Chapter X: How Hugh Was Tested

As the comrades were mounting their horses the next morning, there was a commotion at the inn gate and Fulke of Neuilly entered the courtyard. He waved back the crowd of curious folk who always followed at his heels and strode across to Hugh's side.

He looked, if possible, more gaunt than he had the night before. His eyes burned like coals. Twin patches of vivid scarlet capped his cheekbones. But there was a restraint in his manner which had been lacking when he harangued the crowd in the marketplace.

"It has come to my ears that I did ye twain an injustice," he began curtly. "Fair sirs, none is more humble than I in acknowledging a wrong done. I cry your pardon. But I would have ye believe that I have found so much of wickedness and evil broadcast in the land that it is become hard to see that any goodness may prevail--more particularly among the young and hot-blooded."

Hugh regarded him in bewilderment, but Matteo answered as curtly as he had spoken.

"Of a truth, Messer Fulke, there are few of your cloth would own to a fault. Prithee, what has turned your heart toward us?"

The preacher surveyed the jongleur steadily for a long moment.

"Doth anti-Christ reign in your soul?" he demanded abruptly.

Matteo raised his eyes.

"No more than in yours, Messer Priest. But I have seen more than I care to remember of clerkly hypocrisy, and I cannot abide smugness in place of virtue."

Fulke heard him out quietly.

"That is true, Sir Jongleur," he admitted. "There are a-many of God's servants in this land unworthy of their livery, and it may be such are to be found otherwhere. I have laboured to point out all who came in my way. Hell hath hotter fires for them than for the laity. But I came not hither to argue with ye, fair sirs. I mocked ye for idlers and made use of my power over the people in the market-place to compel ye to a purpose ye did not intend. Thereby I did wrong. You, Messer Englishman, go upon a good quest, and this jongleur, your companion, doth as well as he may in that he aids you. The crosses I put upon ye are meaningless, but I would have ye not forget them."

His eyes flared with a sudden lustre.

"Ay," he continued tensely, "forget them not, for I say to ye, that though ye be not vowed for the Crusade, yet shall your fate be cast with that of the host."

Hugh gasped.

"How know ye this?" he cried.

"I cannot say," answered Messer Fulke, his eyes strangely dulled. "But tongues speak in me over which I have no control. Think well of my words, fair sirs."

He raised his hand in a gesture of blessing, and turned to leave the courtyard. But presently, whilst they watched him, dumbfounded, he retraced his steps.

"Messer Jongleur," he said to Matteo with sad wistfulness, "hast seen the Holy Sepulchre?"

Matteo nodded, too surprised to speak.

"With thine own eyes?"

"Yes."

Fulke sighed.

"Ah, lucky youth! That precious sight upon which mine eyes may never dwell!"

"Surely, you go with the host, Messer Fulke?" asked Hugh kindly.

The priest shook his head.

"I go upon my Father's business," he said. "My path lies otherwhere. God keep you, fair sirs."

Before they could question him further, his quick, nervous stride had carried him into the midst of the crowd at the inn gateway, whose ranks closed around him in a tempest of adulation.

"In sooth, this Fulke is a great priest," said Hugh, as they rode slowly after him to join the column of Crusaders.

"And a sick man," added Matteo thoughtfully.

"Sick?"

"Yes, his days are numbered, or I have never seen the sickness of the lungs. Also, Hugh, he knoweth it."

Matteo spoke no more than the truth. Messer Fulke was too ill to journey on with the host that day. He tarried for a while at Troyes, rallying his strength, and then rode forth to castigate certain dilatory persons who had taken the Cross, and in the heat of his labour perished as he had foreseen, unable to witness the fruit of his own mighty efforts.

The knights and leaders of the host were not sorry to miss Fulke. They had a strong contingent of churchmen for the necessary masses and other holy services, jolly, live-at-your-ease clerks, who kept sermons for sermon time; and the hard-fighting men-at-arms preferred the counsels of such to the relentless, austere piety of the priest of Neuilly, who was swift to seize every opportunity for admonition and who spared none from prince to varlet.

The host was like a snowball that starts an avalanche. Every league that the column traversed brought some addition to it. Perhaps it was the following of a petty baron; perhaps a single adventurer, armoured knight or leather-coated burgher; perhaps the imposing array of a province or town. From day to day the numbers grew, and long before they had traversed Burgundy and reached the pass over Mont Cenis they had attained the proportions of an army.

Geoffrey the Marshal made much of Hugh and Matteo, and they rode with the great lords and barons. Knights famous throughout Europe companioned them--Manasses de l'Lisle, Macaire de Sainte-Menehould, Miles le Brabant, Reginald de Dampierre, Geoffrey de Joinville, Payen d'Orleans, Peter de Bracieux, Matthew de Montmorency, Conon de Béthune, James d'Avesnes, Anseau de Cayeaux and many more, noted for skill in tourney and the field. Villehardouin had not boasted when he claimed that the best men-at-arms of Western Europe were joining the host.

