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 Ca.s.sandra, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 cas.e.m.e.nt. 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 cortege. 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 cas.e.m.e.nt wide and stared out into the night. A calm breeze moved amid the ma.s.ses 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 mult.i.tudes 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, pa.s.sionate, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion, she closed the cas.e.m.e.nt, 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 cas.e.m.e.nt, 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 gla.s.s about him blazed like a shower of gems.
The Sebastian of the cas.e.m.e.nt recalled to her with wizard power the face of the man whom death claimed at dawn. The thought woke no new pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sing 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 ba.s.s answered her from the pa.s.sage.
"Unbar to me, I must speak with you."
She started up from the bed in pa.s.sionless 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 bl.u.s.ter 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 cas.e.m.e.nt, 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 sc.r.a.pe 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 pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sage.
"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 pa.s.sed, the sun smote in, and found her kneeling at her prayer-desk, her breviary dewed with tears.
XII
Fulviac pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion 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 st.i.tches 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.