echo came down from
Mountjoye Hill like the answering neigh of a horse. On the ridge above,
where the dawn light shone, were crowded the men who had come out to see
their women bait Denise.
Bridget began the savage game with a word that brought the blood to
Denise’s face. The women shrieked with delight. Taunts struck her on
every side as they crowded close on her, gloating, screaming, their
mouths full of cursing and derision. They began to shake their fists,
and to stretch their claws towards her, and the smell of their bodies
was in her nostrils.
Bridget swung forward, and spat in her face.
“She would work miracles, this jade, this wanton! Where is my boy, you
minion? Answer me that, I say!”
“Where is your man, eh?”
“We know him, we know him! Let him show his face here!”
“Look at her, the pretty jade!”
“Spoil her beauty. Strip her naked.”
“Out with the harlot. Let her freeze.”
Warts, Sterility, and fifty more were howling about her, drunk with the
very noise they made. For a moment Denise stood white-faced in the midst
of them. Then she disappeared in a swirl of coarse and violent movement,
like a deer that is dragged down and smothered beneath the brown bodies
of the wolves.
The road that morning was a martyr’s way as the redness of the dawn
waned and the sky became cold and grey. Mouths spat upon her, hands
smote her, and clutched at her clothes. Buffeted at every step, jostled,
and torn, she was brought to the boundary of the Abbey _leuga_, and
driven out thence into the world. The women even caught up stones and
pelted her when they had let her go, screaming foul words, and laughing
in loud derision.
Denise was as dazed and as exhausted as though she had been wrecked, and
washed ashore half dead by some lucky wave. Her face was bruised and
bleeding, her clothes in tatters, her tunic torn open so that her bosom
showed. She drew her ragged clothes about her, and went unsteadily down
the road, with the cries of the women still following her as she went.
Denise’s pride made a last brave spreading of its wings. It carried her
beyond the sound of those voices, though her feet dragged, and her knees
gave under her, and a kind of blindness filled her brain.
Perhaps she struggled on for a mile or more before she turned aside, and
lay down under some hazels beside the road. And as she lay there,
dull-eyed, grey-faced, and still half dazed, the power to think came
back like the sense of reviving pain. Horror of herself and of the world
took hold of her by the throat. It was as though those women had spat
upon her soul, and made her revolt from herself as from something
unclean. Those mocking faces symbolised the mercies of her sister women.
All those who knew the truth would scoff, and draw away their skirts.
She was an outcast, a thing whose name might broider a lewd tale.
Denise was no ignorant child, but a grown woman, yet she was weak and in
pain, and her very weakness made her anguish the more poignant. She lay
there a long while under the hazels, not noticing the cold, nor the
sodden soil, for her heart seemed colder than the frost. Life held its
helpless, upturned palms to the unknown. What use was there in living?
God had deserted her, and had suffered her innocence to be put to shame.
She was too weary, too miserable even for bitterness or for rebellion.
Inert despair had her, body and soul.
Presently a boy came along the road towards Battle, driving an ass laden
with paniers full of bread. Close to the spot where Denise lay under the
hazels, the ass was taken with the sulks, and stood obstinately still.
The boy tugged at the bridle, shouted, thwacked the beast with his
stick, but make her budge he could not. Denise sat up and watched him,
this piece of byplay thrusting a wedge between her and the apathy of
despair.
The boy was a sturdy youngster, with brown face, brown smock, and brown
legs splashed with mud. He rubbed his nose with a brown hand, and
catching sight of Denise, took her to be a beggar, and perhaps a bit of
a witch.
“Hi, there,” he shouted, “give over frightening the beast.”
“It is none of my doing,” she said, surprised somehow at the sound of
her own voice.
“She stopped here, none of your tricks, old lady,” said the boy.
Denise put back her hood, and the youngster stared.
“Lord,” said he, “you have been fighting, and you are not old, neither!”
His curiosity was curtailed by the curiosity of the ass, who took to
kicking, sending sundry loaves rolling on the road.
“Hi, there, come and help.”
Denise rose up, and went towards the struggling pair. She took the
bridle from the boy, and began to pull the donkey’s ears, to rub her
poll, and talk to her as though she were a refractory child. The beast
grew suddenly docile, and the bread was saved.
Denise helped the boy to pick up the loaves. He looked hard at her when
they had refilled the paniers, and then offered one of the loaves to
Denise.
“Take it,” he said almost roughly, yet with the brusqueness of a boy’s
good-will.
“It will be missed.”
The boy gave a determined shake of the head.
“Father’s bread. The jade served him the same trick last week, kicked
the loaves on to a dung heap. He can’t blame me.”
He thrust the loaf into Denise’s hand, gave her a friendly grin, and cut
the ass viciously across the hind-quarters with his stick. The response
on the beast’s part was a wild and hypocritical amble.
This simple adventure on the road heartened Denise in very wonderful
fashion, even as the voice of a child may interpose between a man and
murder. It was like a mouthful of wine in the mouth of one ready to
faint upon a journey. Denise watched the boy disappear, hardly thinking
that she had been saved from despair by the obstinacy of an ass. She had
the loaf in her hand and the boy’s smile in remembrance, and the mocking
voices of the morning seemed less shamefully persistent.
