Chapter VII: Part III: XXII (2)

And he, an aristocrat of aristocrats, dirty and dishevelled, rubbed shoulders with the scourings of the gutter, shouted their shouts, echoed their exultation. At first the grim humour of the thing smote him in grosser farcical fashion; but the mood was not for long. He remembered Malise, whimpering and quivering in his arms; he remembered the body dragged about the square and worried by dogs; he remembered the carcase swinging by the rope; he remembered the dripping heads and the fragments of flesh tossed about by the maddened and intoxicated mob. It was then that his eyes grew hot with shame and his blood ran like lava through his veins. It was then that the spirit of a vampire rushed into his heart, and that he swore great solemn oaths by all the bones and relics of the saints. God give him a hale body out of Gilderoy, and this city scum should be scourged with iron and roasted by fire.

He got across the square by dint of his noisy hypocrisy, and turned morosely into a dark alley that led towards the walls. Hot-hearted gentleman, the mere panic-stricken thirst for existence had cooled out of him, and he was in a fine, rendering passion to his finger-tips, a striding, blasphemous temper, that longed to take the whole city by the throat and beat a fist in its bloated face. He wondered what had become of his knights, esquires, and men-at-arms. It was told him in later days how they died fighting in the abbey refectory, died with the Benedictines at their side, and a rare barrier of corpses to tell of the swing of their swords.

Flavian dodged into a dark porch to consider his circumstances and the baffling influence of the same. He had caught enough from the mob to comprehend what had occurred, and what was to follow. Certainly for many months he had heard rumours, but, like other demigods, he had turned a deaf ear and smiled like a Saturn. The largeness of the upheaval stupefied him at first; now, as he pondered it, it gave a more heroic colour to his passions.

To be free of Gilderoy: that was the necessity. He guessed shrewdly enough that the gates would be well guarded. And the walls! He smote his thigh and remembered where the river coursed round the rocky foundations, and washed the walls. A big plunge, a swim, and he would have liberty enough and to spare.

He set off instanter down alleys and byways, through the most poverty-stricken quarter of the city. The place had a hundred stenches on a hot summer night. Naturally enough, such haunts were deserted, save for a few hags garrulous at the doorways, and a few fragments of dirt, called by courtesy, children. The rats had gone marauding, leaving their offal heaps empty.

Keen as a fox, he threaded on, and came before long to the walls, a black mass, rising above the hovels packed like pigsties to the very ramparts. Avoiding a tower, he held along a lane that skirted the wall, looking for one of the many stairways leading to the battlements. It was here, in the light of a tavern window, that he came plump upon two sweaty artisans, rendered somewhat more gross and insolent by the fumes of liquor. The men challenged Flavian with drunken arrogance; they had their password, to the devil. All the accumulated viciousness of an hour tingled in his sword arm. He fell upon the men like a Barak, kicked one carcase into the gutter, and ran on.

He was soon up a stairway, and on the walls, finding them absolutely deserted. The city stretched behind him, a black chaos, emitting a grim uproar, its dark slopes chequered here and there with angry flame. Before him swept the river, and he heard it swirling amid the reeds. Further still, meadows lay open to the stars, and in the distance stood solemn woods and heights, touched with the silver of the sky.

He moved on to where a loop of the river curled up to wash the walls. The water was in full flood at the place, and he heard it gurgling cheerily against the stones. Flavian took a last look at Gilderoy, its castle red with burning cressets, its multitudinous roofs, its uproar like the noise of a nest of hornets. He shook his fist over the city, climbed the battlements, jumped for it, plunged like a log, came up spluttering to strike out for the further bank.

In the meadows the townsfolk kept horses at graze. Flavian, aglow to the finger-tips, with water squelching from his shoes, caught a cob that was hobbled in a field hard by the river. He unhobbled the beast, hung on by the mane, mounted, and set off bare-back for the road to Gambrevault.

XXVIII

Dawn climbing red over pinewoods piled on the hills; dawn optimistic yet ominous, harbinger of war and such perils as set the heart leaping and the blood afire; dawn that cried unto the world, "Better one burst of heroism and then the grave, than a miserable monotony of nothingness, a domestic surfeiting of the senses with a wife and a fat larder."

