In the forest there was an old stone quarry, and in the wall thereof some hermit of long ago had cut himself a little chamber; but the hermit had died in the time of the Barons’ war, and the quarry was full of briers and brambles, broom and bracken. A tall beech wood shut it on every side, so that the place was like a pit into which sunlight fell only at noon and when the sun was high in summer.
In the doorway of this hermit’s cell Fulk of the Forest sat on a truss of dead bracken, and stared moodily at the beech trees. His hands and feet were free enough, but the sides of the quarry went up like a castle wall, and Guy the Stallion and twenty men lay night and day among the bushes that half closed the entry. At night a large fire was lit, and he could hear those who kept guard laughing and singing, and telling lewd tales.
This royal falcon, mewed up and fed upon dainties, was in no mood to be patient. He thought of the “fence” month that was so near, of the deer harried and hunted by boors and thieves, of the hinds, big with fawn, driven hither and thither. The personal part of the adventure balked his wit; he could read no meaning into it, nothing perhaps save the whim of a woman. As for Isoult, he felt no gratitude towards her, but brooded like a Samson shorn of his hair. He was tempted to believe that she had used her woman’s wiles to steal his sword away; that she was playing off a jest on him, and that some day soon he would catch its meaning.
As he stared at the young beech leaves spreading in bright green glooms above the mouse-coloured trunks, he saw a figure appear in one of the woodland aisles, a figure that was all green and blue. He knew Isoult instantly by the way she walked, and the nearer she came the keener grew his anger against her. If she had but left well alone he would have driven the boors like sheep out of the White Lodge. He had been a fool to let her trick him and take away his sword.
Guy’s men started up and louted to her, and Fulk saw her wave them back into the beech wood. As she entered the quarry he saw that she had his sword buckled to her under her green cloak, the leather belt clasping the sky-blue cloth of her cote-hardie She picked her way at her leisure through the brambles, looking at Fulk with eyes that were full of baffling lights and shadows.
Just without the cell’s mouth a broom bush was in bloom, its yellow spikes very brilliant against the green of the young beech leaves. There was a rough stone seat at the entry under the broom bush, and Isoult sat herself down there within a bow’s length of the man on the bracken.
Fulk kept his eyes from her, and stared at the beech wood as though no woman with black hair and red lips sat there under the yellow broom.
“Messire Fulk, am I to laugh or to weep?”
He seemed in no mind to answer her, and his shut mouth and haughty nostrils made her smile to herself with an air of intimate and adventurous mystery.
“I am to snivel then, and ask your pardon because I saved you from having your neck put on a chopping-block? And men are said to be grateful!”
He answered her, without turning his head.
“This is a fool’s business. I can make nothing of it, save that I was a fool to give up my sword.”
“You think that?”
“I have said so.”
“Then I made you act like a fool?”
“So it seems. For the rest, I can see no sense in anything. And if it is a jest it is the dullest one I ever heard of.”
She regarded him with intent and curious eyes, and, unbuckling the sword, laid it across her knees.
“See, here lies your sword. Stretch out your hand and take it, and I’ll neither stir nor cry out.”
For the first time since she had come to sit under the yellow broom Fulk looked straight into her face.
“More tricks!”
“Fulk of the Forest, I play fair. Take your sword and rush out against these fellows yonder. But, before your hawk’s pride flies in the face of Fate, listen.”
He did not move, but kept his eyes on hers.
“Well?”
“I offer you this sword of yours to prove that you do not know the temper of Isoult. Take the sword, play the madman if it pleases you; but I warn you it will make you look the greater fool. Those fellows yonder have had their orders, and each man has his bow. I have heard the orders that were given them, to keep clear, and shoot you through those long legs of yours so that you could neither run nor fight.”
She took the sword by the scabbard and held the hilt towards him.
“Choose.”
He shrugged contemptuously.
“A fool’s business. I can make nothing of it, save that these hedgers and ditchers and horse-thieves are the lords of the forest. Why am I so marked a stag?”
“Because you are—what you are.”
“More words.”
She laid the sword on her knees, and bent towards him, pointing with one forefinger.
“Listen to me, Fulk Ferrers. Have you been on a wild hill in the thick of a thunderstorm, when the sky is like the lid of a black hell and the lightning stabs the earth here, there, and everywhere? Have you not felt like a hare in the grass, a little thing of no account, a wisp of straw in the wind? But perhaps Messire Fulk Ferrers is too stiffnecked and proud to listen while the doom vault cracks over his head!”
Her eyes were intensely black for the moment, her face the face of a witch. Fulk sat rigid, as though he listened to the sound of elf’s horns in the forest.