Denise broke and ate some of the bread, and finding a ditch near with a
film of ice covering it, she broke the ice with her shoe, and soaking
one corner of her tunic in the water, she washed the blood from her
mouth and face. It was then that she found the money that Abbot Reginald
had given her still knotted up in her clothes. And these two things, the
bread and the money, comforted her with the thought that she was not
utterly forgotten of God. Both blessings had come to her by chance, but
when a soul is in the deeps it catches the straws that float to it, and
believes them Heaven-sent.
Despite her wounds and her bruisings Denise walked five miles before
noon. The passion to escape from familiar faces and to sink into the
outer world, had revived in her. She skirted Robertsbridge and its
Abbey, crossing the Rother stream by a footbridge that she found. On the
hill beyond she met a pedlar travelling with his pack, and taking out a
piece of money bought a rough brown smock from him, a needle and some
thread. About noon she found some dry litter under the shelter of a bank
of furze. She put on her brown smock, and mended her cloak, and then
despite the January cold, such an utter weariness came upon her that she
fell asleep.
When Denise awoke it was with a rush of misery into the mind, a misery
so utter that she wished herself asleep again, even sleeping the sleep
of death. She was so stiff with the cold and her rough handling that it
hurt her to move, and the infinite forlornness of her waking made her
shudder. Something soft touched her face, like the drifting petal of
apple blossom out of the blue. A wind had risen and was whistling
through the furze bushes, and buffeting them to and fro. The sky had
grown very sullen. Snow was beginning to fall.
Denise dragged herself up and drew her cloak closer about her. She must
find shelter for the night somewhere, unless she wished to tempt death
in the snow. Yet she had gone but a short way along the road when a
sudden spasm of pain seized her, pain such as she had never felt before.
Denise stood still, clenching her hands, her eyes full of a questioning
dread. The spasm passed, and she went on again slowly, the flakes of
snow drifting about her, the sky and the landscape a mournful blur. She
had walked no more than a furlong when the same pain seized her, making
her catch her breath and stand quivering till the spasm had passed. Nor
was it the pain alone that filled her with a sense of infinite
helplessness and dread. The birth of a new and terrible consciousness
seemed to grip and paralyse her heart. She knew by instinct that which
was upon her, a state that called up a new world of shame and tenderness
and fear.
Denise went on again, a woman laden with the simple and primitive
destiny of a woman. It so happened that she came to a wood beside the
road, and at the edge of the wood under the bare branches of the trees
she saw a lodge built of faggots, and roofed with furze and heather. The
place seemed God-sent in her necessity, and her anguish of soul and
body. Denise found it empty, save for a mass of dry bracken piled behind
some faggots in one corner of the lodge. The place had a rough door
built of boughs. Denise closed it, and hid herself in the far corner of
the lodge, sinking deep into the bed of bracken. The pangs were upon
her, and all the dolour and the foreboding that take hold of a woman’s
heart.
It was bitter cold that night, and the snow came driving from the north,
a ghost mist that wrapped the world in a garment of mystery. The wind
roared in the trees whose bare boughs clapped together, creaking and
chafing amid the roaring of the storm. It was a night when sheep would
die of the cold, or be smothered in the snow drifts banked against the
hedges.
The sky began to clear about dawn, patches of blue showing between
ragged masses of grey cloud. The sun shone out fitfully at first,
flashing upon a white world, upon a world of brilliant snow schemes and
glittering arabesques, with the wood’s sweeps of black shadow across a
waste of white.
The wind had dropped, and there was the silence of snow everywhere, not
a voice, not a sound, save the occasional creaking of a rotten bough and
the swish of its falling snow. The sun climbed higher, and the whiteness
of the world became a pale and blinding glare.
Now, the silence of the wilderness was broken that morning by a slow and
steady sound that grew on the still air. It was the muffled beat of
hoofs upon the snow of the road that ran southwards along the ridge of
the hill. Presently the snorting of the horse, jingle of metal and the
creaking of leather were added to the plodding of the hoofs. A man’s
voice rang out suddenly into a burst of song. The white world was
glorious in the sunshine, marble and lapis lazuli, with flashes here and
there of gold.
The muffled beat of hoofs ceased by the wood where stood the lodge built
of faggots. The snow was virgin about it, and the man turned his horse
towards the wood, swung out of the saddle, and began kicking the snow
aside as though to give the beast a chance of cropping the grass. Taking
wine and meat from a saddlebag, he brushed the snow from a log that lay
outside the lodge, and sat down to make a meal.
And as he sat there in the sun he talked to his horse, and gave the
beast some of the bread from his own breakfast. The horse nosed against
him like a dog, its breath steaming up into the frosty air, its eyes the
colour of sapphires seen against the snow. And there were no sounds save
the man’s voice, the breathing of his horse, and the dripping from the
boughs as the snow thawed in the sun.
In due course the man remounted, and rode off down the road with the
morning sunlight upon his face. Cowering on the bracken in the lodge
Denise lay dazed, and weary, hands and feet numb with the cold. She had
prayed to God that the man might not enter the place, and find her there
on her bed of bracken. He had been so near to her that she had been able
to hear the sound of his breathing, and even the breaking of the crust
of the bread.
Beside her on the bracken lay a white thing that neither moved nor
uttered a cry. Denise lay and stared at it, half with dread and mute
wonder, half with a passion of primeval tenderness that was too deep for
tears. And as Aymery rode away from her into the morning, she kept her
vigil beside that innocent thing that did not whimper and did not move.
The snow and the secret silence thereof seemed part of her life that
morning, and the eyes of the world were full of a questioning mist of
tears.