Out of the east climbed the man on the stolen horse, riding out of the dawn with the lurid phantasms of the night still running riot in his brain. No sleep had smoothed the crumpled page, or touched the memory with unguent to assuage the smart. Maledictions, vengeances, prophecies of fire and sword rushed with the red dawn over the hills.

With forty miles behind him, he came on his jaded, sweaty beast towards his own castle of Gambrevault, forded his own stream, saw his mills gushing foam, heard the thunder of the weir. How eternally peaceful everything seemed in the dewy amber light of the dawn! Away rolled the downs, billows of glorious green, into the west. Gambrevault's towers rose against the blue; he saw the camp in the meadows; his own banner blowing to the breeze.

The meadows that morning were quiet as a graveyard, as the Lord Flavian rode through to the great gate of Gambrevault. Soldiers idling about, stiffened up, saluted, stared in astonishment at the grim, morose-faced man, who rode by on a foundered horse, looking neither to the right hand nor the left. He cut something of a figure, as though he had been in a tavern brawl, and had spent the night snoring in a cow-house. Yet there was an indescribable power and dignity in the tatterdemalion rider for all his tumbled look. The compressed lips, knotted brow, smouldering eyes spoke of phenomenal emotions, phenomenal passions. Not a man cheered, and the silence was yet more eloquent than clamour. He rode in by the great gate, and parrying the blank glances and interrogations of his knights, called for two esquires, and withdrew to his own state rooms.

His first trouble was to acknowledge such necessities as hunger and cleanliness. He contrived to compass both at once, eating ravenously even while he was in the bath. His next command was for his harness, and his esquires armed him, agog for news, even waxing inquisitive, to be snubbed for their pains.

"Assemble my knights and gentlemen in the great hall," ran his order, and after praying awhile in his own private oratory, he passed down to join the assemblage, solemn and soul-burdened as a young Jove.

There is a certain vain satisfaction in being the possessor of some phenomenal piece of news, wherewith to astonish a circle of friends. The dramatic person blurts it out like a stage duke; the real epicure lets it filter through his teeth in fragments, watching with a twinkling satisfaction its effect upon his hearers. The Lord Flavian's revelations that morning were deliberate and gradual, leisurely in the extreme. Many a man waxes flippant or cynical when his feelings are deep and sincere, and he is disinclined to bare his heart to the world. Flavian addressed his assembled knights with a certain stinted and pedantic courtliness; when they had warmed to his level, then he could indulge his sympathies to the full. The atmosphere about those who wait to hear our experiences or opinions is often like cold water, somewhat repellent till the first plunge has been tried.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I regret to inform you that the Abbot Porphyry, my uncle, is numbered with the saints."

So much for the first confession; it elicited a sympathetic murmur from those assembled, a very proper and respectable expression of feeling, but nothing passionate.

"I also have to inform you, with much Christian resignation, that Sir Jordan and Sir Kay, Malise, my page, and some twenty men-at-arms are in all human probability dead."

This time some glimmer of light pervaded the hall. There was still mystification, silence, and an exchanging of glances.

"Finally, gentlemen, I may confess to you that a great insurrection is afoot in the land; that Gilderoy has declared against the King and the nobility; that the scum of a populace has made a great massacre of the magnates; that I, gentlemen, by the grace of God, have escaped to preach to you of these things."

A chorus of grim ejaculations came from the knights and the captains assembled. Astonishment, and emotions more durable, showed on every face. Flavian gained heat, and let his tongue have liberty; at the end of ten minutes of fervid oratory, the men were as wise as their lord and every wit as vicious. Gilderoy had signalised her rising in blood; mob rule had been proclaimed; the peasantry and townsfolk had thrown down the glove to the nobles. These were bleak, plain facts, that touched to the quick the men who stood gathered in the great hall of Gambrevault. Not a sword was in its scabbard when Modred's deep voice gave the cry--

"God and St. Philip--for the King."