“True; I have felt it,” he said.
Her hand dropped to her knee.
“Messire Fulk, you and I are but children on the edge of a strange, storm-swept country. We cannot help ourselves; we are but little people stumbling over the heather. You ask for the why and the wherefore, but it is not for me to answer the riddle for you. What am I but a storm bird blown by wild winds from over the sea? I tell you there is great wrath and dread and violence afoot. You are here because the chance has seized on you as a red shrike seizes a beetle for its larder.”
Her face was a new world to him, intense and white, the red lips uttering words that made him think of the moan of a wind through winter trees, or the clang of swords in a charge of horsemen upon some sunset heath. His manhood bridled, and reared like a startled horse. This voice of hers had reached some primitive instinct in him. His mistrust passed of a sudden and gave place to wonder.
“Strange words!”
Her eyes flashed out at him.
“You may go one way—I another. Someone will speak more plainly before many days have gone. Watch—consider. I know not how you may regard it—as a light adventure, a glorious treason. Do not mistrust me. I charge you, do not mistrust me!”
He gave her a quick, ironical smile.
“There is the beech wood yonder, and out of it will come a dragon, and I shall have no sword!”
“No sword could help you.”
His stare was long and shrewd.
“It may be that Isoult of the Rose will ride on the dragon’s back!”
“If so, I shall be the master,” she said, looking at his hands.
Betimes she left him, and whither she went he knew not, save that she passed away into the beech wood, carrying his sword.
The next morning she came again, and her mood was full of laughter and of the joy of living. She had broken off a white may bough and carried it on her shoulder, and as she came through the woods Fulk heard her singing.
He would not suffer himself to believe that he had looked for her coming, or that her red mouth and her mysterious eyes had any message to move him. Yet that his manhood should leap in him when he saw her among the beech trees in her green cloak and blue cote-hardie, and with the white may bough over her shoulder, was a challenge to his pride. She brought some of the exultant rush of the year with her in the way she walked and the way she carried her head.
“I have come five miles.”
Life was at high noon in her, with a glow of the eyes and face. Fulk took some of the dry bracken and spread it upon the stone bench, and the casual haughtiness of the deed was a part of the morning’s comedy.
“I tell you, Fulk of the Forest, it is good to live. Run through the names of all the wines—malmsey, ypocrasse, basturde, clove, pyment, muscabell. They are nothing to the wind and the sun on the heath.”
Her mood itself was a cup of Spanish wine, and Fulk took a draught of it into his blood.
“Whence have you come?”
“That would be telling! Lying awake under the stars in Gascony and listening to the aspens chattering! Messire Fulk, change with me; take my body and give me yours.”
“What, to lie in a hermit’s cell, and with that braggart for doorkeeper!”
“No, no; to take my arms and mount my horse on a May morning and gallop after adventures. To fight and break spears, and drink with my comrade in arms; to make love to women! Oh! the brave world, the valour and fun, the cry of the trumpets, the snow and the winter sunsets! The wind on the heath has blown itself into my blood!”
Fulk looked at her curiously. She was like no woman of his imaginings—no soft, sleek, sly thing to be kissed for a month and then left to her needle and her prayer desk.
“If I changed with you,” he said, “I promise you that you would love the forest and the red deer, and the heath in bloom, and the laugh of the woodpecker, and the smell of the fern.”
“Ah, I promise you. The rich earth, and the red sap of our life. The great woods, the rivers that go down to the sea, the armed hosts in their battle harness, the strength and the valour, the galloping horses, the scorn of treachery, the eyes that look straight.”
He nodded towards the mouth of the quarry.
“There are eyes over yonder that look round corners and through bushes. The red beard is watching us, his head all swaddled up so that he looks like an old woman in a wimple.”
“That fool! He must have his tongue and his nose in everything! I can play with such bumblebees.”
She stood up and called the swashbuckler.
“Guy, hallo there—friend Guy!”
The Stallion came out from behind a holly bush, carrying his sword on his shoulder, the red twists of his beard ferocious as ever.
“Bring me Blanche’s lute. I saw her over yonder as I came through the wood; and for my touching of her strings she can boast of Isoult as her comrade.”
Guy saluted Isoult with his sword, and disappeared into the beech wood, where Blanche was sitting in a shelter of boughs under a tree, mending a hole in her hose, one bare foot thrust out, her hair bundled up anyhow in a torn net. Her lute lay in a red bag beside her, but as to lending it to Isoult that was another matter. Guy had but to grab at the thing for her to scratch at his face and start screaming like a jay.
