Love Among the Ruins Part 40

"Have I not told you that no woman loves a coward?"

She was silent awhile, with her eyes wistful and melancholy, as though some spiritual conflict were pa.s.sing in her mind. Bitterness escaped in the man's words for all his tenderness and chivalry. He needed an answer. Anon she capitulated and appeared to surrender herself absolutely to circ.u.mstance. She began to tell Flavian of her adoption by Fulviac, of her vision in the ruined chapel, of the part a.s.signed to her as a woman ordained by heaven. He heard her in silence, finding quaint pleasure in listening to her voice, having never heard her talk at such length before. Her voice's modulations, its pathos, its many tones, were more subtle to him than any music, and seemed to steep in oblivion the grim realities of the last few days. He watched the play of thought upon her face, sun and shadow, calm and unrest. He began to comprehend the discords he had flung into her life; she was no longer a riddle to him; her confessions portrayed her soul in warm and delicate colouring--colouring pathetic and heroically pure. He had a glorious sense of joy in an instinctive conviction that this girl was worthy of all the highest chivalry a man's heart can conceive of.

Though he had a strong suspicion that he could humanise her Madonna for her, he refrained from argument, refrained from dilating on the iniquities her so-called crusades had already perpetrated. Moreover, the girl had opened her heart to him with a delicious and innocent ingenuousness. He felt that the hour had blessed him sufficiently; that personalities would be gross and impertinent in the light of that sympathy that seemed suddenly to have enveloped them like a golden cloud. The girl appeared to have surrendered herself spiritually into his keeping, not sorry in measure that a strong destiny had decided her doubts for her. They were to let political considerations and the ephemeral turmoils of the times sink under their feet. It was sufficient for them to be but a man and a woman, to forget the forbidden fruit, and the serpent and his lore. G.o.d walked the world; they were not ashamed to hear His voice.

So they came with their glittering horde of hors.e.m.e.n to Gambrevault, and rode over the green downs with towers beckoning from the blue. The Gilderoy forces were still miles away, and could not have threatened the retreat on Gambrevault had they been wise as to the event. Yeoland rode close at Flavian's side. He touched her hand, looked in her eyes, saw the colour stream to her cheeks, knew that she no longer was his enemy.

"Yonder stands Gambrevault," were his words; "its walls shall bulwark you against the world. Trust me and my eternal faith to you. I shall see G.o.d more clearly for looking in your eyes."

He lodged her in a chamber in the keep, a room that had been his mother's and still held the furniture, books, and music she had used.

Its window looked out on the castle garden, and over the double line of walls to the meadows and woods beyond. Maud, the castellan's wife, was bidden to wait upon her. Flavian gave her the keys of his mother's chests, where silks, samites, sarcenets galore, lace and all manner of golden fripperies, were stored. The ewers of the room were of silver, its hangings of violet cloth, its bed inlaid with ivory and hung with purple velvet. It had a shelf full of beautifully illumined books, a prayer-desk and a small altar, a harp, a lute, an embroidery frame, and numberless curios. Thus by the might of the sword Yeoland was installed in the great castle of Gambrevault.

So Duessa and Balthasar were dead. The girl had told Flavian what had pa.s.sed in Sforza's palace; the news shocked him more than he would have dreamed. The dead wound us with their unapproachableness and the mute pathos of their pale, imagined faces. They are like our own sins that stare at us from the night sky, irrevocable and beyond us for ever.

Flavian ordered tapers to be burnt and ma.s.ses said in the castle chapel for the souls of these two unfortunates. He himself spent more than an hour in silent prayer before he confessed, received penance and absolution.

That evening, at Flavian's prayer, Yeoland came down to meet him in the castle garden, with the castellan's two girls to serve her as maids of honour. She had put aside her armour, and was clad in a jacket of violet cloth, fitting close to the figure, and a skirt of light blue silk. In the old yew walk, stately and solemn, amid the bright parterres and stone urns gushing colour, the two children slipped away and left Yeoland and the man alone.

She seemed to have lost much of her restraint, much of her independence, of her reserve, in a few short hours. Her mood inclined towards silence and a certain delightful solemnity such as a lover loves. Her eyes met the man's with a rare trust; her hands went into his with all the ideal faith he had forecast in his dreams.

They stood together under the yews, full of youth and innocent joy of soul, timid, happily sad, content to be mere children. Flavian touched her hands as he would have touched a lily. She seemed too wonderful, too pure, too transcendent to be fingered. A supreme, a G.o.dly timidity possessed him; he had such love in his heart as only the strong and the pure can know, such love as makes a man a saint unto himself, a being wrapped round with the rarest chivalry of heaven.

Their words were very simple and infrequent.

"I have been thinking," said the girl.

"Yes?"

"How war seems ever in the world."

"How else should I have won you?"

She sighed and looked up over his shoulder at the sunlight glimmering gold through the yews.

"I have been thinking how I bring you infinite peril. They will not lose me easily. What if I bring you to ruin?"