Then like a powder bag flung into a fire came the news of the storming and wrecking of Avalon. A single man-at-arms had escaped the slaughter, escaped by crawling down an offal shoot and hiding till the rebels evacuated the place and marched under cover of night for Geraint. The man had crept out and fled on foot from the stricken place for Gambrevault. It was a tramp of ten leagues, but he had stuck to it through the night like a Trojan, and, knowing the road well, had reached Gambrevault before the sun was at noon. They brought him before Flavian and the rest, fagged to the fifth toe, and hardly able to stand. He told the whole tale, as much as he knew of it, in a blunt yet dazed way. His senses appeared numbed by the deeds that had been done that night.

Flavian leant back in his escutcheoned chair, and gnawed at his lip. This last thrust had gone home more keenly than the rest. That castle of lilies, Avalon the fair, was but a friend of wood and stone, yet a friend having wondrous hold upon his heart. He had been born there, and under the shadows of its towers his mother had taken her last sacrament. Men can love a tree, a cottage, a stream; Flavian loved Avalon as being the temple of the unutterable memories of the past. Desolation and ruin! Bertrand, his old master at arms, slain! He sprang up like an Achilles with the ghost of Patroclus haunting his soul.

"Gentlemen, shall these things pass? Hear me, God and the world, hear my oath sworn in this my castle of Gambrevault. May I never rest till these things are reprieved in blood, till there are too few men to bury the dead. Though my walls fall, and my towers totter, though I win ruin and a grave, I swear by the Sacrament to do such deeds as shall ring and resound in history."

So they went all of them together, and swore by the body and blood of the Lord to take such vengeance as the sword alone can give to the hot passions of mankind.

That noon there was much stir and life in Gambrevault. The camp hummed like a wasp's nest when violence threatens; the men were ready to run to arms on the first sounding of the trumpet. Armourers and farriers were at work. Flavian had sent out two companies of light horse to reconnoitre towards Gilderoy and Geraint. They had orders not to draw rein till they had sure view of such rebel voices as were on the march; to hang on the horizon; to watch and follow; to send gallopers to Gambrevault; on no account to give battle. Companies were despatched to drive in the cattle from the hills, and to bring in fodder. The Gambrevault mills were emptied of flour, and burnt to the ground, in view of their being of use to the rebels in case of a siege. Certain cottages and outhouses under the castle walls were demolished to leave no cover for an attacking force. The cats, tribocs, catapults, and bombards upon the battlements were overhauled, and cleared for a siege.

Towards evening, human wreckage began to drift in from the country, bearing lamentable witness to the thoroughness of Fulviac's incendiarism. Gambrevault might have stood for heaven by the strange scattering of folk who came to seek its sanctuary. Fire and sword were abroad with a vengeance; cottars, borderers, and villains had risen in the night; treachery had drawn its poniard; even the hound had snapped at its master's hand.

Many pathetic figures passed under the great arch of Gambrevault gate that day. First a knight came in on horseback, a baby in his arms, and a woman clinging behind him, sole relics of a home. Margaret, the grey-haired countess of St. Anne's, was brought in on a litter by a few faithful men-at-arms; her husband and her two sons were dead. Young Prosper of Fountains came in on a pony; the lad wept like a girl when questioned, and told of a mother and a sire butchered, a home sacked and burnt. There were stern faces in Gambrevault that day, and looks more eloquent than words. "Verily," said Flavian to Modred the Strong, "we shall have need of our swords, and God grant that we use them to good purpose."

So night drew near, and still no riders had come from the companies that had ridden out to reconnoitre towards Gilderoy and Geraint. Flavian had had a hundred duties on his hands: exercising his courtesy to the refugees, condoling, reassuring; inspecting the defences and the siege train; superintending the victualling of the place. He had ordered his troops under arms in the meadows, and had spoken to them of what had passed at Gilderoy, and what might be looked for in the future. There seemed no lack of loyalty on their part. Flavian had ever been a magnanimous and a generous overlord, glad to be merciful, and no libertine at the expense of his underlings. His feudatories were bound to him by ties more strong than mere legalities. They cheered him loudly enough as he rode along the lines in full armour, with fifty knights following as his guard.

Night came. Outposts had been pushed forward to the woods, and a strong picket held the ford across the river. On the battlements guards went to and fro, and clarions parcelled out the night, and rang the changes. In the east there was a faint yellowish light in the sky, a distant glare as of a fire many miles away. In the camp men were ready to fly to arms at the first thunder of war over the hills.

