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Via Crucis: A Romance of the Second Crusade

by F. Marion Crawford · English · Gutenberg #6350 · 598,148 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Via Crucis: A Romance of the Second Crusade

Author: F. Marion Crawford


        
Release date: August 1, 2004 [eBook #6350]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2014

Language: English

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[Illustration: "SO GILBERT FIRST MET THE QUEEN"]



VIA CRUCIS

A Romance of the Second Crusade

BY

F. MARION CRAWFORD



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"So Gilbert first met the Queen"

"Perhaps that is one reason why I like you"

"Crosses! Give us Crosses!"

Beatrix and Gilbert

"He ... held, while earth and sky whirled with him"

The Knighting of Gilbert

"For a space Gilbert answered nothing"

The Way of the Cross




CHAPTER I


The sun was setting on the fifth day of May, in the year of our Lord's
grace eleven hundred and forty-five. In the little garden between the
outer wall of the manor and the moat of Stoke Regis Manor, a lady
slowly walked along the narrow path between high rose bushes trained
upon the masonry, and a low flower-bed, divided into many little
squares, planted alternately with flowers and sweet herbs on one side,
and bordered with budding violets on the other. From the line where the
flowers ended, spiked rushes grew in sharp disorder to the edge of the
deep green water in the moat. Beyond the water stretched the
close-cropped sward; then came great oak trees, shadowy still in their
spring foliage; and then, corn-land and meadow-land, in long, green
waves of rising tilth and pasture, as far as a man could see.

The sun was setting, and the level rays reddened the lady's golden
hair, and fired the softness of her clear blue eyes. She walked with a
certain easy undulation, in which there were both strength and grace;
and though she could barely have been called young, none would have
dared to say that she was past maturity. Features which had been coldly
perfect and hard in early youth, and which might grow sharp in old age,
were smoothed and rounded in the full fruit-time of life's summer. As
the gold deepened in the mellow air, and tinged the lady's hair and
eyes, it wrought in her face changes of which she knew nothing. The
beauty of a white marble statue suddenly changed to burnished gold
might be beauty still, but of different expression and meaning. There
is always something devilish in the too great profusion of precious
metal--something that suggests greed, spoil, gain, and all that he
lives for who strives for wealth; and sometimes, by the mere absence of
gold or silver, there is dignity, simplicity, even solemnity.

Above the setting sun, tens of thousands of little clouds, as light and
fleecy as swan's-down, some dazzling bright, some rosy-coloured, some,
far to eastward, already purple, streamed across the pale sky in the
mystic figure of a vast wing, as if some great archangel hovered below
the horizon, pointing one jewelled pinion to the firmament, the other
down and unseen in his low flight. Just above the feathery oak trees,
behind which the sun had dipped, long streamers of red and yellow and
more imperial purple shot out to right and left. Above the moat's broad
water, the quick dark May-flies chased one another, in dashes of
straight lines, through the rosy haze, and as the sinking sun shot a
last farewell glance between the oak trees on the knoll, the lady stood
still and turned her smooth features to the light. There was curiosity
in her look, expectation, and some anxiety, but there was no longing. A
month, had passed since Raymond Warde had ridden away with his
half-dozen squires and servants to do homage to the Empress Maud. Her
court was, indeed, little more than a show, and Stephen ruled in
wrongful possession of the land; but here and there a sturdy and honest
knight was still to be found, who might, perhaps, be brought to do
homage for his lands to King Stephen, but who would have felt that he
was a traitor, and no true man, had he not rendered the homage of
fealty to the unhappy lady who was his rightful sovereign. And one of
these was Raymond Warde, whose great-grandfather had ridden with Robert
the Devil to Jerusalem, and had been with him when he died in Nicaea;
and his grandsire had been in the thick of the press at Hastings, with
William of Normandy, wherefore he had received the lands and lordship
of Stoke Regis in Hertfordshire; and his name is on Battle Abbey Roll
to this day.

During ten years Stephen of Blois had reigned over England with varying
fortune, alternately victor and vanquished, now holding his great
enemy, Robert of Gloucester, a prisoner and hostage, now himself in the
Empress's power, loaded with chains and languishing in the keep of
Bristol Castle. Yet of late the tide had turned in his favour; and
though Gloucester still kept up the show of warfare for his
half-sister's sake,--as indeed he fought for her so long as he had
breath,--the worst of the civil war was over; the partisans of the
Empress had lost faith in her sovereignty, and her cause was but
lingering in the shadow of death. The nobles of England had judged
Stephen's character from the hour in which King Henry died, and they
knew him to be a brave soldier, a desperate fighter, an indulgent man,
and a weak ruler.

Finding themselves confronted by a usurper who had no great talent to
recommend him, nor much political strength behind his brilliant
personal courage, their first instinct was to refuse submission to his
authority, and to drive him out as an impostor. It was not until they
had been chilled and disappointed by the scornful coldness of the
Empress Queen's imperious bearing that they saw how much pleasanter it
would be to rule Stephen than to serve Maud. Yet Gloucester was
powerful, and with his feudal retainers and devoted followers and a
handful of loyal independent knights, he was still able to hold Oxford,
Gloucester, and the northernmost part of Berkshire for his sister.

Now, in the early spring of this present year, the great earl had gone
forth, with his followers and a host of masons and labouring men, to
build a new castle on the height by Faringdon, where good King Alfred
had carved the great white horse by tearing the turf from the gravel
hill, for an everlasting record of victory. Broadly and boldly
Gloucester had traced the outer wall and bastions, the second wall
within that, and the vast fortress which was to be thus trebly
protected. The building was to be the work of weeks, not months, and,
if it were possible, of days rather than of weeks. The whole was to be
a strong outpost for a fresh advance, and neither gold nor labour was
to be spared in the execution of the plan. Gloucester pitched his
sister's camp and his own tent upon the grassy eminence that faced the
castle. Thence he himself directed and commanded, and thence the
Empress Maud, sitting beneath the lifted awning of her imperial tent,
could see the grey stones rising, course upon course, string upon
string, block upon block, at a rate that reminded her of that Eastern
trick which she had seen at the Emperor's court, performed by a
turbaned juggler from the East, who made a tree grow from the seed to
the leafy branch and full ripe fruit while the dazed courtiers who
looked on could count fivescore.

Thither, as to a general trysting-place, the few loyal knights and
barons went up to do homage to their sovereign lady, and to grasp the
hand of the bravest and gentlest man who trod English ground; and
thither, with the rest, Raymond Warde was gone, with his only son,
Gilbert, then but eighteen years of age, whom this chronicle chiefly
concerns; and Raymond's wife, the Lady Goda, was left in the manor
house of Stoke Regis under the guard of a dozen men-at-arms, mostly
stiff-jointed veterans of King Henry's wars, and under the more
effectual protection of several hundred sturdy bondsmen and yeomen,
devoted, body and soul, to their master and ready to die for his blood
or kin. For throughout Hertfordshire and Essex and Kent there dwelt no
Norman baron nor any earl who was beloved of his Saxon people as was
the Lord of Stoke; wherefore his lady felt herself safe in his absence,
though she knew well enough that only a small part of that devotion was
for herself.

There are people who seem able to go through life, with profit to
themselves, if not to others, by a sort of vicarious grace arising out
of the devotion wasted on them by their nearest and dearest, and
dependent upon the success, the honour, and the reputation of those who
cherish them. The Lady Goda set down to her own full credit the
faithful attachment which her husband's Saxon swains not only felt for
him, but owed him in return for his unchanging kindness and impartial
justice; and she took the desert to herself, as such people will, with
a whole-souled determination to believe that it was all her due though
she knew that she deserved none of it.

She had married Raymond Warde without loving him, being ambitious of
his name and honours, when his future had seemed brilliant in the days
of good King Henry. She had borne him an only son, who worshipped her
with a chivalric devotion that was almost childlike in its blindness;
but the most that she could feel, in return, was a sort of motherly
vanity in his outward being; and this he accepted as love, though it
was as far from that as devotion to self is from devotion to
another--as greed is far from generosity. She had not been more than
sixteen years of age when she had married, being the youngest of many
sisters, left almost dowerless when their father had departed on a
pilgrimage to the Holy Land, from which he had never returned. Raymond
Warde had loved her for her beauty, which was real, and for her
character, which was entirely the creation of his own imagination; and
with the calm, unconscious fatuity which so often underlies the
characters of honest and simple men, he had continued throughout his
married life to believe that his wife's affection, if neither very deep
nor very high, was centred upon himself and upon Gilbert. Any man a
whit less true and straightforward would have found out the utter
emptiness of such belief within a year. Goda had been bitterly
disappointed by the result of her marriage, so far as her real tastes
and ambitions were concerned. She had dreamt of a court; she was
condemned to the country. She loved gayety; she was relegated to
dulness. Moreover the Lord of Stoke was strong rather than attractive,
imposing rather than seductive, and he had never dreamed of that small
coin of flattery which greedy and dissatisfied natures require at all
costs when their real longings are unfed. It is their nature to give
little; it is their nature and their delight to ask much, and to take
all that is within their reach. So it came to pass that Goda took her
husband's loving generosity and her son's devotion as matters foregone
and of course, which were her due, and which might stay hunger, though
they could not satisfy her vanity's large appetite; and she took,
besides, such other things, both good and bad, as she found in her
path, especially and notably the heart of Arnold de Curboil, a widowed
knight, cousin to that Archbishop of Canterbury who had crowned Stephen
king, after swearing allegiance to Maud. This Arnold, who had followed
his great cousin in supporting King Stephen's cause, had received for
his service broad lands, both farm and forest, in Hertfordshire,
bordering upon the hereditary estates of the Wardes; and in the turmoil
and chaos of the long civil war, his word, at first without Raymond's
knowledge, had more than once saved the latter's little castle from
siege and probable destruction. Warde, in his loyalty to the rightful
sovereign, had, indeed, rather drawn back from the newcomer's
friendship than made advances to win it; but Raymond had yielded in the
end to his wife's sarcasms and to his own sense of obligation, as he
began to find out how, again and again, in the turning tides of civil
strife, his neighbour, though of opposite conviction, served him by
protecting his bondsmen, his neat cattle, and his growing crops from
pillage and destruction. Raymond did not trace such acts of neighbourly
kindness to the day when, hawking with his lady and little Gilbert,
then hardly big enough to sit upon a horse, they had been overtaken by
a winter storm not far from Arnold's lands, and when Arnold himself,
returning from a journey, had bidden them take shelter in a small
outlying manor house, where he was to spend the night, and whither his
servants had brought his little daughter Beatrix to meet her father.
Raymond had accepted the offer for his wife's sake, and the two
families had made acquaintance on that evening, by the blazing fire in
the little hall.

Before supper, the men had talked together with that sort of cheery
confidence which exists almost before the first meeting between men who
are neighbours and of the same rank, and the Lady Goda had put in a
word now and then, as she sat in the high-backed chair, drying the
bright blue cloth skirt of her gown before the crackling logs; and
meanwhile, too, young Gilbert, who had his mother's hair and his
father's deep-set eyes, walked round and round the solemn little
dark-faced girl, who sat upon a settle by herself, clad in a green
cloth dress which was cut in the fashion for grown-up women, and having
two short stiff plaits of black hair hanging down behind the small
coverchief that was tied under her fat chin. And as the boy in his
scarlet doublet and green cloth hose walked backward and forward,
stopping, moving away, then standing still to show off his small
hunting-knife, drawing it half out of its sheath, and driving it home
again with a smart push of the palm of his hand, the little girl's
round black eyes followed all his movements with silent and grave
curiosity. She was brotherless, he had no sisters, and both had been
brought up without companions, so that each was an absolute novelty to
the other; and when Gilbert threw his round cap, spinning on itself, up
to the brown rafters of the dim fire-lit chamber and caught it upon one
finger as it came down again, the little Beatrix laughed aloud. This
seemed to him nothing less than an invitation, and he immediately sat
down beside her on the settle, holding his cap in his hand, and began
to ask her how she was called, and whether she lived in that place all
the year round; and before long they were good friends, and were
talking of plovers' eggs and kingfishers' nests, and of the time when
they should each have a hawk of their own, and a horse, and each a
hound and a footman.

When supper was over and a serving-woman had taken the little Beatrix
away to sleep in the women's upper chamber, and when the steward of the
manor farm, and his wife and the retainers and servants, who had eaten
and drunk their fill at the lower end of the hall, were all gone to
their quarters in the outbuildings,--and when a bed had been made for
Gilbert, in a corner near the great chimney-piece, by filling with
fresh straw a large linen sack which was laid upon the chest in which
the bag was kept during the daytime, and was then covered with a fine
Holland sheet and two thick woollen blankets, under which the boy was
asleep in five minutes,--then the two knights and the lady were left to
themselves in their great carved chairs before the fire. But the Lord
of Stoke, who was a strong man and heavy, and had eaten well and had
drunk both ale and Gascony wine at supper, stretched out his feet to
the fire-dogs, and rested his elbows upon the arms of his chair, and
matched his hands together by the thumbs and by the forefingers, and by
the other fingers, one by one; and little by little the musical, false
voice of his lady, and the singularly gentle and unctuous tones of his
host, Arnold de Curboil, blended together and lost themselves, just as
the gates of dreamland softly closed behind him.

The Lady Goda, who had been far too tired to think of riding home that
night, was not in the least sleepy, and, moreover, she was profoundly
interested in what Sir Arnold had to say, while he was much too witty
to say anything which should not interest her. He talked of the court,
and of the fashions, and of great people whom he knew intimately and
whom the Lady Goda longed to know; and from time to time he managed to
convey to her the idea that the beauties of King Stephen's court would
stand in a poor comparison with her, if her husband could be induced to
give up his old-fashioned prejudices and his allegiance to the Empress
Maud. Lady Goda had once been presented to the Empress, who had paid
very little attention to her, compared with the interest she showed in
Sir Raymond himself. At the feast which had followed the formal
audience, she had been placed between a stout German widow lady and an
Italian abbot from Normandy, who had talked to each other across her,
in dog-Latin, in a way which had seemed to her very unmannerly; and the
German lady had eaten pieces of game-pie with her knife, instead of
using her fingers, as a lady should, before forks were invented. On the
following morning the Lady Goda had been taken away again by her
husband, and her experiences of court life had been brought to an
abrupt close. If the great Earl Robert of Gloucester had deigned to
bestow a word upon her, instead of looking through her with his
beautiful calm blue eyes at an imaginary landscape beyond, her
impressions of life at the Empress's court might have been very
different, and she might ever afterwards have approved her husband's
loyalty. But although she had bestowed unusual pains upon the
arrangement of her splendid golden hair, and had boxed the ears of a
clumsy tirewoman with so much vivacity that her own hand ached
perceptibly three hours afterwards, yet the great earl paid no more
attention to her than if she had been a Saxon dairy-maid. These things,
combined with the fact that she unexpectedly found the ladies of the
Empress's court wearing pocket sleeves, shaped like overgrown
mandolins, and almost dragging on the rushes as they walked, whereas
her own were of the old-fashioned open cut, had filled her soul with
bitterness against the legitimate heir to King Henry's throne and had
made the one-sided barrier between herself and her husband--which she
could see so plainly, but which was quite invisible to him--finally and
utterly impassable. He not only bored her himself, but he had given her
over to be bored by others, and from that day no such thing as even the
mildest affection for him was to be thought of on her side.

It was no wonder that she listened with breathless interest to all Sir
Arnold told her, and watched with delight the changing expression of
his smooth face, contrasted at every point with the bold, grave
features of the Lord of Stoke, solemnly asleep beside her. And Curboil,
on his side, was not only flattered, as every man is when a beautiful
woman listens to him long and intently, but he saw also that her beauty
was of an unusual and very striking kind. Too straight, too cold, too
much like marble, yet with hair almost too golden and a mouth like a
small red wound; too much of every quality to be natural, and yet
without fault or flaw, and too vivid not to delight the tired taste of
the man of pleasure of that day, who had seen the world from London to
Rome and from Rome to the imperial court of Henry the Fifth.

And she, on her side, saw in him the type to which she would naturally
have been attracted had she been perfectly free to make her choice of a
husband. Contrasted with the man of action, of few words, of few
feelings and strong ones, she saw the many-sided man of the world,
whose mere versatility was a charm, and the thought of whose manifold
experiences had in it a sort of mysterious fascination. Arnold de
Curboil was above all a man of tact and light touch, accustomed to the
society of women and skilled in the art of appealing to that
unsatisfied vanity which is the basis of most imperfect feminine
characters. There was nothing weak about him, and he was at least as
brave as most men, besides being more skilful than the majority in the
use of weapons. His small, well-shaped, olive-tinted hand could drive a
sword with a quicker thrust than Raymond Warde's, and with as sure an
aim, though there might not be the same massive strength behind it. In
the saddle he had not the terrible grip of the knee which could make a
strong horse shrink and quiver and groan aloud; but few riders of his
day were more profoundly skilled in the art of showing a poor mount to
good advantage, and of teaching a good one to use his own powers to the
utmost. When Warde had ridden a horse six months, the beast was
generally gone in the fore quarters, and broken-winded, if not dead
outright; but in the same time Curboil would have ridden the same horse
twice as far, and would have doubled his value. And so in many other
ways, with equal chances, the one seemed to squander where the other
turned everything to his own advantage. Standing Sir Arnold was
scarcely of medium height, but seated, he was not noticeably small;
and, like many men of short stature, he bestowed a constant and
thoughtful care upon his person and appearance, which resulted in a
sort of permanent compensation. His dark beard was cut to a point, and
so carefully trimmed as to remind one of those smoothly clipped trees
representing peacocks and dragons, which have been the delight of the
Italian gardener ever since the days of Pliny. He wore his hair neither
long nor short, but the silky locks were carefully parted in the middle
and smoothed back in rich dark waves. There was something almost
irritating in their unnatural smoothness, in the perfect transparency
of the man's healthy olive complexion, in the mouselike sleekness of
his long arching eyebrows, and in the perfect self-satisfaction and
confidence of his rather insolent reddish-brown eyes. His straight
round throat, well proportioned, well set upon his shoulders, and
transparently smooth as his own forehead, was thrown into relief by the
exquisite gold embroidery that edged the shirt of finest Flemish linen.
He wore a close-fitting tunic of fine scarlet cloth, with tight sleeves
slightly turned back to display his shapely wrists; it was gathered to
his waist by a splendid sword-belt, made of linked and enamelled plates
of silver, the work of a skilled Byzantine artist, each plate
representing in rich colours a little scene from the life and passion
of Christ. The straight cross-hilted sword stood leaning against the
wall near the great chimney-piece, but the dagger was still at the
belt, a marvel of workmanship, a wonder of temper, a triumph of Eastern
art, when almost all art was Eastern. The hilt of solid gold,
eight-sided and notched, was cross-chiselled in a delicate but deep
design, picked out with rough gems, set with cunning irregularity; the
guard, a hollowed disk of steel, graven and inlaid in gold with Kufic
characters; the blade, as long as a man's arm from the elbow to the
wrist-joint, forged of steel and silver by a smith of Damascus, well
balanced, slender, with deep blood-channels scored on each side to
within four fingers of the thrice-hardened point, that could prick as
delicately as a needle or pierce fine mail like a spike driven by a
sledge-hammer. The tunic fell in folds to the knee, and the
close-fitted cloth hose were of a rich dark brown. Sir Arnold wore
short riding-boots of dark purple leather, having the tops worked round
with a fine scarlet lacing; but the spur-leathers were of the same
colour as the boot and the spurs themselves of steel, small, sharp,
unornamented, and workmanlike.

Six years had passed since that evening, and still, when the Lady Goda
closed her eyes and thought of Sir Arnold, she saw him as she had seen
him then, with every line of his expression, every detail of his dress,
sitting beside her in the warm firelight, leaning forward a little in
his chair, and talking to her in a tone of voice that was meant to be
monotonous to the sleeper's ear, but not by any means to her own.
Between Warde and Curboil the acquaintance had matured--had been in a
measure forced in its growth by circumstances and mutual obligations;
but it had never ripened into the confidence of friendship on Warde's
side, while on Sir Arnold's it had been but a well-played comedy to
hide his rising hatred for the Lady Goda's husband. And she, on her
side, played her part as well. An alliance in which ambition had held
the place of heart could not remain an alliance at all when ambition
had been altogether disappointed. She hated her husband for having
disappointed her; she despised him for having made nothing of his many
gifts and chances, for clinging to an old cause, for being
old-fashioned, for having seen much and taken nothing--which makes
'rich eyes and poor hands'--for being slow, good-natured, kind-hearted,
and a prey to all who wished to get anything from him. She reflected
with bitterness that for a matter of seven or eight years of waiting,
and a turn of chance which would have meant happiness instead of
misery, she might have had the widowed Sir Arnold for a husband and
have been the Archbishop of Canterbury's cousin, high in favour with
the winning side in the civil war and united to a man who would have
known how to flatter her cold nature into a fiction of feeling, instead
of wasting on her the almost exaggerated respect with which a noble
passion envelops its object, but which, to most women, becomes in the
end unspeakably wearisome.