"I take everything to myself."

"They believe me a saint."

"And I!"

"My conscience will reproach me, but now----"

"Well?"

"I am too happy to remember."

Their eyes met and flashed all the unutterable truths of the soul.

Flavian kissed her hand.

"Forget it all," he said, "save the words I spoke to you over that forest grave. Whatever doom may come upon me, though death frown, I care not; all the sky is at sunset, all the world is full of song. I could meet G.o.d to-morrow with a smile, since you have shown me all your heart."

From a little stone pavilion hidden by laurels the voices of flutes and viols swirled out upon the air. The west grew faint, and twilight increased; night kissed and closed the azure eyes of the day. Under the yew boughs, Flavian and Yeoland walked hand in hand; the music spoke for them; the night made their faces pale and spiritual under the trees.

They said little; a tremor of the fingers, a glance, a sigh were enough.

When the west had faded, and the last primrose streak was gone, Flavian kissed the girl's lips and sent her back to the two children, who were curled on a bench by the laurels, listening sleepily to the music of flute and viol.

The man's soul was too scintillant and joyous to shun the stars. He pa.s.sed up on to the battlements, and listened to the long surge of the summer sea.

And as he paced the battlements that night, he saw red, impish specks of flame start out against the black background of the night. They were the rebel watchfires burning on the hills, sinister eyes, red with the distant prophecy of war.

x.x.xI

It would be difficult to describe the thundercloud of thought that came down upon Fulviac's face when news was brought him of the capture of the girl Yeoland and the decimation of the vanguard from Geraint. There was something even Satanic upon his face for the moment. He was not a pleasant person when roused, and roused he was that day like any ogre.

His tongue ran through the whole gamut of blasphemy before he recovered a finer dignity and relapsed into a grim reserve. His men spoke to him with great suavity. He had decreed that Nord of the Hammer should be hanged for negligence, but the decree was unnecessary, since Flavian's sword had already settled the matter.

The Gilderoy forces therefore turned northwards, with their great baggage and siege train, and in due course came upon the Gerainters bivouacking on the ridge where the battle had taken place. The green slopes were specked with dark motionless figures, dead horses, and the wreckage of war. Men were burying the dead upon the battlefield.

Yeoland's guard had been slaughtered almost to a man; and the whole affair had damped very considerably the ardour of certain of the less trustworthy levies.

But Fulviac was not the man to sit and snivel over a defeat; he knew well enough that he had good men behind him, tough fighting stuff, fired by fanaticism and a long sense of wrong. He harangued his whole force, black-guarded with his lion's roar those concerned in the march from Geraint, treating them to such a scourging with words that they snarled and clamoured to be led on at once to prove their mettle. Their leaders had been at fault, nor did Fulviac keep their spirits cooling in the wind. The power of his own personality was great, and he had twenty thousand men at his back, who knew that to fail meant death and torture.

They had received a check from the Lord of Gambrevault; it was absolutely essential to the cause that they should wipe out the defeat, recapture their Saint and sacred banner, crush Gambrevault once and for ever. To this strenuous tune they marched on towards the sea, and that night lit their fires on the hills that ringed Gambrevault on the north.

As the sun climbed up and spread a curtain of gold over down and upland, those on the walls of Gambrevault saw steel glinting on the hills, the pikes and casques of Fulviac's horde. Yeoland saw them from her cas.e.m.e.nt, as she stood and combed her hair. Flavian, watching with certain knights on the keep, confronted the event with a merry smile.

The shimmering line of silver on the hills had broadened to a darker band, splashed lavishly with steel. The rebel host was coming on in a half moon, with each horn to the sea. Its centre held towards the ford and the dismantled Gambrevault mills, positions strongly held on the southern bank by a redoubt and stockaded trenches.

The criticisms delivered by those watching from the keep were various and forcible.

"By Jeremy--a rare mob!"

"Let them grip at Gambrevault," said Modred, "and they shall clutch at a cactus. Look at that long baggage train in the rear. d.a.m.n them, I guess they have the siege train from Gilderoy."

"We shall sweat a trifle."

Quoth Tristram, "They have little time to spare for a leaguer, rotting in trenches, if they are to make the country rise. They'll not leaguer us."

Flavian watched the advance under his hand.

"Fortunately or unfortunately, gentlemen," he said, "we have taken their Saint, their oracle, and their sacred banner. I imagine they will do their best to dispossess us. It is time we made for the meadows; I reckon we shall have hot work to-day."

When leaving the keep, Flavian crossed the castle garden, and caught under the tunnel of yews the flutter of a woman's gown. Sunlight glimmered through and wove a shimmering network in the air. Green and violet swept the stones; a white face shone in the shadows.

He went to her and kissed her hands. His eyes were brave and joyous as she looked into them, and there was no shadow of fear upon his face.

Trumpets were blowing in the meadows, piercing the confused hum of men running to arms.

"War, ever war!"