Flavian held a council in the great hall, a council attended by all his knights and captains. They had a great map spread upon the table, a chart of the demesnes of Gambrevault and Avalon, and the surrounding country. Their conjectures turned on the possible intentions of the rebels, whether they would venture on a campaign in the open, or lie snug within walls and indulge in raids and forays. And then--as to the loyalty of their own troops? On this point Flavian was dogmatic, having a generous and over-boyish heart, not quick to credit others with treachery.

"I would take oath for my own men," he said; "their fathers have served my fathers; I have never played the tyrant; there is every reason to trust their loyalty."

An old knight, Sir Tristram, had taken a goodly share in the debate, a veteran from the barons' wars, and a man of honest experience, no mere pantaloon. His grey beard swept down upon his cuirass; his deep-set eyes were full of intelligence under his bushy brows; the hands that were laid upon the table were clawed and deformed by gout.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I have not the fitness and youth of many of you, but I can lay claim to some wisdom in war. To my liege lord, whom, sirs, I honour as a man of soul, I would address two proverbs. First, despise not, sire, your enemies."

Modred laughed in his black beard.

"Reverence the scum of Gilderoy?"

"Ha, man, if we are well advised, these folk have been breathed upon by fanaticism. I tell you, I have seen a meanly-born crowd make a very stubborn day of it with some of the best troops that ever saw service. Secondly, sire, I would say to you, turn off your mercenaries if the sky looks black; never trust your neck to paid men when any great peril threatens."

Flavian, out of his good sense, agreed with Tristram.

"Your words are weighty," he said. "So long as we are campaigning, I will pay them well and keep them. If it comes to a siege, I will have no hired bravos in Gambrevault. And now, gentlemen, it is late; get what sleep you may, for who knows what may come with the morrow. Modred and Geoffrey, I leave to you the visiting of the outposts to-night. Order up my lutists and flute-players; I shall not sleep without a song."

He passed alone to the outer battlements, and let the night expand about his soul, the stars touch his meditations. From the minstrels' gallery in the hall came the wail of viols, the voices of flute, dulcimer and bassoon keeping a mellow under-chant. He heard the sea upon the rocks, saw it glimmering dimly to end in a fringe of foam.

So his thoughts soared to the face of one woman in the world, the golden Eve peering out of Paradise, whose soul seemed to ebb and flow like the moan of the distant music. He fell into deep forecastings of the future. He remembered her words to him, her mysterious warnings, her inexplicable inconsistencies, her appeal to war. Gilderoy had taught him much, and some measure of truth shone like a dawn spear in the east. A gulf of war and vengeance stretched from his feet. Yet he let his soul circle like a golden moth about the woman's beauty, while the wail of the viols stole out upon his ears.

XXIX

Little store of sleep had the Lord of Gambrevault that night. War with all its echoing prophecies played through his thought as a storm wind through the rotting casements of a ruin. He beheld the high hills red with beacons, the valleys filled with the surging steel of battle. Gilderoy and its terrors flamed through his brain. Above all, like the moon from a cloud shone the face of Yeoland, the Madonna of the Forest.

He was up and armed before dawn, and on the topmost battlements, eager for the day. The sun came with splendour out of the east, hurling a golden net over the woods piled upon the hills. Mists moved from off the sea, that shimmered opalescent towards the dawn. Brine laded the breeze. The waves were scalloped amber and purple, fringed with foam about the agate cliffs.

The hours were void to the man till riders should come in with tidings of how the revolt sped at Gilderoy and Geraint. The prophetic hints that had been tossed to him from the tongues of the mob had served to discover to him his own invidious fame. Gambrevault, on its rocky headland, stood, the strongest castle in the south, a black mass looming athwart the perilous path of war. The rebels would smite at it. Of that its lord was assured.

At noon he attended mass in the chapel, with all his knights, solacing his impatience with the purer aspirations of the soul. It was even as he left the chapel that Sir Modred met him, telling how a galloper had left the woods and was cantering over the meadows towards the headland. The man was soon under the arch of the great gate, his sweating horse smiting fire from the stones, dropping foam from his black muzzle. The rider was Godamar, Flavian's favourite esquire, a ruddy youth, with the heart of a Jonathan.