Many a time during those six years had she and Sir Arnold met and
talked as on the first night. Once, when the Empress Maud had taken
King Stephen prisoner, and things looked ill for his followers, Warde
had insisted that his neighbour should come over to Stoke Regis, as
being a safer place than his own castle; and once again, when Stephen
had the upper hand, and Sir Raymond was fighting desperately under
Gloucester, his wife had taken her son, and the priest, and some of her
women, and had ridden over to ask protection of Sir Arnold, leaving the
manor to take care of itself.

At first Curboil had constantly professed admiration for Warde's mental
and physical gifts; but little by little, tactfully feeling his
distance, he had made the lady meet his real intention half way by
confiding to him all that she suffered, or fancied that she
suffered--which with some women is the same thing--in being bound for
life to a man who had failed to give her what her ambition craved.
Then, one day, the key-word had been spoken. After that, they never
ceased to hope that Raymond Warde might come to an untimely end.

During these years Gilbert had grown from a boy to a man, unsuspicious,
worshipping his mother as a kind of superior being, but loving his
father with all that profound instinct of mutual understanding which
makes both love and hatred terrible within the closer degrees of
consanguinity. As time went by and the little Beatrix grew tall and
straight and pale, Gilbert loved her quite naturally, as she loved
him--two young people of one class, without other companions, and very
often brought together for days at a time in the isolated existence of
mediaeval castles. Perhaps Gilbert never realized just how much of his
affection for his mother was the result of her willingness to let him
fall in love with Beatrix. But the possibility of discussing the
marriage was another excuse for those long conversations with Sir
Arnold, which had now become a necessary part of Goda's life, and it
made the frequent visits and meetings in the hawking season seem quite
natural to the unsuspecting Sir Raymond. In hunting with Sir Arnold, he
had more than one narrow escape. Once, when almost at close quarters
with an old boar, he was stooping down to meet the tusker with a low
thrust. His wife and Sir Arnold were some twenty paces behind him, and
all three had become separated from the huntsmen. Seeing the position
and the solitude, the Lady Goda turned her meaning eyes to her
companion. An instant later Sir Arnold's boar-spear flew like a
cloth-yard arrow, straight at Sir Raymond's back. But in that very
instant, too, as the boar rushed upon him, Warde sprang to one side,
and, almost dropping to his knee, ran the wild beast through with his
hunting sword. The spear flew harmless over his head, unseen and
unheard, and lost itself in the dead leaves twenty yards beyond him. On
another day, Raymond, riding along, hawk on wrist, ten lengths before
the others, as was his wont, did not notice that they gradually fell
behind, until he halted in a narrow path of the forest, looked round,
and found himself alone. He turned his horse's head and rode back a few
yards, when suddenly three masked men, whom he took for robbers, sprang
up in his path and fell upon him with long knives. But they had
misreckoned their distance by a single yard, and their time by one
second, and when they were near enough to strike, his sword was already
in his hand. The first man fell dead; the second turned and fled, with
a deep flesh wound in his shoulder; the third followed without striking
a blow; and Sir Raymond rode on unhurt, meditating upon the uncertainty
of the times. When he rejoined his wife and friend, he found them
dismounted and sitting side by side on a fallen tree, talking low and
earnestly, while the footmen and falconers were gathered together in a
little knot at some distance. As they heard his voice, Goda started
with a little cry, and Arnold's dark face turned white; but by the time
he was beside them, they were calm again, and smiled, and they asked
him whether he had lost his way. Raymond said nothing of what had
happened to him, fearing to startle the delicate nerves of his lady;
but late on the following night, when Sir Arnold was alone in his
bedchamber, a man ghastly white from loss of blood lifted the heavy
curtain and told his story in a low voice.




CHAPTER II


Now Raymond and his son had gone over into Berkshire, to the building
of the great castle at Faringdon, as has been said; and for a while Sir
Arnold remained in his hold, and very often he rode over alone to
Stoke, and spent many hours with the Lady Goda, both in the hall and in
the small garden by the moat. The priest, and the steward, and the
men-at-arms, and the porter, were all used to see him there often
enough, when Sir Raymond was at home, and they thought no evil because
he came now to bear the lonely lady company; for the manners of those
days were simple.

But on a morning at the end of April, there came a messenger from King
Stephen, bidding all earls, barons, bannerets, and knights, upon their
oath of fealty, join him with their fighting men in Oxford. For form's
sake, the messenger came to Stoke Regis, as not admitting that any
Norman knight should not be on the king's side; and the drawbridge
being down, he rode under the gateway, and when the trumpeter who was
with him had blown three blasts, he delivered his message. Then the
steward, bowing deeply, answered that his lord was absent on a journey;
and the messenger turned and rode away, without bite or sup. But,
riding on to Stortford Castle, he found Sir Arnold, and delivered the
king's bidding with more effect, and was hospitably treated with meat
and drink. Sir Arnold armed himself slowly in full mail, saving his
head, for the weather was strangely warm, and he would ride in his hat
rather than wear the heavy steel cap with the broad nose-guard. Before
an hour had passed he was mounted, with his men, and his footmen were
marching before and behind him on the broad Hertford road. But he had
sent a messenger secretly to the Lady Goda, to tell her that he was
gone; and after that she heard nothing for many days.

In the morning, and after dinner, and before sunset, she came every day
to the little garden under the west wall of the manor, and looked long
toward the road--not that she wished Sir Raymond back, nor that she
cared when Gilbert came, but she well knew that the return of either
would mean that the fighting was over, and that Sir Arnold, too, would
be at leisure to go home.

On that fifth of May, as the sun was going down, she stood still and
looked out toward the road for the tenth time since Curboil had gone to
join the king. The sun sank lower, and still she saw nothing; and she
felt the chill of the damp evening air, and would have turned to go in,
but something held her. Far up the road, on the brow of the rising
ground, she saw a tiny spark, a little dancing flame like the
corpse-candles that run along the graves on a summer's night--first
one, then all at once three, then, as it seemed to her, a score at
least, swaying a little above a compact dark mass against the red sky.
The lights were like little stars rising and falling on the horizon,
and always just above a low, black cloud. A moment more, and the
evening breeze out of the west brought a long-drawn harmony of chanting
to the Lady Goda's ear, the high sweet notes of youthful voices
sustained by the rich counterpoint of many grown men's tones. She
started, and held her breath, shivered a little, and snatched at the
rose bush beside her, so that the thorns struck through the soft green
gauntlet and pricked her, though she felt nothing. There was death in
the air; there was death in the moving lights; there was death in the
minor wail of the monks' voices. In the first moment of imperfect
understanding, it was Arnold whom they were bringing home to her, slain
in battle by her lawful husband, or by Gilbert, her son; it was Arnold
whom they were bringing back to her who loved him, that she might wash
his wounds with her tears, and dry his damp brow with her glorious
hair. Wide-eyed and silent, as the train came near, she moved along by
the moat to meet the procession at the drawbridge, not understanding
yet, but not letting one movement of the men, one flicker of the
lights, one quaver of the deep chant, escape her reeling senses. Then
all at once she was aware that Gilbert walked bareheaded before the
bier, half wrapped in a long black cloak that swept the greensward
behind him. As she turned the last bastion before reaching the
drawbridge, the funeral was moving along by the outer edge of the moat,
and between the procession and her there was only the broad water,
reflecting the lights of the moving tapers, the dark cowls of the
monks, the white surplices of the song-boys. They moved slowly, and
she, as in a dream, followed them on the other side with little steps,
wondering, fearing, starting now with a wild thrill of liberty at last,
now struggling with a half conventional, half hysterical sob that rose
in her throat at the thought of death so near. She had lived with him,
she had played the long comedy of love with him, she had loathed him in
her heart, she had smiled at him with well-trained eyes; and now she
was free to choose, free to love, free to be Arnold's wife. And yet she
had lived with the dead man; and in the far-off past there were little
tender lights of happiness, half real, half played, but never
forgotten, upon which she had once taught her thoughts to dwell
tenderly and sadly. She had loved the dead man in the first days of
marriage, as well as her cold and unawakened nature could love at
all--if not for himself, at least for the hopes of vanity built on his
name. She had hated him in secret, but she could not have hated him so
heartily had there not once been a little love to turn so fiercely
sour. She could not have trained her eyes to smile at him so gently had
she not once smiled for his own sake. And so, when they brought him
dead to the gate of his own house, his wife had still some shreds of
memories for weeds to eke out a show of sorrow.

She passed through the postern in the small round tower beside the
gateway, knowing that when she came out under the portcullis, the
funeral train would be just reaching the other end of the bridge. The
little vaulted room in the lower story of the tower was not four steps
in width across, from door to door; but it was almost dark, and there
the Lady Goda stopped one moment before she went out to meet the
mourners. Standing still in the dimness, she pressed her gloved hands
to her eyes with all her might, as though to concentrate her thoughts
and her strength. Then she threw back her arms, and looked up through
the gloom, and almost laughed; and she felt something just below her
heart that stifled her like a great joy. Then all at once she was calm,
and touched her eyes again with her gloved hands, but gently now, as
though smoothing them and preparing them to look upon what they must
see presently. She opened the little door, and was suddenly standing in
the midst of the frightened herd of retainers and servants, while the
last strains of the dirge came echoing under the deep archway. At that
instant another sound startled the air--the deep bell-note of the great
bloodhounds, chained in the courtyard from sunrise to sunset; and it
sank to a wail, and the wail broke to a howl, dismal, ear-rending,
wild. Before it had died away, one of the Saxon bondwomen shrieked
aloud, and the next took up the cry, and then another, as a likewake
dirge, till every stone in the shadowy manor seemed to have a voice,
and every voice was weeping for the dead lord. And many of the women
fell upon their knees, and some of the men, too, while others drew up
their hoods, and stood with bent heads and folded hands against the
rough walls.

Slowly and solemnly they bore him in and set the bier down under the
mid-arch. Then Gilbert Warde looked up and faced his mother; but he
stood aside, that she might see her husband; and the monks and
song-boys stood back also, with their wax torches, which cast a dancing
glare through the dim twilight. Gilbert's face was white and stern; but
the Lady Goda was pale, too, and her heart fluttered, for she had to
play the last act of her married life before many who would watch her
narrowly. For one moment she hesitated whether to scream or to faint in
honour of her dead husband. Then, with the instinct of the born and
perfect actress, she looked wildly from her son's face to the straight,
still length that lay beneath the pall. She raised one hand to her
forehead, pressing back her golden hair with a gesture half mad, half
dazed, then seemed to stagger forward two steps, and fell upon the
body, in a storm of tears.

Gilbert went to the bier, and lifted one of his mother's gloved hands
from the covered face, and it dropped from his fingers as if lifeless.
He lifted the black cloth pall, and turned it back as far as he could
without disturbing the woman's prostrate figure; and there lay the Lord
of Stoke, in his mail, as he had fallen in fight, in his peaked steel
helmet, the straight, fine, ring-mail close-drawn round his face and
chin, the silky brown hair looking terribly alive against the dead
face. But across the eyes and the forehead below the helmet there was
laid a straight black band, and upon his breast the great mailed hands
clasped the cross-hilted sword that lay lengthwise with his body.
Gilbert, bareheaded and unarmed, gazed down into his father's face for
a while, then suddenly looked up and spoke to all the people who
thronged the gateway.

"Men of Stoke," he said, "here lies the body of Sir Raymond Warde, your
liege lord, my father. He fell in the fight before Faringdon Castle,
and this is the third day since he was slain; for the way was long, and
we were not suffered to pass unmolested. The castle was but half built,
and we were encamped about it with the Earl of Gloucester, when the
king came suddenly from Oxford with a great host; and they fell upon us
unawares at early morning, when we had but just heard the mass and most
of us were but half armed, or not at all. So we fought as we could, and
many fell, and not a few we killed with our hands. And I, with a helmet
on my head and a gambison but half buckled upon my body, and my hands
bare, was fighting with a full-armed Frenchman and was hard pressed.
But I smote him in the neck, so that he fell upon one knee and reeled.
And even in that moment I saw this sight. A score of paces from me, my
father and Sir Arnold de Curboil met face to face, suddenly and without
warning, their swords lifted in the act to strike; but when my father
saw his friend before him, he dropped his sword-arm and smiled, and
would have turned away to fight another; but Sir Arnold smiled also,
and lowered not his hand, but smote my father by the point, unguarded,
and thrust his sword through head and hood of mail at one stroke,
treacherously. And so my father, your liege lord, fell dead unshriven,
by his friend's hand; and may the curse of man and the damnation of
Almighty God be upon his murderer's head, now and after I shall have
killed him. For, as I would have sprung forward, the Frenchman, who was
but stunned, sprang to his feet and grappled with me; and by the time
he had no breath left, and the light broke in his eyes, Sir Arnold was
gone, and our fight was lost. So we made a truce to bury our dead, and
brought them away, each his own."

When he had spoken there was silence for many moments, broken only by
the Lady Goda's unceasing sobs. In the court within, and on the bridge
without, the air grew purple, and dark, and misty; for the sun had long
gone down, and the light from the wax torches, leaping, flaming and
flickering in the evening breeze, grew stronger and yellower under the
gateway than the twilight without. The dark-robed monks looked gravely
on, waiting till they should be told to pass into the chapel--men of
all ages and looks, red and pale, thin and stout, dark and fair, but
all having that something in their faces that marks the churchman from
century to century. Between them and the dead knight, Gilbert stood
still with bent head and downcast eyes, with pale face and set lips,
looking at his mother's bright hair, and at her clutching hands, and
listening to the painfully drawn breath, broken continually by her
agonized weeping. Suddenly the bloodhounds' bay broke out again, fierce
and deep; and on the instant a high young voice rang from the court
through the deep arch.

"Burn the murderer! To Stortford, and burn him out!"

Gilbert looked up quickly, peering into the gloom whence the voice had
spoken. He did not see how, at the words, his mother started back from
the corpse, steadied herself with one hand, and fixed her eyes in the
same direction; but before he could answer, the cry was taken up by a
hundred throats.

"Burn the traitor! burn the murderer! To Stortford! Fagots! Fagots and
pitch!"

High, low, hoarse, clear, the words followed one another in savage
yells; and here and there among the rough men there were eyes that
gleamed in the dark like a dog's.

Then through the din came a rattling of bolts and a creaking of hinges,
as the grooms tore open the stable doors to bring out the horses and
saddle them for the raid; and one called for a light and another warned
men from his horse's heels. The Lady Goda was on her feet, her hands
stretched out imploringly to her son, turning to him instinctively and
for the first time, as to the head of the house. She spoke to him, too;
but he neither heard nor saw, for in his own heart a new horror had
possession, beside which what had gone before was as nothing. He
thought of Beatrix.

"Hold!" he cried. "Let no man stir, for no man shall pass out who would
burn Stortford. Sir Arnold de Curboil is the king's man, and the king
has the power in England; so that if we should burn down Stortford
Castle to-night, he would burn Stoke Manor to-morrow over my mother's
head. Between Arnold de Curboil and me there is death. To-morrow I
shall ride out to find him, and kill him in fair fight. But let there
be no raiding, no harrying, and no burning, as if we were Stephen's
French robbers, or King David's red-haired Scots. Take up the bier; and
you," he said, turning to the monks and song-men, "take up your chant,
that we may lay him in the chapel and say prayers for his unshriven
soul."

The Lady Goda's left hand had been pressed to her heart as though she
were in fear and pain; but as her son spoke, it fell by her side, and
her face grew calm before she remembered that it should grow sad. Until
to-day her son had been in her eyes but a child, subject to his father,
subject to herself, subject to the old manor-priest who had taught him
the little he knew. Now, on a sudden, he was full-grown and strong;
more than that, he was master in his father's place, and at a word from
him, men-at-arms and bondsmen would have gone forth on the instant to
slay the man she loved, and to burn and to harry all that was his. She
was grateful to him for not having spoken that word; and since Gilbert
meant to meet Curboil in a single combat, she felt no fear for her
lover, the most skilled man at fence in all Essex and Hertfordshire,
and she felt sure, likewise, that for his reputation as a knight he
would not kill a youth but half his age.

While she was thinking of these things, the monks had begun to chant
again; the confusion was ended in the courtyard; the squires took up
the bier, and the procession moved slowly across the broad paved space
to the chapel opposite the main gate.

An hour later Sir Raymond's dead body lay before the altar, whereon
burned many waxen tapers. Alone, upon the lowest step, Gilbert was
kneeling, with joined hands and uplifted eyes, motionless as a statue.
He had taken the long sword from the dead man's breast, and had set it
up against the altar, straight and bare. It was hacked at the edges,
and there were dark stains upon it from its master's last day's work.
In the simple faith of a bloody age, Gilbert Warde was vowing, by all
that he and his held sacred, before God's altar, upon God's Sacred
Body, upon his father's unburied corpse, that before the blade should
be polished again, it should be black with the blood of his father's
murderer.

And as he knelt there, his lady mother, now clad all in black, entered
the chapel and moved slowly towards the altar-steps. She meant to kneel
beside her son; but when she was yet three paces from him, a great
terror at her own falseness descended into her heart, and she sank upon
her knees in the aisle.




CHAPTER III


Very early in the morning, Gilbert Warde was riding along the straight
road between Sheering Abbey and Stortford Castle. He rode in his tunic
and hose and russet boots, with his father's sword by his side; for he
meant not to do murder, but to fight his enemy to death, in all the
honour of even chance. He judged that Sir Arnold must have returned
from Faringdon; and if Gilbert met him now, riding over his own lands
in the May morning, he would be unmailed and unsuspecting of attack.
And should they not meet, Gilbert meant to ride up to the castle gate,
and ask for the baron, and courteously propose to him that they should
ride together into the wood. And, indeed, Gilbert hoped that it might
turn out so; for, once under the gateway, he might hope to see Beatrix
for a moment; and two weeks had passed, and terrible things had
happened, since he had last set eyes upon her face.

He met no one in the road; but in the meadow before the castle half a
dozen Saxon grooms, in loose hose and short homespun tunics, were
exercising some of Curboil's great Normandy horses. The baron himself
was not in sight, and the grooms told Gilbert that he was within. The
drawbridge was down, and Gilbert halted just before entering the gate,
calling loudly for the porter. But instead of the latter, Sir Arnold
himself appeared at that moment within the courtyard, feeding a brace
of huge mastiffs with gobbets of red raw meat from a wooden bowl,
carried by a bare-legged stable-boy with a shock of almost colourless
flaxen hair, and a round, red face, pierced by two little round blue
eyes. Gilbert called again, and the knight instantly turned and came
towards him, beating down with his hands the huge dogs that sprang up
at him in play and seemed trying to drive him back. Sir Arnold was
smooth, spotless and carefully dressed as ever, and came forward with a
well-composed smile in which hospitality was skilfully blended with
sympathy and concern. Gilbert, who was as thorough a Norman in every
instinct and thought as any whose fathers had held lands from the
Conqueror, did his best to be suave and courteous on his side.
Dismounting, he said quietly that he desired to speak with Sir Arnold
alone upon a matter of weight, and as the day was fair, he proposed
that they should ride together for a little way into the greenwood. Sir
Arnold barely showed a slight surprise, and readily assented. Gilbert,
intent upon his purpose, noticed that the knight had no weapon.

"It were as well that you took your sword with you, Sir Arnold," he
said, somewhat emphatically. "No one is safe from highwaymen in these
times."

The knight met Gilbert's eyes, and the two looked at each other
steadily for a moment; then Curboil sent the stable-boy to fetch his
sword from the hall, and himself went out upon the drawbridge and
called to one of the grooms to bring in a horse. In less than half an
hour from the time when Gilbert had reached the castle, he and his
enemy were riding quietly side by side in a little glade in Stortford
wood. Gilbert drew rein and walked his horse, and Sir Arnold instantly
did the same. Then Gilbert spoke.

"Sir Arnold de Curboil, it is now full three days since I saw you
treacherously kill my father."

Sir Arnold started and turned half round in the saddle, his olive skin
suddenly white with anger; but the soft fresh colour in Gilbert's cheek
never changed.