Previous Crusades had enlisted larger armies, but in none had the organisation been so precise. Each lord and baron, in accordance with his degree, had made himself the captain of a company of men-at-arms and foot-sergeants who owned his leadership. The lesser barons, in turn, were leagued under the great lords of their localities, and these, likewise, ranged themselves under one or another of the princes at the head of the host, the Marquis Boniface de Montferrat, who had been elected general of the Crusade; Count Baldwin of Flanders and Hainault, Count Louis of Blois, Count Walter de Brienne, Count Hugh de St. Paul, Count Simon de Montfort or Count Bertrand von Katzenelenbogen who led the German Crusaders.

In this task of organisation Villehardouin had played the principal part. Indeed, no other man had borne so considerable a share of the burden of planning the details of mobilising and moving the Crusaders from widely-scattered countries across Europe and the Mediterranean, and now that his dream was approaching fulfilment he was happy as a lad.

"Ah, lordling, little may you guess the toils and anxieties which have been my lot," he said to Hugh, as they rode with the immense white skyline of the Alps before them. "Two and a half years have I laboured since my late lord, the Count Thibaut--God rest his soul!--and his cousin, the Count of Blois, took the cross at the tournament at Ecri and so set an example to all hardy Christians. Many a night have I lain sleepless, fearing the Crusade would never start; but always God hath stepped down and helped us when human aid was not.

"'Tis now more than a year gone since I treated with the Venetians to carry us over-sea, and there were times then when it seemed impossible we could come to terms. But the worst blow ever was struck at me was when I journeyed home, with fair terms gained, to find my lord, Count Thibaut, dying. Never lived there gentler knight! The barons had picked him for their leader, and when he died we were like children without a father.

"Time pressed, and none would fill his place. Duke Odo of Burgundy and Count Thibaut of Bar-le-duc refused. My heart weakened. I lost faith. But as a last resort we sent messages to the Marquis Boniface de Montferrat, begging him to lead us, and at a parliament held at Soissons he gave his consent. Ah, Messer Hugh, I cannot speak of our joy, for we knew him for a lord, bold and fearless and a right trusty knight."

"Well may you say so, Lord Marshal," agreed Matteo, who rode at Villehardouin's other bridle-rein. "There is no better general in all the world than the Marquis. He hath battled in the Holy Land and couched his spear against Saladin himself. The blood of Crusaders runs in his veins. And he hath a ready ear for knightly tales or polished chansons. Greeks and Saracens both he knoweth well."

"A good lord to follow in a good cause," added Hugh.

Matteo drummed with his fingers on his shield, and burst into the "Chanson of William of the Long Sword," elder brother of the Marquis Boniface, whose son was titular King of Jerusalem. The knights urged their horses closer, and when he came to the clamorous chorus they roared it after him, so that the Burgundian peasants by the wayside dropped their tools of husbandry and fled in panic fear:

Bloody-red from helm to heel,
William Long Sword swung his steel!
Round him many a Paynim lance
Sought to ward him, to advance.
But he slew them all.
'Gainst his arm could naught avail--
Scimiter or Damascus mail--
Crushed to earth they fall!

Matteo was always in demand amongst the knights of the several companies, and Hugh found himself thrown into increasing intimacy with the Cæsar Michael and his daughter--or rather, with the Lady Helena. How it began Hugh could not say. But early in the march it was settled that he was to ride with her for certain periods each day. At first it seemed that he met her as they were starting forth in the morning or after the midday rest or perhaps in the midst of a stroll about a village, in which the camp was pitched for the night. Accident was the cause of these early encounters, and loneliness and curiosity stimulated others.

She repelled him, whilst she attracted him. There was something of Oriental mystery, as well as languor, in her character. He was conscious that the face she opposed to him was a mask behind which another personality--he suspected a more fiery, intense, tigerish self, capable of immense selfishness and gusty passions--lurked in enforced concealment. Once he surprised this self, when he looked up to see her eyes blazing under their heavy lids as if they would read the inmost secrets of his heart. But it fled instantly to cover.

"You are so strange-, Messer Hugh," she smiled. "I was wondering if you were really so good and generous?"

There was an under-current of mockery in her words that put Hugh upon the defensive.

"You would make fun of me," he reproached her.

"No," she asserted. "I was thinking of how you listened to the outlaw who argued the wrongs of his kind. It was as if you credited him."

"I did," said Hugh simply. "There is much evil in the world--as Messer Fulke says--and most of it falls upon the peasants."

"But what else are they made for? It is their portion to serve, even as it is the portion of the horse or the dog or the oxen."

"They have souls," answered Hugh, puzzled. "They are people like us, are they not?"

"Oh, have your western monks decided so?" she said carelessly. "'Twas a point I thought otherwise upon."

So she tricked him out of the question he would have asked, at the same time involuntarily exposing a view of her own soul, the driving power of that hidden personality.