Modred brought him to the banqueting-hall, where Flavian awaited him in full harness, two trumpeters at his back.

"Sire, Geraint has risen."

"Ha!"

"They are marching on Gambrevault."

"Your news, on with it."

Godamar told how the troop had neared Geraint at eve and camped in the wood over night. At dawn they had reconnoitred the town, and seen, to their credit, black columns of "foot" pouring out by all the gates. The Gambrevault company had fallen back upon the woods unseen, and had watched the Gerainters massing in the city meadows about a red banner and one in armour upon a white horse. Godamar had lain low in a thicket and watched the rebels march by in the valley. They had passed between two hundred paces of him, and he swore by Roland the Paladin that it was a woman who rode the great white horse.

Flavian had listened to the man with a golden flux of fancy that had divined something of the esquire's meaning.

"Godamar," he said.

"Sire?"

"You rode with me that day when we tracked a certain lady from Cambremont glade towards the pine forest."

"Sire, you forestall me in thought."

"So?"

"I could even swear upon my sword that it is Yeoland of Cambremont who rides with the Gerainters."

Flavian coloured and commended him. Godamar ran on.

"I threaded the thicket, sire, made a detour, galloped hard and rejoined our company. The Gerainters were blind as bats; they had never a scout to serve them. We kept under cover and watched their march. They came due west in three columns, one following the other. Six miles from Geraint, Longsword gave me a spare horse and sent me spurring to bring you the news."

Flavian stroked his chin and brooded.

"Their numbers?" he asked anon.

"Ten thousand men, sire, we guessed it such."

Before Godamar had ended his despatch, a second galloper came in breathless from Gilderoy. He had left Fulviac's rebels massing in the meadows beyond the river, and had kept cover long enough to see the foremost column wheel westwards and take the road for Gambrevault. The scout numbered the Gilderoy force at anything between eight and twelve thousand pikes. Fulviac had been on the march three hours.

The Lord of Avalon stood forward in the oriel in the full light of the sun. Sea, hill, and woodland stretched before him under a peerless sky. There was the scent of brine in the breeze, the banner of youth was ablaze upon the hills. A red heart beat under his shimmering cuirass, red blood flushed his brain. It was a season of romance and of lusty daring, an hour when his manhood shone bright as his burnished sword.

Thoughts were tumbling, moving over his mind like water over a wheel. Geraint stood ten leagues from Gambrevault, Gilderoy thirteen. The Geraint forces had been on the march six hours or more, the men of Gilderoy only three. Hence, by all the craft of Araby, they of Geraint were three hours and three leagues to the fore. Bad generalship without doubt, but vastly prophetic to the man figuring in the oriel, his fingers drumming on the stone sill.

Strategy stirred in him, and waxed like a dragon created from some magic crystal into the might of deeds. The Lord of Gambrevault caught the strong smile of chivalry. A great venture burnt upon his sword. It was no uncertain voice that rang through the hall of Gambrevault.

"Gentlemen, to horse! Trumpets, blow the sally! Let every man who can ride, mount and follow me to-day. Blow, trumpets, blow!"

The brazen throats brayed from the walls, their shrill scream echoing and echoing amid the distant hills. Their message was like the plunging of a boulder into a pool, smiting to foam and clamour the camp in the meadows. Swords were girded on, spears plucked from the sods, horses saddled and bridled in grim haste. In one short, stirring hour Flavian rode out from Gambrevault with twelve hundred steel-clad riders at his back. Those on the walls watched this mass of fire and colour thundering over the meadows, splashing through the ford, smoking away to the east with trumpets clanging, banneroles adance. There was to be great work done that day. The sentinels on the walls gossiped together, and swore by their lord as he had been the King.

Gambrevault and its towers sank back against the skyline, its banner waving heavily above the keep. Flavian's mass of knights and men-at-arms held over the eastern downs that rolled greenly above the black cliffs and the blue mosaics of the sea. A brisk breeze laughed in their faces, setting plumes nodding, banneroles and pensils aslant. Their spears rose like the slim masts of many sloops in a harbour. The sun shone, the green woods beckoned to the glittering mass with its forest of rolling spears.