"Treacherously!" cried the knight, with indignation and with a
questioning tone.

"Foully," answered Gilbert, with perfect calm. "I was not twenty paces
from you when you met, and had I not been hampered by a Frenchman of
your side, who was unreasonably slow in dying, I should have either
saved my father's life or ended yours, as I mean to now."

Thereupon Gilbert brought his horse to a stand and prepared to
dismount, for the sward was smooth and hard and there was room enough
to fight. Sir Arnold laughed aloud as he sat still in the saddle,
watching the younger man.

"So you have brought me here to kill me!" he said as his mirth subsided.

Gilbert's foot was already on the ground, but he paused in the act of
dismounting.

"If you do not like the spot," he answered coolly, "we can ride
farther."

"No, I am satisfied," answered the knight; but before he had spoken the
last word he broke into a laugh again.

They tied up their horses to trees at a little distance, out of reach
of one another, and Gilbert was the first to return to the ring of open
ground. As he walked, he drew his father's sword from its sheath,
slipped the scabbard from the belt, and threw it to the edge of the
grass. Sir Arnold was before him a moment later; but his left hand only
rested on the pommel of his sheathed weapon, and he was still smiling
as he stopped before his young adversary.

"I should by no means object to fighting you," he said, "if I had
killed your father in treachery. But I did not. I saw you as well as
you saw me. Your Frenchman, as you call him, hindered your sight. Your
father was either beside himself with rage, or did not know me in my
mail. He dropped his point one instant, and then flew at me like a
bloodhound, so that I barely saved myself by slaying him against my
will. I will not fight you unless you force me to it; and you had
better not, for if you do, I shall lay you by the heels in two passes."

"Bragging and lying are well coupled," answered Gilbert, falling into
guard. "Draw before I shall have counted three, or I will skewer you
like a trussed fowl. One--two--"

Before the next word could pass his lips, Sir Arnold's sword was out,
keen and bright as if it had just left the armourer's hands, clashing
upon Gilbert's hacked and blood-rusted blade.

Sir Arnold was a brave man, but he was also cautious. He expected to
find in Gilbert a beginner of small skill and reckless bravery, who
would expose himself for the sake of bringing in a sweeping blow in
carte, or attempting a desperate thrust. Consequently he did not
attempt to put his bragging threat into practice, for Gilbert was
taller than he, stronger, and more than twenty years younger. Unmailed,
as he stood in his tunic and hose, one vigorous sword-stroke of the
furious boy might break down his guard and cut him half in two. But in
one respect Curboil was mistaken. Gilbert, though young, was one of
those naturally gifted fencers in whom the movements of wrist and arm
are absolutely simultaneous with the perception of the eye, and not
divided by any act of reasoning or thought. In less than half a minute
Sir Arnold knew that he was fighting for his life; the full minute had
not passed before he felt Gilbert's jagged blade deep in the big
muscles of his sword arm, and his own weapon, running past his
adversary, fell from his powerless hand.

In those days it was no shame to strike a disarmed foe, in a duel to
the death. As Sir Arnold felt the rough steel wrenched from the
flesh-wound, he knew that the next stroke would kill him. Quick as
light, his left hand snatched the long dagger from its sheath at his
left side, and Gilbert, raising his blade to strike, felt as if an
icicle had pierced his breast; his arm trembled in the air, and lost
its hold upon the hilt; a scarlet veil descended before his eyes, and
the bright blood gushed from his mouth as he fell straight backward
upon the green turf.

Sir Arnold stepped back and stood looking at the fallen figure
curiously, drawing his lids down, as some short-sighted men do. Then,
as the sobbing breast ceased to heave and the white hands lay quite
still upon the sward, he shrugged his shoulders, and began to take care
of his own wound by twisting a leathern thong from Gilbert's saddle
very tight upon his upper arm, using a stout oak twig for a lever. Then
he plucked a handful of grass with his left hand and tried to hold his
dagger in his right in order to clean the reddened steel. But his right
hand was useless; so he knelt on one knee beside the body, and ran the
poniard two or three times through the skirt of Gilbert's dark tunic,
and returned it to its sheath. He picked up his sword, too, and
succeeded in sheathing it. He mounted his horse, leaving Gilbert's
tethered to the tree, cast one more glance at the motionless figure on
the grass, and rode away towards Stortford Castle.




CHAPTER IV


Two months after Sir Arnold de Curboil had left Gilbert Warde in the
forest, believing him to be dead, the ghostly figure of a tall,
wafer-thin youth, leaning on the shoulders of two grey brothers, was
led out into the warm shadows of the cloister in Sheering Abbey. One of
the friars carried a brown leathern cushion, the other a piece of stiff
parchment for a fan, and when they reached the first stone seat, they
installed the sick man as comfortably as they could.

Three travelling monks, tramping homeward by the short forest path from
Harlow to Sheering, had found Gilbert lying in his blood, not ten
minutes after the knight had ridden away. Not knowing who he was, they
had brought him to the abbey, where he was at once recognized by the
monks who had formed the funeral procession on the previous evening,
and by others who had seen him. The brother whose duty it was to tend
the sick, an old soldier with the scars of a dozen deep wounds in him,
and by no means a despicable surgeon, pronounced Gilbert's condition
almost hopeless, and assured the abbot that it would be certain death
to the young Lord of Stoke to send him back to his home. He was
therefore laid upon a new bed in an upper chamber that had fair arched
windows to the west, and there the brothers expected that Gilbert Warde
would before long breathe his last and end his race and name. The abbot
sent a messenger to Stoke Regis to inform the Lady Goda of her son's
condition, and on the following day she came to see him, but he did not
know her, for he was in a fever; and three days passed, and she came
again, but he was asleep, and the nursing brother would not disturb
him. After that she sent messengers to inquire about his state, but she
herself did not come again, whereat the abbot and many of the monks
marvelled for a while, but afterwards they understood.

Gilbert lived, and the desperate wound slowly healed, for he was strong
and young, and his blood was untainted; but when at last he was allowed
to stand upon his feet, he seemed to be little more than a fine-drawn
shadow. They dressed him first in a novice's frock, because it was
easier for him to wear, and at last he was well enough to be carried
down from his room, and to sit for an hour upon the stone bench in the
cloister. One of the brothers sat down beside him and slowly fanned his
face with a stiff sheet of yellow parchment, such as the monks used for
binding their books; the other went away to his work. Gilbert leaned
back and closed his eyes, drinking in the sun-sweetened air and the
scent of the flowers that grew in the cloister garden; and the
indescribable sense of peace descended upon his body and soul which
comes to men wrested from death, when danger is passed and their
strength is slowly growing again within them.

It is impossible for any young man of sensitive and believing mind to
spend two months in a great religious institution of his own faith
without feeling himself drawn to the religious life. Lying in his room,
alone for many hours of the day, alone in waking watches of the night,
though a brother was always within call, Gilbert had followed with a
sick man's second sight the lives of the two hundred monks who dwelt in
Sheering Abbey. By asking questions, he knew how they rose at dawn, and
trooped into the dim abbey church to early mass, and went to their
daily work, the lay-brethren and novices in the field, the learned
fathers in the library and the writing-room. He could follow their
daily round of prayer and work, and his heart was with them in both.
Bloodless and emaciated as he lay there, the life of love and war which
had once seemed to him the only one worth living, faded away into the
dimness of an undesired impossibility. He had failed, too, in his first
great deed of arms; his father's murderer was alive, and he himself had
most narrowly escaped death. It seemed to him that his thin white
hands, which could hardly pull the blanket to his chin when he felt
cold, could never again have strength to grasp sword-hilt or hold
bridle, and in the blank collapse of his physical existence the image
of himself as a monk, young, ascetic and holy in his life, presented
itself with a marvellous and luring attraction. He made the nursing
brother teach him prayers from the offices of the night and day, and he
repeated them at the right hours, feeling that he was taking a real
part in the monastic existence. Gradually, too, as he caught the spirit
of the place, the gospel of forgiveness, ever the stumbling-block of
fighting men, appeared to him as something that could be practised
without dishonour, and the determination to kill Sir Arnold gave way to
a sort of attempt at repentance for having even wished to be revenged
upon him.

One thing troubled him constantly and was altogether beyond his
comprehension. His mother seemed to have forgotten his very existence,
and he had not consciously seen her since he had been wounded. He asked
questions every day, and begged the abbot himself to send word to the
Lady Goda asking her to ride over to the abbey. The abbot smiled,
nodded, and seemed to promise; but if the message was ever sent, it
elicited no answer, and after a time, as Gilbert grew steadily better,
not even a messenger came from Stoke Regis to ask about him. Now
Gilbert had worshipped his mother as a sort of superior being, and,
like his father, had deceived himself with the belief that she was
devoted to him; so that, as time went on, and he was utterly neglected
by her, the conviction was forced upon him that something terrible and
unforeseen had happened. Yet the abbot would tell him nothing, nor the
brothers who tended him; to the best of their knowledge, they said, the
Lady of Stoke was well.

"Before long," Gilbert would answer, "I shall be able to go home and
see for myself."

And at this the abbot smiled and nodded, and began to talk of the
weather, which was hot.

But to-day, since he had been allowed to leave his room, Gilbert was
determined to force an explanation. It lacked yet an hour of midday and
dinner-time when the abbot came sauntering along the cloister, followed
at a respectful distance by a couple of monks, who walked side by side
with downcast eyes and hands hidden in their sleeves, their cord
girdles bobbing and swinging rhythmically as they walked. As he came up
to Gilbert, the nursing brother rose and hid his hands in his grey
woollen sleeves.

Gilbert opened his eyes at the sound of the abbot's footsteps, and made
a movement as though he would have risen to greet the lordly churchman,
who had so often visited him in his room, and for whom he felt a
natural sympathy, as for a man of his own race and breeding; for
Lambert, Abbot of Sheering, came of the great Norman house of Clare,
which had taken Stephen's side in the Civil War, a fact which did not
prevent the aristocratic abbot from talking with gentle satire and
occasional bitter sarcasm about the emptiness of Stephen's claims.

He laid his hand on Gilbert's sleeve to make him keep his seat, and sat
down beside him on the bench. He waved the monks away, and they retired
to the other end of the cloister, where they all three sat down
together in silence. The abbot, a delicately made man, with high Norman
features, a colourless beard, once fair, and very bright blue eyes,
laid one of his beautiful hands kindly upon Gilbert's.

"You are saved," he said cheerfully. "We have done our part; youth and
sunshine will do the rest; you will grow strong very quickly, now, and
in a week you will be asking for your horse. They found him beside you,
and he has been well cared for."

"Next week, then," said Gilbert, "I will ride over to Stoke and see my
mother. But I think I shall come back and stay with you again--if you
will have me."

Gilbert smiled as he spoke the last words; but the abbot's face was
grave and his brows were drawn together, as though he were in some
trouble.

"Better stay with us altogether," he said, shaking his head and looking
away.

Gilbert sat motionless for a few seconds, as if the remark had made no
impression upon him; then, realizing that the words contained some
special meaning, he started slightly and turned his hollow eyes to the
speaker's face.

"And not go to see my mother?" His voice expressed the utmost surprise.

"Not--not at present," answered the abbot, taken off his guard by the
directness of the question.

Weak as he was, Gilbert half rose from his seat, and his thin fingers
nervously grasped his companion's arm. He would have spoken, but a sort
of confusion came over him, as if he could not decide which of many
questions to ask first, and before words could form themselves, the
abbot was speaking to him with gentle authority.

"Listen to me," he said; "sit quietly beside me and hear what I have to
say, for you are a man, now, and it is better that you should know it
all at once, and from me, than get it distorted, in miserable morsels,
from the gossip of the brothers within the next day or two."

He paused a moment, holding the young man's hand soothingly while
keeping him in his seat and making him feel that he must stay there.

"What is it?" asked Gilbert, nervously, with half closed eyes. "Tell me
quickly."

"An evil thing," answered the churchman, "--a sad thing, and one of
those that change men's lives."

Again Gilbert started in his seat, more violently this time than
before, and there was the broken ring of genuine fear in his voice.

"My mother is dead!" he cried.

"No, not that. She is in no danger. She is well. She is more than well;
she is happy."

Gilbert was staring almost stupidly at his companion, not in the least
understanding that there could be any evil news about his mother if all
these things were true.

And yet it seemed strange that the abbot should lay stress upon the
Lady Goda's happiness, when Gilbert had been at death's door for many
weeks, and when, as he well knew, she was without news of him.

"Happy!" he echoed, half dazed.

"Too happy," answered the prelate. "Your mother was married when you
had been scarcely a month here with us."

Gilbert stared into the older man's face for one moment after he had
ceased speaking, and then sank back against the wall behind him with
something between a groan and a sigh. One word had struck the ground
from under his feet; the next was to pierce his soul.

"Who is her husband?" he asked under his breath.

Before the abbot answered, his grasp tightened upon Gilbert's hands
with a friendly grip that was meant to inspire courage.

"Your mother has married Sir Arnold de Curboil."

Gilbert sprang to his feet, as though he had been struck in the face by
an enemy. A moment earlier he could not have risen without help; a
moment later he fell backward into the abbot's arms.

Nothing that he had felt in his whole short life--not all the joys and
fears of childhood, which, after all, contains the greatest joys and
fears in life, compounded with the clash of his first fighting day and
the shock of seeing his father killed before his eyes--not all these
together could be compared with what he felt at that plain statement of
the dishonour done upon his house and upon his father's memory. Yet he
was not unconscious.

"Now, by the Sacred Blood--"

Before he could pronounce the solemn vow of revenge that was on his
lips, the abbot's delicate hand was almost crushing his mouth with open
palm to stop the words.

"Arnold de Curboil, perjured to God, false to his king, the murderer of
his friend, the seducer of his friend's wife, is fit for my prayers,"
said the abbot, "not for your steel. Swear no great oaths that you will
kill him; still less swear that you will be avenged upon your mother;
but if you must needs swear something, vow rather that you will leave
them to their fate and never willingly cross their path again. And
indeed, whether you promise that or not, you must needs keep away from
them until you can claim your own with the chance of getting it back."

"My own!" exclaimed Gilbert. "Is Stoke not mine? Am I not my father's
son?"

"Curboil has got Stoke Regis by treachery, as he got your mother. As
soon as he had married her he took her with him to London, and they two
did homage to King Stephen, and the Lady Goda made apology before the
king's court because her former husband had been faithful to the
Empress Maud; and she besought the king to bestow the lordship of Stoke
Regis, with the manor house and all things thereto appertaining, upon
their present lord, Sir Arnold de Curboil, disinheriting you, her son,
both because you are true to the Empress, and because, as she did
swear, you tried to slay Sir Arnold by stealth in Stortford woods. So
you have neither kith nor kin, nor lands nor goods, beyond your horse
and your sword; wherefore I say, it were as well for you to stay with
us altogether."

Gilbert was silent for some time after the abbot had ceased speaking.
He seemed to be utterly overcome by the news that he was disinherited,
and his hands lay upon his knees, loosely weak and expressive of utter
hopelessness. Very slowly he raised his face at last and turned his
eyes upon the only friend that seemed left to him in his destitution.

"So I am an outcast," he said, "an exile, a beggar--"

"Or a monk," suggested the churchman, with a smile.

"Or an adventurer," said Gilbert, smiling also, but more bitterly.

"Most of our ancestors were that," retorted the abbot, "and they have
picked up a fair living by it," he added. "Let me see: Normandy, Maine,
Aquitaine, Gascony--and England. Not a bad inheritance for a handful of
pirates matched against the world."

"Yes, but the handful of pirates were Normans," said Gilbert, as if
that statement alone should have explained the conquest of the
universe. "But the world is half won," he concluded, with a rather
hopeless sigh.

"There is enough to fight for yet," answered the abbot, gravely. "The
Holy Land is not half conquered, and until all Palestine and Syria
shall be one Christian kingdom under one Christian king, there is earth
for Norman feet to tread, and flesh for Norman swords to hack."

Gilbert's expression changed a little, and a light came into his eyes.

"The Holy Land--Jerusalem!" The words came slowly, each with its dream.
"But the times are too old. Who should preach another crusade in our
day?"

"The man whose word is a lash, a sword, and a crown--the man who rules
the world to-day."

"And who is that?" asked Gilbert.

"A Frenchman," answered the abbot--"Bernard of Clairvaux, the greatest
man, the greatest thinker, the greatest preacher, and the greatest
saint of these late days."

"I have heard of him," Gilbert answered, with a sick man's
disappointment at not learning anything new. Then he smiled faintly.
"If he is a miracle-worker, he might find me a good subject."

"You have a home here, Gilbert Warde, and friends," said the abbot,
gravely. "Stay while you will, and when you are ready for the world
again you shall not lack for a coat of mail, a spare mount, and a purse
of gold with which to begin your life."

"I thank you," said Gilbert, feebly, but very gratefully. "I feel as if
my life were not beginning, but ending. I have lost my inheritance, my
home, and my mother in one hour. It is enough, for it is all, and with
it is taken love also."

"Love?" The abbot seemed surprised.

"Can a man marry his mother's husband's child?" asked Gilbert bitterly,
almost contemptuously.

"No," answered the abbot; "that would be within the forbidden degrees
of affinity."

For a long time Gilbert sat still in mournful silence. Then, seeing
that he was very tired, the abbot beckoned to the brothers, who came
and led him back to the stairs, and carried him up to his room. But,
when he was gone, the Abbot of Sheering walked thoughtfully up and down
the cloister for a long time, even until the refectory bell began to
ring for dinner, and he could hear the shuffling steps of the two
hundred hungry monks hurrying to their food, through the distant
staircases and corridors.




CHAPTER V


An autumn morning at dawn, the beach at Dover, the tide at flood, and a
hundred half naked sailors launching a long, black Norman sea-boat bows
on, over chocks through the low surf to the grey swell beyond. The
little vessel had been beached by the stern, with a slack chain hooked
to her sides at the water-line, and a long hawser rove through a rough
fiddle-block of enormous size, and leading to a capstan set far above
high-water mark and made fast by the bight of a chain to an anchor
buried in the sand up to the heavy wooden stock. And now a big old man
with streaming grey beard, and a skin like a salted ox-hide, was
slacking the turns of the hawser from the capstan-drum as the boat
moved slowly down over the well-greased chocks, stopping short now and
then of her own accord, and refusing to move on till twenty stout
sailors on each side, their legs half buried in the sand, their broad
shoulders flattened under the planking, their thick brown hands planted
upon their thighs, like so many Atlases, each bearing a world, had
succeeded, by alternately straining and yielding, in making the little
vessel rock on her keel, and start again toward the water's edge. On
board, the master stood at the stern, ready to ship the long rudder as
soon as she had taken the water. Two men in the bows took in the slack
of the cable, by which the anchor had been dropped some fifty yards
out, so as to keep her head straight when she should leave the
temporary ways. By the mast, for the vessel had but one, stood Gilbert
Warde, watching all that was done, with the profoundly ignorant
interest which landsmen always show in nautical matters. It seemed very
slow to him, and he wondered why the man with the long beard, far up
the beach, did not let go, so that the boat might launch herself. And
while he was trying to solve the problem, something happened which he
could not understand: a chorus of wild yells went up from the sailors
under the sides, the master in the stern threw up one hand and shouted,
the old man let go and yelled back an answer, Gilbert heard a rattling
of chains, and then all at once the boat gathered way, and shot like an
arrow through the low curling surf, far out upon the heaving grey water
beyond, while the two men in the bows got in the slack of the cable,
hand over hand, like madmen, panting audibly, till at last the vessel
swung off by her head and rode quietly at her anchor. An hour later,
with twenty sweeps swinging rhythmically in the tholes, and a fair
southwesterly breeze, the sharp-cut boat was far out in the English
Channel, and before night, the wind holding fair and freshening, the
master dropped anchor almost under the shadow of the Count of Flanders'
castle at Calais. So Gilbert Warde left England, a wanderer,
disinherited of all that should have been his, owing all that he had to
Lambert de Clare, Abbot of Sheering, in the shape of mail and other
armour, with such fine clothes as a young nobleman should have with him
on a journey, two horses, and a purse of which the contents should last
him several months on his travels. For attendants he had with him a
fair-haired Saxon lad who had run away from Stoke to Sheering, and had
refused to leave Gilbert, whom he looked upon as his lawful master; and
there was with him, too, a dark-skinned youth of his own age, a
foundling, christened Dunstan by the monks after a saint of their
order, brought up and taught at the abbey, who seemed to know neither
whose child he was nor whence he came, but could by no means be induced
to enter the novitiate so long as the world had room for wanderers and
adventurers. He was a gifted fellow, quick to learn and tenacious to
remember, speaking Latin and Norman French and English Saxon as well as
any monk in the abbey, quick of hand and light of foot, with daring
black eyes in which the pupils could hardly be found, while the whites
were of a cold, blue grey and often bloodshot; and he had short,
straight black hair, and a face that made one think of a young falcon.
He had begged so hard to be allowed to go with Gilbert, and it was so
evident that he was not born to wear out a church pavement with his
knees, that the abbot had given his consent. During the last weeks
before Gilbert's departure, when he was hourly gaining strength and
could no longer bear to be shut up within the walls of the convent, he
had made a companion of Dunstan, walking and riding with him, for the
fellow could ride, and sometimes entering into long arguments with him
about matters of belief and conscience and honour, and the two had
become attached to each other by their unlikeness; not precisely as
friends and equals, yet by no means as master and man; it was rather
the sort of relation which often existed between knight and squire,
though the two were of the same age, and though Gilbert had no
immediate prospect of winning knightly spurs.