She was more than ordinarily interesting to talk to, for she had known exile since she was a child and had travelled in many countries--over practically all the known world. To Hugh, fresh from his quiet backwater in far-away England, she was a mine of information. He listened breathless to her off-hand stories of courts and rulers and tourneys. But of Constantinople she seldom spoke.

"'Tis a subject that irks me," she replied when he would have questioned her. "Forbear, Messer Hugh. An you were an exile seeing all that you loved and treasured seized by others, the glory and power that was rightfully yours in the possession of a usurper, you would know the sorrow that embitters me."

Then her big eyes flamed and her hand opened and shut, as she dropped her horse's rein.

"Oh, that I were a man!" she cried. "With a few stout knaves at my back I would storm the Triple-Wall and cast Alexius from his ill-gotten throne. I would bind him and his sycophants, tear out their eyes, and leave them to drag out their days with the rats in the dungeons of Blachernae."

"Are they very terrible dungeons?" asked Hugh idly.

The mask dropped across her face.

"All dungeons are terrible," she answered colourlessly.

She paused as if she expected him to ask more; but he said nothing, vaguely uneasy, with the feeling that comes when a hostile swordsman is faced.

For all his reticence, his secret distrust, he could not escape entirely the subtle spell she wove around him. She was beautiful; she was interested in him; she made herself attractive to him. Often he pressed the hunting-glove that he carried beneath his hauberk, and breathed a quiet prayer. He was a simple lad, untaught in the world's ways, only his native honesty and singleness of purpose betwixt him and temptation.

He required all his strength one night when she surprised him as he sat against a boulder on an Alpine hillside, the frosty stars twinkling overhead and a vasty silence below, wrestling with the contending forces in his heart.

The first he knew of her was her hand on his mailed arm.

"Ah, Messer Hugh, you are thinking of your love at home in England," she said softly.

"Love? No--'tis not so," stumbled Hugh.

"Then you have no lady you are pledged to?"

Hugh held silent, and the fingers on his arm seemed to burn through the mail.

"You do not answer," she sighed reproachfully.

"There is nobody in England," he muttered.

She laughed in a way she had, the persuading trill of lapping water in her voice.

"Nobody? That is because there are so many."

He did not answer, and she came closer.

"Do the hills make you lonely, too?" she whispered.

He shivered. It was uncanny.

"Yes," he jerked betwixt clicking teeth.

She waited, still very close to him.

"You do not ask me to sit by you, Hugh," she suggested.

"I--I----"

He rose stiffly.

"Let us seek a fire," he said, mastering himself by a supreme effort. "I am cold."

She walked beside him without a word.

Later that night, whilst Hugh vainly longed for sleep, Matteo came to him.

"Hugh," began the jongleur, "are we comrades?"

"Yes," said Hugh, surprised.

"And betwixt us there are no secrets?"

"I know of none."

"That is well, comrade. Now, prithee, bear with what I say. I speak as becomes a friend. Hugh, I have watched the Lady Helena's interest in you, and it hath seemed to me that she worked with some end in view. I know not what it may be, any more, perchance, than yourself. But we have a quest, you and I; and I feel that she is concerned in it. So my counsel is to discover to her naught of our plans and to remember always that she is a suspected foe."

Hugh clasped the jongleur's hand.

"That is good counsel," he said gratefully. "Doubt not I will heed it."

Matteo's few words proved the necessary alchemy to clear the confusion of Hugh's thoughts. Weaker impulses he put resolutely aside, facing squarely the issues of right and duty. He spent more time in Matteo's company, chatted with knights and lords of tricks of arms, brave deeds in the past, exploits of venery or falconry. At night he slept peacefully again.

If Helena Comnena entertained resentment for Hugh's rebuff, she concealed it easily during the days in which the Crusaders pressed on across the plains of Lombardy toward the head of the Adriatic Sea, where Venice ruled unchallenged from her citadel in the centre of the lagoons. Her manner toward him was precisely the same, a mingling of friendliness and mockery. But she never reverted to their old intimacy until the afternoon the host halted by a sedgy shore and stared over the waters at a silhouette of sparkling domes and towers that marked the Island City.

Huge flat-bottomed boats for the horses and galleys to tow them and carry the knights were in waiting. On all sides rose the bustle of embarkation. Several knights had bidden her adieu, and Hugh rode up in his turn.

"Here we part, lady," he said, and he could not be sure whether he spoke in regret or satisfaction.

"Not so," she denied, and momentarily her eyes swept up to his. "We drift from each other for a little space, Messer Hugh. But--read me for a fortune-teller an you will--Fate hath woven the strands of our lives into the same pattern."

"What mean you?"

"An I knew it all, still I should not tell you," she replied. "Yet here is one crumb for you, confident youth: be jealous how you relate your quest to strangers."

Her father cried out to her, and she turned her horse to ride on board the barge reserved for them.

"Also, I think that you will travel to Constantinople in good company," she flung over her shoulder.