Flavian's pride whimpered as he rode in the van with Modred, Godamar, who bore the banner of Gambrevault, and Merlion d'Or, his herald. The man felt like a Zeus with a thunderbolt poised in his hand. A word, the flash of a sword, the cry of a trumpet, and all this splendid torrent of steel would leap and thunder to work his will. The star of chivalry shone bright in the heavens. As for this woman on the white horse, the Madonna of the Pine Forest, God and the saints, he would charge the whole world, hell and its legions, to win so rich a prize.

Turning northwards, with scouts scattered in the far van, they drew to wilder regions where the dark and saturnine outposts of the great pine forest stood solemn upon the hills. Dusky were the thickets against the sapphire sky, the cloud banners trailing in the breeze. The very valleys breathed of battle and sudden peril of the sword. Rounding a wood, they saw riders flash over the brow of a hill and come towards them at a gallop. The men drew rein before the great company of spears. Their leader saluted his lord, and glanced round grimly upon the sea of steel dwindling over the green slopes.

"Sire, we are well-fortuned."

"Say on."

"Ten thousand rebels from Geraint are on the march two miles away. Godamar has given you the news. We are on the crest of the wave."

Flavian tightened his baldric.

"Good ground to the east, Longsword?"

"Excellent for 'horse,' sire."

"To our advantage?"

"Half a mile further towards Geraint there lies a grass valley, a league long, four furlongs from wood to wood. The rebels will march through it, or I am a dotard. There stands your chance, sire. We can roll down on them like a torrent."

Flavian took time by the throat, and called on his man of the tabard.

"Make me this proclamation," quoth he: "'Gentlemen of Gambrevault, strike for King and chivalry. Let vengeance dye your swords. As for the lady riding upon the white horse, mark you, sirs, let her be as the Virgin out of heaven. We ride to take her and her banner. For the rest, no quarter and no prisoners. We will teach this mob the art of war.'"

The man of the tabard proclaimed it as he was bidden. The iron ranks thundered to him like billows foaming about a rock. Modred claimed silence with uplifted sword.

"Enough, gentlemen, enough. No bellowing. Muzzle your temper. We make our spring in silence, that we may claw the harder."

A line of hills lay before them, heights crowned with black pine woods, save for one bare ridge like a great scimitar carving the sky. Flavian advanced his companies up the slopes, halted them in a broad hollow under the brow of the hill. A last galloper had ridden in with hot tidings of the rebels. The Lord of Gambrevault, with Sir Modred and Longsword, cantered on to reconnoitre. They drew to a thicket of gnarled hollies on the hilltop, and looked down upon a long grass valley bounded north and south by woods.

Half a mile away came the rebel vanguard, a black mass of footmen plodding uphill, their pikes and bills shining in the sun. Pennons and gonfalons danced here and there, while in the thick of the column flew the red banner of the Forest, girt about by the spears of Yeoland's guard. She could be seen on her white horse in the midst of the press. The Gerainters were split into three columns, the second column half a mile behind the first, the third somewhat closer upon the second. They were marching without outriders, as though thoroughly assured of their own safety.

Modred chuckled grimly through his black beard, and smote his thigh.

"Fools, fools!"

"Devilish generalship," quoth Longsword under his beaver. "We can crush their van like a wheatfield before the rest can come up. What say you, sire, fewtre spears, and at them?"

Flavian had already turned his horse.

"No sounding of trumpets, sirs," he said; "we will deal only with their van. Call up our companies. God and St. Philip for Gambrevault!"

Over the bare ridge, with its barriers of sun-steeped trees, steel shivered and spears bristled, rank on rank, wave on wave. With a massed rhythm of hoofs, the flood crested the hill, plunged down at a gallop with fewtred spears. Knee to knee, flank to flank, a thousand streaks of steel deluged the hillside. Their trumpets throated now the charge; the iron ranks clashed and thundered, rocked on with a rush of glittering shields.

As dust rolling before a March wind, so the horsemen of Gambrevault poured down on the horde of wavering pikes. The storm had come sudden as thunder out of a summer sky. Before the hurtling impact of that bolt of war, the palsied ranks of foot crumbled like rotten timber. The Gerainters were too massed and too amazed to squander or give ground, to stem with bill and bow the rolling torrent of death. They were rent and trampled, trodden like straw under the stupendous avalanche of steel that crushed and pulverised with ponderous and invincible might.