It would have been hard, however, to admit that Dunstan could ever
develop into a knight himself. There were strange little blanks in his
ideas of chivalry, curious, unfeeling spots in his moral organization,
which indicated another race, another inheritance of thought, the
traditions of a world older and less simple than the one in which
Gilbert had been brought up.

For Gilbert was the type of noble youth in the days when the light of
chivalry had dawned upon an age of violence, but was not yet fully
risen. God, honour, woman--these made up the simple trinity of a
knight's belief and reverence, from the moment when the Church began to
make an order of fighting men, with ceremonies and obligations of their
own, thereby forever binding together the great conceptions of true
Christianity and true nobility.

In the absence of anything like real learning among the laymen of those
days, education in its simplest and most original sense played a very
large part in life, and Gilbert had acquired that sort of culture in
its highest and best form. The object of mere instruction is to impart
learning for some distinct purpose, but most chiefly, perhaps, in order
that it may be a means of earning a livelihood. The object of education
is to make men, to produce the character of the man of honour, to give
men the inward grace of the gentleman, which cannot manifest itself
outwardly save in good manners, modesty of bearing, and fearlessness;
and such things in earlier days were profoundly associated in the minds
of men with the inward principles and the outward rites of
Christianity. It was the perfect simplicity, and in a measure the ample
harmony, of beliefs, principles, and rules of action that made life
possible at all at a time when the modern art of government was in its
earliest infancy, when the idea of a constitution had been lost in the
chaos of the dark ages, and when the direction of kingdoms,
principalities, and societies was a purely personal matter, wholly
dependent upon individual talent or caprice, virtue or vice, charity or
greed. Without some such foundation in the character of the times,
society, the world, and the Church must have fallen a prey to the
devouring ambitions of that most horrible of human monsters, the
princely unbeliever of the middle ages, who flourished again and again,
sporadically, from England to Constantinople, from Paris to Rome, but
who almost invariably ended in disastrous failure, overcome and trodden
down by the steadily advancing morality of mankind. Such men were John
the Twelfth, of the evil race of Theodora in Rome, and the Jewish
Pierleone who lived a hundred years later, and King John of England,
and last and greatest of all, perhaps, as he was most certainly the
worst, Caesar Borgia.

To be a gentleman when Henry Plantagenet was a boy of twelve, and
Gilbert Warde was going to the Duke of Normandy's court, implied not
many gifts, few principles, and two or three accomplishments at most;
but it meant the possession of those simple requirements in their very
best accepted form, and that species of thoroughness in a few matters
which has been at the root of social superiority in all ages. We have
heard of amateur artists, amateur soldiers, amateur statesmen; but no
one has ever heard of an amateur gentleman. Gilbert Warde knew little
Latin beyond the few prayers taught him by the manor priest at Stoke;
but in the efficacy of those prayers he believed with all his heart and
soul. The Norman French language of the nobles in England was no longer
that of their more refined cousins over the water; but though his
tongue betrayed him for an Englishman, Gilbert had the something which
was of more worth among his equals than a French accent--the grace, the
unaffected ease, the straightforward courtesy, which are bred in bone
and blood, like talent or genius, but which reach perfection only in
the atmosphere to which they belong, and among men and women who have
them in the same degree. Possessing belief and good manners, the third
essential was skill in arms, and, as has been seen, Gilbert was a match
for a swordsman of considerable reputation. The only absolutely
necessary accomplishment for a gentleman in his day was a thorough
knowledge of the chase as a fine art in all its branches, from falconry
to boar-hunting, and in this respect Gilbert was at least the equal of
the average young noble. In spite of his youth, he was therefore
thoroughly equipped for the world; and besides the advantages here set
forth, he had the very great one of feeling that, although he might be
going among strangers, he was going to meet men all brought up to act
and think like himself, in the belief that their ways of acting and
thinking were very much better than those of other people.

But as he rode along the dunes, he was not reflecting upon his own
gifts or prospects. His life was strange to him by its sudden and
complete change, from an existence of more or less peaceful enjoyment,
in which the certainty of fortune, local dignity, and unthwarted love
made the idea of ambition look empty and foolish, to the state of
possessing only a pair of good horses, good weapons, and a little ready
money, with which to lay siege to the universe. Yet even that wide
difference of conditions was insignificant beside the deeper and sadder
misfortunes upon which the young man brooded as he rode, and which had
already embittered his young existence by the destruction of his
highest and most beautiful illusion and of his dearest and happiest
hope.

In the fall of his mother's image from the altar upon which he had set
it, there was the absolute destruction of his own past childhood as it
had always appeared to him. In the fearful illumination of her true
nature, in the broad glare of evil, the little good there might have
been had faded to nothing. It was not possible that she who had married
her husband's murderer within the month could ever have felt one
sincere impulse of love for Raymond Warde, nor that she could ever have
known the slightest real affection for the son whom she had first left
to his fate, and then treacherously cheated of his birthright. The
temple where she had been was still in his heart and mourned her in
emptiness. For nothing else had taken the place of her there; she was
not transformed, she was gone, and had taken with her a lifetime of
tender and gentle memories. When his inward eyes sought her they found
nothing, and their light was quenched in her darkness. She was not as
his father was, dead in fact, but dead in honour. There he lay, as
Gilbert had last looked upon his white face and stiff, mailed form,
himself still, himself as he had been in life and as he was thereafter,
in that place of peace and refreshment where brave men rest. In the
quiet features was reflected forever the truth whereby his life had
been lived; in the crossed hands upon the breast was the last outward
symbol and sign of the simple faith that had been life's guide; in the
strong, straight outlines of a strength splendid in death was the
record of strong deeds well done. Alive, he had been to his son the man
of all others; dead, he was still the man of men, without peer and
without like. It mattered not that he was silent, for he had spoken the
truth; that he was as motionless as a stone, for the cold hand had been
swift to thrust and smite, and had dealt unforgotten blows in a good
cause; that he was deaf, for he had heard the cry of the weak, and had
forborne; that he was blind, for his eyes had seen the light of victory
and had looked unflinching upon an honourable death. Loyal, true,
brave, strong, he lay in his son's heart, still at all points himself.
And Gilbert turned his mind's eyes to the darkness on the other side,
and many a time, as the unwept tears burned in his brain, he wished
that his mother were lying there too, beside his father, dead in the
body but alive forever to him in that which is undying in woman; to be
cherished still, still honoured; to be loved, and still obeyed in the
memory of precept and teaching; to be his mother always, and he to be
in thought her child, even until the grey years should be upon him, and
the Bridge of Fear in sight.

Instead, as his thoughts went back to his home, the woman herself faced
him, not as he had always seen her, but as she had been sometimes seen
by others. The deed she had done--the greatest, the worst, the most
irrevocable--was in her face, and Gilbert's unconscious memory brought
back the details his love of her had once rejected. The cold face was
as hard as flint, the deep blue eyes were untrue and unbelieving, the
small red lips were scornfully parted to show the cruel little teeth,
and there were dashes of flame in the russet hair. Better she had been
dead, better a thousand times that she had come to the sharp end before
her time, than that such a face should be her son's only memory of his
mother.

The lines of the image had been etched in the weak places of his heart
with the keen point of his first grief, and the biting acid of a new
and unnatural hate was eating them deeper day by day. And when, in
spite of himself, his mind dwelt upon her and understood that he was
cursing her who had borne him, he turned back in sheer despair to the
thought of a religious life.

But though it drew him and appealed to all in his nature which had been
uppermost when death had almost tripped him into his grave, it spoke
but half a language now, and was less than half convincing. He could
understand well enough that the monastery might hold the only life for
men who had fought through many failures, from light to darkness, from
happiness to sorrow--men who loved nothing, hoped nothing, hated
nothing any longer, in the great democracy of despair. They sought
peace as the only earthly good they might enjoy, and there was peace in
the cloister. Hope being dead in life, they tasted refreshment in the
hope of a life to come. The convent was good enough for the bankrupt of
love and war. But there must be another rule for those in whom youth
was wounded but not dead, whose hearts were offended but not slain,
whose blood was still strong and hot for good and evil, for men whose
battles were before them still. There must be a remedy against fate
which should not be an offence to God, a struggle against God's will
which should not be a revolt, a life in which virtue should not mean a
prison for soul and body, nor the hope of salvation a friar's cell.

Like many enthusiasts, knowing nothing of the world save by guesswork,
and full of an inborn belief in the existence of perfection, Gilbert
dreamed of realizing the harmony of two opposites--the religious life
and the life of the world. Such dreams seemed not so wild in those
days, when the very idea of knighthood was based upon them, and when
many brave and true men came near to making them seem anything but
fanciful, and practised virtue in a rough-and-ready fashion which would
not pass muster in modern society, though it might in heaven. The
religious idea had taken hold of Gilbert strongly, and before he had
left the abbey he had fallen into the habit of attending most of the
offices in the choir, still wearing the novice's frock which had been
at first but an invalid's robe. And now that he was out in the world to
seek his fortunes, tunic and hose, spur and glove, seemed strange to
him, and he would have felt more at home in a friar's hood. So he felt
that in his life he should never again quite lose the monastic
instinct, and that it was well for him that he could not. He stood on
that perilous thin ridge between past and future to which almost every
man of heart is sooner or later led by fate, where every step may mean
a fall, and where to fall is almost to be lost. The things he had lived
for, the things he had hoped, the things he had loved, had been taken
from him violently, and all at once. There was neither clue, nor guide,
nor hope, and on each side of him yawned the hideous attraction of
despair. Even the recollections of a first love were veiled by what he
understood to be the irrevocable interdiction of the Church, and, in
his strongly spiritual mood, to think of Beatrix appeared to him like a
temptation to mortal sin.

In leaving England, without any definite aim, but with a vague
intention of making his way to Jerusalem, he had obeyed the Abbot of
Sheering rather than followed friendly advice, and his obedience had
savoured strongly of the monastic rule. Lambert de Clare, a man of the
world before he had become a churchman, and a man of heart before he
was a ruler of monks, had understood Gilbert's state well enough, and
had forced the best remedy upon him. The cure for a broken heart, if
there be any, is not in solitude and prayer, but in facing the wounds
and stings of the world's life; and the abbot had almost forcibly
thrust his young friend out to live like other men of his order, while
suggesting a pilgrimage to the Holy Land as a means of satisfying his
religious cravings. As for the material help which Gilbert had
received, it was no shame, in an age not sordid, for a penniless
gentleman to accept both gifts and money from a rich and powerful
person like the Abbot of Sheering, in the certainty of carving out such
fortune with his own hands as should enable him amply to repay the
loan. So far as his immediate destination was concerned, the abbot, who
considered his house to be vastly superior to political dissension, and
secretly laughed at his cousins for supporting King Stephen's upstart
cause, had advised Gilbert to make his way directly to the court of
Geoffrey Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy, and Grand Seneschal of France,
the husband of the Empress Maud, rightful Queen of England. Thither he
was riding, therefore, with Dunstan on his left hand, mounted upon his
second horse, while Alric, the sturdy little Saxon groom and archer,
rode behind them on a stout mule laden with Gilbert's possessions.




CHAPTER VI


Those were the early days of Geoffrey's lordship in Normandy. Twice and
three times he came up from Anjou with his men-at-arms and his footmen
to take possession of his wife's lawful inheritance. Again and again he
was repulsed and driven back to his own dominions, but at the last he
prevailed, and the iron will of the man whose royal race was to give
England fourteen kings, forced Normandy to submission, and thereafter
he ruled in peace. Yet he was not so strongly established but that he
desired sound friendships and strong alliances to support him, and at
the same time he was anxious to obtain help for his wife in her
prolonged struggle for the English crown. In his office of Grand
Seneschal of France he generally caused himself to be represented by a
deputy; but he had lately determined to make a journey to Paris, in the
hope of winning over the young King Louis, and perhaps the beautiful
Queen Eleanor, who was feudal sovereign, in her own right, of Guienne,
Poitou and Aquitaine, and in reality a more powerful personage than the
King himself.

So it fell out that before Gilbert reached his destination he met a
great and splendid train riding toward him on the highroad, two hundred
horse, at the very least, and as many footmen, followed by a long line
of sumpter mules. The road was narrow at that place, so that Gilbert,
with his two men, saw that it would be impossible to pass, and though
it was not natural to him to cede the right of way to any one, he
understood that, in the face of what was a little army, it would be the
part of wisdom to draw aside. A thick growth of thorn bushes made a
natural hedge at that part of the road, and Gilbert and his companions
were obliged almost to back into the briers, as four handsomely dressed
outriders trotted past abreast, not without a glance of rather
supercilious inquiry, for they did not fail to see that Gilbert was a
stranger in their country; and, for a traveller, his retinue was
anything but imposing. He, however, barely glanced at them as they
passed him, for his eyes were fixed upon the advancing cavalcade, a
river of rich and splendid colour flowing toward him between soft green
banks. They were men who rode in peace; for though a standard rose in
the middle rank, it was furled and cased in leather, and the horsemen
who surrounded it were dressed in tunic and hose--crimson, green, rich
dark brown, with the glint of gold, the sheen of silver, the lightning
of steel, relieving the deep hues of dark cloth and velvet here and
there.

A length behind the furled flag rode a man and a boy, side by side, and
the next riders followed two or three lengths behind them. The man,
mounted on a huge white Norman weight-carrier, kept the off side of the
road, his great beast trotting leisurely with a long pounding step, and
an occasional lazy shake of the big white head with the iron-grey
forelock and the well-combed mane. The rider sat square and upright in
the saddle, the plain leathern bridle neither too short nor too long in
the light strong hand, that just moved perceptibly with the horse's
step. He was a man evidently of good height, but not over tall, of
surpassing beauty of form, young in figure, but past middle age if one
judged by his hard features and already furrowed brow; his deep grey
eyes looked steadily ahead from beneath black eyebrows which contrasted
oddly with hair that was already iron-grey. There was something
immovable and fateful about the clean-shaven jaw, the broad flat chin,
the wide strong mouth--something strangely durable that contrasted with
the rich softness of his splendid dress, as though the man, and what
the man meant, were to outlive the fashions of the world.

The boy who rode by his near side, a lad of little more than twelve
years, was both like him and unlike. Sturdy, broad, short-legged,
square beyond his age, any one could see that he was never to inherit
his father's beauty of proportion and grace of bearing; but there was
something in his face that promised all his father's strength and an
even greater independence. The grey eyes were the same, but nearer
together, and almost sinister in their gaze, even at that age; the nose
was already long and rather flat than sharp, and the large straight
lips, even and close set, would have seemed strong even in a grown
man's face. The boy sat upon his small grey Andalusian horse as if he
had lived a lifetime in the saddle, but his twelve-year-old hand was
heavier on the bridle than ever his father's had been.

There was something in the bearing of the two, father and son, so
kingly and high that Gilbert, who had been brought up in Norman
courtesy, involuntarily rose in the saddle as much as his long stirrups
would allow, and lifted his cap from his head, supposing, as was
natural, that he was saluting the lord of the lands through which he
was travelling. The other returned the salutation with a wave of the
hand, looked sharply at Gilbert, and then, to the latter's surprise,
drew rein, the lad beside him ranging back half a length so as not to
be in the way between the other two. For a few seconds neither said a
word. Then the elder man, as though expecting something of which the
younger was not aware, smiled kindly and spoke. His voice was strong
and manly, but clear and sweet.

"You are strange here, sir," he said, with something more like an
assertion than a question in his turn.

"From England, sir," answered Gilbert, bowing slightly in the saddle.

The elder man looked hard at him and knit his brows. Few English
gentlemen had refused allegiance to King Stephen.

"From England? And what may you be doing in Normandy, young sir?
Stephen's friends find little friendship here."

"I am not of them, sir," answered Gilbert, drawing himself up somewhat
haughtily. "I am rather of those who would shorten Stephen's reign by
the length of his life, and his body by a head."

The broad, handsome face of the man with whom he was speaking relaxed
into a smile, and his son, who had at first eyed Gilbert with distrust,
threw back his head and laughed.

"Then I suppose that you are for the Empress," said the man. "But if
you are, why are you not in Gloucester?"

"Sir," answered Gilbert, "being made homeless and landless by Stephen,
I chose rather to cut a fortune out of the world than to beg one of the
Queen, who has none left to give."

"You could fight for her," suggested the other.

"Ay, sir; and I have, and will again, if such gentlemen of Normandy as
you will cross the water and fight also. But as the matter stands
to-day, whosoever shall break the truce shall break his own neck,
without serving the Empress. And meanwhile I ride to the Duke of
Normandy's court, and if I may serve him, I will, but if not, I shall
go farther."

"And who are you, sir, that seek the Duke?"

"I am Gilbert Warde, and my fathers held Stoke Regis in Hertfordshire
from Duke William. But Stephen took it when I was lying ill of a wound
in Sheering Abbey and bestowed it upon another. And you, sir? I crave
your name."

"Geoffrey Plantagenet," answered the Duke, quietly. "And this is my son
Henry, who by the grace of God shall yet be King of England."

Gilbert started at the name, and then noticed for the first time that
both father and son wore in their velvet caps a short dry sprig of the
broom-plant. He sprang to the ground and came forward on foot,
bareheaded, and stood beside the Duke's near stirrup.

"Your pardon, my lord," he said; "I should have known you."

"That might have been hard," answered Geoffrey, "since you had never
seen me. But as you were on your way to find me and wished to serve me,
mount again and ride with us to Paris, whither we go."

So Gilbert mounted, and would have fallen back in the train among the
young squires, behind the five ranks of knights who rode after the
Duke. But Geoffrey would not let him take his place at once, for he was
glad to have news of the long struggle in England, the end of which was
to set a Plantagenet upon the throne; and he asked many questions which
the young man answered as well as he could, though some of them were
not easy; and the boy Henry listened with grave face and unwinking eyes
to all that was said.

"If I had been in my mother's place," he said at last, in a pause, "I
would have cut off Stephen's head in Bristol Castle."

"And let your uncle Gloucester be put to death by Stephen's wife?"
Geoffrey looked at his son curiously.

"She would not have done it," answered Henry. "There could have been no
more war, with Stephen dead. But if she had killed my uncle, well, what
of that? The crown of England is worth one life, at least!"

Gilbert heard and wondered at the boy's hardness, but held his peace.
He was surprised also that the Duke should say nothing, and the speech
of the one and the silence of the other clearly foreshadowed the
kingdom for one or both. But the boy's words seemed heartless and not
altogether knightly to Warde, who was himself before all things a man
of heart; and the first impression made on him by the precocious lad
was more or less a wrong one, since Henry afterwards turned out a just
and kind man, though often stern and unforgetful of offence. And
Gilbert was very far from guessing that the young prince was suddenly
attracted to him in the strongest possible way, and that in the first
meeting he had unconsciously laid the foundations of a real friendship.

After a time, as the Duke asked no more questions, Gilbert took it for
granted that he was no longer wanted, and fell back to his proper place
among the riders. The young squires received him with cordiality and
not without a certain respect for one who, though not even a knight,
had been so much honoured by their sovereign. And Gilbert himself,
though he felt at home amongst them at first, as a man feels with his
own kind, yet felt that he was divided from them by the depth of his
own misfortunes. One of them spoke of his home at Bayeux, and of his
father, and Gilbert's face grew grave; another told how his mother had
herself embroidered in gold the fine linen collar that showed above his
low-cut tunic. Gilbert bit his lips, and looked away at the rolling
green country. And one, again, asked Gilbert where his home might be.

"Here," answered Warde, striking the pommel of his saddle with his
right hand and laughing rather harshly.

