XIGive doubt the password, and the outer battlements are traitorously stormed. Parley with pity, and the white banner flutters on the keep.Provided her emotions inspire her, a woman is strong; let her take to logic, and she is a rushlight wavering in the wind. In her red heart lies her divinity; her feet are of clay when reason rules her head.The girl Yeoland took doubt to her chamber that night, a malicious sprite, sharp of wit and wild of eye. All the demons of discord were loosed in the silence of the night. Pandora's box stood open, and the hours were void of sleep; faces crowded the shadows, voices wailed in the gloom. Her thoughts rioted like frightened bats fluttering and squeaking round a torch. Sleep, like a pale Cassandra, stood aloof and watched the mask of these manifold emotions.Turn and twist as she would amid her fevered pillows, a wild voice haunted her, importunate and piteous. As the cry of one sinking in a stormy sea, it rang out with a passionate vehemence. Moreover, there was a subtle echo in her own heart, a strong appeal that did not spare her, toss and struggle as she would. Decision fluttered like a wounded bird. Malevolence rushed back as an ocean billow from the bastion of a cliff that emblemed mercy.With a beating of wings and a discordant clamour, a screech-owl buffeted the casement. A lamp still burnt beneath the crucifix; the glow had beaconed the bird out of the night. Starting up with a shiver of fear, she quenched the lamp, and crept back to bed. The darkness seemed to smother her like a cloak; the silence took to ghostly whisperings; a death-watch clicked against the wall.The night crawled on like a funeral cortège. Baffled, outfaced, sleepless, she rose from her tumbled bed, and paced the room as in a fever. Still wakefulness and a thousand dishevelled thoughts that hung about her like her snoodless hair. Again and again, she heard the distant whirr and rattle of wheels, the clangour of the wire, as the antique clock in Fulviac's chamber smote away the hours of night. Each echo of the sound seemed to spur to the quick her wavering resolution. Time was flying, jostling her thoughts as in a mill race. With the dawn, the Lord Flavian would die.Anon she flung the casement wide and stared out into the night. A calm breeze moved amid the masses of ivy, and played upon her face. She bared her breast to its breath, and stood motionless with head thrown back, her white throat glimmering amid her hair. Below, the sombre multitudes of the trees showed dim and ghostly, deep with mystery. A vague wind stirred the branches; the dark void swirled with unrest, breaking like a midnight sea upon a cliff. A few straggling stars peeped through the lattice of the sky.She leant against the sill, rested her chin upon her palms, and brooded. Thoughts, fierce, passionate, and clamorous, came crying like gusts of wind through a ruined house. Death and dead faces, blood, the yawn of sepulchres, life and the joy of it, all these passed as visions of fire before her fancy. Vengeance and pity agonised her soul. She answered yea and nay with the same breath; condemned and pardoned with contradicting zeal. Youth lifted up its face to her, piteous and beautiful. Death reached out a rattling hand into her bosom.Presently, a far glow began to creep into the sky; a gradual greyness absorbed the shadows of the night. The day was dawning. From the forest, the trembling orisons of the birds thrilled like golden light into the air. Unutterable joy seemed to flood forth from the piping throats. Even the trees seemed to quiver to the sound. With a rush of bitter passion, she closed the casement, cast herself upon her bed, and strove to pray.Again came the impotent groping into nothingness. A dense mist seemed to rise betwixt her soul and the white face of the Madonna. Aspiration lessened like an afterglow, and dissolved away into a dark void of doubt. Prayer eluded her; the utterances of her heart died in a miserable endeavour, and she could not think.The spiritual storm wore itself away as the dawn streamed in with a glimmer of gold. Yeoland lay and stared at the casement, and the figure of Sebastian rendered radiant by the dawn, the whiteness of his limbs tongued with dusky rills of blood, where the barbs had smitten into the flesh. Sombre were the eyes, and shadowy with suffering. A halo of gold gilded the youthful face. The painted glass about him blazed like a shower of gems.The Sebastian of the casement recalled to her with wizard power the face of the man whom death claimed at dawn. The thought woke no new passion in her. The night's vigil had left her reason like a skein of tangled silk, and with the day she verged towards a wearied apathy. The voice of pity in her waned to an infrequent whisper that came like the rustling of leaves on a summer night. She realised that it had dawned an hour or more; that the man had knelt and fallen to Nord's sword.Suddenly the silence was snapped by a far outcry sounding in the bowels of the cliff. Gruff voices seemed to echo and re-echo like breakers in a cavern. A horn blared. She heard the thudding of a door, the shrilling of mail, the clangour of iron steps passing up the gallery.Shivering, she raised herself upon her elbow to listen. Were they bringing her the man's head, grey and blood-dabbled, with closed lids and mangled neck? She fell back again upon her pillows, pressed her hands to her face with a great revulsion of pity, for the image had burnt in upon her brain.The clangour of harness drew near, with an iron rhythm as of the march of destiny. It ceased outside the door. A heavy hand beat upon the panelling."Who knocks?"Her own voice, strained and shrill, startled her like an owl's hoot. Fulviac's deep bass answered her from the passage."Unbar to me, I must speak with you."She started up from the bed in passionless haste, ran to a closet, drew out a cloak and wrapped it about her shoulders. Her bare feet showed white under her night-gear as she slid the bolt from its socket, and let the man in. He was fully armed save for his salade, which he carried in the hollow of his arm. His red cloak swept his heels. A tower of steel, there was a clangorous bluster about him that bespoke action.The girl had drawn apart, shivering, and gathering her cloak about her, for in the gloom of the place she had thought for an instant that Fulviac carried a mangled head."A rider has brought news," he said to her. "John of Brissac's men have taken Prosper the Preacher, to hang him, as their lord has vowed, over the gate of Fontenaye. They are on the march home from Gilderoy, ten lances and a company of arbalestiers. I ride to ambuscado them. Prosper shall not hang!"She stood with her back to the casement, and looked at him with a restless stare. Her thoughts were with the man whose grey eyes had pleaded with her through the night. Her fears clamoured like captives at the gate of a dungeon."What is more, this vagabond of Avalon has been begging twelve hours' grace to scrape his soul clean for Peter.""Ah!" she said, with a sudden stark earnestness."I will give him till sunset----""If I suffer it----""The dog has spirit. I would thrust no man into the dark till he has struck a bargain with his own particular saints."She drew back, sank down into a chair with her hair half hiding her face."You are right in being merciful," she said very slowly.Magic riddle of life; rare roseate rod of love. Was it youth leaping towards youth, the cry of the lark to the dawn, the crimson flowering of a woman's pity? The air seemed woven through with gold. A thousand lutes had sounded in the woods. Voiceless, she sat with flickering lids, amazed at the alchemy that had wrought ruth out of hate.Fulviac had drawn back into the gloom of the gallery. He turned suddenly upon his heel, and his scabbard smote and rang against the rock."I take all the men I have," he said to her, "even the dotard Jaspar, for he knows the ways. Gregory and Adrian I leave on guard; they are tough gentlemen, and loyal. As for the lordling, he is well shackled."Yeoland was still cowering in her chair with the mysterious passions of the moment."You will return?" she asked him."By nightfall, if we prosper; as we shall."He moved two paces, stayed again in his stride, and flung a last message to her from the black throat of the passage."Remember, there is no recantation over this business. The man is my affair as well as yours. He is a power in the south, and would menace us. Remember, he must die."He turned and left her without more palaver. She heard him go clanging down the gallery, heard the thunder of a heavy door, the braying of a horn. A long while she sat motionless, still as stone, her hands lying idle in her lap. When an hour had passed, the sun smote