Isoult laughed.
“Between them they will break the strings, yet I shall get the lute.”
The squabble was soon over, Big Blanche’s voice oozing away into a futile whimpering that was smothered by the big oaths and blasphemies of her man. She had wriggled away and was cowering against the tree trunk in order to escape from a foot that was none too delicate in the use of its big toe.
“You sing, you big slug! You have a voice like the bung-hole of a barrel!”
He marched off, and coming to Isoult, presented the lute to her with a fine obeisance, his sword cocked over his shoulder. One red eye looked slantwise at Fulk of the Forest.
“Madame Isoult, sing, and we shall forget to be hungry.”
“Or to quarrel—or boast!”
She took the lute to her bosom, and struck the strings, waiting for Guy the Stallion to take himself off.
“What shall I sing, good comrade?”
“Just what comes to the bird’s throat.”
And so she sang to him of Ipomedon, and Gingamor, and the Romaunt of the Rose, and of strange forests and haunted meres, and of the banners of kings red as the sunset. Fulk’s heart went out to her because of her singing, and all his mistrust of her melted like wax.
When she had ended he looked long at her as though trying to fathom her soul.
“Isoult, who and what are you? For some day I needs must know.”
“Good comrade, I am but a bird from over the sea, and yet I have no ring on my foot.”
“I marvel——”
“That I should sing?”
“No. That you should fly with these jays and stormcocks.”
She glanced at him slantwise under black lashes.
“Why should I tell you what no man in the land knows?”
“Why, indeed?” he echoed her.
“We are two riddles, you and I,” she said, “to be guessed, some time or never. But whether we shall guess each other, God and our need may show.”
Meanwhile, Guy the Stallion lay flat on his belly behind a bush, gnawing grass, and watching them with hungry eyes. The beast in him desired Isoult and hated the man beside her. And from a little distance Big Blanche watched her man, her round, white face sullen, and glum, and jealous.
About that time Father Merlin had news brought him. Runners came to the White Lodge in the forest, where Merlin was to be found sitting on a stool by the pond, fishing; or kneeling in the hall before a little wooden cross that he had hung on a peg in one of the oak posts. Every hour he might be found kneeling there, eyes closed, a smile on his harsh face, looking as though he had prayed for the souls of men and saw the Great Ones of Heaven descending instantly to succour the poor.
The runners came from north, east, and west. Each man had much the same message to give to Father Merlin, and he would listen with a rapt look and then return the fellow his blessing.
“Peace to you, my son. Assuredly, God and St. Francis have remembered the poor.”
Merlin knew what he knew as he took his walks in the forest, a thin, grey figure in a great, green world. He would pause upon the hills, and look east and west, his hood turned back, his eyes gleaming, his broad nostrils sniffing the air. Father Merlin had been a villein’s son, and all the fierce, sneering spirit of the man sprang back with a snarl of hatred from those who ruled by right of birth. A hundred hungers and humiliations lay on him like a hair shirt. He chafed to tear the pomp from the lords’ shoulders and to fling it as a cape of freedom over the poor, though the noble’s purse might find its way into St. Francis’s wallet and his power into St. Francis’s hand.
He cried aloud as the west wind came up the slope of the hill, and blew his grey frock about his knotty knees.
“Blow, wind, blow! The poor shall trample Mammon into the mud!”
Much such a cry as Merlin’s had gone through all the land, and the men of the fields had heard it and lifted their heads—brown waters running together in flood time from every ditch and stream. The carter had left his horses; the woodman had shouldered his axe and left the oak bark but half stripped for the tanner; the serf had set his scythe upon a pole; the smith had shouldered his hammer; the charcoal burner had forgotten his fire. Everywhere they gathered, these brown men, with a murmur like the rustling of dead leaves when a great host marches to battle along a woodland road in autumn. Their mouths were uttering strange new words, “The Commons and the King!”
A stupor of fear had seized on all those who ruled. The lords and gentry had shut themselves up in their castles and houses, or ridden off out of the way of the wind. Doors were barred, bridges raised, shutters bolted. Reeves, clerks, tax-gatherers, hid themselves in cellars and hay-lofts. Women shivered and lay awake at night. The suddenness of the thing had astonished the gentles as though the brown earth were heaving under their feet. Knights who had fought in the French wars sat sullenly at home, too proud, perhaps, to risk the pride of the sword against the insolence of a smith’s hammer or a labourer’s flail. The ignoble many had risen against the arrogant few, and the arrogance was with the mob for the moment.