He was older than most of them, for they ranged from fourteen to
eighteen years, and were chiefly beardless boys who had never seen
fight, whose fathers had fought Geoffrey Plantagenet until they had
recognized that he was the master, as the great Duke William had been
in his day, and then, being beaten, had submitted whole-heartedly and
all at once, as brave men do, and had forthwith sent their sons to
learn arms and manners at Geoffrey's court. So none of these youths had
slain a man with his own hand, as Gilbert had at Faringdon, nor had any
of them faced an enemy with plain steel in a quarrel, as Gilbert had
faced Sir Arnold de Curboil. Though Gilbert told little of his story
and less of his deeds, they saw that he was older than they, they felt
that he had seen more than they had, and they guessed that his hand was
harder and heavier than theirs.

As the day wore, and they rode, and halted, and dined together in the
vast outer hall of a monastery which they reached soon after midday,
the young men who sat beside Gilbert noticed that he could repeat the
Latin words of the long grace as well as any monk, and one laughed and
asked where he had got so much scholarship.

"I lay two months in an abbey," answered Gilbert, "healing of a wound,
and the nursing brother taught me the monks' ways."

"And how came you by such a wound?" asked the young squire.

"By steel," answered Gilbert, and smiled, but he would say no more.

And after that, two or three asked questions of Gilbert's man Dunstan,
and he, being proud of his master, told all he knew, so that his
hearers marvelled that such a fighter had not yet obtained knighthood,
and they foretold that if Long Gilbert, as they named him for his
height, would stay in the Duke's service, he should not be a squire
many weeks.

And on the next day and the days following it was clear to them all
that Gilbert was in the way of fortune by the hand of favour; for as
the company rode along in the early morning by dewy lanes, where
Michaelmas daisies were blooming, a groom came riding back to say that
the young Henry--the Count, as they began to call him about that
time--wished the company of Master Warde, to tell him more of England.
So Gilbert cantered forward and took his place beside the young prince,
and for more than an hour answered questions of all sorts about English
men, English trees, English cattle, and English dogs.

"It will all be mine before long," said the boy, laughing, "but as I
have never seen it, I want your eyes."

And every day thereafter, in the morning and afternoon, Gilbert was
sent for to tell the lad stories about England; and he talked as if he
were speaking to a grown man and said many things about his own country
which had long been in his heart, in the strong, good language of a man
in earnest. Henry listened, and asked questions, and listened again,
and remembered what he heard, not for a day only, nor a week, but for a
lifetime, and in the boy the king was growing hour by hour.

Sometimes, while they talked, the Duke listened and said a few words
himself, but more often he rode on out of the train alone, in deep
thought, or called one of the older knights to his side; and when
Gilbert's quick ear caught fragments of their conversation, they were
generally talking of country matters--crops, horse-breeding, or the
price of grain.

So they rode, and in due time they came to fields of mud left by a
subsiding river, and here and there green hillocks rose out of the
dreary expanse, and on them were built castles of grey stone. But in
the flats there were mud hovels of brickmakers and of people living
miserably by the river; and then all at once the ground rose a little
to the bank, with a street, and houses of brick and stone; and between
these, upon an island, Gilbert, rising in his stirrups to see over the
heads of his companions, descried the castle of the King of France,
with its towers and battlements, its great drawbridge, and its solid
grey walls, in those days one of the strongest holds in all the world.

Then they all halted, and the Duke's herald rode forward to the gate,
and the King's herald was seen within, and there was a great blowing of
horns and a sound of loud, high voices reciting formal speeches in a
monotone. After that there was a silence, and horns again, and more
recitation, and a final blast, after which the Duke's herald came back,
and the King's herald came out upon the drawbridge, followed by men in
rich clothes of white cloth, embroidered with gold lilies that shone in
the autumn sun, like little tongues of flame; and the Duke's standard
was unfurled to the river breeze, and the goodly train rode slowly over
the drawbridge at the end of the solid wooden causeway which spanned
the main width of the stream, and so, by the main gate, into the great
court of honour. And Gilbert rode close behind young Henry, who called
him his chancellor in jest, and would not let him ride out of his sight.

Within the court were great buildings reared against the outer walls;
but in the midst was the King's hall and dwelling, and in the porch at
the head of the steps which led to the main door, the King and Queen
were waiting in state, in their robes of ceremony, with all their
household about them, to receive their Grand Seneschal and brother
sovereign, Geoffrey Plantagenet. But Gilbert, looking boldly before
him, saw that the King of France was a fair, pale man with a yellow
beard, strong and knightly, but with dull and lifeless blue eyes; and
Gilbert looked at the lady who sat beside him, and he saw that the
Queen of France was the most beautiful woman in the world; and when his
eyes had seen her it was long before he looked away.

He saw a being so unlike all he had known before, that his idea of
woman changed from that hour for his whole life--a most perfect
triplicity of beauty, grace and elastic strength. Some have doubtless
possessed each separate perfection, but the names of those who had all
three are as unforgotten as those of conquerors and supreme poets.
Gilbert's eyes fixed themselves, and for a moment he was in a sort of
waking trance, during which he could not for his life have described
one feature of the Queen's face; but when she spoke to him, his heart
leapt and his eyelids quivered, and her image was fixed upon his memory
forever. Young though he was, it would have been contrary to his grave
and rather melancholy disposition to lose his heart at first sight to
any woman, and it was neither love, nor love's forerunner, that
overcame him as he gazed at the Queen. It was a purely visual
impression, like that of being dazzled by a bright light, or made giddy
by sudden motion.

She was as tall as the King, but whereas he was heavily and awkwardly
built, her faultless proportion made an ungraceful movement an
impossibility, and the rhythmic ease of her slightest gesture expressed
an unfaltering bodily energy which no sudden fatigue nor stress of long
weariness could bring down. When she moved, Gilbert wished that he
might never see her in repose, yet as soon as the motion ceased, it
seemed a crime upon beauty to disturb her rest.

Her face and her throat, uncovered to the strong morning light, were of
a texture as richly clear as the tinted leaves of young orange-blossoms
in May; and like the flowers themselves, it seemed to rejoice in air
and sun, in dew and rain, perfected, not marred, by the touch of heat
and cold. The straight white throat rose like a column from the neck to
the delicate lobe of the faultless ear, and a generously modelled line
sprang in a clean curve of beauty to the sudden rounding of the ivory
chin, cleft in the midst by nature's supreme touch. Low on her forehead
the heavy waves of her hair were drawn back to each side under the
apple-green silk coverchief that was kept in place by the crown of
state. But she wore no wimple, and the broad waves flowed down upon her
shoulders and hung behind her like a heavy mantle. And they were of
that marvellous living hue, that the westering sun casts through oak
leaves upon an ancient wall in autumn. All in her face was of light,
from her hair to her white forehead; from her forehead to her radiant
eyes, deeper than sapphires, brighter than mountain springs; from the
peach-blossom bloom of her cheeks to the living coral of her lips.

She wore a close-fitting upper garment of fine green cloth, embroidered
with a small design in silver thread, in which the heraldic cross of
Aquitaine alternated with a conventional flower. The girdle of fine
green leather, richly embroidered in gold, followed exactly the lower
line of this close garment round the hips, and the long end fell
straight from the knot almost to the ground. The silken skirt in many
folds was of the same colour as the rest, but without embroidery. The
mantle of state, of a figured cloth of gold lined with straw-coloured
silk, hung in wide folds from her shoulders, her hair falling over it,
and it was loosely held in place by a twisted cord of gold thread
across her breast. Contrary to the fashion of the day, her sleeves were
tight and closed at the wrists, and green gloves encased her hands, and
were embroidered on the back with the cross of Aquitaine.

Gilbert was standing two steps behind young Henry, who was on his
father's left, and was consequently directly opposite to the Queen, as
the boy bent one knee, and taking her gloved hand, touched the
embroidery with his lips. Gilbert was hardly aware that she was looking
into his eyes, while his own were riveted on her face, and when she
spoke, he started in surprise.

"And who is this?" she asked, smiling, as she saw what an effect her
beauty produced upon the young man.

Henry turned half round, with a step backward, and took Gilbert's hand.

"This is my friend," he said, dragging him forward; "and if you like
me, you shall please to like him, too, and tell the King to knight him
at once."

"You have a strong recommendation to grace, sir," said the Queen.

She looked down at the imperious boy's square face and laughed; but
looking up and meeting Gilbert's eyes again, the ring of her laugh
changed oddly and died away in a short silence. It was long since she
had looked upon so goodly a man; she was weary of her monkish husband,
and she was the grand-daughter of William of Aquitaine, giant,
troubadour, and lover. It was no wonder that there was light in her
eyes, and life in every fibre of her beautiful body.

"I think I shall like your friend," she said, speaking to Henry, but
still looking at the man.

And so Gilbert first met the Queen; and as she held out her hand to him
and he took it, kneeling on one knee, she unconsciously drew young
Henry close to her, and her arm was round his neck, and her hand
pressed his shoulder in a very gentle way, so that he looked up into
her face. But if any one had told her then that she should love the man
in vain, that she should be divided from the fair-haired King beside
her and become the wife of the broad-faced, rough-fisted little boy
whose curly head barely reached her shoulder, the prophet might have
fared ill, as readers of the future often do.

But meanwhile the King stood talking quietly with Duke Geoffrey, who
presently crossed to salute the Queen, not dreaming what strange
spirits had taken possession of the hearts of three persons in one
moment. For the third was Henry himself. When the Queen gave her right
hand to his father her other was still on the boy's shoulder, and when
she would have withdrawn it he caught it with both his own and held it
there; and suddenly the blood sprang up in his cheeks even to the roots
of his hair, and for the first and last time in his life Henry
Plantagenet was almost ridiculous, and wished that he might hide his
head. Yet he would not loose his hold on the Queen's hand.




CHAPTER VII


While Duke Geoffrey tarried in Paris, receiving much honour at the
King's court, but obtaining very little encouragement in his hope of
help against Stephen, the time was heavy on the hands of some of his
followers; but others of them, seeing that they had little service and
much leisure, made up their minds to do not only what was good in their
own eyes, but sometimes also that which was evil, as a certain
chronicler once said of the English knights. For the wine of Gascony
was good, but some said that the vintage of Burgundy was better, and a
matter of such weight was evidently not to be left undecided; yet the
more often it came to judgment, the more evidence and testimony were
required in the case, so that the court sat night and day without
agreeing upon a verdict.

But Gilbert had never learned to sit for hours over a cup, slowly
addling his wits and marking the hour when the room should begin to
swing upon the pivot of his head; and Henry kept him constantly by his
side, saying that he was the only sober man in his father's court,
knight or squire; nor would the boy let him go, excepting when he
himself could pass his time with the Queen, and then he was more than
anxious that Gilbert should disappear. At first Eleanor was amused by
the lad's childish passion, but as she herself greatly preferred
Gilbert's society to that of Henry, she soon grew weary of the rather
tame sport which consisted in making a boy of twelve years fall
desperately in love with her.

Moreover, Henry was precocious and keen-sighted beyond his years, and
was not long in discovering his idol's predilection for his friend. His
chief consolation was that Gilbert himself seemed indifferent, and came
and went at the Queen's bidding as though he were obeying an order
rather than an impulse.

One lazy autumn afternoon, when the air was as hot as summer, and the
flies were swarming about the open doors of the great stables, and
before the deep archway that led into the main kitchen, and about the
open windows of the knights' and squires' quarters,--when the air was
still and lazy, and not a sound was heard in the vast enclosure of the
castle-yard,--Henry and Gilbert came out to play at tennis in a shady
corner behind the church, where there was a penthouse that would serve.

In half a dozen strokes Henry had scored high to Gilbert's nothing, and
the boy dropped the ball at his feet to tighten the network he had made
on his hand by winding a bowstring in and out between his fingers and
across the palm, as men did before rackets were thought of. Suddenly he
turned half round and faced Gilbert, planting himself with his sturdy
legs apart and crossing his arms, which were bare to the elbow; for he
had taken off his cloth tunic, and his embroidered shirt, girdled at
the waist by a leathern belt, hung over his scarlet hose, and was wide
at the neck and turned back above his elbows. He was hatless, ruddy,
and hot.

"Will you answer a fair question fairly, Master Gilbert?" he asked,
looking his friend in the eyes.

Gilbert had fallen into the habit of treating him like a man, as most
people did, excepting the Queen, and gravely nodded an answer.

"Do you not think that the Queen of France is the most beautiful woman
in the world?"

"Yes," answered Gilbert, without a smile, and without the slightest
hesitation.

The boy's eyes, that were so near together, gleamed and fixed
themselves in rising anger, while a dark red flush mounted from his
bare throat to his cheeks, and from his cheeks to his forehead.

"Then you love her?" he asked fiercely, and the words were thick on his
lips.

Gilbert was not easily surprised, but the conclusion was so sudden and
unexpected that he stared for a moment in blank amazement before he
smiled.

"I?" he exclaimed. "I love the Queen? I should as soon think of
coveting the King's crown!"

Henry looked into Gilbert's face a moment longer, and the blood slowly
subsided from his own.

"I can see that you are in earnest," he said, picking up the ball at
his feet, "though I cannot see why a man should not covet a king's
crown as well as a king's wife." He struck the ball.

"You are young," said Gilbert, "to ride atilt through all the Ten
Commandments at once."

"Young!" exclaimed the boy, keeping the ball up. "So was David when he
killed the giant! So was Hercules when he strangled the serpents, as
you told me the other day. Young!" he cried a second time, with
forcibly concentrated contempt. "You should know, Master Gilbert, that
a Plantagenet of thirteen years is the match of any other man of
twenty. As I can beat you at tennis, though you are six years older
than I, so I can beat you in other matters, and with the Queen herself,
even though she is half in love with you already, as all the court is
saying; and she shall belong to me some day, though I have to slay that
dish-faced prayer-master of a king to get her."

Gilbert was no more morally timid than he was physically a coward, but
he looked round with some anxiety as the boy uttered his outrageous
boast.

The place they had chosen for their game was the deep and shady corner
where the church made a right angle with the royal palace. The grass
was cropped during several hours every morning by a dozen sheep and
lambs kept in a stable at the other end of the castle-yard during the
rest of the day. The springing turf was kept fresh even in summer's
drought by the deep shadows. The church wall, built of well-hewn blocks
of stone, was flat and smooth, and was strengthened at regular
intervals by buttresses springing straight up from the sloping
penthouse of masonry, some two yards high. The interval between the
last buttress and the wall of the palace made an admirable court, and,
indeed, the tennis-courts of later days all seem to have been modelled
upon just such corners of old church architecture. The wall of the
palace was also smooth and almost without windows on that side. There
was one on the lower floor, at a considerable distance from the corner,
but the other was at least four or five yards from the ground, just
above the point where Gilbert and Henry were playing, and was made in
Norman fashion of two round arches springing from the rough-hewn
capital of a small stone column between them. Gilbert had often noticed
this window, though it was above an ordinary side glance, as he played
the ball at the other wall; and even as he turned now, he looked
instinctively behind him and towards the distant lower window.

A sweet low laugh rang out into the summer air just above his head. He
looked up to meet the sound, and young Henry missed the ball and turned
his eyes in the same direction. His bluff, boyish face blushed scarlet,
but Gilbert turned slowly pale, stepped back, and took his round
pointed cap from his fair hair in acknowledgment of the Queen's
presence.

"You were listening, Madam," cried the boy, red in his anger. "But I am
glad you did, since you have heard the truth."

The Queen laughed again, and drew back her head as if to see whether
there were any one in the room behind her, her white hand lying over
the stone sill, meanwhile, as if to show that she was not going away.
Gilbert even thought that the slender fingers tapped the stone ledge in
a reassuring way. Then she looked out again. A few late flowers and
sweet herbs grew in an earthenware trough in one division of the
window. There was sweet basil and rosemary, and a bit of ivy that tried
to find a hold upon the slender column, and, partly missing it, hung
down over the window-ledge. A single monthly rose made a point of
colour among the sweet green things.

The Queen was still smiling as she rested her elbows upon the sill and
her chin on her folded hands. She was near enough to the tennis-players
to be heard by them if she spoke in a low tone.

"Are you angry because Master Gilbert is frightened?" she asked,
looking at Henry. "Or are you frightened because his lordship, the
Count of Anjou, is angry?" she inquired, turning her eyes to Gilbert.

He smiled at her way of opening the conversation, but Henry thought
that she was laughing at him and grew redder than ever. Not deigning to
answer, he picked up the ball and served it over the penthouse to
himself, striking it back cleverly enough. The Queen laughed again as
he kept his face resolutely turned from her.

"Will you teach me to play, if I come down to you?" she asked, looking
at the back of his head.

"It is no game for women," answered the boy, rudely, and still keeping
the ball up.

"Will you give me a lesson, Master Gilbert?"

The laughing eyes were suddenly grave as they turned to the young
Englishman, the smiling lips grew tender, and the voice was gentle.
Without turning round, Henry felt the change and knew that she was
looking at his friend; he served the ball with a vicious stroke that
brought it back too high for him. Without turning his head to see where
it had rolled, the angry boy walked off, picked up his tunic, which lay
on the turf at a little distance, threw it over his arm, jammed his
pointed cap upon his head with his other hand, and departed in offended
dignity.

The Queen smiled as she looked after him, but did not laugh again.

"Will you teach me to play tennis?" she asked of Gilbert, who was
hesitating as to what he should do. "You have not answered me yet."

"I shall at all times do your Grace's bidding," answered Gilbert,
inclining his head a little and making a gesture with the hand that
held his cap as if to put himself at her disposal.

"At all times?" she asked quietly.

Gilbert looked up quickly, fearing lest he might be tricked into a
promise he did not understand, and he did not answer at once. But she
would not repeat the question.

"Wait," she said, before he spoke. "I am coming down."

With an almost imperceptible gesture, like a greeting, she disappeared.
Gilbert began to walk up and down, his hands behind him, his eyes on
the ground, and he did not see the tennis-ball which Henry had lost
until he almost stumbled over it. The boy's words had roused an
entirely new train of ideas in his mind. Perhaps no man could be so
free from vanity as not to be pleased, even against his will, with the
thought that the most beautiful living woman, and she a queen, was in
love with him. But whatever satisfaction of that sort Gilbert may have
felt was traversed in an opposite direction by the cool sense of his
own indifference. And besides, that was a simple age in which sins were
called by their own names and were regarded with a sort of
semi-religious, respectful abhorrence by most honest gentlemen; and
what was only the general expression of a narrow but high morality had
been branded upon Gilbert's soul during the past months in letters that
were wounds by the ever-present memory of his own mother's shame.

The confusion of his reflections was simplified by the appearance of
Queen Eleanor. At the window of the lower story, which opened to the
ground, she stepped out, looked up and down the deserted yard, and then
came towards him. Gilbert had been long enough in Paris to understand
that Queen Eleanor had not the slightest regard for the set rules,
formal prejudices, and staid traditions of her husband's court; and
when King Louis gravely protested against her dressing herself in man's
mail, bestriding his own favourite charger, and tilting at the Saracen
quintain in the yard, she hinted with more or less good or ill nature,
according to her mood, that her possessions were considerably more
extensive than the kingdom of France, and that what she had been taught
to do by William of Aquitaine was necessarily right, and beyond the
criticism of Louis Capet, who was descended from a Paris butcher.
Nevertheless, the Englishman had some reasonable doubts and misgivings
at finding himself, a humble squire, alone in that quiet corner with
the most beautiful and most powerful of reigning queens. But she, whose
quick intuition was a gift almost beyond nature, knew what he felt
before she had reached his side. She spoke quite naturally and as if
such a meeting were an everyday occurrence.

[Illustration: "PERHAPS THAT IS ONE REASON WHY I LIKE YOU"]

"You did not know that the window was mine?" she said quietly. "I saw
how surprised you were when I looked out. It is a window of a little
hall behind my room. There is a staircase leading down. I often come
that way, but I hardly ever look out. To-day as I was passing I heard
that silly child's angry voice, and when I saw his face and heard what
he said, I could not help laughing."

"The young Count is in earnest," said Gilbert, quietly, for it would
have seemed disloyal to him to join in the Queen's laughter.

"In earnest! Children are always in earnest!"

"They deserve the more respect," retorted the Englishman.

"I never heard of respecting children," laughed the Queen.

"You never read Juvenal," answered Gilbert.

"You often say things which I never heard before," answered the Queen.
"Perhaps that is one reason why I like you."

She stopped and leaned against the penthouse, for they had reached the
corner of the court, and she thoughtfully bit a sprig of rosemary which
she had picked from her window in passing. Gilbert could not help
watching the small white teeth that severed the little curling grey
leaves like ivory knives, but the Queen's eyes were turned from him and
were very thoughtful.