in, and found her kneeling at her prayer-desk, her breviary dewed with tears.XIIFulviac passed away that morning into the forest, a shaft of red amid the mournful glooms. Colour and steel streamed after him fantastically. The great cliff, silent and desolate, basked like a leviathan in the sun.Of the daylight and its crown of gold, the girl Yeoland had no deep joy. When she had ended her passion over the blazoned pages of her breviary, and mopped her tears with a corner of her gown, she rose to realism, and turned her mood to the cheating of the dues of time.The hours lagged with enough monotony to degenerate a saint; Yeoland was very much a woman. The night had left her a legacy of evil. She had shadows under her eyes, and a constant swirl of thoughts within her brain that made solitude a torture-house, full of prophetic pain. There was her lute, and she eschewed it, seeing that her fingers seemed as ice. As for her embroidery, the stitches wandered haphazard, wrought grotesque things, or lost all method in a stupor of sloth. She threw the banner aside in a fume at last, and let her broodings have their way.The forenoon crawled, like a beggar on a dusty high-road in the welt of August. Time seemed to stand and mock her. Hour by hour, she was tortured by the vision of steel falling upon a strong young neck, of a white face lying in a pool of blood, of a dripping carcase and a sweating sword. Though the vision maddened her, what could her weak hands do? The man was shackled, and guarded by men with whom she dared not tamper. Moreover, she remembered the last look in Fulviac's keen eyes.Towards evening she grew rabid with unrest, fled from the cave by the northern stair, and took sanctuary amid the tall shadows of the forest. The pine avenues were ever like a church to her, solemn, stately, sympathetic as night. There was nought to anger, nought to bring discord, where the croon of the branches soothed like a song.It was as she played the nun in this forest cloister, that a strange thought challenged her consciousness under the trees. It was subtle, yet full of an incomprehensible bitterness, that made her heart hasten. Even as she considered it, as a girl gazes at a jewel lying in her palm, the charm flashed magic fire into her eyes. This victim for the sword lay shackled to the wall in the great guard-room. She would go and steal a last glance at him before Fulviac and death returned.Stairway, bower, and gallery were behind her. She stood in Fulviac's parlour, where the lamp burnt dimly, and harness glimmered on the walls. The door of the room stood ajar. She stole to it, and peered through the crack left by the clumsy hingeing, into the lights and shadows of the room beyond.At the lower end of a long table the two guards sat dicing, sprawling greedily over the board, the lust of hazard writ large in their looks. The dice kept up a continuous patter, punctuated by the intent growls of the gamesters. By the sloping wall of the cavern, palleted on a pile of dirty straw, lay the Lord Flavian of Gambrevault, with his hands shackled to a staple in the rock. He lay stretched on his side, with his back turned towards the light, so that his face was invisible to the girl behind the door.She watched the man awhile with a curious and dark-eyed earnestness. There was pathos in the prostrate figure, as though Hezekiah-like the man had turned to the bare rock and the callous comfort despair could give. Once she imagined that she saw a jerking of the shoulders, that hinted at something very womanish. The thought smote new pity into her, and sent her away from the cranny, trembling.Yeoland withdrew into Fulviac's room, and thence into the murk of the gallery leading to her bower. A sudden sense of impotence had flooded into her heart; she even yearned for some shock of Fate that might break the very bonds that bound her to her vengeance, as to a corpse. On the threshold of her room, a sudden sound brought her to a halt like a hand thrust out of the dark to clutch her throat. She stood listening, like a miser for thieves, and heard much.A curse came from the guard-room, the crash of an overturned bench, the tingling kiss of steel. She heard the scream as of one stabbed, a smothered uproar, an indiscriminate scuffling, then----silence. She stood a moment in the dark, listening. The silence was heavy and implacable as the rock above. Fear seized her, a lust to know the worst. She ran down the gallery into Fulviac's room. The door was still ajar; she thrust it open and entered the great cavern.Her doubts elapsed in an instant. At the long table, a man sat with his head pillowed on his arms. A red rivulet curled away over the board, winding amid the drinking horns, isleting the dice in its course. On the floor lay the second guard, a smudge of crimson oozing from his grey doublet, his arms rigid, his hands clawing in the death-agony. At the end of the table stood the Lord Flavian of Gambrevault, free.Three cubits of steel had tangled the plot vastly in the passing of a minute. The climax was like a knot of silk thrust through with a sword. The two stood motionless a moment, staring at each other across the length of the table, like a couple of mutes over a grave. The man was the first to break the silence."Madame," he said, with a certain grand air, and a flippant gesture, "suffer me to condone with you over the lamentable tricks of Fortune. But for gross selfishness on my part, I should still be chastening myself for the unjust balancing of our feud. God wills it, seemingly, that I should continue to be your debtor."Despite her woman's wit, the girl was wholly puzzled how to answer him. She was wickedly conscious in her heart of a subtle gratitude to Heaven for the sudden baulking of her malice. The man expected wrath from her, perhaps an outburst of passion. Taking duplicity to her soul, she stood forward on the dais and tilted her chin at him with dutiful defiance."Thank my irresolution, messire," she said, "for this reprieve of fortune."He came two steps nearer, as though not unminded to talk with her in open field."At dawn I might have had you slain," she continued, with some hastening of her tongue; "I confess to having pitied you a little. You are young, a mere boy, weak and powerless. I gave you life for a day."The man reddened slightly, glanced at the dead men, and screwed his mouth into a dry smile."Most harmless, as you see, madame," he said. "For your magnanimity, I thank you.Deo gratias, I will be as grateful as I may."She stood considering him out of her dark, long-lashed eyes. The man was good to look upon, ruddy and clean of lip, with eyes that stared straight to the truth, and a pose of the head that prophesied spirit. The sunlight of youth played sanguine upon his face; yet there was also a certain shadow there, as of premature wisdom, born of pain. There were faint lines about the mouth and eyes. For all its sleek and ruddy comeliness, it was not the face of a boy."Messire," she said to him at last."Madame.""He who lurks over long in the wolf's den may meet the dam at the door."He smiled at her, a frank flash of sympathy that was not devoid of gratitude."Haste would be graceless," he said to her."How so?" she asked him."Ha, Madame Yeoland, have I not watched my arms at night before the high altar at Avalon? Have I not sworn to serve women, to keep troth, and to love God? You judge me hardly if you think of me as a butcher and a murderer. For the death of your kinsfolk I hold myself ashamed."There was a fine light upon his face, a power of truth in his voice that was not hypocritic. The girl stared him over with a certain critical earnestness that boasted a gleam of approval."Fair words," she said to him; "you did not speak thus to me last eve.""Ah!" he cried, beaming on her, "I was cold as a corpse; nor could I whine, for pride.""And your shackles?"He laughed and held up both hands; the wrists were chafed and bloody."It was ever a jest against me," he said, "that I had the hands of a woman, white and meagre, yet strong with the sword. Your fellows thrust a pair of wristlets on me fit for a Goliath, strong, but bulky. My hands have proved my salvation. I pulled them through while the guards diced, crept for a sword, gained it, and my freedom."She nodded, and was not markedly dismal, though the wind had veered against her cause. The man with the grey eyes was a being one could not quarrel with with easy sincerity. Probably it did not strike her at the moment that this friendly argument with the man she had plotted to slay was a contradiction worthy of a woman.The Lord of Avalon meanwhile had drawn still nearer to the girl upon the dais. His grey eyes had taken a warmer lustre into their depths, as though her beauty had kindled something