It was a wild May, both in wind and temper. The hawthorn bloom was scattered like snow, and late frosts nipped even the young bracken. The north wind roared out of a hard blue sky, making the green world shiver, and bringing Berserk steel into the painted pleasance of spring. The mood of the hind suited the mood of the weather. The fields were empty, and the men who should have laboured there were running like madmen hither and thither. The cold spell out of the north seemed to have given a rougher edge to the boorish temper, making it remember the mud and rain in the winter fields, the sour food at home in the draughty clay-daubed cottage; while Master Gentleman sat in his stone house before the fire under the great chimney, and drank hot Spanish wines, and had furs to draw about him. The wolf spirit was abroad. These men of the fields were drunk with years of envy, hatred, and sullen anger; they raged through the country-side, plundering cellars and larders, tearing down the banks of fish ponds, breaking mill wheels, cutting down orchard trees, emptying granaries and dovecots, killing deer, and harrying warrens. Pride of birth was taken by the beard, mocked, and treated to the savage horse-play of these men of the soil.
“When Adam delved and Eve span,Where was then the gentleman?”
“When Adam delved and Eve span,Where was then the gentleman?”
“When Adam delved and Eve span,Where was then the gentleman?”
“When Adam delved and Eve span,
Where was then the gentleman?”
They howled these words in the villages, along the roads, and over the heaths and commons. The French Jacquerie seemed to have come again with its gibbering fury, its wild lust and blood spilling; and many a woman trembled for her honour, and many a gentleman dreamt of his bloody head dancing upon a pike.
Father Merlin knew what he knew. The runners came to him carrying news, and one May morning he sought Isoult. She had taken herself to one of the empty forest lodges where two sheep and their lambs fed in the deserted orchard and a cow came to the byre gate to be milked.
It was so cold that Isoult had brought in wood and kindled a fire, and Merlin found her in the dark, black oak hall, sitting on a stool, and staring at the flames. A loose shutter banged to and fro in the wind, and the twittering of the sparrows in the thatch sounded cold and thin.
Merlin’s eyes shone out from under the shadow of his cowl. He pulled up a stool, and, spreading his hands to the blaze, spoke of the roughness of the weather.
“And yet our Rose blooms,” said he; “and the young man of the quarry, is he as cold as the wind out of the north?”
She did not look at Merlin, but her eyes were dark and set steadily towards some inward thought.
“He is—what he is.”
“Does the scent of the rose count for nothing in June? Come now, what have you seen, my daughter?”
She answered him slowly, almost grudgingly.
“The third finger of the left hand is crooked. A blow from a quarter-staff broke it. And over the right eyebrow there is a small brown mole.”
“Good. You would know this apple from another?”
She nodded.
Merlin spread his arms dramatically, and then stared in silence at the fire. The eyes under the cowl glistened, and the harsh face with its savage sagacity looked hungry and exultant.
“We have two puppets and two strings! Speak to me, Isoult. Let me hear what you have to tell.”
She rested her chin on her fist.
“I have nothing to tell. I will wager that you cannot take the hood from that hawk and make him fly as you please.”
“Say you so! But a young man may be persuaded, and you—my daughter——”
“I, too, have the fettle of a falcon.”
“Am I a fool? But what have you done? How have you played with him?”
“Merlin, be careful how you tempt me to be angry!”
He looked at her intently, and then, leaning forward, began to speak with a whispering eagerness, his voice sounding like the blowing of a wind through a crack in a shutter. Isoult sat back, rigid, her eyes staring at the fire, her throat stiffening, her lips pressed together. She was very white when he uttered the first words, but a slow surge of blood rose into her face, and her eyes glittered like water touched by the sun at dawn.
Suddenly she started up, and her face flamed.
“Enough! Am I to listen to this?”
Merlin stroked the air with his hands.
“My daughter, I speak advisedly. Is it not a glory to any woman for her to make and unmake kings? And this Fulk is not unworthy. The blood of a great prince runs in him.”
She walked to and fro, and then stood and looked down at him with a scorn that she did not dissemble.
“No. I sing no such song for you, Master Merlin. By my troth, I bid you beware.”
He waved his hands with the same smoothing motion, and dared to meet her eyes.
“My daughter, you are in too hot a hurry. The King of the Commons will not have to wed a princess out of France or Spain. She who is comely and proud and valiant can sit by such a king. Come now—consider.”
“Merlin, I know that tongue of yours.”
“Let us leave it to Dame Nature, Isoult. Love leaps in where he pleases.”
“I give you neither yea nor nay.”
“In that I must find my comfort.”