Gilbert deemed it necessary to say something.

"Your Grace is very kind." He bowed respectfully.

"What makes you so sad?" she asked suddenly, after a short pause, and
turning her eyes full upon him. "Is Paris so dull? Is our court so
grave? Is my Gascony wine sour, that you will not be merry like the
rest, or"--she laughed a little--"or are you not treated with the
respect and consideration due to your rank?"

Gilbert drew himself up a little as if not pleased by the jest.

"You know well that I have no rank, Madam," he said; "and though it
should please you to command of me some worthy deed, and I should, by
the grace of God, deserve knighthood, yet I would not have it save of
my lawful sovereign."

"Such as teaching me to play tennis?" she asked, seeming not to hear
the end of his speech. "You should as well be knighted for that as for
any other thing hard to do."

"Your Grace is never in earnest."

"Sometimes I am." Her eyelids drooped a little as she looked at him.
"Not often enough, you think? And you--too often. Always, indeed."

"If I were Queen of France, I could be light-hearted, too," said
Gilbert. "But if your Grace were Gilbert Warde, you should be perhaps a
sadder man than I."

And he also laughed a little, but bitterly. Eleanor raised her smooth
brows and spoke with a touch of irony.

"Are you so young, and have you already such desperate sorrows?"

But as she looked, his face changed, with that look of real and cruel
suffering which none can counterfeit. He leaned back against the
penthouse, looking straight before him. Then she, seeing that she had
touched the nerve in an unhealed wound, glanced sidelong at him, bit
upon her sprig of rosemary again, turned, and with half-bent head
walked slowly along to the next buttress; she turned again there, and
coming back stood close before him, laying one hand upon his folded arm
and looking up to his eyes, that gazed persistently over her head.

"I would not hurt you for the world," she said very gravely. "I mean to
be your friend, your best friend--do you understand?"

Gilbert looked down and saw her upturned face. It should have moved him
even then, he thought, and perhaps he did not himself know that between
her and him there was the freezing shadow of a faint likeness to his
mother.

"You are kind, Madam," he said, somewhat formally. "A poor squire
without home or fortune can hardly be the friend of the Queen of
France."

She drew back from him half a step, but her outstretched hand still
rested on his arm.

"What have lands and fortune to do with friendship--or with love?" she
asked. "Friendship's home is in the hearts of men and women;
friendship's fortune is friendship's faith."

"Ay, Madam, so it should be," answered Gilbert, his voice warming in a
fuller tone.

"Then be my friend," she said, and her hand turned itself palm upward,
asking for his.

He took it and raised it to his lips in the act of bending one knee.
But she hindered him; her fingers closed on his with a strength greater
than he had supposed that any woman could possess, and she held him and
made him stand upright again, so that he would have had to use force to
kneel before her.

"Leave that for the court," she said; "when we are alone let us enjoy
our freedom and be simply human beings, man and woman, friend and
friend."

Gilbert still held her hand, and saw nothing but truth in the mask of
open-hearted friendship in which she disguised her growing love. He was
young and thought himself almost friendless; a generous warmth was
suddenly at his heart, with something compounded of real present
gratitude and of the most chivalrous and unselfish devotion for the
future.

She felt that she had gained a point, and she forthwith claimed the
privilege of friendship.

"And being friends," she said, still holding his hand as he stood
beside her, "will you not trust me and tell me what it is that seems to
break your heart? It may be that I can help you."

Gilbert hesitated, and she saw the uncertainty in his face, and pressed
his hand softly as if persuading him to speak.

"Tell me!" she said. "Tell me about yourself!"

Gilbert looked at her doubtfully, looked away, and then turned to her
again. Her voice had a persuasion of its own that appealed to him as
her beauty could not. Almost before he knew what he was doing he was
walking slowly by her left side, in the shade of the church, telling
her his story; and she listened, silently interested, always turning
her face a little toward his, and sometimes meeting his eyes with eyes
of sympathy. He could not have told his tale to a man; he would not
have told it to a woman he loved; but Eleanor represented to him a new
and untried relation, and the sweet, impersonal light of friendship
waked the dark places of his heart to undreamt confidence.

He told her what had befallen him, from first to last, but the sound of
his own words was strange to him; for he found himself telling her what
he had seen two and three years ago, in the light of what he had known
but a few months, yet almost as if he had known it from the first. More
than once he hesitated in his speech, being suddenly struck by the
horror of what he was telling, and almost doubting the witness of his
own soul to the truth. One thing only he did not tell--he never spoke
of Beatrix, nor hinted that there had been any love in his life.

They turned, and turned again many times, and he was hardly aware that
at the end the Queen had linked one hand in his right arm and gently
pressed it from time to time in sign of sympathy. And when he had
finished, with a quaver in his deep voice as he told how he had come
out into the world to seek his fortune, she stopped him, and they both
stood still.

"Poor boy!" she exclaimed softly. "Poor Gilbert!"--and her tone
lingered on the name,--"the world owes you a desperate debt--but the
world shall pay it!"

She smiled as she spoke the last words, pressing his arm more suddenly
and quickly than before; and he smiled, too, but incredulously. Then
she looked down at her own hand upon his sleeve.

"But that is not all," she continued thoughtfully; "was there no
woman--no love--no one that was dearer than all you lost?"

A faint and almost boyish blush rose in Gilbert's cheek, and
disappeared again instantly.

"They took her from me, too," he said in a low, hard voice. "She was
Arnold de Curboil's daughter--when he married my mother he made his
child my sister. You know the Church's law!"

Eleanor was on the point of saying something impulsively, but her
eyelids suddenly drooped and she checked herself. If Gilbert Warde did
not know that the Church granted dispensations in such cases, she saw
no good reason for telling him.

"Besides," he added, "I could not have her now, unless I could take her
from her father by force."

"No," said the Queen, thoughtfully. "Is she fair?"

"Very dark," said Gilbert.

"I meant, is she beautiful?"

"To me, yes: the most beautiful in the world. But how should I know? I
have never heard others speak of her; she is not beautiful as your
Grace is,--not radiantly, supremely, magnificently perfect,--yet to my
eyes she is very lovely."

"I should like to see her," said the Queen.

In the silence that followed they began to walk up and down again side
by side, but Eleanor's hand no longer rested on Gilbert's arm. She
could see that his eyes were fixed upon a face that was far away, and
that his hand longed for a touch not hers; and a painful little thrill
of disappointment ran through her, for she was not used to any sort of
opposition, in great things or small. The handsome Englishman attracted
her strangely, and not by his outward personality only. From the first
a sort of mystery had hung over him, and she had felt, when she was
with him, the inexplicable fascination of a curiosity which she should
be sure to satisfy sooner or later. And now, having learned something
of his life, and liking him the more for what she knew, she was
suddenly filled with an irresistible longing to see the girl who had
made the first mark on Gilbert's life. She tried to conjure up the
young face, and the dark hue he had spoken of brought the vision of a
fateful shadow. Her mind dwelt upon the girl, and she started visibly
when Gilbert spoke to her.

"And has your Grace no deed for me to do?" he asked. "Is there nothing
whereby I may prove my thanks?"

"Nothing, save that you be indeed my friend--a friend I can trust, a
friend to whom I may speak safely as to my own soul, a friend whom I
may tell how heartily I hate this life I lead!"

She uttered the last words with a sudden rising accent of unruly
discontent, as genuine as every other outward showing of her vital
nature.

"How can your life be hateful?" asked Gilbert, in profound
astonishment, for he did not know her half as well as she already knew
him.

"How can it be anything else?" she asked, "How should life not be
hateful, when every natural thing that makes life worth living is
choked as soon as it is awake? Oh, I often wish I were a man!"

"Men do not wish you were," answered Gilbert, with a smile.

Suddenly, while they were speaking, a sound of voices filled the air
with loud chanting of Latin words. Instinctively the Queen laid her
hand on Gilbert's sleeve and drew him into the shadow of a buttress,
and he yielded, scarcely knowing what he did. The chanting swelled on
the air, and a moment later the procession began to appear beyond the
corner of the church. Two and two, led by one who bore a cross, the
song-boys in scarlet and white came first, then Benedictine monks in
black, then priests of the cathedral in violet cloth with fine white
linen surplices and bearing wax candles. And they all chanted as they
walked, loudly, fervently, as if a life and a soul depended on every
note. Then, as the Queen and Gilbert looked on from the shade where
they stood, they saw the canopy of cloth of gold borne on its six
gilded staves by slim young men in white, and beneath it walked the
venerable bishop, half hidden under the vast embroidered cope from
which the golden monstrance emerged, grasped by his closely wrapped
hands; and his colourless eyes were fixed devoutly upon the Sacred
Host, while his lips moved in silent prayer.

Just as the canopy was in sight the procession halted for some time. In
the shadow of the buttress Eleanor knelt upon the turf, looking towards
the Sacred Host, and Gilbert dropped upon one knee at her side, very
reverently bending his head.

Eleanor looked straight before her with more curiosity than religious
fervour, but in her ear she heard Gilbert's deep voice softly chanting
with the monks the psalms he had so often sung at Sheering Abbey. The
Queen turned her head at the sound, in surprise, and watched the young
man's grave face for a moment without attracting his attention.
Apparently she was not pleased, for her brows were very slightly drawn
together, the corners of her eyes drooped, and the deep bright blue was
darkened. At that moment the canopy swayed a little, the ancient bishop
moved his shoulders under the heavy cope in the effort of starting
again, and the procession began to move onward.

Next after the bishop, from behind the end of the church, the King came
into sight, walking, monk-like, with folded hands, moving lips and
downcast eyes, the long embroidered bliaut reaching almost to his feet,
while the scarlet mantle, lined with blue and bordered with ermine,
fell straight from his shoulders and touched the turf as he walked. He
was bareheaded, and as Eleanor noticed what was evidently intended for
another act of humility, the serene curve of her closed lips was
sharpened in scorn. And suddenly, as she gazed at her husband's cold,
white features in contempt, she heard Gilbert's voice at her elbow
again, chanting the Latin words musically and distinctly, and she
turned almost with a movement of anger to see the bold young face
saddened and softened by the essence of a profound belief.

"Was I born to love monks!" she sighed half audibly; but as she looked
back at the procession she started and uttered a low exclamation.

Beside her husband, but a little after him as the pageant turned, a
straight, thin figure came into sight, clad in a monk's frock scarcely
less dazzling white than the marvellous upturned face. At Eleanor's
exclamation Gilbert also had raised his eyes from the ground, and they
fixed themselves on the wonderful features of the greatest man of the
age, while his voice forgot to chant and his lips remained parted in
wonder. Upon the bright green grass against the background of hewn
stone walls, in the glorious autumn sunshine, Bernard of Clairvaux
moved like the supernal vision of a heavenly dream. His head thrown
back, the delicate silver-fair beard scarcely shadowing the spiritual
outlines of an almost divine face, his soft blue eyes looked upward,
filled with a light not earthly. The transparent brow and the almost
emaciated cheeks were luminously pale, and seemed to shed a radiance of
their own.

But it would have been impossible to say what it was in the man's form
or face that made him so utterly different and distinct from other men.
It was not alone the Christlike brow, nor the noble features inherited
from a line of heroes; it was not the ascetic air, the look of bodily
suffering, nor the fine-drawn lines of pain which, as it were, etched a
shadowy background of sorrow upon which the spiritual supremacy blazed
like a rising star: it was something beyond all these, above name and
out of definition, the halo of saintship, the glory of genius, the
crown of heroism. Of such a man, one's eyes might be filled, and one
might say, 'Let him not speak, lest some harsh tone or imperfect speech
should pierce the vision with sharp discord, as a rude and sudden sound
ends a soft dream.' Yet he was a man who, when he raised his hand to
lead, led millions like children; who, when he opened his lips to
speak, spoke with the tongue of men and of angels such words as none
had spoken before him--words which were the truth made light; one who,
when he took pen in hand to write to the world's masters, wrote without
fear or fault, as being the scribe of God, but who could pen messages
of tenderest love and gentlest counsel to the broken-hearted and the
heavy-laden.

Gilbert's eyes followed the still, white glory of the monk's face, till
the procession turned in a wide sweep behind the wing of the palace,
and even then the tension of his look did not relax. He was still
kneeling with fixed gaze when the Queen was standing beside him. The
scorn was gone from her lips and had given place to a sort of tender
pity. She touched the young man's shoulder twice before he started,
looked up, and then sprang to his feet.

"Who is that man?" he asked earnestly.

"Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux," answered the Queen, looking far away. "I
almost worshipped him once, when I was a child,--it is the will of
Heaven that I should lose my heart to monks!"

She laughed, as she had laughed from the window.

"Monks?" Gilbert repeated the word with curiosity. "Are you one of
those persons for whom it is necessary to explain everything?" asked
Eleanor, still smiling and looking at him intently. "I think you must
be half a monk yourself, for I heard you singing the psalms as sweetly
as any convent scholar."

"Even if I were not half a monk, but one altogether, I should not
wholly understand your Grace's speech;" Gilbert smiled, too, for he was
immeasurably far from guessing what was in her mind.

"So I have thought, in all these weeks and days while we have been
together."

Her eyes darkened as she looked at him, but his were clear and calm.

"Do you understand this?" she asked, and she laid her two hands upon
his shoulders.

"What?" he asked in surprise.

"This," she said, very softly, drawing herself near to him by her hands.

Then he knew, and he would have straightened himself, but her hands
sprang to meet each other round his neck, and her face was close to
his. But the vision of his own sinful mother rose in her eyes to meet
him.

She held him fast, and three times she kissed him before she would let
him go.




CHAPTER VIII


Gilbert had reached Paris in the train of Duke Geoffrey in September;
the Christmas bells were ringing when he first caught sight of the
walls and towers of Rome. As he drew rein on the crest of a low hill,
the desolate brown waste of the Campagna stretched behind him mile upon
mile to northward, toward the impenetrable forests of Viterbo, and Rome
was at last before him. Before him rose the huge half-ruined walls of
Aurelian, battered by Goth and Saracen and imperial Greek; before him
towered the fortress of Hadrian's tomb, vast, impregnable, ferocious.
Here and there above the broken crenellation of the city's battlements
rose dark and slender towers, square and round, marking the places
where strong robbers had fortified themselves within the city. But from
the point where Gilbert halted, Rome seemed but a long brown ruin, with
portions standing whole, as brown as the rest under the bright depths
of vaulted blue, unflecked by the least fleece of cloud, in the
matchless clearness of the winter's morning. Profound disappointment
came upon him as he looked. With little knowledge and hardly any
information from others who had journeyed by the same road, he had
built himself an imaginary city of unspeakable beauty, wherein graceful
churches rose out of sunlit streets and fair open places planted with
lordly avenues of trees. There, in his thoughts, walked companies of
men with faces like the face of the great Bernard, splendid with
innocence, radiant with the hope of life. Thither, in his fancy, came
the true knights of the earth, purified of sin by vigils in the holy
places of the East, to renew unbroken vows of chastity and charity and
faith. There, in his dream, dwelt the venerable Father of Bishops, the
Vicar of Christ, the successor of Peter, the Servant of the servants of
God, the spotless head of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.
There, in his heart, he had made the dwelling of whatsoever things are
upright and just and perfect in heaven, and pure and beautiful on
earth. That was the city of God, of which his soul was the architect,
and in which he was to be a dweller, in peace that should pass
understanding.

He had left behind him in Paris another vision and one that might well
have dazzled him--such favour as falls to few; such hopes as few can
plant in their lives and still fewer can rear to maturity; such love as
few indeed could hope for--the love of supreme and royal beauty.

When he had ridden out of the castle on the island, older by some
months, richer by such gifts as it was no shame for him to take of Duke
Geoffrey and young Henry Plantagenet, he had believed himself wiser,
too, by half a lifetime.

He was confident in his own strength, in his own wisdom, in his own
endurance; he fancied that he had fought against a great temptation,
where he had in truth been chilled and terrified by the haunting vision
of another's evil; he imagined that the little sharp regret, which
stung his heart with longing for the sweetness of a sin that might have
been, was the evil remnant of a passion not wholly quenched, whereas it
was but the craving of a natural vanity that had not been strong enough
to overcome a repugnance which he himself only half understood.

He seemed in his own eyes to have made the sacrifice of his worldly
future for the sake of his knightly ideal; but in truth, to a man
without ambition, the renunciation had been easy and had been made in
acquiescence with his real desires, rather than in opposition to them.

And now he looked upon the city of his hope, and it crumbled to a dusty
ruin under his very hand; he stood on ground made reverent by the march
of history and sanctified by the blood of Christians, and it was but
one great wilderness, of which he himself was the centre. His heart
sank suddenly within him, and his fingers clutched at the breast of his
tunic under his surcoat, as though the pain were bodily and real. Long
he sat in silence, bending a little in the saddle, as if worn out with
fatigue, though he had ridden only three hours since daybreak.

"Sir," said his man Dunstan, interrupting his master's meditations,
"here is an inn, and we may find water for our horses."

Gilbert looked up indifferently, and then, as there was no near
building in sight, he turned inquiringly to his man. A sardonic smile
played on Dunstan's lean dark face as he pointed to what Gilbert had
taken for three haystacks. They were, indeed, nothing but conical straw
huts standing a few steps aside from the road, thirty yards down the
hill. The entrance to each was low and dark, and from the one issued
wreaths of blue smoke, slowly rising in the still, cold air. At the
same entrance a withered bough proclaimed that wine was to be had. A
ditch beyond the furthest hut was full of water, and at some distance
from it a rude shed of boughs had been set up to afford the horses of
travellers some shelter from winter rain or summer sun. As Gilbert
looked, a man came out, bowing himself almost double to pass under the
low aperture. He wore long goatskin breeches and a brown homespun
tunic, like a monk's frock, cut short above the knees, and girdled with
a twisted thong. Shaggy black hair thatched his square head, and a thin
black beard framed the yellow face, which had the fever-stricken look
of the dwellers in the Campagna.

Though this was the first halting-place of the kind to which Gilbert
had come in the Roman plain, he was no longer easily surprised by
anything, and he did not even smile as he rode forward and dismounted.

Besides his own men he had with him the muleteer who acted as guide and
interpreter, and without whom it was impossible for a foreigner to
travel in Italy. The peasant bowed to the ground, and led Gilbert to
the entrance of the hut where he usually served his customers with food
and drink, and in the gloom within Gilbert saw a rough-hewn table and
two benches standing upon the well-swept floor of beaten earth. But the
Englishman made signs that he would sit outside, and the scanty
furniture was brought out into the open air. The third hut was a refuge
and a sleeping-place for travellers overtaken at nightfall on their way
to the city.

"The monk is asleep," said the peasant host, lifting his finger to his
lips because Gilbert's men were talking loud near the entrance.

Gilbert understood as much as that without his interpreter; for in
those days the Provencal tongue was an accomplishment of all well-born
persons, and it was not unlike certain dialects of Italy.

"A monk?" repeated Gilbert, indifferently.

"He calls himself one, and he wears a grey frock," answered the other.
"But we are glad when he comes, for he brings us good fortune. And you
may see that I speak the truth, since he came late in the night, and
your lordship is the first guest at the huts this morning."

"Then you know him well?"

"Every one knows him," answered the man.

He turned, and Gilbert saw him lift up a hurdle of branches and
disappear underground. His cellar was deep and cool, one of the many
caverns which communicate with the catacombs and riddle the Campagna
from Rome to the hills. Gilbert seated himself upon the smaller of the
two benches at the end of the table; his three men took the other, and
laid aside their caps out of respect for their master. The horses were
tethered under the shed of boughs till they should be cool enough to be
watered. The southern side of the hut was sunny and warm, and the place
smelled of dry grass, of clean straw, and, faintly, of smouldering fire.

Gilbert was hardly conscious that he was thinking of anything as he
stared out at the rolling waste, folding his hands together upon the
hilt of his long sword. Just then a man emerged from the third hut,
drew himself up facing the sun, and rubbed his eyes before he looked
toward the party at the other table. When he saw them, he hesitated for
a moment, and then came up to Gilbert with the apparent intention of
addressing him.