"God and Gambrevault, kill, kill!"

Such was the death-cry thundered out over the rebel van. The column broke, burst into infinite chaos. Yeoland's guards alone stood firm, a tough core of oak amid rotten tinder. Over the trampled wreckage the fight swirled and eddied, circling about the knot of steel where the red banner flapped in the vortex of the storm.

Yeoland sat dazed on her white horse, as one in the grip of some terrific dream. Nord was at her side, snarling, snapping his jaw like a wolf, his great iron mace poised over his shoulder. The red banner flapped prophetic above their heads. Around them the fight gathered, a whirlwind of contorted figures and stabbing steel.

Yeoland's eyes were on one figure in the press, a man straddling a big bay horse, smiting double-handed with his sword, his red plume jerking in the hot rush of the fight. She saw horse and man go down before him; saw him buffet his way onward like a galley ploughing against wind and wave. His leaping sword and tossing plume came steady and strenuous through the girdle of death.

Fear, pride, a hundred battling passions played like the battle through the woman's mobile brain. She watched the man under the red plume with an intensity of feeling that made her blind to all else for the moment. Love seemed to struggle towards her in bright harness through the fight. She saw the last rank of the human rampart pierced. The man on the bay horse came out before her like some warrior out of an old epic.

None save Nord stood between them, shaggy and grim as a great Norse Thor. She watched the iron mace swing, saw it fall and smite wide. Flavian stood in the stirrups, both hands to the hilt, his horse's muzzle rammed against the opposing brute's chest. The blow fell, a great cut laid in with all the culminating courage of an hour. The sword slashed Nord's gorget, buried its blade in the bull-like neck. He clutched at his throat, toppled, slid out of the saddle and rolled under his horse's hoofs.

The man's hand snatched at the girl's bridle; he dragged her and her horse out of the press. She had a confused vision of carnage, of stabbing swords and trampling hoofs. She saw her banner-bearer fall forward on his horse's neck, thrust through with a sword, while Modred seized the banner staff from his impotent hand. The rebel column had deliquesced and vanished. In its stead she was girdled by grim and exultant horsemen whose swords flashed in the sun.

Trumpets blew the retreat. A thousand glittering riders swarmed about her and the knight with the red plume. She had his words confusedly in her ears, strong, passionate words, heroic, yet utterly tender. They rode uphill together amid the clangour of his men. In a minute they had won the ridge, and were swinging down the further slope with their faces towards Gambrevault.

XXX

Paris and Helen have been dead centuries, yet in that universal world of the mind they still live, young and glorious as when the Grecian galleys ploughed foam through the blue AEgean. The world loves a lover. Troilus stages our own emotions for us in godlier wise than we poor realists can hope to do. We owe an eternal gratitude to those who have stood for love in history. All men might well desire to play the Tristan to Iseult of the Irish eyes. We forget Gemma Donati, and follow with Dante's wistful idealism the gleaming figure of Beatrice in Paradise.

Now the Lord Flavian was one of those happy persons who seem to stumble into heaven either by prodigious instinct or remarkable good-fortune. God gives to many men gold; to others intellect; to some truth; to few, a human echo, a harmony in the spirit, the right woman in the world. Many of us are such unstable folk that we vibrate vastly to a beautiful face and hail heaven in a pair of violet eyes. The chance is that such a business turns out miserably. It is a wise rule to search the world through to find your Beatrice, or bide celibate to the end. Happy is the man whose instinctive choice is ratified by all the wisest poetry of heaven. Happy is he who finds a ruby as he rakes the ephemeral flower-gardens of life, a gem eternally bright and beautiful, durable, unchanging, flashing light ever into the soul. It is given to few to love wisely, to love utterly, to love till death.

That summer day Flavian saw life at its zenith, as he rode through the woods on the way to Gambrevault. The horse had dropped to a trot, and the man had taken off his helmet and hung it at his saddle-bow. He was still red from the melee; his eyes were bright and triumphant. The girl at his side looked at him half-timidly, a tremor upon her lip, her glances clouded. The terrific action of the last hour still seemed to weigh upon her senses, and she seemed fated to be the sport of contending sentiments. No sooner had she struggled to some level of saintliness than love rushed in with burning wings, and lo, all the tinsel of her religion fell away, and she was a mere Eve, a child of Nature.