He sat awhile beside the fire, brooding and fingering his chin. Isoult had gone out into the orchard, but when he sought her there she was not to be found. Merlin crossed himself, and turned back towards the White Lodge.
“A woman’s anger is not to be trusted,” he said to himself, “for oftentimes it rises out of the passion it pretends to scorn. I must feel how that young man’s heart beats. Hot blood is very helpful.”
Isoult, hidden among some yew trees on the side of the hill above the orchard, watched Merlin’s grey frock disappear into the green of the woods. Her face shone white and hard, but in her eyes there was something of wonder, even of fear.
Fulk sat in the doorway of the hermit’s cell and watched the dusk come down—the slow, subtle dusk of a still May evening. The beech wood had been full of the singing of birds, and on the top of a holly near the quarry’s mouth a thrush had poured out all its joy and desire, its grey-brown breast turned towards the sunset. The beech foliage had changed from vivid green to amethyst, the trunks from grey to black, while orange, amber, and saffron were flung abroad across an exultant west. Now, later still, the woods rose in soft, rounded blackness against a deep blue sky, with the crescent of the moon clear as polished steel.
Fulk sat there brooding, his face growing grey in the dusk. The smoke of a fire rose beyond the mouth of the quarry—a grey, sinuous pillar that swayed slightly from side to side or thrust out a ghostly arm when some breath of wind played upon it. Now and again a voice growled sulkily, but since the birds had ceased their singing the silence had become immense, irrefutable, supreme.
Presently there was a crackling of brushwood. The pillar of smoke swelled to a cloud of draughty vapour; dead wood had been thrown on the fire, and the flames licked through it and rose as crimson and yellow tongues against the blackness of the beech wood. A sense of restlessness seemed to come from nowhere and to show itself in the wavering lights and shadows that played under the boughs of the beeches. Fulk saw a solitary figure outlined against the fire, thrusting a pole under the burning brushwood, and looking, with the jagged comb of its hood, like a sinister black devil.
Something moved in the mouth of the quarry, a patch of greyness that disassociated itself from the vague gloom of the brambles and furze. Fulk’s chin went up, and his eyes were on the alert. The figure shaped itself into that of a grey friar, and Fulk guessed it to be Father Merlin.
He came gliding in like a ghost. A grey arm went up and gave Fulk a benediction.
“Peace to you, Fulk Ferrers.”
Merlin sat himself down on the stone seat outside the cell, with his staff across his knees. His cowl was drawn, and Fulk could not see his face, but merely a patch of blackness where the face should be.
The Franciscan took his beads and muttered three prayers, and Fulk watched him, wondering what Merlin’s business might be, and how far he was to be trusted.
“Has the blood grown restless in you, Fulk Ferrers?”
His voice was smooth and persuasive.
“No more than in a hawk on a perch.”
“The hawk would fly, eh! Young blood runs hot. I have many things to say to you, Fulk of the Forest.”
The darkness was between them, and Merlin’s voice came out of it with a cautious, intimate murmur.
“My son, who has not heard of wrongs that should be righted, of things hidden away under the ground when they should be brought into the light of day? Listen to me, son Fulk. A priest comes by many truths, and by strange stories, and sometimes it is difficult for a man to believe his own ears and eyes.”
He bent over his staff and stared into Fulk’s face, his cowl slipping back a little, so that a gaunt chin poked out and Fulk saw the gleam of his eyes.
“Listen to strange tidings.”
Merlin’s voice fell to a whisper; and Fulk, looking into the dim face, felt as though some sly and persuasive hand were touching him. Isoult’s enigmatic words were in his ears, and his mistrust bristled.
“Speak out, friar, if you have anything to say.”
“Assuredly I can paint you a picture such as few young men have ever looked upon.”
It may be that Father Merlin had passed an hour in the quarry before Guy the Stallion and his men heard a throttled voice calling for help. They tumbled up from about the fire and went running into the quarry, dodging in and out between the masses of bramble and furze. Guy had taken a burning brand from the fire, and its flare showed them Merlin flat on his back and Fulk of the Forest on top of him.
They fell upon Fulk, dragged him off, and bore him back against the quarry wall. He did not struggle with them, and his passivity was part of his scorn. Merlin turned over on his hands and knees, wheezing and fighting for breath, his lips blue, and his eyes full of tears. He gathered himself up, coughing, and feeling his throat.
Guy swaggered forward.
“Give the word, father, and we’ll make an end.”
Merlin’s hood had fallen back. He turned on Guy with grinning, furious face.
“Fool! Tie the man up, and put a sack over his head. And keep that dagger of yours out of mischief.”