Above the height of average men, the figure looked unnaturally tall by
its gauntness, and the heavy folds of the grey woollen frock fell
together below the breast as if they covered a shadow. Long, bony
hands, that seemed woven of sinews and leather, but which were not
without a certain nervous refinement, hung from loose-jointed brown
wrists left bare by sleeves that were too short. The head was so
roughly angular that even the thick masses of dark brown hair which
fell to the shoulders could not make the angles seem like curves, and
the face displayed the fervent features of a fanatic--dark, hollow
cheeks, deep-sunk, blazing eyes, the vast lines of an ascetic mouth, a
great jaw scarcely fringed by the scant black beard. Gilbert saw before
him a face and figure that might have belonged to a hermit of Egypt, an
ascetic of the Syrian desert, a John the Baptist, an Anthony of Thebes.
The man wore a broad leathern girdle; a blackened rosary, with beads as
large as walnuts, hung from his side and ended in a rough cross of
wrought iron.

Gilbert half rose from his seat, moved to one end of the short bench,
and invited the stranger to sit beside him. The monk bent his head
slightly, but not a feature moved as he took the proffered place in
silence. He folded his great hands on the edge of the rough-hewn board
and stared at the ruinous brown city to southward.

"You are a stranger," he said in Provencal, after a long pause and in a
singularly musical voice, but without turning his eyes to Gilbert.

"I have never seen Rome before," answered Gilbert.

"Rome!" There was a sort of almost heartbroken pity in the tone of the
single syllable that fell from the lips of the wandering monk.

"You have never seen Rome before? There it lies, all that is left of
it--the naked bones of the most splendid, the most beautiful, the most
powerful city in the world, murdered by power, done to death by popes
and emperors, by prefects and barons, sapped of life by the evil canker
of empire, and left there like a dead dog in the Campagna, to be a prey
to carrion beasts and a horror to living men."

The gaunt stranger set his elbows upon the table and bit his nails
savagely, while his burning eyes fixed themselves on the distant towers
of Rome. Then Gilbert saw that this man was no common wandering friar,
begging a meal for his frock's sake, but one who had thoughts of his
own, and with whom to think was to suffer.

"It is true," said Gilbert, "that Rome is less fair to see than I had
supposed."

"And you are deceived of your hopes before you have entered her gate,"
returned the other. "Are you the first? Are you the last? Has Rome made
an end of deceiving, and found the termination of disappointment? Rome
has deceived and disappointed the world. Rome has robbed the world of
its wealth, and devoured it, and grown gaunt to the bone. Rome has
robbed men of their bodies and of their lives, and has torn them limb
from limb wantonly, as a spoiled hawk tears a pheasant and scatters the
bright feathers on the ground. Rome has robbed men of their souls and
has fed hell with them to its surfeit. And now, in her turn, her
grasping hands have withered at the wrists, her insatiable lips are
cracking upon her loosening teeth, and the mistress of the world is the
sport of Jews and usurers."

"You speak bitterly," said Gilbert, looking curiously at his new
acquaintance.

The monk sighed, and his eyes softened wonderfully as he turned to the
young man. He had been speaking in a tone that slowly rose to
shrillness, like a cry of bodily pain. When he spoke again his voice
was low and sweet.

"Bitterly, but for her sake, not for mine," he said. "If I have given
my life for her, she will not give me hers. Though I have laid at her
feet all that I had, she shall put nothing into my hand nor give me
anything but a ditch and a handful of earth for my bones, unless some
emperor or pope shall leave them upon a gallows. But I have asked of
her, for herself and her own sake, that she should do by herself
honourably, and draw her neck from the yoke and shake off the burdens
under which she has stumbled and fallen. I have asked of her to stand
upright again, to refuse to eat from the hand that has wounded her, and
not to hearken to the voice of violence and cursing. I have asked that
Rome should cast out the Stranger Emperor, and cast down the churchman
from the king's throne, and take from him the king's mask. I have asked
Rome to face her high robbers whom she calls barons, her corruption,
her secret weakness, as a brave man faces his sins and confesses them
and steadfastly purposes to offend God no more, All this I have asked,
and in part she has heard; and I have paid the price of my asking, for
I am an outcast of many kingdoms and a man excommunicated under the
Major Interdiction."

A gentle smile, that might have been half indifference, half pity,
wreathed the ascetic lips as he spoke the last words. They were not
empty words in those days, and unawares Gilbert shrank a little from
his companion.

"I see that you are a devout person," said the friar, quietly. "Let my
presence not offend you at your meal. I go my way."

But as he began to rise, Gilbert's hand went out, and his fingers met
round the skeleton arm in the loose grey sleeve.

"Stay, sir," he said, "and break your fast with us. I am not such a one
as you think."

"You shrank from me," said the stranger, hesitating to resume his seat.

"I meant no discourtesy," answered Gilbert. "Be seated, sir. You call
yourself an outcast. I am but little better than a wanderer,
disinherited of his own."

"And come you hither for the Pope's justice?" asked the friar,
scornfully. "There is no Pope in Rome. Our last was killed at the head
of a band of fighting men, on the slope of the Capitol, last year, and
he who is Pope now is as much a wanderer as you and I. And in Rome we
have a Republic and a Senate, and justice of a kind, but only for
Romans, and claiming no dominion over mankind; for to be free means to
set free, to live means to let live."

"I shall see what this freedom of yours is like," said Gilbert,
thoughtfully. "For my part I am not used to such thoughts, and though I
have read some history of Rome, I could never understand the Roman
Republic. With us the strongest is master by natural law. Why should
the strong man share with the weak what he may keep for himself? Or if
he must, in your ideal, then why should not the strong nation share her
strength and wealth with her weak neighbour? Is it not enough that the
strong should not wantonly bruise the weak nor deal unfairly by him?
The Normans can see no more harm or injustice in holding than we see in
taking what we can; and so we shall never understand your republics and
your senates."

"Are you a Norman, sir?" asked the friar. "Are you a kinsman of
Guiscard and of them that last burnt Rome? I do not wonder that the
civilization of a republic should seem strange to you!"

Gilbert was listening, but his eyes had wandered from the friar's face
in the direction of the dusty road that led to Rome, and between his
companion's words his quick ear had caught the sound of hoofs, although
no horses were yet in sight but his own. Just as the friar ceased
speaking, however, a troop of seven riders appeared at the turn of the
road. They were rough-looking men in long brown cloaks that were in
tatters at the edge; they wore round caps of mail on their heads, with
a broad leathern strap under the chin; their faces were dark, their
beards black and unkempt, and they rode small, ragged horses, as ill
cared for as themselves.

Gilbert sprang up almost as soon as he saw them, for he knew that, not
being travellers, they could hardly be anything but highwaymen. His own
men were on their feet as soon as he, while the muleteer guide
disappeared round the hut quietly and swiftly, like a mouse when a cat
is in sight. Gilbert made straight for his horses, followed by Dunstan
and the groom; but before he could reach them, two of the riders had
jumped the ditch from the road and intercepted him, while the others
rode on toward the shed to carry off his horses. His sword was out in a
flash, his men were beside him, their weapons in their hands, and the
grimy riders drew theirs also; it was like a little storm of steel in
the bright air. The Englishman's long blade whirled half a circle above
his head; the blow would beat down the horseman's guard and draw blood,
too.

But in mid-air his wrist was seized in the sudden grasp of sinewy
fingers, and the friar was already between him and his adversary,
warning the other off with his outstretched hand. The loose sleeve had
slipped back from his wrist, baring a brown, emaciated arm and elbow
upon which the swollen veins seemed to twist and climb like leafless
vines upon a withered tree. His lips were white, his eyes blazed, and
his voice was suddenly harsh and commanding.

"Back!" he cried, almost savagely.

To Gilbert's very great astonishment, the single word produced an
instantaneous and wonderful effect. The riders lowered their weapons,
looked at one another, and then sheathed them; the others, who were
loosing Gilbert's horses and mules, suddenly desisted at the sound of
the friar's voice. Then the one nearest to Gilbert, who was a shade
less grimy than the rest, and who wore in his cap a feather from a
pheasant's tail, slipped to the ground, and bending low under his
tattered brown cloak, took the hem of the monk's frock in his right
hand and kissed it fervently. Gilbert stood aside, leaning upon his
unsheathed sword, and his wonder grew as he looked on.

"We ask your pardon, Fra Arnoldo," cried the chief, still kneeling.
"How could we guess that you were breakfasting out here this morning?
We thought you far in the north."

"And therefore thought yourselves free to rob strangers and steal
cattle, and cut one anothers' throats?"

"This is probably a part of the civilization of a republic," observed
Gilbert, with a smile.

But the highwaymen, all dismounted now, came crowding to the feet of
Arnold of Brescia in profound, if not lasting, contrition, and they
begged a blessing of the excommunicated monk.




CHAPTER IX


Gilbert lodged at the sign of the Lion, over against the tower of Nona,
by the bridge of Sant' Angelo. The inn was as old as the times of
Charlemagne, when it had been named in honour of Pope Leo, who had
crowned him emperor. But the quarter was at that time in the hands of
the great Jewish race of Pierleoni, whose first antipope, Anacletus,
had not been dead many years, and who, though they still held the
castle and many towers and fortresses in Rome, had not succeeded in
imposing the antipope Victor upon the Roman people, against the will of
Bernard of Clairvaux.

Rome lay along the river, in those days, like wreckage and scum thrown
up on the shore of a wintry sea. Some twenty thousand human beings were
huddled together in smoky huts, most of which were built against the
outer walls and towers of the nobles' strongholds--a miserable
population, living squalidly in terrible times, starving while the
nobles fought with one another, rising now and then like a vision of
famine and sword to take back by force the right of life which force
had almost taken from them. Gilbert wandered through the crooked,
unpaved streets, in and out of gloomy courts and over desolate wastes
and open places, the haunts of ravenous dogs and homeless cats that
kept themselves alive on the choice pickings of the city's garbage. He
went armed and followed by his men, as he saw that other gentlemen of
his condition did, and when he knelt in a church to hear mass or to say
a prayer, he was careful to kneel with his back to the wall or to a
pillar, lest some light-handed worshipper should set a razor to his
wallet strings or his sword-belt.

At his inn, too, he lived in a state of armed defence against every
one, including the host and the other guests; and the weekly settlement
was a weekly battle between Dunstan, who paid his master's scores, the
little Tuscan interpreter, and Ser Clemente, the innkeeper, in which
the Tuscan had the most uncomfortable position, finding himself placed
buffer-like between the honest man and the thief, and exposed to
equally hard hitting from both. Rome was poor and dirty and a den of
thieves, murderers, and all malefactors, dominated alternately by a
family of half-converted Jews, who terrorized the city from strong
points of vantage, and then, on other days, by the mob that followed
Arnold of Brescia when he appeared in the city, and who would have torn
down stone walls with their bare hands at his merest words, as they
would have faced the barons' steel with naked breast. At such times men
left their tasks--the shoemaker his last, the smith his anvil, the
crooked tailor his bench--to follow the northern monk to the Capitol,
or to some church where he was to speak to them; and after the men came
the women, and after the women the children, all drawn along by the
mysterious attraction which they could neither understand nor resist.
The tramping of many feet made a dull bass to the sound of many human
voices, high and low, crying out lustily for 'Arnold, a Senate, and the
Roman Republic'; and then taking up the song of the day, which was a
ballad of liberty, in a long minor chant that broke into a jubilant
major in the burden--the sort of song the Romans have always made in
time of change, the kind of ballad that goes before the end of a
kingdom, like a warning voice of fate.

On such days, when the mob went howling and singing after its idol,
southwards to the Capitol or even to the far Lateran where Marcus
Aurelius sat upon his bronze horse watching the ages go by, then
Gilbert loved to wander in the opposite direction, across the castle
bridge and under the haunted battlements of Sant' Angelo, where evil
Theodora's ghost walked on autumn nights when the south wind blew, and
through the long wreck of the fair portico that had once extended from
the bridge to the basilica, till he came to the broad flight of steps
leading to the walled garden-court of old Saint Peter's. There he loved
to sit musing among the cypresses, wondering at the vast bronze
pine-cone and the great brass peacocks which Symmachus had brought
thither from the ruins of Agrippa's baths, wherein the terrible
Crescenzi had fortified themselves during more than a hundred years.
Sitting there alone, while Dunstan puzzled his uncertain learning over
deep-cut inscriptions of long ago, and Alric, the groom, threw his
dagger at a mark on one of the cypress trees, hundreds of times in
succession, and rarely missing his aim, Gilbert felt, in the silence he
loved, that the soul of Rome had taken hold of his soul, and that in
Rome it was good to live for the sake of dreaming, and that dreaming
itself was life. The past, with his mother's sins, his own sorrows, the
friendship of the boy Henry, the love of Queen Eleanor, were all
infinitely far removed and dim. The future, once the magic mirror in
which he had seen displayed the glory of knightly deeds which he was to
do, was taken up like a departing vision into the blue Roman sky. Only
the present remained, the idle, thoughtful, half-narcotic present, with
a mazy charm no man could explain, since so far as any bodily good was
concerned there was less comfort to be got for money, more fever to be
taken for nothing, and a larger element of danger in everyday life in
Rome than in any city Gilbert had traversed in his wanderings. Yet he
lingered and loved it rather for what it denied him than for what it
gave him, for the thoughts it called up rather than for the sights it
offered, for that in it which was unknown, and therefore dear to dwell
upon, rather than for the sadness and the darkness and the evil that
all men might feel.

But through all he felt, and in all he saw, welding and joining the
whole together, there was the still fervour of that something which he
had at first known in Sheering Abbey--something to which every fibre of
his nature responded, and which, indeed, was the mainspring of the
world in that age. For devotion was then more needful than bread, and
it profited a man more to fight against unbelievers for his soul's sake
than to wear hollows in altar-steps with his knees, or to forget his
own name and put off his own proper character and being, as a nameless
unit in a great religious order.

At first the enormous disappointment of Rome had saddened and hurt him.
He had fancied that where there was no head there could be no house,
that where the leader was gone the army must scatter and be hewn in
pieces. But as he stayed on, from week to week and from month to month,
he learned to understand that the Church had never been more alive,
more growing, and more militant than at that very time when the true
and rightful pontiffs were made outcasts one after the other, while
their places, earthly and spiritual, were given to instruments of feud
and party. For the Church was the world, while Rome meant seven or
eight thousand half-starved and turbulent ruffians, with their wives
and children, eager always for change, because it seemed that no change
could be for the worse.

But in the ancient basilica of Saint Peter there was peace; there the
white-haired priests solemnly officiated in the morning and at noon,
and toward evening more than a hundred rich voices of boys and men sang
the vesper psalms in the Gregorian tones; there slim youths in violet
and white swung silver censers before the high altar, and the incense
floated in rich clouds upon the sunbeams that fell slanting to the
ancient floor; there, as in many a minster and cloister of the world,
the Church was still herself, as she was, and is, and always will be;
there words were spoken and solemn prayers intoned which had been
familiar to the lips of the Apostles, which are familiar to our lips
and ears to-day, and of which we are sure that lips unborn will repeat
them to centuries of generations. Gilbert, type of Christian layman,
kneeled in the old cathedral, and chanted softly after the choir, and
breathed the incense-laden air that seemed as natural to him as ever
the hay-scented breeze of summer had been, and he was infinitely
refreshed in soul and body. But then again, alone in his room at the
Lion Inn, late in the night, when he had been poring over the
beautifully written copy of Boethius, given him by the Abbot of
Sheering, he often opened wide the wooden shutters of his window and
looked out at the castle and at the flowing river that eddied and
gleamed in the moonlight. Then life rose before him in a mystery for
him to solve by deeds, and he knew that he was not to dream out his
years in the shadowy city, and the strong old instinct of his race bade
him go forth and cut his fortune out of the world's flank alive. Then
his blood rose in his throat, and his hands hardened one upon the
other, as he leaned over the stone sill and drew the night air sharply
between his closed teeth; and he resolved then to leave Rome and to go
on in search of strange lands and masterful deeds. On such nights, when
the wind blew down the river in the spring, it brought to him all the
hosts of fancy, spirit armies, ghostly knights, and fairy maidens, and
the forecast shadows of things to come. There was a tragic note, also;
for on his right, as he looked, there rose the dark tower of Nona, and
from the highest turret he could clearly see in the moonlight how the
long rain-bleached rope hung down and swayed in the breeze, and the
noose at the end of it softly knocked upon the tower wall; more than
once, also, when he had looked out in the morning, he had seen a corpse
hanging there by the neck, stiff and staring and wet with dew.

But when the spring day dawned and the birds sang at his window, and
when, looking out, he felt the breath of the sweet south and saw that
Rome smiled again, then his resolutions failed, and instead of bidding
Dunstan pack his armour and his fine clothes for a journey, he made his
men mount and ride with him to the far regions of the city. Often he
loitered away the afternoon in the desolate regions of the Aventine,
riding slowly from one lonely church to another, and sometimes spending
an hour in conversation with a solitary priest who, by living much
alone and among inscriptions and old carvings, had gathered a little
more learning than was common among the unlettered Romans.

He met with no adventures; for though the highways in the country
swarmed with robbers always on the watch for a merchant's train or for
a rich traveller, yet within the city's limits, small as was the
authority of the Senate and of the Prefect, thieves dared not band
together in numbers, and no two or three of them would have cared to
come to blows with Gilbert and his men.

Nor did he make friends in Rome. His first intention had been to
present himself to the principal baron in the city, as a traveller of
good birth, and to request the advantages of friendship and protection;
and so he would have done in any other European city. But he had soon
learned that Rome was far behind the rest of the world in the social
practices of chivalry, and that in placing himself under a Roman
baron's protection he would, to all intents and purposes, be taking
service instead of accepting hospitality. Even so, he might have been
willing to take such a position for the sake of adventure; yet he could
by no means make up his mind to a choice between the half-Jewish
Pierleoni and the rough-mannered Frangipani. To the red-handed
Crescenzi he would not go; the Colonna of that time were established on
the heights of Tusculum, and the Orsini, friends to the Pope, had
withdrawn to distant Galera, in the fever-haunted marsh northwest of
Rome.

But here and there he made the acquaintance of a priest or a monk whose
learned conversation harmonized with his thoughts and helped the grave
illusion in which--perhaps out of sheer idleness--he loved to think
himself back in the abbey in England. And so he led a life unlike the
lives around him, and many of the people in the quarter learned to know
him by sight, and called him and his men 'the English'; and as most of
the people of Rome were very much occupied with their own affairs,
chiefly evil, Gilbert was allowed to live as he pleased. But for the
fact that even his well-filled purse must in the course of time be
exhausted, he might have spent the remainder of his life in the Lion
Inn, by the bridge, carelessly meditative and simply happy. But other
forces were at work to guide his life into other channels, and he had
reckoned ill when he had fancied, being himself unmoved, that the love
of such a woman as Queen Eleanor was a mere incident without
consequence, forgotten like a flower of last year's blossoming.

Several times during the winter and in the spring that followed, the
friar Arnold came to see him in his lodgings and talked of the great
things that were coming, of the redemption of man from man by the
tearing down of all sovereign power, whether of pope or emperor, or
king or prince, to make way for the millennium of a universal republic.
Then the fanatic's burning eyes flashed like beacons, his long arms
made sudden and wild gestures, his soft brown hair stood from his head
as though lifted by a passing breeze, and his whole being was
transfigured in the flash of his own eloquence. When he spoke to the
Romans with that voice and with that look, they rose quickly to a
tumult, as the sea under a gale, and he could guide them in their
storming to ends of destruction and terror. But there was no drop of
southern blood in Gilbert's veins nor anything to which the passionate
Italian's eloquence appealed. Instead of catching fire, he argued;
instead of joining Arnold in his attempt to turn the world into a
republic, he was more and more persuaded of the excellence of all he
had left behind him in the north. He incarnated that aristocratic
temper which has in all times, since Duke William crossed the water,
leavened the strong mass of the Anglo-Saxon character, balancing its
rude democratic strength with the keenness of a higher physical
organization and the nobility of a more disinterested daring, and again
and again rousing the English-speaking races to life and conquest, when
they were sunk deep in the sordid interests of trade and money-making.
So when Arnold talked of laws and institutions which should again make
Rome the mistress of the world, Gilbert answered him by talking of men
who had the strength to take the world and to be its masters and make
it obey whatsoever laws they saw fit to impose. Between the two there
was the everlasting difference between theory and action; and though it
chanced that just then Arnold, the dreamer, was in the lead of change
and revolution, while Gilbert, the fighter, was idling away weeks and
months in a dream, yet the fact was the same, and in manly strength and
inward simplicity of thought Gilbert Warde, the Norman, was far nearer
to the man who made Rome imperial than was the eloquent Italian who
built the mistress city of his thoughts out of ideas and theories,
carved and hewn into shapes of beauty by the tremendous tools of his
wit and his words. At the root of the great difference between the two
there was on the one side the Norman's centralization of the world in
himself, as being for himself, and on the other the Latin's power and
readiness to forget himself in the imaginations of an ideal state.