Flavian watched her with the tenderness of a strong man, who is ready to give his life for the woman he serves. Love seemed to rise from her and play upon him like perfume from a bowl of violets; her eyes transfigured him, and he longed to touch her hair.

"At last."

"Lord?"

"Treat me as a man, I hate that epithet."

"You are a great signor."

"What are titles, testaments, etiquettes to us! I am only great so long as you trust and honour me."

"Your power might appear precarious."

"As you will."

"Yet war is loose!"

He looked round upon the sea of men that rolled on every hand.

"And war at its worst. I have seen enough in three days to make me loathe your partisans and their principles."

"Perhaps."

"It is a wicked and inhuman business."

"What are you going to do with me?" she said.

"Remove you from the hands of butchers and offal-mongers; put you like a pearl in a casket in my own castle of Gambrevault."

"You incur the greater peril."

"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 passing 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 circumstance. She began to tell Flavian of her adoption by Fulviac, of her vision in the ruined chapel, of the part assigned 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. God walked the world; they were not ashamed to hear His voice.

So they came with their glittering horde of horsemen 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 God 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 passed 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 masses 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 godly 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 God 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 passed 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.

XXXI

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 casement, 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. Damn 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!"

"You are sad?"

"Fulviac has the whole kingdom at his back."

"If he led the world, I should not waver."

"With me it is different; I am a woman and you know my heart."

"So well that I seek to know nothing else in the world, I desire no greater wisdom than my love. You are with me, and my heart sings. No harm can come to you whatever doom may fall on Gambrevault."

"Think you my thoughts are all of my own safety?"

"Ah, golden one, never fear for me. What is life? a little joy, a little pain, and then eternity. I would rather have an hour's glory in the sun than fifty years of grey monotony. It is something to fight, and even to die, for the love of a woman. There is no shadow over my soul."

There was a great heroism in his voice, and her eyes caught the light from his. She touched his cuirass with her slim white fingers.

"God keep you!"

"Ha, I do not smell of earth to-day, nor dream of requiems."

"No, you will come back to me."

"Give me your scarf."

She took the green silk and knotted it about his arm; a rich colour shone in her cheeks, her eyes were warm and wonderfully luminous.

"God keep you!"

So he kissed her lips and left her.

The rebel horde had rolled down in their thousands from the hills. Flavian saw their black masses moving from the woods, as he rode down from the great gate. It was evident to him that Fulviac would try and force the ford and win his way to the open meadows beyond. The river ran fast with a deep but narrow channel, and there was only one other ford some nine miles upstream. His own men were under arms in the meadows. With his knights round him, Flavian rode down to the redoubt and trenches by the river-bank, packed as they already were with archers and men-at-arms. He was loudly cheered as he reined in and scanned the rebel columns moving over the downs.

Fulviac had ridden forward with a company of spears to reconnoitre. He saw the captured banner of The Maid hoisted derisively on Gambrevault keep; he saw the redoubt and the stockades covering the ford; the foot massed in the meadows; Flavian's mounted men-at-arms drawn up under the castle walls. Sforza and several captains of note were with Fulviac. The man was in a grim mood, a slashing Titanic humour. The passage of the river was to be forced, Flavian's men engaged in the meadows. He would drive them into Gambrevault before nightfall. Then they would cast their leaguer, bring up the siege train taken from Gilderoy, and batter at Gambrevault till they could storm the place.

Early in the day Fulviac detached a body of two thousand men under Colgran, a noted free-lance, to march upstream, cross by the upper ford, and threaten Flavian on the flank. The fighting began at ten of the clock, when Fulviac's bowmen scattered along the river and opened fire upon the stockades. Flavian's archers and arbalisters responded. A body of five thousand rebels advanced with great mantlets upon wheels to the northern bank and entrenched themselves there. A second body, with waggons laden with timber and several flat-bottomed boats, poured down to the river a mile higher up, and began to throw a rough, raft-like bridge across the stream. At half-past ten masses of men-at-arms splashed through the water at the ford, under cover of a hot fire from the archers lining the bank, and began an assault upon the redoubt and the stockades.