A man went off towards the fire, and returned with leather thongs and an old sack. Merlin was still fingering his throat, and his voice was a hoarse whisper.
“Make no mistake over it—tie him up as a spider ties up a fly.”
He stood and watched them, and when the thing was done he went very close to Fulk and stared into his face.
“Fool! What of six feet of cold earth under a beech tree? Sleep on the edge of the black hole, my son, and look down into it when the daylight comes—the cold grey light after cock-crow.”
Fulk kept his mouth shut and his eyes on Merlin’s. His nostrils quivered. There was no slackening of his pride. Merlin sneered at him.
“Put the sack over my lord’s head, and lay him down like a baby to sleep on the bracken. Fulk Ferrers, I wish you good dreams, and cool blood in the morning.”
It was Isoult, mistrustful of Father Merlin’s subtlety, who came through the beech wood just when the grey light of the dawn was making the world look huge and vague and very mysterious. She found the men sleeping about the fire, and Guy the Stallion, who should have been on the watch, sitting doubled up with his head on his arms.
Isoult glided past them and came to the doorway of the cell. It was so dark within that she could see nothing, though she could hear the sound of a man’s breathing. She stood there and called softly, putting her hands about her mouth.
“Fulk! Fulk of the Forest!”
He was sleeping lightly, and woke with a start to the presence of an old flour sack over his head and shoulders, and the leather thongs about wrists and ankles. It was very dark in the cell, and his waking mood was as coldly grim and implacable as his proud disgust could make it. He had fallen asleep with the prospect of having his throat cut in the morning, and it was no affair of his if some fool woke him so early.
“Good comrade, are you still dreaming?”
She had stolen in, but could see little but a vague shape lying on the bracken. Fulk bristled at the sound of her voice.
“Isoult?”
“Surely! Speak low. The birds are just beginning, and our friend Guy is asleep.”
One piping note had thrilled up from the beeches, and of a sudden a score of other bird voices followed it, making the grey light quiver.
“Is the sun up?”
“Surely a man can see with his own eyes!”
“With a sack tied over his head! Here is something for a woman to laugh at.”
She came nearer.
“What! Have they tied you up? I had a feeling that you and Merlin had come to the dagger point. Has he spoken?”
“Spoken? It would have been his last sermon if those fellows yonder had given me three more minutes.”
She knelt down beside him and he felt her fingers moving over his face.
“Lie very still.”
Isoult took the knife from her girdle, thrust the point through the sacking, slit it crosswise, and turned back the flaps. A haze of grey light was streaming into the cell, but it was not strong enough to show her the set and rigid hostility of his face.
“So Merlin has spoken. Now, good comrade, do you see the light?”
His lips moved stiffly, ironically.
“I see many things—treachery, and lies, and dishonour, and the hands of a woman.”
Isoult sat back on her heels, and thrust her knife back into its sheath.
“Ah, so you look askance at me, and my hands are full of treachery!”
He did not look at her, but at the vault of rock above him.
“What God knows the devil discovers. This madman Merlin spoke of shriving me at dawn. He shall find me stiff in the neck.”
“This madman would make and unmake kings; he will use you, Messire Fulk, or break you, if he can. Wait, answer me one question. Think you that I am so mean a thing as to play the quean at Merlin’s bidding, even though I follow the same cause?”
“With hedgehogs, and rats, and field-mice——”
“Answer me this question.”
Her voice challenged him with an edge of passion, and her eyes looked straight at his.
“What do you believe of me, Fulk Ferrers?”
“Everything—and nothing.”
“So! My hands fastened these thongs on you?”
“It may be.”
She bent over him with sudden vehement fierceness.
“Fulk Ferrers, look at me.”
Isoult’s face was so close to his that he could feel her warm breath upon his mouth. The daylight had gathered, and her hair was like a black cloud, her face the moon, and the red of her lips was the dawn. Moreover, her eyes held his as desire challenges desire, or as a sword presses upon a sword.
“Look at me. Am I a cut-throat jade, Merlin’s creature? By my maidenhood, I should not be here an I were. Listen. The truth may say that you are a bastard brother to the King, that you are as like as two apples, that you may serve as well as he. I say it may be so, else why should Merlin be so venomously wise? As for you, you say that you have chosen. Good. But I too have a choice to make; the hands you mistrust might unfasten the bonds that bind you!”
He looked up at her with a half-sullen fire in his eyes.
“Call me a bastard, and the mother who bore me a ——. No, by God, I’ll not put my lips to it! Let that truth stick in Merlin’s throat.”