"Men are talking of a second Crusade," said Arnold, one day, when he
and Gilbert had chanced to meet in the garden court of Saint Peter's.

Gilbert was standing with his back against one of the cypress trees,
watching the fiery monk with thoughtful eyes.

"They talk of Crusades," said Arnold, stopping to face the young man.
"They talk of sending hundreds of thousands of Christian men to die
every death under God's sun in Palestine--for what? To save men? To
lift up a race? To plant good, that good may grow? They go for none of
those things. The sign on their breasts is the cross; the word on their
lips is Christ; the thought in their hearts is the thought of all your
ruthless race--to take from others and add to your own stores; to take
land, wealth, humanity, life, everything that can be taken from
conquered man before he is left naked to die."

Gilbert did not smile, for he was wondering whether there were not some
truth in the monk's accusation.

"Do you say this because Norman men hold half of your Italy?" he asked
gravely. "Have they held it well or ill?"

"Ill," answered Arnold, fixing his eyes sharply on Gilbert's face. "But
that is not the matter; some of them have helped me, too. There are
good men and bad among Normans, as among Saracens."

"I thank you," said Gilbert, smiling now, in spite of himself.

"The devils also believe and tremble," retorted Arnold, grimly quoting.
"The taking of the South proves my words; it is not half my meaning.
Men take the cross and give their lives for a name, a tradition, the
sacred memories of a holy place. They will not give a week of their
lives, a drop of their blood, for their fellow-men, nor for the beliefs
that alone can save the world."

"And what are those beliefs?" asked Gilbert.

Arnold paused before he replied, and then as he lifted his face, it was
full of light.

"Faith, Hope, Charity," he answered, and then, as his head drooped with
a sudden look of hopelessness, he turned away with slow steps toward
the great gate.

Gilbert did not change his position as he looked after him rather
sadly. The man's perfect simplicity, his eagerness for the most lofty
ideals, the spotless purity of his life, commanded Gilbert's most true
admiration. And yet to the Norman, Arnold of Brescia was but a dreamer,
a visionary, and a madman. Gilbert could listen to him for a while, but
then the terrible tension of the friar's thought and speech wearied
him. Just now he was almost glad that his companion should depart so
suddenly; but as he watched him he saw him stop, as if he had forgotten
something, and then turn back, searching for some object in the bosom
of his frock.

"I had forgotten what brought me here," said the friar, producing a
small roll of parchment tied and bound together with thin leathern
laces, and tied again with a string of scarlet silk to which was
fastened a heavy leaden seal. "I have here a letter for you."

"A letter!" Gilbert showed a not unnatural surprise. He had never
received a letter in his life, and in those days persons of ordinary
importance rarely sent or received messages except by word of mouth.

"I went to your lodging," replied the monk, handing Gilbert the
parchment. "I guessed that I might find you here, where we have met
before."

"I thank you," said Gilbert, turning the roll over in his hands as if
hardly knowing what to do. "How came you by this?"

"Last night there arrived messengers from France," answered Arnold,
"bringing letters for the Senate and for me, and with them was this,
which the messenger said had been delivered into his hand by the Queen
of France, who had commanded him to find out the person to whom it was
addressed, and had promised him a reward if he should succeed. I
therefore told him that I would give it to you."

Gilbert was looking at the seal. The heavy disk of lead through which
the silken strings had been drawn was as large as the bottom of a
drinking-cup and was stamped with the device of Aquitaine; doubtless
the very one used by Duke William, for it bore the figures of Saint
George and the Dragon, which Eleanor was afterwards to hand down to
English kings to this day. Gilbert tried to pull the silk cord through
the lead, but the blow that had struck the die had crushed and jammed
them firmly.

"Cut it," suggested the friar, and his ascetic face relaxed in a smile.

Gilbert drew his dagger, which was a serviceable blade, half an ell
long, and as broad as a man's three fingers under the straight
cross-hilt, and as sharp as a razor on both edges, for Dunstan was a
master at whetting. Gilbert cut the string and then the laces, and
slipped the seal into his wallet, unrolling the stiff sheet till he
found a short writing, some six or eight lines, not covering half the
page, and signed, 'Eleanora R.'

But when he had opened the letter he saw that it was not to be read
easily. Nevertheless, his eye lighted almost at once upon the name
which of all others he should not hare expected to find there,
'Beatrix.' There was no mistaking the letters, and presently he found
them once again, and soon after that the sense was clear to him.

'If this reach you,' it said, in moderately fair Latin, 'greeting. I
will that you make haste and come again to our castle in Paris, both
because you shall at all times be welcome, and more especially now, and
quickly, because the noble maiden Beatrix de Curboil is now at this
court among my ladies, and is in great hope of seeing you, since she
has left her father to be under my protection. Moreover, Bernard, the
abbot, is preaching the Cross in Chartres and other places, and is
coming here before long, and to Vezelay. Beatrix greets you.'

"Can you tell me where I can find the messenger who brought you this?"
asked Gilbert, looking up when he had at last deciphered every word.

But Arnold was gone. The idea that an acquaintance whom he had been
endeavouring to convert to republican doctrines should be in
correspondence with one of those sovereigns against whom he so bitterly
inveighed had finally disgusted him, and he had gone his way, if not in
wrath, at least in displeasure. Seeing himself alone, Gilbert shrugged
his shoulders indifferently, and began to walk up and down, reading the
letter over and over. It was very short, but yet it contained so much
information that he found some difficulty in adjusting his thoughts to
what was an entirely new situation, and one which no amount of thinking
could fully explain. He was far too simple to suppose that Eleanor had
called Beatrix to her court solely for the sake of bringing him back to
Paris. He therefore imagined the most complicated and absurd reasons
for Queen Eleanor's letter.

He told himself that he must have been mistaken from beginning to end;
that the Queen had never felt anything except friendship for him, but a
friendship far deeper and more sincere than he had realized; and he was
suddenly immensely grateful to her for her wish to build up happiness
in his life. But then, again, she knew as well as he--or as well as he
thought he knew--that the Church would not easily consent to his union
with Beatrix, and as he closed his eyes and recalled scenes of which
the memories were still vivid and clear, the shadow that had chilled
his heart in Paris rose again between him and Eleanor's face, and he
distrusted her, and her kiss and her letter, and her motives. Then,
too, it seemed very strange to him that Beatrix should have left her
father's house; for Arnold de Curboil had always loved her, and it did
not occur to Gilbert that his own mother had made the girl's life
intolerable. He was to learn that later, and when he knew it, he tasted
the last and bitterest dregs of all. Nevertheless, he could not
reasonably doubt the Queen's word; he was positively certain that he
should find Beatrix at the French court, and from the first he had not
really hesitated about leaving at once. It seemed to be the only
possible course, though it was diametrically opposed to all the good
resolutions which had of late flitted through his dreams like summer
moths.

On the next day but one, early in the spring morning, Gilbert and his
men rode slowly down the desolate Via Lata, and under Aurelian's arch,
past the gloomy tomb of Augustus on the left, held by the Count of
Tusculum, and out at last upon the rolling Campagna, northward, by the
old Flaminian Way.




CHAPTER X


June was upon Italy, as a gossamer veil and a garland on the brow of a
girl bride. The first sweet hay was drying in Tuscan valleys; the fig
leaves were spreading, and shadowing the watery fruit that begins to
grow upon the crooked twigs before the leaves themselves, and which the
people call "fig-blossoms," because the real figs come later; the fresh
and silvery olive shoots had shed a snow-flurry of small white stars;
the yellow holy thorn still blossomed in the rough places of the hills,
and the blending of many wild flowers was like a maiden blush on the
earth's soft bosom.

At early morning Gilbert rode along the crest of a low and grassy hill
that was still sheltered from the sun by the high mountains to
eastward, and he drank in the cool and scented air as if it had been
water of paradise, and he a man saved out of death to life by the
draught. There was much peace in his heart, and a still security that
he had not felt yet since he had seen his father lying dead before him.
He knew not how it was, but he was suddenly sure that Beatrix loved him
and had escaped to the court of France in the hope of finding him, and
was waiting for him day by day. And he was also sure that the Church
would not cut him off from her in the end, let the churchmen say what
they would. Was not the Queen of France his friend? She would plead his
case, and the Pope would understand and take away the bar. He thought
of these things, and he felt his hopes rising bright, like the steady
sun.

He reached the end of the crest and drew rein before descending, and he
looked down into the broad valley and the river winding in and out
among trees, gleaming like silver out there in the sun beyond the
narrowing shadow, then dark blue, and then, in places, as black as ink.
The white road, broad and dusty, winding on to Florence, followed the
changing river. Gilbert took his cap from his head and felt the
coolness of the morning on his forehead and the gentle breath of the
early summer in his fair hair; and then, sitting there in the deep
silence, bareheaded, it seemed to him that he was in the very holy
place of God's cathedral.

"The peace of God, which passeth all understanding," he repeated softly
and almost involuntarily.

"Now the God of peace be with you all, amen," answered Dunstan.

But there was a tone in his voice that made Gilbert look at him, and he
saw in the man's face a quiet smile, as if something amused him, while
the black eyes were fixed on a sight far away. Dunstan was pointing to
what he saw; so Gilbert looked, too, and he perceived a gleaming, very
far off, that moved slowly on the white road beside the shining river.

"They are expecting a fight to-day," said Gilbert, "for they are in
mail and their mule-train is behind them."

"Shall we turn aside and ride up the mountain, to let them pass?" asked
Dunstan, who could fight like a wildcat, but had also the cat's
instinctive caution.

"It would be a pity not to see the fight," answered Gilbert, and he
began to ride forward down the descent.

The track was worn down to the depth of a man's height by the hoofs of
the beasts that had trodden it for ages; and in places it was very
narrow, so that two laden mules could hardly pass each other. Young
chestnut shoots of three or four years' growth sprang up in thick green
masses from the top of the bank on each side, and now and then the
branches of nut trees almost joined their broad leaves across the way,
making a deep shade that was cool and smelt of fresh mould and green
things. A little way down the hill a spring of water trickled into a
little pool hollowed out by travellers, and the water overflowed and
made thick black mud of the earth churned up with last year's dead
leaves.

Gilbert let his horse stop to drink, and his men waited in single file
to take their turn.

"Psst!" The peculiar hiss which Italians make to attract attention came
sharp and distinct from the low growth of the chestnut shoots.

Gilbert turned his head quickly in the direction of the sound. A
swarthy face appeared, framed in a close leathern cap on which small
rings of rusty iron were sewn strongly, but not very regularly. Then a
long left arm, clad in the same sort of mail, pushed the lower boughs
aside and made a gesture in the direction whence Gilbert had come,
which was meant to warn him back--a gesture of the flat hand, held
across the breast with thumb hidden, just moving a little up and down.

"Why should I go back?" asked Gilbert, in his natural voice.

"Because yes," answered the dark man, in the common Italian idiom, and
in a low tone. "Because we are waiting for the Florentines, certain of
us of Pistoja, and we want no travellers in the way. And then--because,
if you will not--"

The right arm suddenly appeared, and in the hand was a spear, and the
act was a threat to run Gilbert through, unmailed as he was, and just
below his adversary. But as Gilbert laid his hand upon his sword,
looking straight at the man's eye, he very suddenly saw a strange
sight; for there was a long arrow sticking through the head, the point
out on one side and the feather on the other; and for a moment the man
still looked at him with eyes wide open. Then, standing as he was, his
body slowly bent forward upon itself as if curling up, and with a crash
of steel it rolled down the bank into the pool of water, where the
lance snapped under it.

For little Alric, the Saxon groom, had quietly slipped to the ground
and had strung his bow, suspecting trouble, and had laid an arrow to
the string, waiting; and little Alric's aim was very sure; it was also
the first time that he had shot a man, and he came of men who had been
bowmen since Alfred's day, and before that, and had killed many, for
generations, so that it was an instinct with them to slay with the bow.

"Well done, boy!" cried Gilbert.

But his horse reared back, as the dead body fell splashing into the
pool, and Alric quietly unstrung his bow again and remounted to be
ready. Then Gilbert would have ridden on, but Dunstan hindered him.

"This fellow was but a sentinel," he said. "A little further on you
will find these woods filled with armed men waiting to surprise the
riders we saw from above. Surely, I will die with you, sir; but we need
not die like rats in a corn-bin. Let us ride up a little way again, and
then skirt the woods and take the road where it joins the river, down
in the valley."

"And warn those men of Florence that they are riding into an ambush,"
added Gilbert, turning his horse.

So they rode up the hill; and scarcely were they out of sight of the
spring when a very old woman and a ragged little boy crept out of the
bushes, with knives, and began to rob the dead man of his rusty mail
and his poor clothes.

Gilbert reached the road a long stone's-throw beyond the last chestnut
shoots, and galloped forward to meet the advancing knights and
men-at-arms. He drew rein suddenly, a dozen lengths before them, and
threw up his open right hand. They were riding leisurely, but all in
mail, some having surcoats with devices embroidered thereon, and most
of them with their heads uncovered, their steel caps and hoods of mail
hanging at their saddle-bows.

"Sirs," cried Gilbert, in a loud, clear voice, "you ride to an ambush!
The chestnut woods are full of the men of Pistoja."

A knight who rode in front, and was the leader, came close to Gilbert.
He was a man not young, with a dark, smooth face, as finely cut as a
relief carved upon a shell, and his hair was short and iron-grey.

Gilbert told him what had happened in the woods, and the elderly knight
listened quietly and thoughtfully, while examining Gilbert's face with
half-unconscious keenness.

"If you please," said the young man, "I will lead you by the way I have
ridden, and you may enter the bushes from above, and fight at better
advantage."

But the Florentine smiled at such simple tactics. To feel the breeze,
he held up his right hand, which issued from a slit in the wrist of his
mail, so that the iron mitten hung loose; and the wind was blowing
toward the woods. He called to his squire.

"Take ten men, light torches, and set fire to those young trees."

The men got a cook's earthenware pot of coals, fed all day long with
charcoal on the march, lest there should be no fire for the camp at
night; and they lit torches of pitched hemp-rope, and presently there
was a great smoke and a crackling of green branches. But the leader of
the Florentines put on his steel cap and drew the mail hood down over
his shoulders, while all the others who were bareheaded did the same.

"Sir," said the knight to Gilbert, "you should withdraw behind us, now
that you have done us this great service. For presently there will be
fighting here, and you are unmailed."

"The weather is overwarm for an iron coat," answered Gilbert, with a
laugh. "But if I shall not trespass upon the courtesies of your country
by thrusting my company upon you, I will ride at your left hand, that
you may the more safely slay with your right."

"Sir," answered the other, "you are a very courteous man. Of what
country may you be?"

"An Englishman, sir, and of Norman blood." He also told his name.

"Gino Buondelmonte, at your service," replied the knight, naming
himself.

"Nay, sir," laughed Gilbert, "a knight cannot serve a simple squire!"

"It is never shame for gentle-born to serve gentle-born," answered the
other.

But now the smoke was driving the men of Pistoja out of the wood, and
the hillside down which Gilbert had ridden was covered with men in
mail, on horseback, and with footmen in leather and such poor armour as
had been worn by the dead sentinel. Buondelmonte thrust his feet home
in his wide stirrups, settled himself in the saddle, shortened his
reins, and drew his sword, while watching all the time the movements of
the enemy. Gilbert sat quietly watching them, too. As yet he had never
ridden at a foe, though he had fought on foot, and he unconsciously
smiled with pleasure at the prospect, trying to pick out the man likely
to fall by his sword. In England, or in France, he would certainly have
put on the good mail which was packed on the sumpter mule's back; but
here in the sweet Italian spring, in the morning breeze full of the
scent of wild flowers, and the humming of bees and the twittering of
little birds, even fighting had a look of harmless play, and he felt as
secure in his cloth tunic as if it had been of woven steel.

The position of the Florentines was the better, for they had the broad
homeward road behind them, in case of defeat; but the men of Pistoja,
driven from the woods by the thick smoke and the burning of the
undergrowth, were obliged to scramble down a descent so steep that many
of them were forced to dismount, and they then found themselves huddled
together in a narrow strip of irregular meadow between the road and the
foot of the stony hill. Buondelmonte saw his advantage. His sword shot
up at arm's length over his head, and his high, clear voice rang out in
a single word of command.

In a moment the peace of nature was rent by the scream of war. Hoofs
thundered, swords flashed, men yelled, and arrows shot through the
great cloud of dust that rose suddenly as from an explosion. In the
front of the charge the Italian and the Norman rode side by side, the
inscrutable black eyes and the calm olive features beside the Norman's
terrible young figure, with its white glowing face and fair hair
streaming on the wind, and wide, deep eyes like blue steel, and the
quivering nostrils of the man born for fight.

Short was the strife and sharp, as the Florentines spread to right and
left of their leader and pressed the foe back against the steep hill in
the narrow meadow. Then Buondelmonte thrust out straight and sure, in
the Italian fashion, and once the mortal wound was in the face, and
once in the throat, and many times men felt it in their breasts through
mail and gambison and bone. But Gilbert's great strokes flashed like
lightnings from his pliant wrist, and behind the wrist was the Norman
arm, and behind the arm the relentless pale face and the even lips,
that just tightened upon each other as the deathblows went out, one by
one, each to its place in a life. The Italian destroyed men skilfully
and quickly, yet as if it were distasteful to him. The Norman slew like
a bright destroying angel, breathing the swift and silent wrath of God
upon mankind.

Blow upon blow, with clash of steel, thrust after thrust as the darting
of serpents, till the dead lay in heaps, and the horses' hoofs churned
blood and grass to a green-red foam, till the sword-arm waited high and
then sank slowly, because there was none for the sword to strike, and
the point rested among the close-sewn rings of mail on Buondelmonte's
foot, and the thin streams of blood trickled quietly down the dimmed
blade.

"Sir," said Buondelmonte, courteously, "you are a marvellous fine
swordsman, though you fence not in our manner, with the point. I am
your debtor for the safety of my left side. Are you hurt, sir?"

"Not I!" laughed Gilbert, wiping his broad blade slowly on his horse's
mane for lack of anything better.

Then Buondelmonte looked at him again and smiled.

"You have won yourself a fair crest," he laughed, as he glanced at
Gilbert's cap.

"A crest?" Gilbert put up his hand, and uttered an exclamation as it
struck against a sharp steel point.

A half-spent arrow had pierced the top of his red cloth cap and was
sticking there, like a woman's long hairpin. He thought that if it had
struck two inches lower, with a little more force, he should have
looked as the man in the woods did, whom Alric had killed. He plucked
the shaft from the stiff cloth with some difficulty, and, barely
glancing at it, tossed it away. But little Alric, who had left the
guide to take care of the mules and had followed the charge on foot,
picked up the arrow, marked it with his knife and put it carefully into
his leathern quiver, which he filled with arrows he picked up on the
grass till it would hold no more. Dunstan, who had ridden in the press
with the rest, was looking among the dead for a good sword to take, his
own being broken.

"Florence owes you a debt, sir," said Buondelmonte, an hour later, when
they were riding back from the pursuit. "But for your warning, many of
us would be lying dead in that wood. I pray you, take from the spoil,
such as it is, whatsoever you desire. And if it please you to stay with
us, the archbishop shall make a knight of you, for you have won
knighthood to-day."

But Gilbert shook his head, smiling gravely.

"Praised be God, I need nothing, sir," he answered. "I thank you for
your courteous hospitality, but I cannot stay, seeing that I ride upon
a lady's bidding. And as for a debt, sir, Florence has paid hers
largely in giving me your acquaintance."

"My friendship, sir," replied Buondelmonte, not yielding in compliment
to the knightly youth.

So they broke bread together and drank a draught, and parted. But
Buondelmonte gave Dunstan a small purse of gold and a handful of silver
to little Alric and the muleteer, and Gilbert rode away with his men,
and all were well pleased.

Yet when he was alone in the evening, a sadness and a horror of what he
had done came over him; for he had taken life that day as a man mows
down grass, in swaths, and he could not tell why he had slain, for he
knew not the men who fought on the two sides, nor their difference. He
had charged because he saw men charging, he had struck for the love of
strife, and had killed because it was of his nature to kill. But now
that the blood was shed, and the sun which had risen on life was going
down on death, Gilbert Warde was sorry for what he had done, and his
brave charge seemed but a senseless deed of slaughter, for which he
should rather have done penance than received knighthood.

"I am no better than a wild beast," he said, when he had told Dunstan
what he felt. "Go and find out a priest to pray for t

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