akin to awe in his heart. He set the point of the sword on the floor, his hands on the hilt, and looked up at the white face medallioned in the black splendour of its hair."Madame," he said very gravely, "it is the way of the world to feel remorse when such an emotion is expedient, and to fling penitence into the bottomless pit when the peril is past. I shall prove to you that mine is no such April penitence. Here, on the cross of my sword, I swear to you a great oath. First, that I will build a chapel in Cambremont glade, and establish a priest there. Secondly, I will rebuild the tower, refit it royally, attach to it cottars and borderers from mine own lands. Lastly, mass shall be said and tapers burnt for your kinsfolk in every church in the south. I myself will do such penance as the Lord Bishop shall ordain for my soul."The man was hotly in earnest over the vow--red as a ruby set in the sun. Yeoland looked down upon him with the glimmer of a smile upon her lips as he kissed the cross of the sword."You seem honest," she said to him."Madame, on this sword I swear it. It is hard to believe any good of an enemy. Behold me then before you as a friend. There is a feud betwixt us, not of my willing. By God's light I am eager to bridge the gulf and to be at peace."She shook her head and looked at him with a sudden mysterious sadness. Such a pardon was beyond belief, the man's pure ardour, nothing but seed cast upon sand. Fulviac, a tower of steel, seemed to loom beyond him--an iron figure of Fate, grim and terrible."This can never be," she said.His eyes were honestly sorrowful."Is madame so implacable?""Ah!" she said, "you do not understand me."He stood a moment in thought, as though casting about in his heart for the reason of her sternness. Despite her wrongs, he was assured by some spirit voice that it was not death that stalked betwixt them like an angel of doom. As he stood and brooded, a gleam of the truth flashed in upon his brain. He went some steps back from her, as though destiny decreed it that they should sever unabsolved."Your pardon, madame," he said to her; "the riddle is plain to me. I no longer grope into the dark. This man, here, is your husband."She went red as a rose blushing on her green throne at the coming of the dawn."Messire.""Your pardon.""Ah, I am no wife," she said to him. "God knows but for this man I should be friendless and without home. He has spread honour and chivalry before my feet like a snow-white cloak. Even in this, my godless vengeance, he has served me."The man strode suddenly towards the dais, with his face turned up to hers. A strange light played upon it, half of passion, half of pity. His voice shook, for all its sanguine strength."Ah, madame, tell me one thing before I go.""Messire.""Have I your pardon?""If you love life, messire, leave me.""Have I your pardon?""Go! ere it is too late."Like a ghostly retort to her appeal came the sound of armed men thundering over the bridge. Their rough voices rose in the night's silence, smitten through with the clash and clangour of arms. Fulviac had caught John of Brissac's company in the woods by Gilderoy. There had been a bloody tussle and much slaughter. Triumphant, they were at the gate with Prosper the Preacher in their midst.The pair in the cavern stared at each other with a mute appeal."Fulviac," said the girl in a whisper."The door!""It is barred."They were silent and round-eyed, as children caught in the midst of mischief. Mailed fists and pike staves were beating upon the gate. A babel of impatience welled up without."Adrian, Gregory!""Lazy curs!""Unbar, unbar!"Mocking silence leered in retort. Yeoland and the Lord of Avalon were still as mice. The din slackened and waned, as though Fulviac's men were listening for sound of life within. Then came more blows upon the gate; fingers fumbled at the closed grill. The man Gregory lay and stared at the rocky roof; Adrian sat with his face pooled by his own blood.A fiercer voice sounded above the clamour. It was Fulviac's. The girl shivered as she stood."Ho, there, Gregory, Adrian; what's amiss with ye?"Still silence, mocking and implacable. The lull held for the moment; then the storm gathered."Break down the gate," roared the voice; "by God, we will see the bottom of this damned silence."The Lord Flavian of Avalon had stood listening with the look of a man cooped in a cavern, who hears the sea surging to his feet. He glanced at the dead guards, and went white. To save his soul from purgatory it behoved him to act, and to act quickly. A single lamp still burnt in the oratory of hope. He went near to the girl on the dais, and held up the crossed hilt of his sword."By the Holy Cross, mercy!"She cast a frightened glance into his eyes, and continued mute a moment. The thunder grew against the gate, the crash of steel, a rending din that went echoing into all the pits and passage-ways of the place. Fulviac's men had dragged the trunk of a fallen pine up the causeway, and were charging the gate till the timber groaned.The man, with his sword held like a crucifix, stood and pleaded with his eyes."Mercy!" he said; "you know this warren and can save me.""Are you a craven?""Craven? before God, no, only desperate. What hope have I unharnessed, one sword against fifty?"For yet another moment she appeared irresolute, dazed by the vision of Fulviac's powerful wrath. He was a stark man and a terrible, and she feared him. The timbers of the gate began to crack and gape. Flavian of Avalon lifted up his voice to her with a passionate outburst of despair."God, madame, I cannot die. I am young, look at me, life is at its dawn. By your woman's mercy, hide me. Give me not back to death."His bitter agitation smote her to the core. She looked into his eyes; they were hungry as love, and very piteous. There could be no sinning against those eyes. Great fear flooded over her like a green billow, bearing her to the inevitable. In a moment she was as hot to save him as if he had been her lover."Come," she said, "quick, before the gate gives."She led him like the wind through Fulviac's parlour, and down the gallery to her own bower. It was dark and lampless. She groped to the postern, fumbled at the latch and conquered it. Night streamed in. She pushed the man out and pointed to the steps."The forest," she said, "for your life; bear by the stars for the north."A full moon had reared her silver buckler in the sky. The night was sinless and superb, drowned in a mist of phosphor glory. The man knelt at her feet a moment, and pressed his lips to the hem of her gown."The Virgin bless you!""Go----""I shall remember."He descended and disappeared where the trees swept up with wizard glimmerings to touch the cliff. When he had fled, Yeoland passed back into the cavern, and met Fulviac before the splintered gate with a lie upon her lips.PART IIXIIIFra Balthasar rubbed his colours in the chapel of Castle Avalon, and stared complacently upon the frescoes his fingers had called into being.A migratory friar, Fra Balthasar had come from the rich skies, the purple vineyards, the glimmering orange groves of the far south. Gossip hinted that a certain romantic indiscretion had driven him northwards over the sea. A "bend sinister" ran athwart his reputation as a priest. Men muttered that he was an infidel, a blasphemous vagabond, versed in all the damnable heresies of antiquity. Be that as it may, Fra Balthasar had come to Gilderoy on a white mule, with two servants at his back, an apt tongue to serve him, and much craft as a painter and goldsmith. He had set up abottegaat Gilderoy, and had cozened the patronage of the magnates and the merchants. Moreover, he had netted the favour of the Lord Flavian of Avalon, and was blazoning his chapel for him with the lavish fancy of a Florentine.Fra Balthasar stood in a cataract of sunlight, that poured in through a painted window in the west. He wore the white habit of Dominic and the long black mantle. A golden mist played about his figure as he rubbed his palette, and scanned with the egotism of the artist thePietà painted above the Lord Flavian's state stall. That gentleman, in the flesh, had established himself on a velvet hassock before the altar steps, thus flattering the friar in the part of a sympathetic patron. The Lord of Avalon had dedicated his own person to art as an Eastern King in the splendour of Gothic arms, kneeling bare-headed before the infant Christ.Fra Balthasar was a plump man and a comely, black of eye and full of lip. His shaven chin shone blue as sleek velvet. He had turned from thePietà towards the altar, where a triptych gleamed with massed and brilliant colour. The Virgin, a palpitating divinity breathing stars and gems from her full bosom, gazed with a face of sensuous serenity at the infant lying in her lap. She seemed to exhale an atmosphere of gold. On either wing, angels, transcendant girls in green and silver, purple and azure, scarlet and white, made the soul swim with visions of ruddy lips and milk-white hands. Their wings gleamed like opals. They looked too frail for angels, too human for heaven.The Lord of Avalon sat on his scarlet hassock, and stared at the Madonna with some measure of awe. She was no attenuated, angular, green-faced fragment of saintliness, but by every curve a woman, from plump finger to coral lip."You are no Byzantine," quoth the man on the hassock, with something of a sigh.The priest glanced at him and smiled. There were curves in lip and nostril that were more than indicative of a sleek and sensuous worldliness. Fra Balthasar was much of an Antinous, and doted on the conviction."I paint women, messire," he said.His lordship laughed."Divinities?"Balthasar flourished his brush."Divine creatures, golden flowers of the world. Give me the rose to crush against my mouth, violets to burn upon my bosom. Truth, sire, consider the sparkling roundness of a woman's arm. Consider her wine-red lips, her sinful eyes, her lily fingers dropping spikenard into the soul. I confess, sire, that I am a man."The friar's opulent extravagance of sentiment suited the litheness of his look. Balthasar had enthroned himself in his own imagination as a species of Apollo, a golden-tongued seer, whose soul soared into the glittering infinitudes of art. An immense egotist, he posed as a full-blooded divinity, palpitating to colour and to sound. He had as many moods as a vain woman, and was a mere fire-fly in the matter of honour."Reverend sire," quoth the man on the footstool with some tightening of the upper lip, "you bulk too big for your frock, methinks."Balthasar touched a panel with his brush; cast a glance over his shoulder, with a cynical lifting of the nostril."My frock serves me, sire, as well as a coat of mail.""And you believe the things you paint?"The man swept a vermilion streak from his brush."An ingenuous question, messire.""I am ever ingenuous.""A perilous habit.""Yet you have not answered me."The friar tilted his chin like a woman eyeing herself in a mirror."Religion is full of picturesque incidents," he said."And is profitable.""Sire, you shame Solomon. There are ever many rich and devout fools in the world. Give me a gleaming Venus, rising ruddy from the sea, rather than a lachrymose Magdalene. But what would you? I trim my Venus up in fine apparel, put a puling infant in her lap.Ecce--Sancta Maria."The man on the footstool smiled despite the jester's theme, a smile that had more scorn in it than sympathy."You verge on blasphemy," he said."There can be no blasphemy where there is no belief.""You are over subtle, my friend.""Nay, sire, I have come by that godliness of mind when man discovers his own godhead. Let your soul soar, I say, let it beat its wings into the blue of life. Hence with superstition. Shall I subordinate my mind to the prosings of a mad charlatan such as Saul of Tarsus? Shall I, like each rat in this mortal drain, believe that some god cares when I have gout in my toe, or when I am tempted to bow to Venus?"The man on the hassock grimaced, and eyed the friar much as though he had stumbled on some being from the underworld. He was a mystic for all his manhood."God pity your creed," he said."God, the inflated mortal----""Enough.""This man god of yours who tosses the stars like so many lemons.""Enough, sir friar.""Defend me from your mass of metaphor, your relics of barbarism. We, the wise ones, have our own hierarchy, our own Olympus.""On my soul, you are welcome to it," quoth the man by the altar.Balthasar's hand worked viciously; he was strenuous towards his own beliefs, after the fashion of dreamers delirious with egotism. The very splendour of his infidelity took its birth from the fact that it was largely of his own creating. His pert iconoclasm pandered to his own vast self-esteem."Tell me for what you live," said the man by the altar."For beauty.""And the senses?""Colours, odours, sounds. To breathe, to burn, and to enjoy. To be a Greek and a god.""And life?""Is a great fresco, a pageant of passions."The Lord of Avalon sprang up and began to pace the aisle with the air of a man whose blood is fevered. For all his devoutness and his mystical fidelity, he was in too human and passionate a mood to be invulnerable to Balthasar's sensuous shafts of fire. The Lord Flavian had come by a transcendental star-soaring spirit, an inspiration that had torched the wild beacon of romance. He was red for a riot of chivalry, a passage of desire.Turning back towards the altar, he faced the Madonna with her choir of angel girls. Fra Balthasar was watching him with a feline sleekness of visage, and a smile that boasted something of contempt. The friar considered spirituality a species of magician's lanthorn for the cozening of fools."What quip have you for love?" said the younger man, halting by the altar rails.Balthasar stood with poised brush."There is some sincerity in the emotion," he said."You are experienced?""Sire, consider my 'habit.'"The friar's mock horror was surprising, an excellent jest that fell like a blunted bolt from the steel of a vigorous manhood. The Lord Flavian ran on."Shall I fence with an infidel?" he asked."Sire, a man may be a man without the creed of Athanasius.""How much of me do you understand?"Fra Balthasar cleared his throat."The Lady Duessa, sire, is a rose of joy.""Monk!""My lord, it was your dictum that you are ever ingenuous. I echo you.""Need I confess to you on such a subject?""Nay, sire, you have the inconsistency of a poet.""How so?""Well, well, one can sniff rotten apples without opening the door of the cupboard."The younger man jerked away, and went striding betwixt the array of frescoes with something of the wild vigour of a blind Polyphemus. Balthasar, subtle sophist, watched him from the angle of his eye with the sardonic superiority of one well versed in the contradictions of the world. He had scribbled a shrewd sketch of the passions stirring in his patron's heart. Had he not heard from the man's own lips of the white-faced elf of the pine woods and her vengeance? And the Lady Duessa! Fra Balthasar was as wise in the gossip of Gilderoy as any woman."Sire," he said, as the aristocrat turned in his stride, "I ask of you a bold favour.""Speak out.""Suffer me to paint your mood in words."The man stared, shrugged his shoulders, smiled enigmatically."Try your craft," he said.Balthasar began splashing in a foreground with irritable bravado."My lord, you were a fool at twenty," were his words."A thrice damned fool," came the echo.Balthasar chuckled."And now, messire, a golden chain makes a Tantalus of you. Life crawls like a sluggish river. You chafe, you strain, you rebel, feed on your own heart, sin to assert your liberty. Youth slips from you; the sky narrows about your ears. Well, well, have I not read aright?""Speak on," quoth the man by the altar."Ah, sire, it is the old tale. They have cramped up your youth with book and ring; shut you up in a moral sarcophagus with a woman they call your wife. You burn for liberty, and the unknown that shines like a purple streak in a fading west. Ah, sire, you look for that one marvellous being, who shall torch again the youth in your heart, make your blood burn, your soul to sing. That one woman in the world, mysterious as the moon, subtle as the night, ineffably strange as a flaming dawn. That woman who shall lift you to the stars; whose lips suck the sap of the world; whose bosom breathes to the eternal swoon of all sweet sounds. She shall light the lust of battle in your heart. For her your sword shall leap, your towers totter. Chivalry should lead you like a pillar of fire out of the night, a heroic god striving for a goddess."The Lord of Avalon stood before the high altar as one transfigured. Youth leapt in him, red, glorious, and triumphant. Balthasar's tongue had set the pyre aburning."By God, it is the truth," he said.The friar gathered his brushes, and took breath."Hast thou found thy Beatrice, O my son?""Have I gazed into heaven?"Balthasar's voice filled the chapel."Live, sire, live!" he said."Ah!""Be mad! Drink star wine, and snuff the odours of all the sunsets! Live, live! You can repent in comfort when you are sixty and measure fifty inches round the waist."
XI
Give doubt the password, and the outer battlements are traitorously stormed. Parley with pity, and the white banner flutters on the keep.
Provided her emotions inspire her, a woman is strong; let her take to logic, and she is a rushlight wavering in the wind. In her red heart lies her divinity; her feet are of clay when reason rules her head.
The girl Yeoland took doubt to her chamber that night, a malicious sprite, sharp of wit and wild of eye. All the demons of discord were loosed in the silence of the night. Pandora's box stood open, and the hours were void of sleep; faces crowded the shadows, voices wailed in the gloom. Her thoughts rioted like frightened bats fluttering and squeaking round a torch. Sleep, like a pale Cassandra, stood aloof and watched the mask of these manifold emotions.
Turn and twist as she would amid her fevered pillows, a wild voice haunted her, importunate and piteous. As the cry of one sinking in a stormy sea, it rang out with a passionate vehemence. Moreover, there was a subtle echo in her own heart, a strong appeal that did not spare her, toss and struggle as she would. Decision fluttered like a wounded bird. Malevolence rushed back as an ocean billow from the bastion of a cliff that emblemed mercy.
With a beating of wings and a discordant clamour, a screech-owl buffeted the casement. A lamp still burnt beneath the crucifix; the glow had beaconed the bird out of the night. Starting up with a shiver of fear, she quenched the lamp, and crept back to bed. The darkness seemed to smother her like a cloak; the silence took to ghostly whisperings; a death-watch clicked against the wall.
The night crawled on like a funeral cortège. Baffled, outfaced, sleepless, she rose from her tumbled bed, and paced the room as in a fever. Still wakefulness and a thousand dishevelled thoughts that hung about her like her snoodless hair. Again and again, she heard the distant whirr and rattle of wheels, the clangour of the wire, as the antique clock in Fulviac's chamber smote away the hours of night. Each echo of the sound seemed to spur to the quick her wavering resolution. Time was flying, jostling her thoughts as in a mill race. With the dawn, the Lord Flavian would die.
Anon she flung the casement wide and stared out into the night. A calm breeze moved amid the masses of ivy, and played upon her face. She bared her breast to its breath, and stood motionless with head thrown back, her white throat glimmering amid her hair. Below, the sombre multitudes of the trees showed dim and ghostly, deep with mystery. A vague wind stirred the branches; the dark void swirled with unrest, breaking like a midnight sea upon a cliff. A few straggling stars peeped through the lattice of the sky.
She leant against the sill, rested her chin upon her palms, and brooded. Thoughts, fierce, passionate, and clamorous, came crying like gusts of wind through a ruined house. Death and dead faces, blood, the yawn of sepulchres, life and the joy of it, all these passed as visions of fire before her fancy. Vengeance and pity agonised her soul. She answered yea and nay with the same breath; condemned and pardoned with contradicting zeal. Youth lifted up its face to her, piteous and beautiful. Death reached out a rattling hand into her bosom.
Presently, a far glow began to creep into the sky; a gradual greyness absorbed the shadows of the night. The day was dawning. From the forest, the trembling orisons of the birds thrilled like golden light into the air. Unutterable joy seemed to flood forth from the piping throats. Even the trees seemed to quiver to the sound. With a rush of bitter passion, she closed the casement, cast herself upon her bed, and strove to pray.
Again came the impotent groping into nothingness. A dense mist seemed to rise betwixt her soul and the white face of the Madonna. Aspiration lessened like an afterglow, and dissolved away into a dark void of doubt. Prayer eluded her; the utterances of her heart died in a miserable endeavour, and she could not think.
The spiritual storm wore itself away as the dawn streamed in with a glimmer of gold. Yeoland lay and stared at the casement, and the figure of Sebastian rendered radiant by the dawn, the whiteness of his limbs tongued with dusky rills of blood, where the barbs had smitten into the flesh. Sombre were the eyes, and shadowy with suffering. A halo of gold gilded the youthful face. The painted glass about him blazed like a shower of gems.
The Sebastian of the casement recalled to her with wizard power the face of the man whom death claimed at dawn. The thought woke no new passion in her. The night's vigil had left her reason like a skein of tangled silk, and with the day she verged towards a wearied apathy. The voice of pity in her waned to an infrequent whisper that came like the rustling of leaves on a summer night. She realised that it had dawned an hour or more; that the man had knelt and fallen to Nord's sword.
Suddenly the silence was snapped by a far outcry sounding in the bowels of the cliff. Gruff voices seemed to echo and re-echo like breakers in a cavern. A horn blared. She heard the thudding of a door, the shrilling of mail, the clangour of iron steps passing up the gallery.
Shivering, she raised herself upon her elbow to listen. Were they bringing her the man's head, grey and blood-dabbled, with closed lids and mangled neck? She fell back again upon her pillows, pressed her hands to her face with a great revulsion of pity, for the image had burnt in upon her brain.
The clangour of harness drew near, with an iron rhythm as of the march of destiny. It ceased outside the door. A heavy hand beat upon the panelling.
"Who knocks?"
Her own voice, strained and shrill, startled her like an owl's hoot. Fulviac's deep bass answered her from the passage.
"Unbar to me, I must speak with you."
She started up from the bed in passionless haste, ran to a closet, drew out a cloak and wrapped it about her shoulders. Her bare feet showed white under her night-gear as she slid the bolt from its socket, and let the man in. He was fully armed save for his salade, which he carried in the hollow of his arm. His red cloak swept his heels. A tower of steel, there was a clangorous bluster about him that bespoke action.
The girl had drawn apart, shivering, and gathering her cloak about her, for in the gloom of the place she had thought for an instant that Fulviac carried a mangled head.
"A rider has brought news," he said to her. "John of Brissac's men have taken Prosper the Preacher, to hang him, as their lord has vowed, over the gate of Fontenaye. They are on the march home from Gilderoy, ten lances and a company of arbalestiers. I ride to ambuscado them. Prosper shall not hang!"
She stood with her back to the casement, and looked at him with a restless stare. Her thoughts were with the man whose grey eyes had pleaded with her through the night. Her fears clamoured like captives at the gate of a dungeon.
"What is more, this vagabond of Avalon has been begging twelve hours' grace to scrape his soul clean for Peter."
"Ah!" she said, with a sudden stark earnestness.
"I will give him till sunset----"
"If I suffer it----"
"The dog has spirit. I would thrust no man into the dark till he has struck a bargain with his own particular saints."
She drew back, sank down into a chair with her hair half hiding her face.
"You are right in being merciful," she said very slowly.
Magic riddle of life; rare roseate rod of love. Was it youth leaping towards youth, the cry of the lark to the dawn, the crimson flowering of a woman's pity? The air seemed woven through with gold. A thousand lutes had sounded in the woods. Voiceless, she sat with flickering lids, amazed at the alchemy that had wrought ruth out of hate.
Fulviac had drawn back into the gloom of the gallery. He turned suddenly upon his heel, and his scabbard smote and rang against the rock.
"I take all the men I have," he said to her, "even the dotard Jaspar, for he knows the ways. Gregory and Adrian I leave on guard; they are tough gentlemen, and loyal. As for the lordling, he is well shackled."
Yeoland was still cowering in her chair with the mysterious passions of the moment.
"You will return?" she asked him.
"By nightfall, if we prosper; as we shall."
He moved two paces, stayed again in his stride, and flung a last message to her from the black throat of the passage.
"Remember, there is no recantation over this business. The man is my affair as well as yours. He is a power in the south, and would menace us. Remember, he must die."
He turned and left her without more palaver. She heard him go clanging down the gallery, heard the thunder of a heavy door, the braying of a horn. A long while she sat motionless, still as stone, her hands lying idle in her lap. When an hour had passed, the sun smote in, and found her kneeling at her prayer-desk, her breviary dewed with tears.
XII
Fulviac passed away that morning into the forest, a shaft of red amid the mournful glooms. Colour and steel streamed after him fantastically. The great cliff, silent and desolate, basked like a leviathan in the sun.
Of the daylight and its crown of gold, the girl Yeoland had no deep joy. When she had ended her passion over the blazoned pages of her breviary, and mopped her tears with a corner of her gown, she rose to realism, and turned her mood to the cheating of the dues of time.
The hours lagged with enough monotony to degenerate a saint; Yeoland was very much a woman. The night had left her a legacy of evil. She had shadows under her eyes, and a constant swirl of thoughts within her brain that made solitude a torture-house, full of prophetic pain. There was her lute, and she eschewed it, seeing that her fingers seemed as ice. As for her embroidery, the stitches wandered haphazard, wrought grotesque things, or lost all method in a stupor of sloth. She threw the banner aside in a fume at last, and let her broodings have their way.
The forenoon crawled, like a beggar on a dusty high-road in the welt of August. Time seemed to stand and mock her. Hour by hour, she was tortured by the vision of steel falling upon a strong young neck, of a white face lying in a pool of blood, of a dripping carcase and a sweating sword. Though the vision maddened her, what could her weak hands do? The man was shackled, and guarded by men with whom she dared not tamper. Moreover, she remembered the last look in Fulviac's keen eyes.
Towards evening she grew rabid with unrest, fled from the cave by the northern stair, and took sanctuary amid the tall shadows of the forest. The pine avenues were ever like a church to her, solemn, stately, sympathetic as night. There was nought to anger, nought to bring discord, where the croon of the branches soothed like a song.
It was as she played the nun in this forest cloister, that a strange thought challenged her consciousness under the trees. It was subtle, yet full of an incomprehensible bitterness, that made her heart hasten. Even as she considered it, as a girl gazes at a jewel lying in her palm, the charm flashed magic fire into her eyes. This victim for the sword lay shackled to the wall in the great guard-room. She would go and steal a last glance at him before Fulviac and death returned.
Stairway, bower, and gallery were behind her. She stood in Fulviac's parlour, where the lamp burnt dimly, and harness glimmered on the walls. The door of the room stood ajar. She stole to it, and peered through the crack left by the clumsy hingeing, into the lights and shadows of the room beyond.
At the lower end of a long table the two guards sat dicing, sprawling greedily over the board, the lust of hazard writ large in their looks. The dice kept up a continuous patter, punctuated by the intent growls of the gamesters. By the sloping wall of the cavern, palleted on a pile of dirty straw, lay the Lord Flavian of Gambrevault, with his hands shackled to a staple in the rock. He lay stretched on his side, with his back turned towards the light, so that his face was invisible to the girl behind the door.
She watched the man awhile with a curious and dark-eyed earnestness. There was pathos in the prostrate figure, as though Hezekiah-like the man had turned to the bare rock and the callous comfort despair could give. Once she imagined that she saw a jerking of the shoulders, that hinted at something very womanish. The thought smote new pity into her, and sent her away from the cranny, trembling.
Yeoland withdrew into Fulviac's room, and thence into the murk of the gallery leading to her bower. A sudden sense of impotence had flooded into her heart; she even yearned for some shock of Fate that might break the very bonds that bound her to her vengeance, as to a corpse. On the threshold of her room, a sudden sound brought her to a halt like a hand thrust out of the dark to clutch her throat. She stood listening, like a miser for thieves, and heard much.
A curse came from the guard-room, the crash of an overturned bench, the tingling kiss of steel. She heard the scream as of one stabbed, a smothered uproar, an indiscriminate scuffling, then----silence. She stood a moment in the dark, listening. The silence was heavy and implacable as the rock above. Fear seized her, a lust to know the worst. She ran down the gallery into Fulviac's room. The door was still ajar; she thrust it open and entered the great cavern.
Her doubts elapsed in an instant. At the long table, a man sat with his head pillowed on his arms. A red rivulet curled away over the board, winding amid the drinking horns, isleting the dice in its course. On the floor lay the second guard, a smudge of crimson oozing from his grey doublet, his arms rigid, his hands clawing in the death-agony. At the end of the table stood the Lord Flavian of Gambrevault, free.
Three cubits of steel had tangled the plot vastly in the passing of a minute. The climax was like a knot of silk thrust through with a sword. The two stood motionless a moment, staring at each other across the length of the table, like a couple of mutes over a grave. The man was the first to break the silence.
"Madame," he said, with a certain grand air, and a flippant gesture, "suffer me to condone with you over the lamentable tricks of Fortune. But for gross selfishness on my part, I should still be chastening myself for the unjust balancing of our feud. God wills it, seemingly, that I should continue to be your debtor."
Despite her woman's wit, the girl was wholly puzzled how to answer him. She was wickedly conscious in her heart of a subtle gratitude to Heaven for the sudden baulking of her malice. The man expected wrath from her, perhaps an outburst of passion. Taking duplicity to her soul, she stood forward on the dais and tilted her chin at him with dutiful defiance.
"Thank my irresolution, messire," she said, "for this reprieve of fortune."
He came two steps nearer, as though not unminded to talk with her in open field.
"At dawn I might have had you slain," she continued, with some hastening of her tongue; "I confess to having pitied you a little. You are young, a mere boy, weak and powerless. I gave you life for a day."
The man reddened slightly, glanced at the dead men, and screwed his mouth into a dry smile.
"Most harmless, as you see, madame," he said. "For your magnanimity, I thank you.Deo gratias, I will be as grateful as I may."
She stood considering him out of her dark, long-lashed eyes. The man was good to look upon, ruddy and clean of lip, with eyes that stared straight to the truth, and a pose of the head that prophesied spirit. The sunlight of youth played sanguine upon his face; yet there was also a certain shadow there, as of premature wisdom, born of pain. There were faint lines about the mouth and eyes. For all its sleek and ruddy comeliness, it was not the face of a boy.
"Messire," she said to him at last.
"Madame."
"He who lurks over long in the wolf's den may meet the dam at the door."
He smiled at her, a frank flash of sympathy that was not devoid of gratitude.
"Haste would be graceless," he said to her.
"How so?" she asked him.
"Ha, Madame Yeoland, have I not watched my arms at night before the high altar at Avalon? Have I not sworn to serve women, to keep troth, and to love God? You judge me hardly if you think of me as a butcher and a murderer. For the death of your kinsfolk I hold myself ashamed."
There was a fine light upon his face, a power of truth in his voice that was not hypocritic. The girl stared him over with a certain critical earnestness that boasted a gleam of approval.
"Fair words," she said to him; "you did not speak thus to me last eve."
"Ah!" he cried, beaming on her, "I was cold as a corpse; nor could I whine, for pride."
"And your shackles?"
He laughed and held up both hands; the wrists were chafed and bloody.
"It was ever a jest against me," he said, "that I had the hands of a woman, white and meagre, yet strong with the sword. Your fellows thrust a pair of wristlets on me fit for a Goliath, strong, but bulky. My hands have proved my salvation. I pulled them through while the guards diced, crept for a sword, gained it, and my freedom."
She nodded, and was not markedly dismal, though the wind had veered against her cause. The man with the grey eyes was a being one could not quarrel with with easy sincerity. Probably it did not strike her at the moment that this friendly argument with the man she had plotted to slay was a contradiction worthy of a woman.
The Lord of Avalon meanwhile had drawn still nearer to the girl upon the dais. His grey eyes had taken a warmer lustre into their depths, as though her beauty had kindled something akin to awe in his heart. He set the point of the sword on the floor, his hands on the hilt, and looked up at the white face medallioned in the black splendour of its hair.
"Madame," he said very gravely, "it is the way of the world to feel remorse when such an emotion is expedient, and to fling penitence into the bottomless pit when the peril is past. I shall prove to you that mine is no such April penitence. Here, on the cross of my sword, I swear to you a great oath. First, that I will build a chapel in Cambremont glade, and establish a priest there. Secondly, I will rebuild the tower, refit it royally, attach to it cottars and borderers from mine own lands. Lastly, mass shall be said and tapers burnt for your kinsfolk in every church in the south. I myself will do such penance as the Lord Bishop shall ordain for my soul."
The man was hotly in earnest over the vow--red as a ruby set in the sun. Yeoland looked down upon him with the glimmer of a smile upon her lips as he kissed the cross of the sword.
"You seem honest," she said to him.
"Madame, on this sword I swear it. It is hard to believe any good of an enemy. Behold me then before you as a friend. There is a feud betwixt us, not of my willing. By God's light I am eager to bridge the gulf and to be at peace."
She shook her head and looked at him with a sudden mysterious sadness. Such a pardon was beyond belief, the man's pure ardour, nothing but seed cast upon sand. Fulviac, a tower of steel, seemed to loom beyond him--an iron figure of Fate, grim and terrible.
"This can never be," she said.
His eyes were honestly sorrowful.
"Is madame so implacable?"
"Ah!" she said, "you do not understand me."
He stood a moment in thought, as though casting about in his heart for the reason of her sternness. Despite her wrongs, he was assured by some spirit voice that it was not death that stalked betwixt them like an angel of doom. As he stood and brooded, a gleam of the truth flashed in upon his brain. He went some steps back from her, as though destiny decreed it that they should sever unabsolved.
"Your pardon, madame," he said to her; "the riddle is plain to me. I no longer grope into the dark. This man, here, is your husband."
She went red as a rose blushing on her green throne at the coming of the dawn.
"Messire."
"Your pardon."
"Ah, I am no wife," she said to him. "God knows but for this man I should be friendless and without home. He has spread honour and chivalry before my feet like a snow-white cloak. Even in this, my godless vengeance, he has served me."
The man strode suddenly towards the dais, with his face turned up to hers. A strange light played upon it, half of passion, half of pity. His voice shook, for all its sanguine strength.
"Ah, madame, tell me one thing before I go."
"Messire."
"Have I your pardon?"
"If you love life, messire, leave me."
"Have I your pardon?"
"Go! ere it is too late."
Like a ghostly retort to her appeal came the sound of armed men thundering over the bridge. Their rough voices rose in the night's silence, smitten through with the clash and clangour of arms. Fulviac had caught John of Brissac's company in the woods by Gilderoy. There had been a bloody tussle and much slaughter. Triumphant, they were at the gate with Prosper the Preacher in their midst.
The pair in the cavern stared at each other with a mute appeal.
"Fulviac," said the girl in a whisper.
"The door!"
"It is barred."
They were silent and round-eyed, as children caught in the midst of mischief. Mailed fists and pike staves were beating upon the gate. A babel of impatience welled up without.
"Adrian, Gregory!"
"Lazy curs!"
"Unbar, unbar!"
Mocking silence leered in retort. Yeoland and the Lord of Avalon were still as mice. The din slackened and waned, as though Fulviac's men were listening for sound of life within. Then came more blows upon the gate; fingers fumbled at the closed grill. The man Gregory lay and stared at the rocky roof; Adrian sat with his face pooled by his own blood.
A fiercer voice sounded above the clamour. It was Fulviac's. The girl shivered as she stood.
"Ho, there, Gregory, Adrian; what's amiss with ye?"
Still silence, mocking and implacable. The lull held for the moment; then the storm gathered.
"Break down the gate," roared the voice; "by God, we will see the bottom of this damned silence."
The Lord Flavian of Avalon had stood listening with the look of a man cooped in a cavern, who hears the sea surging to his feet. He glanced at the dead guards, and went white. To save his soul from purgatory it behoved him to act, and to act quickly. A single lamp still burnt in the oratory of hope. He went near to the girl on the dais, and held up the crossed hilt of his sword.
"By the Holy Cross, mercy!"
She cast a frightened glance into his eyes, and continued mute a moment. The thunder grew against the gate, the crash of steel, a rending din that went echoing into all the pits and passage-ways of the place. Fulviac's men had dragged the trunk of a fallen pine up the causeway, and were charging the gate till the timber groaned.
The man, with his sword held like a crucifix, stood and pleaded with his eyes.
"Mercy!" he said; "you know this warren and can save me."
"Are you a craven?"
"Craven? before God, no, only desperate. What hope have I unharnessed, one sword against fifty?"
For yet another moment she appeared irresolute, dazed by the vision of Fulviac's powerful wrath. He was a stark man and a terrible, and she feared him. The timbers of the gate began to crack and gape. Flavian of Avalon lifted up his voice to her with a passionate outburst of despair.
"God, madame, I cannot die. I am young, look at me, life is at its dawn. By your woman's mercy, hide me. Give me not back to death."
His bitter agitation smote her to the core. She looked into his eyes; they were hungry as love, and very piteous. There could be no sinning against those eyes. Great fear flooded over her like a green billow, bearing her to the inevitable. In a moment she was as hot to save him as if he had been her lover.
"Come," she said, "quick, before the gate gives."
She led him like the wind through Fulviac's parlour, and down the gallery to her own bower. It was dark and lampless. She groped to the postern, fumbled at the latch and conquered it. Night streamed in. She pushed the man out and pointed to the steps.
"The forest," she said, "for your life; bear by the stars for the north."
A full moon had reared her silver buckler in the sky. The night was sinless and superb, drowned in a mist of phosphor glory. The man knelt at her feet a moment, and pressed his lips to the hem of her gown.
"The Virgin bless you!"
"Go----"
"I shall remember."
He descended and disappeared where the trees swept up with wizard glimmerings to touch the cliff. When he had fled, Yeoland passed back into the cavern, and met Fulviac before the splintered gate with a lie upon her lips.
PART II
XIII
Fra Balthasar rubbed his colours in the chapel of Castle Avalon, and stared complacently upon the frescoes his fingers had called into being.
A migratory friar, Fra Balthasar had come from the rich skies, the purple vineyards, the glimmering orange groves of the far south. Gossip hinted that a certain romantic indiscretion had driven him northwards over the sea. A "bend sinister" ran athwart his reputation as a priest. Men muttered that he was an infidel, a blasphemous vagabond, versed in all the damnable heresies of antiquity. Be that as it may, Fra Balthasar had come to Gilderoy on a white mule, with two servants at his back, an apt tongue to serve him, and much craft as a painter and goldsmith. He had set up abottegaat Gilderoy, and had cozened the patronage of the magnates and the merchants. Moreover, he had netted the favour of the Lord Flavian of Avalon, and was blazoning his chapel for him with the lavish fancy of a Florentine.
Fra Balthasar stood in a cataract of sunlight, that poured in through a painted window in the west. He wore the white habit of Dominic and the long black mantle. A golden mist played about his figure as he rubbed his palette, and scanned with the egotism of the artist thePietà painted above the Lord Flavian's state stall. That gentleman, in the flesh, had established himself on a velvet hassock before the altar steps, thus flattering the friar in the part of a sympathetic patron. The Lord of Avalon had dedicated his own person to art as an Eastern King in the splendour of Gothic arms, kneeling bare-headed before the infant Christ.
Fra Balthasar was a plump man and a comely, black of eye and full of lip. His shaven chin shone blue as sleek velvet. He had turned from thePietà towards the altar, where a triptych gleamed with massed and brilliant colour. The Virgin, a palpitating divinity breathing stars and gems from her full bosom, gazed with a face of sensuous serenity at the infant lying in her lap. She seemed to exhale an atmosphere of gold. On either wing, angels, transcendant girls in green and silver, purple and azure, scarlet and white, made the soul swim with visions of ruddy lips and milk-white hands. Their wings gleamed like opals. They looked too frail for angels, too human for heaven.
The Lord of Avalon sat on his scarlet hassock, and stared at the Madonna with some measure of awe. She was no attenuated, angular, green-faced fragment of saintliness, but by every curve a woman, from plump finger to coral lip.
"You are no Byzantine," quoth the man on the hassock, with something of a sigh.
The priest glanced at him and smiled. There were curves in lip and nostril that were more than indicative of a sleek and sensuous worldliness. Fra Balthasar was much of an Antinous, and doted on the conviction.
"I paint women, messire," he said.
His lordship laughed.
"Divinities?"
Balthasar flourished his brush.
"Divine creatures, golden flowers of the world. Give me the rose to crush against my mouth, violets to burn upon my bosom. Truth, sire, consider the sparkling roundness of a woman's arm. Consider her wine-red lips, her sinful eyes, her lily fingers dropping spikenard into the soul. I confess, sire, that I am a man."
The friar's opulent extravagance of sentiment suited the litheness of his look. Balthasar had enthroned himself in his own imagination as a species of Apollo, a golden-tongued seer, whose soul soared into the glittering infinitudes of art. An immense egotist, he posed as a full-blooded divinity, palpitating to colour and to sound. He had as many moods as a vain woman, and was a mere fire-fly in the matter of honour.
"Reverend sire," quoth the man on the footstool with some tightening of the upper lip, "you bulk too big for your frock, methinks."
Balthasar touched a panel with his brush; cast a glance over his shoulder, with a cynical lifting of the nostril.
"My frock serves me, sire, as well as a coat of mail."
"And you believe the things you paint?"
The man swept a vermilion streak from his brush.
"An ingenuous question, messire."
"I am ever ingenuous."
"A perilous habit."
"Yet you have not answered me."
The friar tilted his chin like a woman eyeing herself in a mirror.
"Religion is full of picturesque incidents," he said.
"And is profitable."
"Sire, you shame Solomon. There are ever many rich and devout fools in the world. Give me a gleaming Venus, rising ruddy from the sea, rather than a lachrymose Magdalene. But what would you? I trim my Venus up in fine apparel, put a puling infant in her lap.Ecce--Sancta Maria."
The man on the footstool smiled despite the jester's theme, a smile that had more scorn in it than sympathy.
"You verge on blasphemy," he said.
"There can be no blasphemy where there is no belief."
"You are over subtle, my friend."
"Nay, sire, I have come by that godliness of mind when man discovers his own godhead. Let your soul soar, I say, let it beat its wings into the blue of life. Hence with superstition. Shall I subordinate my mind to the prosings of a mad charlatan such as Saul of Tarsus? Shall I, like each rat in this mortal drain, believe that some god cares when I have gout in my toe, or when I am tempted to bow to Venus?"
The man on the hassock grimaced, and eyed the friar much as though he had stumbled on some being from the underworld. He was a mystic for all his manhood.
"God pity your creed," he said.
"God, the inflated mortal----"
"Enough."
"This man god of yours who tosses the stars like so many lemons."
"Enough, sir friar."
"Defend me from your mass of metaphor, your relics of barbarism. We, the wise ones, have our own hierarchy, our own Olympus."
"On my soul, you are welcome to it," quoth the man by the altar.
Balthasar's hand worked viciously; he was strenuous towards his own beliefs, after the fashion of dreamers delirious with egotism. The very splendour of his infidelity took its birth from the fact that it was largely of his own creating. His pert iconoclasm pandered to his own vast self-esteem.
"Tell me for what you live," said the man by the altar.
"For beauty."
"And the senses?"
"Colours, odours, sounds. To breathe, to burn, and to enjoy. To be a Greek and a god."
"And life?"
"Is a great fresco, a pageant of passions."
The Lord of Avalon sprang up and began to pace the aisle with the air of a man whose blood is fevered. For all his devoutness and his mystical fidelity, he was in too human and passionate a mood to be invulnerable to Balthasar's sensuous shafts of fire. The Lord Flavian had come by a transcendental star-soaring spirit, an inspiration that had torched the wild beacon of romance. He was red for a riot of chivalry, a passage of desire.
Turning back towards the altar, he faced the Madonna with her choir of angel girls. Fra Balthasar was watching him with a feline sleekness of visage, and a smile that boasted something of contempt. The friar considered spirituality a species of magician's lanthorn for the cozening of fools.
"What quip have you for love?" said the younger man, halting by the altar rails.
Balthasar stood with poised brush.
"There is some sincerity in the emotion," he said.
"You are experienced?"
"Sire, consider my 'habit.'"
The friar's mock horror was surprising, an excellent jest that fell like a blunted bolt from the steel of a vigorous manhood. The Lord Flavian ran on.
"Shall I fence with an infidel?" he asked.
"Sire, a man may be a man without the creed of Athanasius."
"How much of me do you understand?"
Fra Balthasar cleared his throat.
"The Lady Duessa, sire, is a rose of joy."
"Monk!"
"My lord, it was your dictum that you are ever ingenuous. I echo you."
"Need I confess to you on such a subject?"
"Nay, sire, you have the inconsistency of a poet."
"How so?"
"Well, well, one can sniff rotten apples without opening the door of the cupboard."
The younger man jerked away, and went striding betwixt the array of frescoes with something of the wild vigour of a blind Polyphemus. Balthasar, subtle sophist, watched him from the angle of his eye with the sardonic superiority of one well versed in the contradictions of the world. He had scribbled a shrewd sketch of the passions stirring in his patron's heart. Had he not heard from the man's own lips of the white-faced elf of the pine woods and her vengeance? And the Lady Duessa! Fra Balthasar was as wise in the gossip of Gilderoy as any woman.
"Sire," he said, as the aristocrat turned in his stride, "I ask of you a bold favour."
"Speak out."
"Suffer me to paint your mood in words."
The man stared, shrugged his shoulders, smiled enigmatically.
"Try your craft," he said.
Balthasar began splashing in a foreground with irritable bravado.
"My lord, you were a fool at twenty," were his words.
"A thrice damned fool," came the echo.
Balthasar chuckled.
"And now, messire, a golden chain makes a Tantalus of you. Life crawls like a sluggish river. You chafe, you strain, you rebel, feed on your own heart, sin to assert your liberty. Youth slips from you; the sky narrows about your ears. Well, well, have I not read aright?"
"Speak on," quoth the man by the altar.
"Ah, sire, it is the old tale. They have cramped up your youth with book and ring; shut you up in a moral sarcophagus with a woman they call your wife. You burn for liberty, and the unknown that shines like a purple streak in a fading west. Ah, sire, you look for that one marvellous being, who shall torch again the youth in your heart, make your blood burn, your soul to sing. That one woman in the world, mysterious as the moon, subtle as the night, ineffably strange as a flaming dawn. That woman who shall lift you to the stars; whose lips suck the sap of the world; whose bosom breathes to the eternal swoon of all sweet sounds. She shall light the lust of battle in your heart. For her your sword shall leap, your towers totter. Chivalry should lead you like a pillar of fire out of the night, a heroic god striving for a goddess."
The Lord of Avalon stood before the high altar as one transfigured. Youth leapt in him, red, glorious, and triumphant. Balthasar's tongue had set the pyre aburning.
"By God, it is the truth," he said.
The friar gathered his brushes, and took breath.
"Hast thou found thy Beatrice, O my son?"
"Have I gazed into heaven?"
Balthasar's voice filled the chapel.
"Live, sire, live!" he said.
"Ah!"
"Be mad! Drink star wine, and snuff the odours of all the sunsets! Live, live! You can repent in comfort when you are sixty and measure fifty inches round the waist."