She sat back and gazed at him.
“Oh, stiffnecked, proud, splendid fool! Were I to soar, would you not follow? Such a flight of falcons into the blue together!”
He turned his head aside, for her eyes, her mouth, her voice tormented him.
“Isoult, have done. Whether this be one gross lie or not—I’ll not wanton with it, or with these scrapings of the fields. God—if I have a prince’s blood in me, I’ll play the prince.”
She thrust out her hands, eyes alight, her breath coming and going more quickly.
“Ah! That has an echo! I soar to that. I——Listen! Did you hear?”
She turned sharply, and Fulk saw her bosom, throat, and face outlined against the doorway.
“Merlin’s voice!”
She started up and passed out into the quarry just as Father Merlin’s grey cowl appeared among the furze bushes. He was alone, and his face seemed to narrow when he saw Isoult.
She went to meet him boldly, head held high, and with an imperiousness that attacked and did not wait to be challenged.
“Merlin, you have neither the wit nor the hands of a woman. What! Brought to the footpad’s threat of the knife and six feet of earth already? Thank me for being up before dawn.”
He eyed her cautiously, and when he spoke his voice was still harsh from Fulk’s crumpling of his throat.
“Ah, my bird of the morning!”
“I have uncovered the man’s eyes. A woman’s face is fairer to look at than the inside of a sack. Wait and see whether there is no magic.”
Merlin laughed noiselessly.
“We are less proud this morning?” he said.
The men of Sussex were on the march, and Father Merlin rode on a white mule, with Fulk on a forest pony beside him, and the Sussex men wondered who the priest’s prisoner might be, for Fulk was lashed to the beast he rode, and his head was swathed up in white linen. Father Merlin rode softly, smiling upon these children who were to lay all the lords and gentlemen of England in the dust. When the chance served he talked to Fulk, using a scathing, ironical, and tempting tongue, and hinting at adventures that tended towards both heaven and hell.
Isoult of the Rose also went with this great company of the poor, mounted upon a black horse that had been stolen out of somebody’s stable. She had put off her gay colours and rode in russet, though the red leather shoes remained. They had given her a pony to carry her lute and her baggage, and Guy the Stallion marched at no great distance like a sergeant-at-arms, with fat Blanche trailing sulkily after him.
Isoult was a silent woman that morning, but her eyes were very watchful and missed little that was to be seen. June had come; the woods were like great green clouds against the blue; the bracken was frothing round the oak stems, and lush grass stood knee-deep in the meadows. Not only was it thundery weather, but a blight seemed on the land, an oppressive stillness, an invisible terror that waited in the hot and stagnant woodland. Other companies of the poor had been on the march before them, and had left the slime of their track behind—a burnt barn here and there, an empty manor-house with the gate broken and the house door hanging askew on its hinges, and once, the body of a man with a black face dangling from a tree. The country-side seemed very empty, save at some tavern or intake where a knot of noisy oafs with bills and cudgels in their hands waited to join the great company of the poor.
Very often Isoult was in the thick of these marching boors, and her nostrils showed the subtle shadow of an incipient scorn. The day was steamy, and the mob smelt and sweated, shouted and swore, spat, jostled, cracked coarse jokes, and drank out of bottles. Its breath was not pleasant. The hairy faces were leering and cruel, and their exultation belched in the face of the morning. All along the track she heard them bawling:
“When Adam delved and Eve span,Where was then the gentleman?”
“When Adam delved and Eve span,Where was then the gentleman?”
“When Adam delved and Eve span,Where was then the gentleman?”
“When Adam delved and Eve span,
Where was then the gentleman?”
“Hinds!” she thought. “Where was all your insolent, sweating dust! I could half wish you at the mercy of a hundred galloping spears!”
Moreover, some of them crowded about her, and hot faces were smeary with a gloating thought of her comeliness. She saw the dull lust in their eyes, and her pride became ice. They were like cattle jostling, leaping, bellowing. Now and again the shrill and screaming laughter of a woman eddied up. There was one huge fellow with a purple birth-mark covering half his face, who strode along carrying a small cask as a drum, and beating it with a hammer. He shouted perpetually with the voice of a cow that has been separated from its calf, “Death to all the lords and gentles!” and when he shouted his mouth looked like a red sore.
Late in the day they were crossing a lonely valley, where a stream ran between willows and aspens. A mill-house, built of timber and white plaster and thatched with straw, stood in the thick of an orchard about a hundred paces above the ford, and Isoult saw a dozen men break away and make for the mill-house. The fore-hoofs of her horse were, in the water when she heard a woman’s scream, a scream that was smothered instantly as though a big hand had been clapped over the screamer’s mouth.
The men near Isoult laughed.
“Old Bill o’ Mead Barrel will be first in, I wager you.”
She turned her horse sharply, scattered the men, and rode through the grassland along the edge of the stream, and leaving her horse at the gate by the footbridge, crossed over by the planking that passed close to the mill-wheel. There was a little garden of flowers and herbs in front of the house, and from within came the cries of a woman.
Isoult’s voice was merciless.
“Back, you dogs!”
Her right hand was armed, but the men fell away sheepishly from before the steel of her scorn. A woman lay cowering in a corner, and the big fellow with the purple face who had been beating the barrel like a drum was standing over her with a torn piece of cloth in one hand.
Isoult beckoned the woman.
“Come.”
She twisted past the big man, and, half crawling, fled to Isoult’s knees. And the men let her go, standing mute and balked, avoiding each other’s eyes.
Isoult pointed the woman over the bridge.
“Go; take to the woods. Hide while the wild swine are abroad.”
She kissed Isoult’s hand and fled.
Isoult waited on the footbridge, but the men hung back in the mill-house, for her scorn had sobered them.
Turning to cross the bridge, she found Merlin riding up on his white mule between the willows and aspens. His cowl fell back as he dismounted, and he was showing his teeth like a horse minded to bite.
Isoult called to him.
“Merlin, are your swine to root as they please?”
He made light of it, sneeringly.
“Keep away from the sty, Isoult; your nose is too delicate. Things must happen. I will speak to the fools.”
As he passed her on the bridge their eyes crossed like swords.
“Sing to our hooded falcon to-night, my daughter. It may be that I have softened his heart.”
She gave Merlin no answer, but, remounting her horse, rode back slowly towards the ford.
A halt was called under the edge of a crimson sunset that overtopped the black plumes of a forest of firs. Isoult left her horse with Guy the Stallion, and walked towards the spot where Merlin’s white mule was tethered, and where men were pitching a rough hide tent.
Merlin came out to her and his eyes were enigmatical.
“The lute and the voice and the eyes may serve,” he said; “and yet, Isoult, why should I trust you?”
“Because my wrongs were great, and because I should be a worse enemy than friend.”
“The falcon is hidden away over yonder. He shall have wine and meat, and a fair woman to sing to him.”
“No spying upon us, Merlin. Let me play with him as I please.”
She found Fulk in a green dell on the edge of the wood, nearly a furlong from the place where the men of Sussex were camped for the night. He was sitting amid the bracken under a fir tree, ankles and wrists lashed together, his face masked by the linen swathings. Two men with bows over their knees were squatting on the edge of the dell, their faces half hidden by scarlet hoods. Isoult guessed that Merlin had followed her, and, glancing back, she caught sight of his grey figure moving amid the trunks of the firs. He called to the two men on the edge of the dell, and they arose and left Fulk and Isoult alone together.
“Good comrade, I am to sing to the King’s brother at Merlin’s desire, but not to a man muffled up like a leper.”
She put her lute on the ground, and, kneeling behind him, unfastened the linen band that covered his face.
“Wrists and ankles might also be free!”
He answered her without turning his head.
“I am not to be tempted.”
She smiled from her vantage point, and, throwing the linen aside, sat down close to him among the bracken. A stone bottle of wine and a clean cloth full of bread and meat had been sent to Fulk by Father Merlin.
“Let us eat and drink, comrade; and then I will sing to you.”
He glanced at her as though he took her to be mocking him, and she remembered his helpless hands.
“I must not untie you, or Merlin would be suspicious. The wood is full of eyes. But my hands can serve for both of us.”
She fed him and gave him the wine to drink, and though she laughed over it a little, to Fulk it was a fool’s business, and he was shy of her eyes and hands. His grim face sought to hold her at arm’s length, though the redness of her mouth tormented him.
Dusk was falling, and the fir wood behind them began to grow very black against the sky. The Sussex men were lighting fires in the valley, and making a great uproar like the noise of beasts at feeding time. Isoult’s eyes grew restless, and kept watching the darkening wood.
“Fulk, shall I sing?”
“You were sent to sing.”
She reached for her lute, which lay between them.
“Merlin is a grey ghost, ready to haunt us. I must sing, for he may be listening.”
Her eyes had strangeness, mystery; they were eyes that whispered, and drew him aside into the intimate shadow of her plotting.
“Listen, and live.”
She struck a few thin, plaintive notes, and her voice was a mere murmur: