The Forest Lovers

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THE FOREST LOVERS

A ROMANCE

BY

MAURICE HEWLETT

TO

MRS. W. K. CLIFFORD

WITH

THE AUTHOR'S HOMAGE

CONTENTS

CHAPTERS

I. PROSPER LE GAI RIDES OUT
II. MORGRAUNT, AND A DEAD KNIGHT
III. HOLY THORN AND HOLY CHURCH
IV. DOM GALORS
V. LA DESIROUS
VI. THE VIRGIN MARRIAGE
VII. GALORS ABJURES
VIII. THE SALLY AT DAWN
IX. THE BLOOD-CHASE AND THE LOVE CHASE
X. FOREST ALMS
XI. SANCTUARY
XII. BROKEN SANCTUARY
XIII. HIGH MARCH, AND A GREAT LADY
XIV. A RECORDER
XV. THREE AT TORTSENTIER
XVI. BOY AND GIRL
XVII. ROY
XVIII. BOY'S LOVE
XIX. LADY'S LOVE
XX. HOW PROSPER HELD A REVIEW
XXI. HOW THE NARRATIVE SMACKS AGAIN OF THE SOIL
XXII GALORS CONQUAESTOR
XXIII. FALVE THE CHARCOAL-BURNER
XXIV. SECRET THINGS AT HAUTERIVE
XXV. THE ROAD TO GOLTRES
XXVI. GUESS-WORK AT GOLTRES
XXVII. GALORS RIDES HUNTING
XXVIII. MERCY WITH THE BEASTS.
XXIX. WANMEETING CRIES, 'HA! SAINT JAMES!'
XXX. THE CHAINED VIRGIN OF SAINT THORN
XXXI. 'ENTRA PER ME'
XXXII 'BIDE THE TIME'
XXXIII. SALOMON IS DRIVEN HOME
XXXIV. LA DESIRÉE
XXXV. FOREST LOVE
XXXVI. THE LADY PIETOSA DE BRÉAUTÉ

THE FOREST LOVERS

CHAPTER I

PROSPER LE GAI RIDES OUT

My story will take you into times and spaces alike rude and uncivil. Blood will be spilt, virgins suffer distresses; the horn will sound through woodland glades; dogs, wolves, deer, and men, Beauty and the Beasts, will tumble each other, seeking life or death with their proper tools. There should be mad work, not devoid of entertainment. When you read the word _Explicit_, if you have laboured so far, you will know something of Morgraunt Forest and the Countess Isabel; the Abbot of Holy Thorn will have postured and schemed (with you behind the arras); you will have wandered with Isoult and will know why she was called La Desirous, with Prosper le Gai, and will understand how a man may fall in love with his own wife. Finally, of Galors and his affairs, of the great difference there may be between a Christian and the brutes, of love and hate, grudging and open humour, faith and works, cloisters and thoughts uncloistered--all in the green wood--you will know as much as I do if you have cared to follow the argument. I hope you will not ask me what it all means, or what the moral of it is. I rank myself with the historian in this business of tale-telling, and consider that my sole affair is to hunt the argument dispassionately. Your romancer must be neither a lover of his heroine nor (as the fashion now sets) of his chief rascal. He must affect a genial height, that of a jigger of strings; and his attitude should be that of the Pulpiteer:--Heaven help you, gentlemen, but I know what is best for you! Leave everything to me.

It is related of Prosper le Gai, that when his brother Malise, Baron of Starning and Parrox, showed him the door of their father's house, and showed it with a meaning not to be mistaken, he stuck a sprig of green holly in his cap. He put on his armour; his horse and sword also he took: he was for the wilds. Baron Jocelyn's soul, the priests reported, was with God; his body lay indubitably under a black effigy in Starning Church. Baron Malise was lord of the fee, with a twisted face for Prosper whenever they met in the hall: had there been scores no deeper this was enough. Prosper was a youth to whom life was a very pretty thing; he could not afford to have tarnish on the glass; he must have pleasant looks about him and a sweet air, or at least scope for the making of them. Baron Malise blew like a miasma and cramped him like a church-pew: then Adventure beaconed from far off, and his heart leapt to greet the light. He left at dawn, and alone. Roy, his page, had begged as hard as he dared for pillion or a donkey. He was his master's only friend, but Prosper's temper needed no props. "Roy," said he, "what I do I will do alone, nor will I imperil any man's bread. The bread of my brother Malise may be a trifle over-salt to my taste, but to you it is better than none at all. Season your tongue, Roy, enure it. Drink water, dry your eyes, and forget me not."

He kissed him twice and went his way without any more farewells than the boy's snivelling. He never looked behind at Starning demesne, where he had been born and bred and might have followed his father to church, nor sideways at the broad oaks, nor over to the well-tilled fields on either side his road; but rather pricked forward at a nimble pace which tuned to the running of his blood. The blood of a lad sings sharpest in the early morning; the air tingles, the light thrills, all the great day is to come. This lad therefore rode with a song towards the West, following his own shadow, down the deep Starning lanes, through the woods and pastures of Parrox, over the grassy spaces of the Downs, topping the larks in thought, and shining beam for beam against the new-risen sun. The time of his going-out was September of the harvest: a fresh wet air was abroad. He looked at the thin blue of the sky, he saw dew and gossamer lie heavy on the hedge-rows. All his heart laughed. Prosper was merry.

Whither he should go, what find, how fare, he knew not at all. Morgraunt was before him, and of Morgraunt all the country spoke in a whisper. It as far, it was deep, it was dark as night, haunted with the waving of perpetual woods; it lay between the mountains and the sea, a mystery as inviolate as either. In it outlaws, men desperate and hungry, ran wild. It was a den of thieves as well as of wolves. Men, young men too, had ridden in, high-hearted, proud of their trappings, horses, curls, and what not; none had ever seen them come out. They might be roaming there yet, grown old with roaming, and gaunt with the everlasting struggle to kill before they were killed: who could tell? Or they might have struck upon the vein of savage life; they might go roaring and loving and robbing with the beasts--why not? Morgraunt had swallowed them up; who could guess to what wild uses she turned her thralls? That was a place, pardieu! Prosper, very certain that at twenty-three it is a great thing to be hale and astride a horse, felt also that to grow old without having given Morgraunt a chance of killing you young would be an insipid performance. "As soon be a priest!" he would cry, "or, by the Rood, one of those flat-polled monks kept there by the Countess Isabel." Morgraunt then for Prosper, and the West; beyond that--"One thing at a time," thought he, for he was a wise youth in his way, and held to the legend round his arms. Seeing that south of him he could now smell the sea, and beyond him lay Morgraunt, he would look no further till Morgraunt lay below him appeased or subjugate.

A tall and lean youth was Prosper le Gai, fair-haired and sanguine, square-built and square-chinned. He smiled at you; you saw two capital rows of white teeth, two humorous blue eyes; you would think, what a sweet-tempered lad! So in the main he was; but you would find out that he could be dangerous, and that (curiously) the more dangerous he was, the sweeter his temper seemed to be. If you crossed him once, he would stare; twice, he would laugh; three times, you would swear he was your humble servant; but before you could cross him again he would have knocked you down. The next moment he would give you a hand up, and apologize; after that, so far as he was concerned, you might count him your friend for life. The fact is, that he was one of those men who, like kings, require a nominal fealty before they can love you with a whole heart: it is a mere nothing. But somebody, they think, must lead. Prosper always felt so desperately sure it must be he. That was apt to lend a frenzy to his stroke and a cool survey to his eye (as being able to take so much for granted), which made him a good friend and a nasty enemy.

It also made him, as you will have occasion to see, a born fighter. He went, indeed, through those years of his life on tiptoe, as it were, for a fight. He had a light and springing carriage of the head, enough to set his forelock nodding; his eye roved like a sea-bird's; his lips often parted company, for his breath was eager. He had a trick of laughing to himself softly as he went about his business; or else he sang, as he was now singing. These qualities, little habits, affectations, whatever you choose to call them, sound immaterial, but they really point to the one thing that made him remarkable--the curious blend of opposites in him. He blent benevolence with savagery, reflectiveness with activity. He could think best when thought and act might jump together, laugh most quietly when the din of swords and horses drowned the voice, love his neighbour most sincerely when about to cut his throat. The smell of blood, the sight of wounds, or the flicker of blades, made him drunk; but he was one of those who grow steady in their cups. You might count upon him at a pinch. Lastly, he was no fool, and was disposed to credit other people with a balance of wit.

He disliked frippery, yet withal made a brave show in the sun. His plain black mail was covered with a surcoat of white and green linen; over this a narrow baldrick of red bore in gold stitches his device of a hooded falcon, and his legend on a scroll, many times repeated and intercrossed--_I bide my time_. In his helmet were three red feathers, on his shield the blazon of his house of Gai--_On a field sable, a fesse dancettée or_, with a mullet for difference. He carried no spear; for a man of his light build the sword was the arm. Thus then, within and without, was Messire Prosper le Gai, youngest son of old Baron Jocelyn, deceased, riding into the heart of the noon, pleased with himself and the world, light-minded, singing of the movement and the road.

Labourers stayed their reaping to listen to him; but there was nothing for them. He sang of adventure. Girls leaned at cottage doorways to watch him down the way. There was nothing for them either, for all he sang of love.

"She who now hath my heart
is so in every part;" etc., etc.

The words came tripping as a learnt lesson; but he had never loved a girl, and fancied he never would. Women? Petticoats! For him there was more than one adventure in life. Rather, my lady's chamber was the last place in which he would have looked for adventure.

On the second day of his journey--in a country barren and stony, yet with a hint of the leafy wildernesses to come in the ridges spiked with pines, the cropping of heather here and there, and the ever-increasing solitude of his way--he was set upon by four foot-pads, who thought to beat the life out of his body as easily as boys that of a dog. He asked nothing better than that they should begin; and he asked so civilly that they very soon did. The fancy of glorious youth transformed them into knights-at-arms, and their ashen cudgels into blades. The only pity was that the end came so soon.

His sword dug its first sod, and might have carved four cowards instead of one; but he was no vampire, so thereafter laid about him with the flat of the tool. The three survivors claimed quarter. "Quarter, you rogues!" cried he. "Kindly lend me one of your staves for the purpose." He gave them a drubbing as one horsed his brother in turn, and dropped them, a chapfallen trio, beside their dead. "Now," said he, "take that languid gentleman with you, and be so good for the rest of your journey as to imitate his indifference to strangers. Thus you will have a prosperous passage. Good day to you."

He slept on the scene of his exploit, rose early, rode fast, and by noon was plainly in the selvage of the great woods. The country was split into bleak ravines, a pell-mell of rocks and boulders, and a sturdy crop of black pines between them. An overgrowth of brambles and briony ran riot over all. Prosper rode up a dry river-bed, keeping steadily west, so far as it would serve him; found himself quagged ere a dozen painful miles, floundered out as best he might, and by evening was making good pace over a rolling bit of moorland through which ran a sandy road. It was the highway from Wanmouth to Market Basing and the north, if he had known. Ahead of him a solitary wayfarer, a brown bunch of a friar, from whose hood rose a thin neck and a shag of black hair round his tonsure--like storm-clouds gathering about a full moon--struck manfully forward on a pair of bare feet.

"God be with you, brother gentleman," cried the friar, turning a crab-apple face upwards.

"And with you, my brother, who carry your slippers," Prosper replied.

"Eh, eh, brother! They go softer than steel for a gouty toe."

"Poor gout, Master Friar, I hope, for Saint Francis' peace of mind."

"My gentleman," said the friar, "let me tell you the truth. I am a poor devil out of Lucca, built for matrimony and the chimney corner, as Grandfather Adam was before me. Brother Bonaccord of Outremer they call me in religion, but ill-accord I am in temper, by reason of the air of this accursed land, and a most tempestuous blood of my own. For why! I go to the Dominicans of Wanmouth, supplicating that I am new landed, and have no convent to my name and establishment in the Church. They take me in. Ha! they do that. Look now. 'A sop of bread and wine,' I cry, 'for the love of God.' It is a Catholic food, very comfortable for the stomach. Ha! they give me beer. Beer? Wet death! I am by now as gouty as a cardinal, and my eye is inflamed. I think of the Lucchese--those shafts of joy miscalled women--when I should be thinking of my profession. I am ready as ever to admit two vows, but Saint Paul himself cannot reconcile me to the third. Beer, my friend, beer."

"You will do well enough, friar, if you are going the forest road. You will find no Lucchesan ladies thereabouts."

"I am none so sure, gentleman. There were tales told at the Wanmouth hostel. Do you know anything of a very holy place in these parts, the Abbey of Saint Giles of the Thorn? Black monks, my brother; black as your stallion."

"I think they are white monks," said Prosper, "Bernardines."

"I spoke of the colour of their deeds, young sir," answered Brother Bonaccord.

"I know as little of them as of any monks in Christendom, friar," Prosper said. "But I have seen the Abbot and spoken with him. Richard Dieudonné is his name, well friended by the Countess."

"He is well friended by many ladies, some of account, and some of none at all, by what I hear," said the friar, rather dryly for such a twinkling spirit.

"Ah, with ladies," Prosper put in, "you have me again; for I know less of them than of monks, save that both have petticoats. Your pardon, brother."

"Not a bit, not a bit, brother again," replied the friar. "I admit the hindrance; and could tell you of the advantages if I had the mind. But as to the ladies, suffer me to predict that you will know more of them before you have done."

"I think not," said Prosper. Brother Bonaccord began to laugh.

"They will give you no peace yet awhile," said he. "And let me tell you this, from a man who knows what he is talking about, that if you think to escape them by neglecting them, you are going the devil's way to work. If you wish them to let you alone, speak them fair, drop easily to your knee, be a hand-kisser, a cushion-disposer, a goer on your toes. They will think you a lover and shrug you away. Never do a woman a service as if to oblige her; do it as if to oblige yourself. Then she will believe you her slave. Then you are safe. That is your game, brother."

"You have studied ladies, friar?"

"Ah, ah! I have indeed. They are a wondrous fair book. I know no other. Why should I?"

"Oh, why indeed?" Prosper assented. "For my part, I find other studies more engrossing."

With such talk they went until they reached a little wood, and then disposed of themselves for the night. When Prosper woke next morning the good man had gone. He had left a written message to the effect that, petticoats or none, he had stolen a march on steel, and might be looked for at Malbank.

"I wonder how much stuff for his mind that student of ladies will win at Malbank," laughed Prosper to himself, little knowing, indeed.

CHAPTER II

MORGRAUNT, AND A DEAD KNIGHT

Leaving the high road on his right hand, Prosper struck over the heath towards a solemn beech-wood, which he took to be the very threshold of Morgraunt. As a fact it was no more than an outstretched finger of its hand, by name Cadnam Thicket. He skirted this place, seeking an entry, but found nothing to suit him for an hour or more. Then at last he came to a gap in the sandy bank, and saw that a little mossy ride ran straight in among the trees. He put his horse at the gap, and was soon cantering happily through the wood. Thus he came short upon an adventure. The path ran ahead of him in a tapering vista, but just where it should meet in a point it broadened out suddenly so as to make a double bay. The light fell splashing upon this cleared space, and he saw what he saw.

This was a tall lady, richly dressed in some gauzy purple stuff, dragging a dead man by the heels, and making a very bad business of it. She was dainty to view, her hands and arms shone like white marble; but apart from all this it was clear to Prosper that she lacked the mere strength for the office she had proposed herself. The dead man was not very tall, but he was too tall for the lady. The roughness of the ground, the resistance of the underwood, the incapacity of the performers, made the procession unseemly.

Prosper, forgetting Brother Bonaccord, quickened his horse to a gallop, and was soon up with the toiling lady. She stopped when she heard him coming, stood up to wait for him, quick-breathing and a little flushed, and never took her eyes off him.

It was clearly a time for discretion: so much she signalled from her brown eyes, which were watchful, but by no means timid. He remembered afterwards that they had been apt to fall easily into set stares, and thus to give her a bold look which seemed to invite you to be bold also. But though he could not see this now, and though he had no taste for women, it was certain she was handsome in a profuse way. She had a broad full bust; her skin, dazzling white at the neck, ran into golden russet before it reached the burnt splendour of her cheeks; her mouth, rather long and curved up at the corners, had lips rich and crimson; of which, however, the upper was short to a fault, and so curled back as to give her, a pettish or fretful look. Her dark hair, which was plentiful and drawn low over her ears into a heavy knot at the nape of her neck, was dressed within a fine gold net. Her arms were bare to the elbow, large and snowy white; from her fingers gems and gold flashed at him. Prosper, who knew nothing whatever about it, judged her midway between thirty and forty. Such was the lady; the man he had no chance of overlooking, for the other had dropped her handkerchief upon his face before she left him. "Sir," she now said, in a smooth and distinguishable voice, when Prosper had saluted her, "you may do me a great service if you will, which is to carry this dead man to his grave in the wood."

"By the faith I have," Prosper replied, "I will help you all I can. But when we have buried him you shall tell me how he came by his death, and how it is that his grave is waiting for him."

"I can tell you that at once," she said quickly; "I have but just dug it with a mattock I was so lucky as to find by a stopped earth on the bank yonder. The rest I will gladly acquaint you with by and by. But first let us be rid of him."

Prosper dismounted and went to take up his burden. First of all, however, he deliberately removed the handkerchief and looked it in the face. The dead man lay stiff and staring, with open eyes and a wry mouth. Hands and face were livid, a light froth had gathered on his lips. He looked to have suffered horribly--as much in mind as body: the agony must have bitten deep into him for the final peace of death never to have come. Now Prosper knew very little of death as yet, save that he had an idea that he himself would never come to endure it; but he knew enough to be sure that neither battle nor honour had had any part here. The man had been well-dressed in brown and tawny velvet, was probably handsome in a sharp, foreign sort. There was a ring upon his finger, a torn badge upon his left breast, with traces of a device in white threads which could not be well made out. Puzzling over it, Prosper thought to read three white forms on it--water-bougets, perhaps, or billets--he could not be sure. The whole affair seemed to him to hold some shameful secret behind: he thought of poison, or the just visitation of God; but then he thought of the handsome lady, and was ashamed to see that such a conclusion must involve her in the mess. Pitying, since he could not judge, he lifted the body in his arms and followed the lady's lead through the brushwood. At the end of some two hundred yards or more of battling with the boughs, she stopped, and pointed to a pit, with a mattock lying on the heaped earth close by. "There is the grave," she said.

"The grave is a shallow grave," said Prosper.

"It is deeper than he was," quoth the lady. There was a ring in this rather ugly to hear, as all scorn is out of tune with a dead presence. You might as well be contemptuous of a baby. But Prosper was no fool, to think at the wrong time. He laid the body down in the grave, and busied himself to compose it into some semblance of the rest there should be in that bed at least. This was hard to be done, since it was as stiff as a board, and took time. The lady grew impatient, fidgeted about, walked up and down, could not stand for a moment: but she said nothing. At last Prosper stood up by the side of the grave, having done his best.

"I am no priest," says he, "God knows; but I cannot put a man's body into the earth without in some sort commending his soul. I must do what I can, and you must pardon an indifferent advocate, as God will."

"If you are advised by me," said the lady, "you will leave that affair where it is. The man was worthless."

"We cannot measure his worth, madam: we have no tools for that. The utmost we can do is to bury part of him, and pray for the other part."

"You speak as a priest whom I had thought a soldier," said she with some asperity. "If you are what you now seem, I will remind you of a saying which should be familiar--Let the dead bury their dead."

"As I live by bread," Prosper cried out, "I will commend this man's soul whither it is going."

"Then I will not listen to you, sir," she answered in a pale fume. "I cannot listen to you."

Prosper grew extremely polite. "Madam, there is surely no need," he said. "If you cannot you will not. Moreover, I should in any case address myself elsewhere."

He had folded the dead man's arms over his breast, and shut his eyes. He had wiped his lips. The thing seemed more at peace. So he crossed himself and began, _In nomine patris_, etc., and then recited the _Paternoster_. This almost exhausted his stock, though it did not satisfy his aspirations. His words burst from him. "O thou pitiful dead!" he cried out, "go thou where Pity is, in the hope some morsels may be justly thine. Rest thou there, who wast not restful in thine end, and quitted not willingly thy tenement; rest thou there till thou art called. And when thou art called to give an account of thyself and thine own works, may that which men owe thee be remembered with that which thou dost owe! _Per Christum dominum_," etc.

He bowed his head, crossed himself very piously; then stood still, smiling gently upon the man he knew nothing of, save that he had been young and had lost his race. He did not see the lady; she was, however, near by, not looking at the man at the grave, but first at Prosper and then at the ground. Her fingers were twisting and tangling together, and her bosom, restless as the sea, rose and fell fitfully. She was pale, save at the lips; like Prosper she smiled, but the smile was stiff. Prosper set to work with the shovel and soon filled up the grave. Then he turned to the lady.

"And now, madam, we will talk a little, if you please." He had a cool and level voice; yet it came upon her as if it could have but one answer.

She looked at him for some seconds without reply. For his part, Prosper had kept his eyes fixed equally on her; hers fell first.

She coloured a little as she said-"Very willingly. You have done me a service for which I am very much in your debt. You shall command me as you will, and find me ready to recompense you with what I have." She stopped as if to judge the weight of her words, then went on slowly--"I know not, indeed, how could I deny you anything."

Prosper could have seen, if he would, the quickened play of her breath.

"Let us go into the open," said he, "and find my horse. Then you shall tell me whence you are, and whither I may speed you, and how safeliest--with other things proper to be known."

They went together. "My lord," said she then, "my lodging is far from here and ill to come by. Nevertheless, I know of a hermitage hard at hand where we could rest a little, and thereafter we could find the way to my house. Will you come with me thither?"

"Whither?" asked Prosper.

"Ah, the hermitage, or wheresoever you will."

Prosper looked steadily at her.

"Tell me the name and condition of the dead man," said he.

"Ranulf de Genlis, a knight of Brittany."

"The badge on his breast was of our blazonry," said Prosper, half to himself, "and he looked to have been of this side the Southern Sea."

"Do you doubt my word, Sir Knight?"

"Madam, I do not question it. Will you tell, me how he came by his death?"

"I was hunting very early in the morning with my esquires and ladies, and by ill-hap lost them and my way. After many wanderings in search of either, I encountered this man now dead, and inquired news of him. He held me some time in talk, delayed me with sham diligence, and at last and, suddenly professed an ardent love for me. I was frightened, for I was alone in the wood with him, in a glade not far from here. And it seemed that I had reason, since from words he went on to force and clamour and violence. I had almost succumbed--I know not how to hint at the fate which threatened me, or guess how long I could have struggled against it. He had closed with me, he held me in a vice; then all at once he loosed hold of me and shuddered. Some seizure or sudden stroke of judgment overtook him, I suppose, so that he fell and lay writhing, with a foam on his lips, as you saw. You may judge," she added, after waiting for some comment from Prosper, which did not come, "you may judge whether this is a pleasant tale for me to tell, and whether I should tell it willingly to any man. For what one attempted against me another might also try--and not fail."

She stopped and glanced at her companion. The manner in each of them was changed; the lady was not the scornful beauty she had seemed, while Prosper's youth was dry within him. She seemed a suppliant, he a judge, deliberate. Such a story from such an one would have set him on fire an hour ago; but now his words came sharply from him, whistling like a shrill wind.

"The grave was dug overnight," was what he said.

The lady started and paled. Then she drew a deep breath, and said--"Do you again doubt my word, sir?"

"I do not question it," he replied as before. It is a fact that he had noticed the turned earth by the pit. There was gossamer upon it, but that said little. Rabbits had been there also, and that said everything.

The lady said nothing more, and in silence they went on until they reached a fork in the path. Prosper stopped here. One path led north, the other west.

"Here is my road," said he, pointing to the west.

"The hermitage is close by, my lord," urged the lady in a low voice. "I pray my lord to rest him there."

"That I cannot do," says he.

She affected indignation. "Is it then in the honour of a knight to desert a lonely lady? I am learning strange doctrine, strange chivalry! Farewell, sir. You are young. Maybe you will learn with years that when a lady stoops to beg it is more courtly to forestall her."

Prosper stood leaning on his shield. "The knight's honour," he said, "is in divers holds--in his lady's, in God's, and in the king's. These three fly not always the same flag, but two at least of them should be in pact."

"Ah," said she slyly, "ah, Sir Discreet, I see that you have the lady first."

Prosper grew graver. "I said 'his lady,'" he repeated.

"And could not I, for such service as yours, be your lady, fair sir?" she asked in a very low and troubled voice. "At least I am here--alone--in the wood--and at your mercy."

Prosper looked straight in front of him, grave, working his mouth. Those who knew him would have gone by the set of his chin. He may have been thinking of Brother Bonaccord's prediction, or of the not very veiled provocation of the lady's remarkable candour. There grew to be a rather bleak look in his face, something blenched his blue eyes. He turned sharply upon the woman, and his voice was like a frost.

"Having slain one man this day," he said, "I should recommend you to be wary how you tread with another."

She stared open-mouthed at him for a full minute and a half. Then, seeing he never winked or budged, she grew frightened and piteous, threw her arms up, turned, and fled up the north path, squealing like a wounded rabbit.

Prosper clapped-to his spurs and made after her with his teeth grinding together. Very soon, however, he pulled up short. "The man is dead. Let her go for this present. And I am not quite sure. I will bide my time."

That was the motto of the Gais--"I bide my time." He was, nevertheless, perfectly sure in his private mind; but then he was always perfectly sure, and recognized that it was a weakness of his. So the woman went her way, and he his for that turn...

Riding forward carelessly, with a loose rein, he slept that night in the woods. Next day he rode fast and long without meeting a living soul, and so came at last into Morgraunt Forest, where the trees shut out the light of the day, and very few birds sing. He entered the east purlieus in the evening of his fifth day from Starning, and slept in a rocky valley. Tall black trees stood all round him, the vanguards of the forest host.

CHAPTER III

HOLY THORN AND HOLY CHURCH

In South Morgraunt stands Holy Thorn, more properly the Abbey of Saint Giles of Holy Thorn, a broad and fair foundation, one of the two set up in the forest by the Countess Isabel, Dowager of March and Bellesme, Countess of Hauterive and Lady of Morgraunt in her own right. Where the Wan river makes a great loop, running east for three miles, and west again for as many before it drives its final surge towards the Southern Sea, there stands Holy Thorn, Church and Convent, watching over the red roofs of Malbank hamlet huddled together across the flood. Here are green water-meadows and good corn-lands, the abbey demesne; here also are the strips of tillage which the tenants hold; here the sluices which head up the river for the Abbey mills, make thunderous music all day long. Over this cleared space and over some leagues of the virgin forest, the Abbot of Saint Thorn has sac and soc, tholl and theam, catch-a-thief-in, catch-a-thief-out, as well as other sovereign prerogatives, all of which he owes to the regret and remorse of the Countess Isabel over the death of her first husband and only lover, Fulk de Bréauté. Further north, in Mid-Morgraunt, is Gracedieu, her other foundation--equally endowed, but holding white nuns instead of white monks.

Now it so happened that as Prosper le Gai entered the purlieus of Morgraunt, the Countess Isabel sat in the Abbey parlour of Saint Thorn, knitting her fine brows over a business of the Abbot's, no less than the granting of a new charter of pit and gallows, pillory and tumbril to him and his house over the villeins of Malbank, and the whole fee and soke. The death of these unfortunates, or the manner of it, was of little moment; but the Countess, having much power, was jealous how she lent it. She sat now, therefore, in the Abbot's great chair, and before her stood the Abbot himself, holding in his hands the charter fairly written out on parchment, with the twisted silk of three colours ready to receive her seal. It was exactly this which she was not very ready to give, for though she knew nothing of his villeins, she knew much of the Abbot, and was of many minds concerning him. There was yet time; their colloquy was in secret; but now she tapped with her foot upon the stool, and the Abbot watched her narrowly. He was a tall and personable man, famous for his smile, stout and smooth, his skin soft as a woman's, his robe, his ring, his cross and mere slippers all in accord.

At length, says he, "Madam, for the love of the Saints, but chiefly for Mary's love; to the glory of God and of Saint Giles of Holy Thorn; to the ease of his monks and the honour of the Church, I beseech your Ladyship this small boon."

The clear-cold eyes of the Countess Isabel looked long at him before she said--"Do I then show love to the Saints and give God honour, Lord Abbot, by helping you swing your villeins? Pit and gallows, pillory and tumbril! You go too far."

"Dear lady," said he, "I go no further, if I have them, than my Sisters of Gracedieu. That hedged community of Christ's brides hath all these commodities and more, even the paramount privilege of Sanctuary, which is an appanage of the very highest in the Holy Fold. And I must consider it as scarcely decent, as (by the Mass) not seemly at all, that your Holy Thorn, this sainted sprig of your planting, should lack the power to prick. Our people, madam, do indeed expect it. It is not much. Nay!"--for he saw his Lady frown and heard her toe-taps again--"indeed, it is not much. A little pit for your female thief to swim at large, for your witch and bringer-in of hell's ordinances; a decent gallows a-top for your proper male rascal; a pillory for your tenderer blossom of sin while he qualify for an airy crown, or find space for repentance and the fruits of true contrition; lastly, a persuasive tumbril, a close lover for your incorrigible wanton girls--homely chastisement such as a father Abbot may bestow, and yet wear a comely face, and yet be loved by those he chasteneth. Madam, is this too much for so great a charge as ours? We of Holy Thorn nurture the good seed with scant fortune, being ridden down by evil livers, deer-stealers, notorious persons, scandalous persons. A little pit, therefore! a little limber gallows!"

But the Countess mused with her hand to her chin, by no means persuaded. She was still a young woman, and a very lonely one; her great prerogatives (which she took seriously) tired her to death, but the need of exercising them through other people was worst of all. Now she said doubtfully, "I have no reason in especial to trust you, Abbot."

The Abbot, who knew better than she how true this was, bit his lip and remained silent. He was a very comely man and leaned much to persuasion, particularly with women. He was always his own audience: the check, therefore, amounted to exposure, almost put him to open shame. The Countess went on to ask, who in particular of his villeins he had dread of, who was turbulent, who a deer-stealer, who notorious as a witch or wise woman, who wanton and a scandalous liver? And here the Abbot was apt with his names. There was Red Sweyn, half an outlaw already, and by far too handy with his hunting-knife; there was Pinwell, as merry a little rogue as ever spoiled for a cord. There were Rogerson and Cutlaw; there was Tom Sibby, the procuress. Mald also, a withered malignant old wife, who had once blighted a year's increase by her dealing with the devil. Here was stuff for gallows, pit and pillory, all dropping-ripe for the trick. For tumbril, he went on (watching his adversary like a cat), "who so proper as black-haired Isoult, witch, and daughter of a witch, called by men Isoult la Desirous--and a gaunt, half-starved, loose-legged baggage she is," he went on; "reputed of vile conversation for all the slimness of her years--witch, and a witch's brat."

He looked sideways at the great lady as he spoke of this creature, and saw that all was going exactly as he would wish it. He had not been the Countess' confessor for nothing, nor had he learnt in vain the story of her secret marriage with Fulk de Bréauté, and of the murder of this youth on Spurnt Heath one blowy Bartlemy Eve. And for this reason he had dared to bring the name of Isoult into his catalogue of rogues, that he knew his woman, and all woman-kind; how they hate most in their neighbours that which they are tenderest of in themselves. Let there be no mistake here. The Countess had been no luxurious liver, though a most unhappy one. The truth is that, beautiful woman as she still was, she had been a yet more beautiful girl, Countess of Hauterive in her own right, and as such betrothed to the great Earl Roger of March and Bellesme. Earl Roger, who was more than double her age, went out to fight; she stayed at home, in the nursery or near it, and Fulk de Bréauté came to make eyes. These he made with such efficacy that Isabel lost her heart first and her head afterwards, wedded Fulk in secret, bore him a child, and was the indirect means of his stabbing by the Earl's men as he was riding through the dark over Spurnt Heath. The child was given to the Abbot's keeping (whence it promptly and conveniently vanished), the Countess was married to the Earl; then the Earl died. Whereupon she, still young, childless so far as she could learn, and possessed of so much, founded her twin abbeys in Morgraunt to secure peace for the soul of Fulk and her own conscience. This will suffice to prove that the Abbot had some grounds for his manoeuvring. The breaking of her troth to the Earl she held to make her an adulteress; the stabbing of Fulk by the Earl to prove her a murderess. There was neither mercy nor discernment in these reproaches. She believed herself a wanton when she had been but a lover. For no sin, therefore, had she so little charity as for that which the Abbot had imputed to his candidate for the tumbril. Isoult la Desirous it was who won the charter, as the Abbot had intended she should, to serve his end and secure her own according to his liking.

For the charter was sealed and seisin delivered in the presence of Dom Galors, almoner of the Abbey, of Master Porges, seneschal of High March, and of one or two mesne lords of those parts. Then the Countess went to bed; and at this time Prosper le Gai was also lying in the fringes of Morgraunt, asleep on his shield with his red cloak over him, having learned from a hind whom he met on the hill that at Malbank Saint Thorn he would find hospitality, and that his course must lie in such and such a direction.

CHAPTER IV

DOM GALORS

Next day, as soon as the Countess had departed for High March, the Abbot Richard called Dom Galors, his almoner, into the parlour and treated him in a very friendly manner, making him sit down in his presence, and putting fruit and wine before him. This Galors, who I think merits some scrutiny, was a bullet-headed, low-browed fellow, too burly for his monkish frock (which gave him the look of a big boy in a pinafore), with the jowl of a master-butcher, and a sullen slack mouth. His look at you, when he raised his eyes from the ground, had the hint of brutality--as if he were naming a price--which women mistake for mastery, and adore. But he very rarely crossed eyes with any one; and with the Abbot he had gained a reputation for astuteness by seldom opening his lips and never shutting his ears. He was therefore a most valuable book of reference, which told nothing except to his owner. With all this he was a great rider and loved hunting. His _Sursum Corda_ was like a view-holloa, and when he said, _Ite missa est_, you would have sworn he was crying a stag's death instead of his Saviour's. In matters of gallantry his reputation was risky: it was certain that he had more than a monk, and suspected that he had less than a gentleman should have. The women of Malbank asseverated that venison was not his only game. That may or may not have been. The man loved power, and may have warred against women for lack of something more difficult of assault. He was hardly the man to squander himself at the bidding of mere appetite; he was certainly no glutton for anything but office. Still, he was not one to deny himself the flutter of the caught bird in the hand. He had, like most men who make themselves monks by calculation, a keen eye for a girl's shape, carriage, turn of the head, and other allies of the game she loves and always loses: such things tickled his fancy when they came over his path; he stooped to take them, and let them dangle for remembrances, as you string a coin on your chain to remind you at need of a fortunate voyage. At this particular moment he was tempted, for instance, to catch and let dangle. The chance light of some shy eye had touched and then eluded him. I believe he loved the chase more than the quarry. He knew he must go a-hunting from that moment in which the light began to play will-o'-the-wisp; for action was his meat and dominion what he breathed. If you wanted to make Galors dangerous you had to set him on a vanishing trail. The girl had been a fool to run, but how was she to know that?

To him now spoke the Abbot Richard after this fashion. "Galors," he said, "I will speak to you now as to my very self, for if you are not myself you may be where I sit some day. A young monk who is almoner already may go far, especially when he is young in religion, but in years ripe. If you prove to be my other self, you shall go as far as myself can push you, Galors. Rest assured that the road need not stop at a mitred abbey. In the hope, then, that you may go further, and I with you, it is time that I speak my full mind. We have our charter, as you have seen--and at what cost of sweat and urgency, who can tell so surely as I? But there, we have it: a great weapon, a lever whereby we may raise Holy Thorn to a height undreamed of by the abbots of this realm, and our two selves (perched on the top of Holy Thorn) yet higher. Yet this charter, gotten for God's greater glory (as He knoweth who readeth hearts!), may not work its appointed way without an application which poor and frail men might scarcely dare for any less object. There is abroad, Galors, dear brother, a most malignant viper, lurking, as I may say, in the very bosom of Holy Church; warmed there, nesting there, yet fouling the nest, and grinding her tooth that she may strike at the heart of us, and shiver what hath been so long a-building up. Of that viper you, Galors, are the chosen instrument--you and the charter--to draw the tooth."

The Abbot spoke in a low voice, and was breathless; it was not hard to see that he was uncommonly in earnest. Galors turned over in his mind all possible plots against an Abbey's peaceful being--tale-bearing to the Archbishop, a petition for a Papal Legate, a foreshore trouble, a riot among the fishermen of Wanmouth, some encroachment by the ragged brethren of Francis and Dominic--and dismissed them all as not serious enough to lose breath about.

"Who is your viper, father?" was what he said.

"It is the girl Isoult of Matt-o'-the-Moor; Isoult whom they call La Desirous," replied his spiritual father. The heart of Galors gave a hot jump; he knew the girl well enough--too well for her, not well enough yet for himself. It was precisely to win the woeful beauty of her that he had set his snares and unleashed his dogs. Did the Abbot know anything? Impossible; his reference forbad the fear. Was the girl something more than a dark woodland elf, a fairy, haggard and dishevelled, whose white shape shining through rags had made his blood stir? The mask of his face safeguarded him through this maze of surmise; nothing out of the depths of him was ever let to ruffle that dead surface. He commanded his voice to ask, How should he find such a girl? "For," said he, "in Malbank girls and boys swarm like dies on a sunny wall." The deceit implied was gross, yet the Abbot took it in his haste.

"Thus you shall know her, Galors," he said. "A slim girl, somewhat under the common size of the country, and overburdened with a curtain of black hair; and a sullen, brooding girl who says little, and that nakedly and askance; and in a pale face two grey eyes a-burning."

All this Galors knew better than his Abbot. Now he asked, "But what is her offence, father? For even with power of life and member the law of the land has force, that neither man nor maid, witch nor devil, may be put lightly away."

For this "put away" the Abbot thanked him with a look, and added, that she was suspected of witchcraft, seeing Mald her mother was a notorious witch, and the wench herself the byword and scorn of all the country-side. Sorcery, therefore, or incontinence--"whichever you will," said he. "Any stick will do to beat a dog with."

Galors had much to say, but said nothing. There was something behind all this, he was sure, knowing his man by heart. He judged the Abbot to be bursting with news, and watched him pace the parlour now struggling with it. Sure enough the murder was out before he had taken a dozen turns. "Now, Galors," he said, in a new and short vein, "listen to me. I intend to do what I should have done fourteen years ago, when I held this girl in my two hands. I let slip my chance, and blame myself for it; but having slipt it indeed, it was gone until this charter of ours brought it back fresh. You know how we stand here, you and I and the Convent-all of us at the disposition of her ladyship. A great lady, my friend, and a young one, childless, it is said, without heir of her own. Morgraunt may go to the Crown or Holy Thorn and Gracedieu may divide it."

"She may marry again," put in Galors.

"She is twice a widow," the Abbot snapped him up, and gave his first shock. "She is twice a widow, once against her will. She will never marry again."

"Then, my father," said Galors, "we should be safe as against the Crown, which the Countess probably loves as little as the rest of her kind."

"The Countess Isabel," said the Abbot, speaking like an oracle, "is not childless."

Galors understood.

"Do not misunderstand me in this, Brother Galors," said the Abbot. "We will do the girl no unnecessary harm. We will slip her out of the country if we can get any one to take her. Put it she shall be married or hanged." Galors again thought that he understood. The Abbot went on. "There shall be no burning, though that were deserved; not even tumbril, though that were little harm to so hot a piece. There shall be, indeed, that which the Countess believes to have been already-a sally at dawn and a flitting. There will then be no harm done. The tithing will be free of a sucking witch, and the heart of our benefactress turned from the child of her sin (for such it was to break troth to the earl, and sin she deems it) to the child of her spiritual adoption, to wit, our Holy Thorn." He added "You are in my obedience, Galors. I love you much, and will see to your advancement. You have a great future. But, my brother, remember this. Between a woman's heart and her conscience there can be no fight. There is, rather, a triumph, wherein the most glorious of the' victor's spoils is that same conscience, shackled and haled behind the car. That you should know, and on that you must act. Remember you are fighting for Saint Giles of Holy Thorn, and be speedy while the new tool still burns in your hand."

So with his blessing he dismissed Dom Galors for the day.

CHAPTER V

LA DESIROUS

Prosper le Gai--all Morgraunt before him--rose from his bed before the Countess had turned in hers; and long before the Abbot could get alone with Dom Galors he was sighing for his breakfast. He had, indeed, seen the dawn come in, caught the first shiver of the trees, the first tentative chirp of the birds, watched the slow filling of the shadowy pools and creeks with the grey tide of light. From brake to brake he struggled, out of the shade into the dark, thence into what seemed a broad lake of daylight. He met no living thing; or ever the sun kissed the tree-tops he was hungry. He was well within Morgraunt now, though only, as it might be, upon the hem of its green robe; the adventurous place opened slowly to him like some great epic whose majesty and force dawns upon you by degrees not to be marked. It was still twilight in the place where he was when he heard the battling of birds' wings, the screaming of one bird's grief, and the angry purr of another, or of others. He peered through the bush as the sound swelled. Presently he saw a white bird come fluttering with a dropt wing, two hen-harriers in close pursuit. They were over her, upon her, there was a wrangle of wings--brown and white--even while he watched; then the white got clear again, and he could see that she bled in the breast. The sound of her screaming, which was to him like a girl crying, moved him strangely. He jumped from his saddle, ran to the entangled birds and cuffed the two hawks off; but seeing that they came on again, hunger-bold no doubt, he strangled them and freed the white pigeon. He took her up in his hands to look at her; she was too far gone for fear; she bled freely, but he judged she would recover. So she did, after he had washed out the wound; sufficiently at least to hop and flutter into covert. Prosper took to his horse and journey with her voice still ringing in his head.

In another hour's travel he reached a clearing in the wood, hedged all about with yew-trees and holm oaks very old; and in the midst of it saw a little stone altar with the figure of a woman upon it. He was not too hungry to be curious, so he dismounted and went to examine. The saint was Saint Lucy the Martyr, he saw; the altar, hoary as it was with lichen and green moss, had a slab upon it well-polished, with crosses let into the four corners and into the middle of the stone; there were sockets for tapers, and marks of grease new and thick. Before he approached it a hind and her calf had been cropping the grass between the cracks of the altar-steps; all else was very still, yet had a feeling of habitancy and familiar use.

His instinct when he saw an altar being to say his prayers, he knelt down then and there, facing the image, yet a little remote from it. A very soft tread behind him broke in upon his exercises; some one was coming, whence or how he did not then know. The comer was a young girl clothed in a white woollen garment, which was bound about her waist with a green cord; she was bareheaded; on her feet were thick sandals, bound also with thongs of green. Prosper watched her spread a white cloth upon the altar-slab, and set a Mass-book upon a stand; he saw her go and return with two lighted tapers for the sockets, he saw a silver crucifix shine between them. The girl, when all this business was done, stepped backwards down the steps, and stood at the foot of the altar with hands clasped upon her bosom and head bent lowly. "By the Saints," thought Prosper, "Morgraunt is a holy place, it seems. There is to be a Mass."

So it was. An old priest came out of the thicket in a vestment of yellow and gold thread, bearing in his hands the Sacrament under a green silk veil. The girl knelt down as he passed up the steps; he began his Mass, but in so low a voice that it hardly touched the forest peace.

Rabbits came creeping out of bush and bracken, a wood-dove began her moan, two or three deer stood up. Then Prosper thought--"If the beasts come to prayers, it behoves me as a Christian man to hear Mass also. Moreover, it were fitting that adventure should begin in that manner, to be undertaken in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." He went forward accordingly, flush with the girl, and knelt down by her. When it was the time of Communion, both drew nearer and received Christ's body. Prosper, for his part, did not forget the soul of the dead man, De Genlis or another, whose body he had buried in Cadnam Wood, but commended it to God together with the sacrifice of the altar. The woman came into his mind. "No, by God," thought he; "she is the devil, or of him; I will never pray for her," which was Prosper all over.

Mass done, he remembered that he had the honour to be uncommonly hungry. The priest had gone back into the wood, the girl was removing the altar furniture, and seemed unconscious of his presence; but Prosper could not afford that.

"My young gentlewoman," he said with a bow, "you will see before you, if you turn your head, a very hungry man."

"Are you hungry, sir?" she said, looking and smiling at him, "then in three minutes you shall be filled." Whereupon she went away with her load, and quickly returned with another more to Prosper's mind. She gave him bread and hot milk in a great bowl, she gave him a dishful of wild raspberries, and waited on him herself in the prettiest manner. Without word said she watered his horse for him; and all the while she talked to him, but of nothing in the world but the birds and beasts, the falling of the leaf, and the thousand little haps and chances of her quiet life. Prosper suited his conversation to her book. He told her of the white bird's rescue, and she opened her blue eyes in wonder.

"Why, I dreamed of it last night," she said very solemnly.

"You dreamed of it, Alice?" he echoed. She was called, she had told him, Alice of the Hermitage.

"Yes, yes. A white bird and two hen-harriers. Ah, and there was more. You have not yet done all. You have not yet begun!" She was full of the thing.

"By my faith, I have wrung the necks of the pair of them," said Prosper. "I know not how they can expect more of me than that."

"Listen," said Alice of the Hermitage, "the bird will be again chased, again wounded. Morgraunt is full of hawks. You will see her again. My dream was very precise. You will see her again; but this time the chase will be long, and achievement only at the peril of your own honour. But it seems that you shall win in the end what you have thought to have won already, and the wound in the breast will be staunched."

"Hum," said Prosper. "Now you shall tell me what I ought to do, how I ought to begin. For you know the saw--'The sooner begun, the sooner done.'"

"Oh, sir,". cries she, "you shall ride forward in the name of God, remembering your manhood and the vows you made when you took up your arms." She blushed as she spoke, kindling with her thoughts.

"I will do that," said Prosper, kindled in his turn. And so he left her, and travelled all day towards Malbank Saint Thorn. He lay at night in the open wood, not far, as he judged, from Spurnt Heath, upon whose westernmost border ran Wan; there, or near by, he looked to find the Abbey.

He spent the night at least better than did Dom Galors, whose thoughts turned equally to Spurnt Heath. That strenuous man had taken the Abbot's counsel to bed with him, a restless partner. An inordinate partner also it proved to be, not content to keep the monk awake. Turning every traffic of his mind to its own advantage, it shook out the bright pinions of adventure over the dim corridors of Holy Thorn, and with every pulse of the ordering bell came a reiteration of its urgency. All night long, through all the task work of the next morning, the thought was with him--"By means of this woman I may be free. Free!" he cried. "I may be set up on high through her. Lord of this land and patron of Holy Thorn; a maker and unmaker of abbots to whom now I must bow my knees. Is it nothing to be master of a lovely wife? Ha, is it nothing to rule a broad fee? A small thing to have abbots kiss my hands? Lord of the earth! is this not worth a broken vow, which in any case I have broken before? Oh, Isoult la Desirous, if I desired you before when you went torn and shamefaced through the mire, what shall I say to you going in silk, in a litter, with a crown, Isoult la Desirée!" He called her name over and over, Isoult la Desirée, la Moult-Desirée, and felt his head spinning.

Matins, Lauds, and Prime, he endured this obsession. The day's round was filled with the amazing image of a crowned, hollow-eyed, tattered little drab, the mock and wonder of throngs of witnesses, appreciable only by himself as a pearl of priceless value. The heiress of Morgraunt, the young Countess of Hauterive, La Desirous, La Desirée. Desirable she had been before, but dealing no smarter scald than could be drowned in the well of love which for him she might have been for an hour. But now his burn glowed; the Abbot had blown it red. Ambition was alight; he was the brazier. It danced in him like a leaping flame. Certainly Prosper slept better on his side of Spurnt Heath.

At dusk the monk could bear himself and his burden of knowledge no longer. He went to look for Isoult on the heath in a known haunt of hers. He found her without trouble, sitting below the Abbot's new gallows. She was a girl, childishly formed, thin as a haggard-hawk, with a white resentful face, and a pair of startled eyes which, really grey, had a look of black as the pupil swam over the iris. The rags which served her for raiment covered her but ill; her legs were bare, she was without head-covering; all about her face her black hair fell in shrouds. She sat quite still where she was, with her elbows on her knees, and chin between her two hands, gazing before her over the heath. Above her head two thieves, first-fruits of the famous charter, creaked as they swung in their chains. If Isoult saw Galors coming, she made no effort to escape him; when her eyes met his her brooding stare held its spell.

The monk drew near, stood before her, and said--"Isoult la Desirous, you shall come with me into the quarry, for I have much to say to you."

"Let it be said here," she replied, without moving. But he answered--"Nay, you shall come with me into the quarry."

"I am dead tired. Can you not let me be, Dom Galors?"

"I have what will freshen you, Isoult. Come with me."

"If I must, I must."

Then he led her away, and she went tamely enough to the quarry.

There he took her by both her hands, and so held her, waiting till she should be forced to look up at him. When at last, sick and sullen, she raised her eyes, he could hardly contain himself. But he did.

"What were you doing by the Abbot's new gallows, Isoult?"

"I would rather be there now than here. The company is more to my liking."

"You may be near enough by to-morrow, if what I have learned be true."

The girl's eyes grew larger and darker. "Are they going to hang me?" she asked.

"Are you not a witch?"

"It is said."

"Your mother Mald is a witch--eh?"

"Yes, she is a witch."

"And are not you? You know Deerleap--eh?"

"It is said that I do."

"And you know what must be done to witches."

"They will hang me, Dom Galors! Will they hang me by Cutlaw and Rogerson?"

"There is room for you there."

"What can they prove?"

"Pshaw! Is proof needed? Are you not a baggage?"

"I know not."

"A wanton?"

"Ah, you should know that!"

"If it depended upon me, Isoult, I could save you. But the Abbot means to make an example and set a terror up before the evil-doers in this walk of Morgraunt. What am I before the Abbot, or what is my love for you to be brought to his ears? It is doom more certain still, my dear."

"Then I shall be hanged."

"Listen to me now, Isoult. Listen close. No, leave your hands where they are; they are safer there than elsewhere. So leave them and listen close. No soul in Malbank but myself and the Lord Abbot knows of what I have told you now. Me he told this morning. Judge if that was good news for your lover's ear!"

Isoult shivered and hung her head. Galors went on--"At the risk of everything a monk should fear, and of everything, by God, that such a monk as I am should care to win, I contended with my spiritual father. Spare me the particulars; I got some shrewd knocks over it, but I did win this much. You are to be hanged to-morrow, Isoult, or noosed in another way. A ring is to play a part. You shall be bride of the tree or a man's bride. I won this, and left the Abbot chuckling, for much as he knows he has not guessed that the goose-girl, the tossed-out kitchen-girl, the scarecrow haunter of the heath, should be sought in marriage. But I knew more than he; and now," he said, stooping over the bent girl,--"and now, Isoult la Desirous, come with me!"

He tried to draw her towards him, but she trembled in his hands so much that he had to give over. He began his arguments again, reasoned, entreated, threatened, cajoled; he could not contain himself now, being so near fruition. The spell of the forest was upon him. "Let Love be the master," he said, "for there is no gainsaying him, nor can cloister walls bar his way; but his flamy wings top even these. Ah, Isoult!" he cried out in his passion; "ah, Isoult la Desirée, come, lest I die of love and you of the tree."

The girl, who feared him much more than the death he had declared, was white now and desperate. But she still held him off with her stiffened arms and face averted. She tried to cheapen herself. "I am Matt's bad daughter, I am Matt's bad daughter! All the tithing holds me in scorn. Never speak of love to such as I am, Galors." And when he tried to pull her she made herself rigid as a rod, and would not go.

So love made the man mad, and spread and possessed him. Contest goaded Galors: action was his meat and dominion what he breathed; by resisting she had made the end more sure. By her imprisoned wrists he drew her in, and when she was so close that her head was almost upon his breast, he breathed over her. "A mitred abbey have I trampled down for your love; yes, and to be bishop of a see. Therefore you must come."

She fell to whining and entreaty, white to the lips and dry with fear. All that she could say was, "I am bad. I am bad, but not so bad! Never ruin me, Dom Galors." Then it was that she heard the voice of Prosper singing afar off on the heath. Prosper sang--

"What if my metal Be proved as high as a hawk's in good fettle!
Then you shall see
The world my fee, And the hearts of men for my Seigniory."

And the girl thought to herself, "Help cometh!" and changed the voice of her grief and the beating of her heart. By this the guile a woman has always by her tongue had play: she could talk more gently to her gaoler, and beg a little time--a short hour or so--to plan and arrange their affairs. He thought her won and grew very tender; he kissed her hands many times, called her his dear heart, became, in a word, the clumsy gallant he claimed to be. All this too she endured: she began to gabble at random, sprightly as a minion, with all the shifts of a girl in a strait place ready at command. Her fear was double now: she must learn the trend of the singer and his horse, and prevent Galors from hearing either. This much she did. The sound came steadily on. She heard the horse's hoofs strike on a flint outside the quarry, she heard Prosper, singing softly to himself. Her time had come. She sprang at arm's-length from Galors and called out, "Help, for charity!" with all her might.

Prosper started, drew his sword, and headed his horse for the quarry. In the mouth of it he reined up to look about him. He was sure of his direction, but not of his way, "Help is here!" he cried with his sword on high and red plumes nodding. Air and the light of the sun seemed to follow him, as if he had cut a slit in a shroud and let in the day. Then it was that Isoult found strength to shake free from her enemy, to run to Prosper, to clasp his knee, to babble broken words, entreaties for salvation, and to stoop to his foot and kiss it.

"What is all this about, my child?" asked Prosper wondering.

"Oh" cried the girl, "my lord! the monk seeks to do me a wrong, and a shame greater than all!"

Prosper looked deeper into the quarry. There he saw Galors, the white monk, who stood fixed, biting his nails keenly there. Then he laughed, saying, "I cannot fight a monk," and sheathed his sword. He did not love monks, none of his house did. He had seen the new gallows, could measure the build of the fellow in the quarry; and though he could not plumb the girl's soul through her misty eyes, he could read her shaking lips and clinging hands; he could see, and be shocked to see, how young she was to be acquainted with grief, and with sin how likely familiar. The hint of the thing revolted him; he dared not leave her there.

"See here, child," said he, "I will set you before me, and we will ride together for a while. Perhaps the evening chills will temper the monk; but if not, I am to lodge at his abbey this night, and may prepare that for him which will cool him. Will you come up to me?"

The ghost of a smile hovered over her white drawn face for a minute. "I will go where you will take me, my lord," said she.

"Come up with you then," he replied. He stooped there and then, took her below the arms, and lightly swung her into the saddle before him. There she sat, modern fashion, with his sword arm for her stay. "I should like to read that hulk a lesson," said her protector wistfully, "but I doubt he will have it before night. Oh, let him hang!" So he turned and rode out of the quarry on to the heath.

Galors stood a long time in the place where they left him, drawing blood from his bitten fingers. Darkness gathered fast with a storm of wind and rain. Nevertheless he stayed on; and night came down to find him still there.

CHAPTER VI

THE VIRGIN MARRIAGE

He had to talk, and as the girl gave him no help, Prosper found himself asking questions and puzzling out the answers he got, trying to make them fit with the facts. He was amazed that one so delicately formed should go barefooted and bareheaded, clad in torn rags. To all his questions she replied in a voice low and tremulous, and very simply--that is to say, to such of them as she would answer at all. To many--to all which touched upon Galors and his business with her in the quarry--she was as dumb as a fish. Prosper was as patient as you could expect.

He asked her who she was, and how called. She told him--"I am Matt-of-the-Moors child, and men call me Isoult la Desirous."

"That is a strange name," said he. "How came you by such a name as that?"

"Sir," said Isoult, "I have never had any other; and I suppose that I have it because I am unhappy, and not at peace with those who seek me."

"Who seeks you, Isoult?"

To that she gave no reply. So Prosper went on.

"If many sought you, child," he said, "you were rightly called Isoult la Desirée, but if you, on the other hand, sought something or somebody, then you were Isoult la Desirous. Is it not so?"

"My lord," said Isoult, "the last is my name."

"Then it must be that you too seek something. What is it that you seek, that all the tithing knows of it?"

But she hung her head and had nothing to say. He went on to speak of Galors, to her visible disease. When he asked what the monk wanted with her, he felt her tremble on his arm. She began to cry, suddenly turned her face into his shoulder, and kept it there while her sobs shook through her.

"Well, child," said he, "dry your tears, and turn your face to such light as there is, being well assured of this, that whatever he asked of you he did not get, and that he will ask no more."

"I fear him, I fear him," she said very low--and again, "I fear him, I fear him."

"Drat the monk," said Prosper, laughing, "is he to cut me out of a compliment?"

Whereupon she turned a very woebegone and tearful face up to his. He looked smilingly down; a sudden wave of half-humbrous pity for a thing so frail and amazed swam about him; before he knew he had kissed her cheek. This set her blushing a little; but she seemed to take heart, smiled rather pitifully, and turned again with a sigh, like a baby's for sleep.

The night gathered apace with a chill wind; some fine rain began to fall, then heavy drops. Gradually the wind increased, and the rain with it. "Now we shall have it," said Prosper, sniffing for the storm. He covered Isoult with his cloak, folded it about her as best he could, and tucked it in; she lay in his arms snug enough, and slept while he urged his horse over the stubbed heath. The water hissed and ran over the baked earth; where had been dry channels, rents and scars, full of dust, were now singing torrents and broad pools fetlock deep. Prosper let his good beast go his own gait, which was a sober trot, and ever and again as he heard the ripple of running water and the swirl and suck of the eddies in it, he judged that he must soon or late touch the Wan river, whereon stood the Abbey and his bed. What to do with the girl when he got there? That puzzled him. "A well-ordered abbey," he thought, "has no place for a girl, and one ill-ordered has too many. In the first case, therefore, Holy Thorn would leave her at the gate, and in the second, that is where I myself would let her stay. So it seems that she must needs have a wet skin." He felt carefully about the sleeping child; the cloak kept her dry and warm as a toast. She was sound asleep. "Good Lord!" cried Prosper, "it's a pity to disturb this baby of mine. Saracen and I had better souse. Moreover, I make no nearer, by all that appears, to river Wan or Holy Thorn. Come up, horse; keep us moving."

The stream he had followed he now had lost. It was pitchy dark, with a most villainous storm of rain and wind. Saracen caught the infection of his master's doubts; he stopped short, and bowed his head to snuff the ground. Prosper laughed at the plight they were both in, and looked about him, considering what he should do. Very far off he could see a feeble light flickering; it was the only speck of brightness within his vision, and he judged it too steady for a fen-flame. Lodging of some sort should be there, for where there is a candle there is a candlestick. This was not firelight. To it he turned his tired beast, and found that he had been well advised. He was before a mud-walled hovel; there through the horn he saw the candle-flame. He drew his sword and beat upon the door. For answer the light was blown swiftly out, and the darkness swam about him like ink.

"Scared folk!" he laughed to himself, hammering at the door with a will.

Then Isoult stirred on his arm and awoke with a little whimper, half dreaming still, and not knowing where she was. She sat up in the saddle dazed with sleep.

"The night is wild," said Prosper, "and I have found us the shadow of a shade, but as yet we lack the substance." Then he set-to, pounding at the door again, and crying to those within to open for the sake of all the saints he could remember.

Isoult freed herself from the cloak, and slid down from her seat in the saddle. Putting her face close to the door she whistled a low note. The candle was re-lit, many bolts were withdrawn; finally the door opened a little way, and an old man put his head through the chink, staring out into the dark.

"God's life, you little rip," said the anxious rogue, "you gave us a turn!"

Isoult spoke eagerly and fast, but too low for Prosper to hear what she said. The man was in no mind to open further, and the more he speered at the horseman the less he seemed to like it. Nevertheless, after a time the girl was let into the hut, and the door slammed and bolted as before. Between the shocks of the storm Prosper could now hear a confusion of voices--Isoult's, low, even, clear and quick; the grating comments of the old rogue who kept the door, and another voice that trembled and wailed as if passion struggled with the age in it, to see which should be master. Once he thought to catch a fourth--a brisk man's voice, with laughter and some sort of authority in it, which seemed familiar; but he could not be sure about this. In the main three persons held the debate.

After a long wrangle it seemed that the women were to have their way. Again the door-bolts were drawn, again the door opened by the old man, and this time opened wide. With bows lower than the occasion demanded, Prosper was invited to be pleased to enter. He saw to his horse first, and made what provision he could for him in an outhouse. Then he stooped his head and entered the cottage.

He came directly into a bare room, which was, you may say, crouched under a pent of turves and ling, and stank very vilely. The floor was of beaten clay, like the walls; for furniture it had a table and bench. Sooty cobwebs dripped from the joists, and great spiders ran nimbly over them; there were no beds, but on a heap of rotting skins in one corner two rats were busy, and in another were some dry leaves and bracken. There was no chimney either, though there was a peat fire smouldering in what you must call the hearth. The place was dense with the fog of it; it was some time, therefore, before Prosper could leave blinking and fit his eyes to see the occupants of his lodging.... Isoult, he saw, stood in the middle of the room leaning on the table with both her hands; her bead was hanging, and her hair veiled all her face. Near her, also standing, was the old man--a sturdy knowing old villain, with a world of cunning and mischief in his pair of pig's eyes. His scanty hair, his beard, were white; his eyebrows were white and altogether monstrous. He blinked at Prosper, but said nothing. The third was a woman, infinitely old as it seemed, crouched over the fired peats with her back to the room. She never looked up at all, but muttered and sighed vainly to herself and warmed her hands. Lastly, in a round-backed chair, cross-legged, twirling his thumbs, twinkling with comfortable repletion, sat Prosper's friend of the road, Brother Bonaccord of Lucca.

"God save you, gentleman," he chirped. "I see we have the same taste in lodgings. None of your Holy Thorns for us--hey? But a shakedown under a snug thatch, with a tap of red wine such as I have not had out of my own country. What a port for what a night--hey?"

Prosper nodded back a greeting as he looked from one to another of these ill-assorted hosts of his, and whenever he chanced on the motionless girl he felt that he could not understand it. Look at her! how sweet and delicate she was, how small and well-set her head, her feet and hands how fine, her shape how tender. "How should a lily spring in so foul a bed?" thought he to himself. Morgraunt had already taught him an odd thing or two; no doubt it was Morgraunt's way.

The old man set bread and onions on the table, with some sour red wine in a jug. "Sit and eat, my lord, while you may," he said.

So Prosper and Isoult sat upon the bench and made the most of it, and he, being a cheerful soul, talked and joked with Brother Bonaccord. Isoult never raised her eyes once, nor spoke a word; as for the numbed old soul by the fire; she kept her back resolutely on the room, muttered her charms and despair, and warmed her dry hands as before.

When they had eaten what they could there came a change. The friar ceased talking; the old man faced Prosper with a queer look. "Sir, have you well-eaten and drunken?" he asked.

Prosper thanked him; he had done excellently.

"Well, now," said the man, "as I have heard, after the bride-feast comes the bridal. Will your worship rest with the bride brought home?"

Prosper got up in an awkward pause. He looked at the man as if he were possessed of the devil. Then he laughed, saying, "Are you merry, old rogue?"

"Nay, sir," said the ancient, "it is no jest. If she mate not this night--and it's marriage for choice with this holy man--come sunrise she'll be hanged on the Abbot's new gallows. For, she is suspected of witchcraft and many abominations."

"Is she your daughter, you dog, and do you speak thus of your daughter?" cried Prosper in a fury.

"Sir," said the man, "who would own himself father to a witch? Nevertheless she is my daughter indeed."

"What is the meaning of all this? Would you have me marry a witch, old fool?" Prosper shouted at him. The man shrugged.

"Nay, sir, but I said it was marriage for choice--seeing the friar was to hand. We know their way, to marry as soon as look at you. But it's as you will, so you get a title to her, to take her out of the country."

Prosper turned to look at Isoult. He saw her standing before the board, her head hung and her two hands clasped together. Her breathing was troubled--that also he saw. "God's grace!" thought he to himself, "is she so fair without and within so rotten? Who has been ill-ordering the world to this pass?" He watched her thoughtfully for some time; then he turned to her father.

"See now, old scamp," he said, "I have sworn an oath to high God to succour the weak, to right wrong, and to serve ladies. Nine times under the moon I sware it, watching my arms before the cross on Starning Waste. Judge you, therefore, whether I intend to keep it or not. As for your daughter, she can tell you whether some part of it I have not kept even now. But understand me, that I do not marry on compulsion or where love is not. For that were a sin done toward God, and me, and a maid."

The old rascal blinked his eyes, jerking his head many times at the shameful girl. Then he said, "Love is there fast and sure. She is all for loving. They call her Isoult la Desirous, you must know."

"Yes," said Prosper, "I do know it, for she has told me so already.'

"And to-morrow she will desire no more, since she will be hanged," said Matt-o'-the-Moor.

Prosper started and flushed, and--

"That is a true gospel, brother," put in the friar. "The Abbot means to air his gallows at her expense; but there is worse than a gallows to it. What did I tell you of the Black Monks when you called 'em White? There is a coal-black among them who'll have her if the gallows have her not. It is Galors or gallows, fast and sure."

Prosper rubbed his chin, looked at the friar, looked at Matt, looked at Isoult. She neither lifted her head nor eyes, though the others had met him sturdily enough. She stood like a saint on a church porch; he thought her a desperate Magdalen.

"Isoult, come here," said he. She came as obediently as you please, and stood before him; but she would not look up until he said again, "Isoult, look me in the face." Then she did as she was told, and her eyes were unwinking and very wide open, full of dark. She parted her lips and sighed a little, shivering somewhat. It seemed to him as if she had been with the dead already and seen their kingdom. Prosper said, "Isoult is this true that thou wilt be hanged to-morrow?"

"Yes, lord," said Isoult in a whisper.

"Or worse?"

"Yes, lord," she said again, quivering.

"Save only thy lot be a marriage this night?"

"Yes, lord," she said a third time. So he asked,

"Art thou verily what this old man thy father hath testified against thee--a witch, a worker of iniquity and black things, and of abominations with the devil?"

Isoult said in a very still voice--"Men say that I am all this, my lord."

But Prosper with a cry called out, "Isoult, Isoult, now tell me the truth. Dost thou deserve this death?"

She sighed, and smiled rather pitifully as she said--

"I cannot tell, lord; but I desire it."

"Dost thou desire death, child?" cried he, "and is this why thou art called La Desirous?"

"I desire to be what I am not, my lord, and to have that which I have never had," she answered, and her lip trembled.

"And what is that which you are not, Isoult?"

She answered him "Clean."

"And what is that which you have never had, my child?"

"Peace," said Isoult, and wept bitterly.

Then Prosper crossed himself very devoutly, and covered his face while he prayed to his saint. When he had done he said, "Cease crying, Isoult, and tell me the truth, by God and His Christ, and Saint Mary, and by the face of the sky. Art thou such a one as I would wed if love were to grow between me and thee, or art thou other?"

She ceased her crying at this and looked him full in the face, deadly pale. "What is the truth to you concerning me?" she said.

He answered her, "The truth is everything, for without it nothing can have good beginning or good ending."

This made her meek again and her eyes misty. She held out a hand to him, saying, "Come into the night, and I will tell my lord."

He took it. Hand-in-hand they went out of the cottage, and hand-in-hand stood together alone under the sky. It was still black and heavy weather, but without rain. Isoult dropped his hand and stood before him. She shut her arms over her breast so that her two wrists crossed at her throat. Looking full at him from under her brows she said--

"By God and His Christ, and Saint Mary, and by the face of the sky, I will tell you the truth, lord. If the witch's wax be not as abominable as the witch, or the vessel not foul that hath held a foul liquor, then thou couldst never point scorn at me."

"Speak openly to me, my child," said Prosper, "and fear nothing."

So she said, "I will speak openly. I am no witch, albeit I have seen witchcraft and the revelry of witches on Deerleap. And though I have seen evil also I am a maiden, my lord, and such as you would have your own sister to be before she were wed."

But Prosper put her from him at an arm's-length. He was not yet satisfied.

"What was thy meaning then," he asked, "to say that thou wouldst be that which thou wert not?" He could not bring himself to use the word which she had used; but she used it again.

"Ah, clean!" she said with a weary gesture. "Lord, how shall I be clean in this place? Or how shall I be clean when all say that I am unclean, and so use towards me?" She began to cry again, quite silently. Prosper could hear the drips fall from her cheeks to her breast, but no other sound. She began to moan in her trouble--"Ah, no, no, no!" she whispered, "I would not wed with thee, I dare not wed with thee."

"Why not?" said Prosper.

"I dare not, I dare not!" she answered through her teeth, and he felt her trembling under his hand. He thought before he spoke again. Then he said--

"I have vowed a vow to my saint that I will save you, soul and body; and if it can be done only by a wedding, then we will be married, you and I, Isoult. But if by battle I can serve your case as well, and rid the suspicion and save your neck, why, I will do battle."

"Nay, lord," said the girl, "I must be hanged, for so the Lord Abbot has decreed." And then she told him all that Galors had given her to understand when he had her in the quarry.

Prosper heard her to the end: it was clear that she spoke as she believed.

"Well, child," said he, "I see that all this is likely enough, though for the life of me I cannot bottom it. But how then," he cried, after a little more thinking, "shall I let you be hanged, and your neck so fine and smooth!"

"Lord," she said, "let be for that; for since I was born I have heard of my low condition, and if my neck be slim 'tis the sooner broke. Let me go then, but only grant me this grace, to stand beside me at the tree and not leave me till I am dead. For there may be a worse thing than death preparing for me." Again she cried out at her own thoughts "Ah, no, no, no, I dare not let thee wed me!" He heard the wringing of her hands, and guessed her beside herself.

He stood, therefore, reasoning it all out something after this fashion. "Look now, Prosper," thought he, "this child says truer than she knows. It is an ill thing to be hanged, but a worse to deserve a hanging, and worst of all for her, it seems, to escape a hanging. And it is good to find death sweet when he comes (since come he must), but better to prove life also a pleasant thing. And life is here urgent, though in fetters, in this child's breast; but death is not yet here. Yet if I leave her she gains death, or life (which is worse), and if I take her with me it can only be one way. What then! a man can lay down his life in many ways, giving it for the life that needeth, whether by jumping a red grave or by means slower but not less sure. And if by any deed of mine I pluck this child out of the mire, put clear light into her eyes (which now are all dark), and set the flush on her grey cheeks which she was assuredly designed to carry there; and if she breathe sweet air and grow in the grace of God and sight of men--why then I have done well, however else I do."

He thought no more, but took the girl's hand again in both of his. "Well, Isoult," he said cheerfully, "thou shalt not be hanged yet awhile, nor shall that worse thing befall thee. I will wed thee as soon as I may. At cock-crow we two will seek a priest."

"Lord," she said, "a priest is here in this place."

"Why, yes! Brother Bonaccord. Well," said Prosper, "let us go in."

But Isoult was troubled afresh, and put her hand against his chest to stay him; breathing very short.

"Lord," she said, "thou wilt wed me to save my soul from hell and my body from hanging; but thou hast no love for me in thy heart, as I know very well."

Here was a bother indeed. The girl was fair enough in her peaked elfin way; but the fact was that he did not love her--nor anybody. He had nothing to say therefore. She waited a little, and then, with her voice sunk to a low murmur, she said--

"We two will never come together except in love. Shall it not be so?"

Prosper bowed, saying--

"It shall be so."

The girl knelt suddenly down and kissed his foot. Then she rose and stood near him.

"Let us go in," she said.

Looking up, they saw the field of heaven strewn thick with stars, the clouds driven off, the wind dropt. And then they went into the hovel hand-in-hand, as they had gone out.

As soon as he saw them come in together the old man fell to chuckling and rubbing his hands.

"Wife Mald, wife Mald, look up!" cried he; "there will be a wedding this night. See, they are hand-fasted already."

Mald the witch rose up from the hearth at last and faced the betrothed. She was terrible to view in her witless old age; her face drawn into furrows and dull as lead, her bleared eyes empty of sight or conscience, and her thin hair scattered before them. It was despair, not sorrow, that Prosper read on such a face. Now she peered upon the hand-locked couple, now she parted the hair from her eyes, now slowly pointed a finger at them. Her hand shook with palsy, but she raised it up to bless them. To Prosper she said--

"Thou who art as pitiful as death, shalt have thy reward. And it shall be more than thou knowest."

To the girl she gave no promises, but with her crutch hobbled over the floor to where she stood. She put her hand into her daughter's bosom and felt there; she seemed contented, for she said to her very earnestly--

"Keep thou what thou hast there till the hour of thy greatest peril. Then it shall not fail thee to whomsoever thou shalt show it."

Then she withdrew her hand and crawled back to crouch over the ashes of the fire; nor did she open her lips again that night, nor take any part or lot in what followed.

"Call the priest, old man," said Prosper, "for the night is spending, and to-morrow we should be up before the sun."

The old thief went to a little door and opened it, whispering,

"Come, father;" and there came out Brother Bonaccord of Lucca, very solemn, vested in a frayed vestment.

"Young sir," he said, wagging a portentous finger, "you are of the simple folk our good Father Francis loved. No harm should come of this. And I pray our Lady that I never may play a worse trick on a maid than this which I shall play now."

"We have no ring," said Prosper to all this prelude.

"Content you, my master," replied Matt-o'-the-Moor; "here is what you need."

And he gave him a silver ring made of three thin wires curiously knotted in an endless plait.

"The ring will serve the purpose," Prosper said. "Now, brother, at your disposition."

Brother Bonaccord had no book, but seemed none the worse for that. He took the ring, blessed it, gave it to Prosper, and saw that he put it in its proper place; he said all the words, blessed the kneeling couple, and gave them a brisk little homily, which I spare the reader. There they were wedded.

Matt-o'-the-Moor at the end of the ceremony gave Prosper a nudge in the ribs. He pointed to a heap of leaves and litter.

"The marriage-bed," he said waggishly, and blew out the light.

Isoult lay down on the bed; Prosper took off his body-armour and lay beside her, and his naked sword lay between them.

CHAPTER VII

GALORS ABJURES

Dom Galors knew a woman in East Morgraunt whose name was Maulfry. She lived in Tortsentier, a lonely tower hidden deep in the woods, and had an unwholesome reputation. She was held to be a courtesan. Many gentlemen adventurous in the forest, it was said, had found dishonourable ease and shameful death at her hands. She would make them great cheer at first with hunting parties, dancing in the grass-rides, and love everywhere: so much had been seen, the rest was surmise. It was supposed that, being tired, or changing for caprice, she had them drugged, rifled them at leisure, slew them one way or another, and set her nets for the next newcomer. This, I say, was surmise, and so it remained. Tortsentier was hard to come at, Morgraunt wide, death as easy as lying. Men in it had other uses for their eyes than to spy at their neighbours, and found their weapons too often needed in their own quarrels to spare them for others. To see a man once did not set you looking for him to come again. You might wander for a month in Morgraunt before you got out. True, the odds were against your doing either; but whose business was that?

Galors probably knew the truth of it, for he was very often at Tortsentier. He knew, for instance, of Maulfry's taste for armour. The place was full of it, and had a frieze of shields, which Maulfry herself polished every day, as brave with blazonry as on the day they first went out before their masters. Maulfry was very fond of heraldry. It was a great delight of hers to go through her collection with such a man as Galors, who thoroughly understood the science, conning over the quarterings, the legends, the badges and differences, and capping each with its appropriate story, its little touch of romance, its personal reference to each owner in turn. There was no harm in all this, and for Galors' part he would be able to testify that there was no luxurious company there when he came, and no dark hints of violence, treachery, or mischief for the most suspicious eye to catch at. Tortsentier was not so far from the Abbey liberties that one might not fetch at it in a six hours' ride, provided one knew the road. Galors was a great rider and knew the road by heart. He was a frequent visitor of Maulfry's, therefore, and would have seen what there was to see. If the cavillers had known that it would have quieted many a whisper over the fire. They might have been told, further, that Maulfry and he were very old friends, and from a time long before his entry into religion at Holy Thorn. If there had been love between them, it had left no scar. Love with Galors was a pastime: he might make a woman his mistress, but he could never allow her to be his master. And whatever there had been in this sort, any love now left in Maulfry for the monk was largely tempered with respect. They were excellent friends.

It was to Tortsentier and to Maulfry that Dom Galors rode through the rain when he had finished biting his nails in the quarry. Very late that night he knocked at her door. Maulfry, who slept by day, opened at once, and when she saw who it was made him very welcome. She sent her page up with dry clothes, heaped logs on the fire, and set a table against his return, with venison, and white bread, and sweet wine. Galors, who was ravenous by now, needed no pressing: he sat down and ate without speaking, nor did she urge him for a message or for news, but kept her place by the fire, smiling into it until he had done. She was a tall, dark woman, very handsome and finely shaped, having the neck, arms, and bosom of Juno, or of that lady whom Nicholas the Pisan sculptor fashioned on her model to be Queen of Heaven and Earth. And Maulfry suffered no one to be in doubt as to the abundance and glory of her treasure.

When Galors was well fed she beckoned him with a nod to his place on the settle. He came and sat by the side of her, blinking into the fire for some minutes without a word.

"Well, friend," said Maulfry at last, "and what do you want with your servant at such an hour? For though I am not unused to have guests, it is seldom that you are of the party in these days."

Galors, who never made prefaces, told her everything, except the real rank and condition of Isoult. As to that, he said that the lady in question was undoubtedly an heiress, as she was undeniably a beauty, but he was careful to make it plain that her inheritance, and not her person, tempted him. This I believe to have been the truth by now. He then related what had passed in the quarry, and what he intended to do next. He added--

"Whether I succeed or not--and as to that much depends upon you--I am resolved to abjure my frock and my vows, and to aim henceforward for a temporal crown."

"I think the frock is all that need concern you," said Maulfry.

"You are right, pretty lady," he replied "and that shall concern me no more. You shall furnish me with a suit of mail out of your store, with a shield, a good spear and a sword. I have already a horse, which I owe to the vicarious bounty of the Lord Abbot, exercised through me, his right-hand man. This then will be all I shall ask of you on my account, so far as I can see at present. With what I know to back them they may win me an earldom and a pretty partner. At least they will enable me to pay Master Red-Feather my little score."

The pupils of Maulfry's eyes narrowed to a pair of pin points.

"What is this?" she said quickly. "Red feathers? A surcoat white and green? A gold baldrick? Did he bear a _fesse dancettée_ upon his shield, a hooded falcon for his crest?" Her questions chimed with her panting.

"By baldrick and shield I know him for a Gai of Starning," said Galors. "So much is certain, but which of them in particular I cannot tell certainly. There were half-a-dozen at one time. Not Malise, I think. He is too thin-lipped for such work as that. He can do sums in his head, is a ready reckoner. This lad was quick enough to act, but not quick enough to refrain from acting. Malise would not have acted. He can see too far ahead. Nor is it Osric. He would have made speeches and let vapours. This lad was quiet."

"Quiet as God," said Maulfry with a stare.

"But," Galors went on, "you need not think for him, who or what he was. I shall meet him to-morrow, and if things go as they should you shall see me again very soon. You shall come to a wedding. A wedding in Tortsentier will not be amiss, dame. Moreover, it will be new. If I fail--well, then also you shall see me, and serve me other ways. Will you do this?"

Maulfry frowned a little as she thought. Then she laughed.

"You know very well I will do more for you than this. And how much will you do for me, Galors?"

"Ask and see," said Galors.

"I too may have accounts to settle."

"You will find me a good bailiff, Maulfry. Punctual at the audit."

Maulfry laughed again as she looked up at her armour. Galors' look followed hers.

"Choose, Galors," she said; "choose, my champion. Choose, Sir Galors de Born!"

Galors took a long and deliberate survey.

"I will go in black," said he, "and for the rest, since I am no man of race, the coat is indifferent to me." So he began to read and comment upon his texts. "_Je tiendray_--why, so I shall, but it savours of forecast, brags a little."

"None the worse for my knight," said Maulfry.

"No, no," he laughed, "but let me get something of which to brag first. Hum. _Dieu m'en garde_--we will leave God out of the reckoning, I think. _Designando_--I will do more than point out, by the Rood! _Jesus, Amor, Ma Dame_--I know none of these. _Entra per me_--Oh brave, brave! 'Tis your latest, dame?"

Maulfry's eyes grew hard and bright. "Choose it, choose, my Galors!" she cried. "And if with that you beat down the red feather, and blind the hooded hawk, you will serve me more than you dream. Oh, choose, choose!"

"_Entra per me_ pleases me, I confess. But what are the arms? Wickets?"

"Three white wicket-gates on a sable field. It was the coat of Salomon de Montguichet."

"Salomon?" said Galors all in a whisper. "Never Salomon? Do you not remember?"

Maulfry laughed. "I should remember, I think. But there is no monopoly. What we choose others can choose. The name is free to the world, and a great name."

Galors, visibly uneasy; thought hard about it. Then he swore. "And I go for great deeds, by Heaven! Give it me, Dame. I will have it. _Entra per me_! And shut the wickets when I am in!"

He kissed Maulfry then and there, and they went to bed.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SALLY AT DAWN

On the morning after his strange wedding Prosper rose up early, quite himself. He left Isoult asleep in the bed, but could see neither old man, old woman, nor friar; so far as he could tell, he and his wife were alone in the cottage. Now he must think what to do. He admitted freely enough to himself that he had not been in a condition for this overnight; the girl's mood had exalted him; he had acted, and rightly acted (he was clear about this); now he must think what to do. The first duty was plain: he went out into the air and bathed in a pool; he took a quick run and set his blood galloping; then he groomed and fed his horse; put on his armour, and said his prayers. In the course of this last exercise he again remembered his wife, on whose account he had determined to make up his mind. He rose from his knees at once and walked about the heath, thinking it out.

"It is clear enough," he said to himself, "that neither my wife nor I desired marriage. We are not of the same condition; we have not--I speak for myself and by implication for her also--we have not those desires which draw men and women towards each other. Love, no doubt, is a strange and terrible thing: it may lead a man to the writing of verses and a most fatiguing search for words, but it will not allow him to be happy in anything except its own satisfaction; and in that it seems absurd to be happy. Marriage is in the same plight: it may be a good or a bad thing; without love it is a ridiculous thing. Nevertheless my wife and I are of agreement in this, that we think marriage better than being hanged. I do not understand the alternatives, but I accept them, and am married. My wife will not be hanged. For the rest, I shall take her to Gracedieu. The devout ladies there will no doubt make a nun of her; she will be out of harm's way, and all will be well."

He said another prayer, and rose up much comforted. And then as he got up Isoult came out of the cottage.

She ran towards him quickly, knelt down before he could prevent her, took his hand and kissed it. She was very shy of him, and when he raised her up and kissed her forehead, suffered the caress with lowered eyes and a face all rosy. Prosper found her very different from the tattered bride of over-night. She had changed her rags for a cotton gown of dark blue, her clouds of hair were now drawn back over her ears into a knot and covered with a silk hood of Indian work. On her feet, then bare, he now saw sandals, round her waist a leather belt with a thin dagger attached to it in a silver sheath. She looked very timidly, even humbly up at him whenever he spoke to her--with the long faithfulness of a dog shining in her big eyes: but she looked like a girl who was to be respected, and even Prosper could not but perceive what a dark beauty she was. Pale she was, no doubt, except when she blushed; but this she did as freely as hill-side clouds in March.

"Where is your wedding-ring, my child?" he asked her, when he had noticed that it was not where he had put it.

"Lord, it is here," said she, blushing again. She drew from her neck a fine gold chain whereon were the ring and another trinket which beamed like glass.

"Is that where you would have it, Isoult?"

"Yes, lord," she answered. "For this present it must be there."

"As you will," said Prosper. "Let us break our fast and make ready, for we must be on our journey before we see the sun." Isoult went into the cottage as Brother Bonaccord came out with good-morning all over his puckered face.

Isoult brought bread and goats'-milk cheese, and they broke their fast sitting on the threshold, while the sun slowly rose behind the house and lit up the ground before them--a broken moorland with heather-clumps islanded in pools of black water. The white forest mist hid every distance and the air was shrewdly cold; but Prosper and the friar gossiped cheerfully as they munched.

"We friars," said Brother Bonaccord, "have been accused of a foible for wedding-rings. I grant you I had rather marry a healthy couple than leave them aching, and that the sooner there's a christening the better I am pleased. Another soul for Christ to save; another point against the devil, thinks I! I have heard priests say otherwise: they will christen if they must, and marry if it is not too late; but they would sooner bury you any day. Go to! They live in the world (which I vow is an excellent place), and eat and drink of it; yet they shut their eyes, pretending all the time that they are not there, but rather in skyey mansions. If this is not a fit and proper place for us men, why did God Almighty take six days a-thinking before He bid it out of the cooking pot? For a gift to the devil? Not He! 'Stop bubbling, you rogue,' says He; 'out of the pot with you and on to the platter, that these gentlemen and ladies of mine may cease sucking their fingers and dip in the dish!' Pooh! Look at your mother Mary and your little brother Gesulino. There was a wedding for you, there was a sacring! Beloved sons are ye all, young men; full of grace are ye, young women! God be good, who told me to couple ye and keep the game a-going! Take my blessing, brother, and the sleek and tidy maid you have gotten to wife; I must be on the road. I am for Hauterive out of the hanging Abbot's country. He'll be itching about that new gallows of his, thinking how I should look up there."

He kissed them both very heartily and trudged out into the mist, waving his hand.

"There goes a good soul," said Prosper. "Give me something to drink, child, I beseech you."

Isoult brought a great bowl of milk and gave it into his hands, afterwards (though he never saw her) she drank of it from the place where he had put his lips. Then it was time for them also to take the road. Isoult went away again, and returned leading Prosper's horse and shield; she brought an ass for herself to ride on. Curtseying to him she asked--

"Is my lord ready?"

"Ready for anything in life, my child," said he as he took her up and put her on the ass. Then he mounted his horse. They set off at once over the heath, striking north. None watched them go.

The sky was now without cloud. White all about, it swam into clear blue overhead. A light breeze, brisk and fresh, blew the land clear, only little patches of the morning mist hung torn and ragged about the furze-bushes. The forest was still densely veiled, but the sun was up, the larks afloat; the rains of over-night crisped and sparkled on the grass: there was promise of great weather. Presently with its slant roofs shining, its gilded spires and cross, Prosper saw on his left the great Abbey of Holy Thorn. He saw the river with a boat's sail, the village of Malbank Saint Thorn on the further bank and the cloud of thin blue smoke over it; far across the heath came the roar of the weirs. Behind it and on all sides began to rise before him the dark rampart of trees--Morgraunt.

Prosper's heart grew merry within him at the sight of all this freshness, the splendour of the morning. He was disposed to be well contented with everything, even with Isoult, upon whom he looked down once or twice, to see her pacing gently beside him, a guarded and graceful possession. "Well, friend," he said to himself, "you have a proper-seeming wife, it appears, of whom it would be well to know something."

He began to question her, and this time she told him everything he asked her, except why she was called Isoult la Desirous. As to this, she persisted that she could not tell him. He took it good-temperedly, with a shrug.

"I see something mysterious in all this, child," said he, "and am not fond of mysteries. But I married thee to draw thee from the hangman and not thy secrets from thee. Keep thy counsel therefore."

She hung her head.

To all other questions she was as open as he could wish. From her earliest childhood, he learned, she had known servitude, and been familiar with scorn and reproach. She had been swineherd, goose-girl, scare-crow, laundress, scullery-wench, and what not, as her mother could win for her. She could never better herself, because of the taint of witchcraft and all the unholiness it brought upon her. As laundress and scullery-maid she had been at the Abbey; that had been her happiest time but for one circumstance, of which she told him later. Of her father she spoke little, save that he had often beaten her; of her mother more tenderly--it seemed they loved each other--but with an air of constraint. Her parents were undoubtedly in ill-savour throughout the tithing; her father, a rogue who would cut a throat as easily as a purse, her mother, a wise woman patently in league with the devil. But she said that, although she could not tell the reason of it, the Abbot had protected them from judgment many a time--whether it was her father for breaking the forest-law, deer-stealing, wood-cutting, or keeping running dogs; or her mother from the hatred and suspicion of the Malbank people, on account of her sorceries and enchantments. More especially did the Abbot take notice of her, and, while he never hesitated to expose her to every infamous reproach or report, and (apparently) to take a delight in them, yet guarded her from the direct consequences as if she had been sacred. This her parents knew very well, and never scrupled to turn to their advantage. For when hard put to it they would bring her forward between them, set her before the Abbot, and say, "For the sake of the child, my lord, let us go." Which the Abbot always did.

Cried Prosper here, "What did he want, this fatherly Abbot?"

"My lord," said Isoult, "he sought to have me put away."

"Well, child," Prosper chuckled, "he has got his wish."

"He wished it long ago, lord," she said; "before I was marriageable."

"And it was not to thy taste?"

"No, lord."

"It was not of that then that thou wert La Desirous?"

"No, lord," said Isoult in a low voice.

"So I thought," was Prosper's comment to himself. "The friar was out."

She went on to tell him of her service with the Abbey as laundry-maid, then as scullery-girl; then she spoke of Galors. She told him how this monk had seen her by chance in the Abbey kitchen; how he sought to get too well acquainted with her; how she had fled the service and refused to go back. Nevertheless, and in spite of that, she had had no peace because of him. He chanced upon her again when she was among the crowd at the Alms Gate waiting for the dole, had kept her to the end, and spoken with her then and there, telling her all his desire, opening all his wicked heart. She fled from him again for the time; but every day she must needs go up for the dole, so every day she saw him and endured his importunities. This had lasted up to the very day she saw Prosper: at that time he had nearly prevailed upon her by his own frenzy and her terror of the Abbot's, threat. She never doubted the truth of what he told her, for the Abbot's privy mind had been declared to much the same purpose to Mald her mother.

"But this privy mind of his," said Prosper, "must have swung wide from its first leaning, which seems to have been to preserve thee. Could he not have ruined thee without a charter? An Abbot and a cook-maid! Could he not have ruined thee without a rope?"

"My lord," she replied, "I think he was merciful. I was to be hanged by his desire; but there was worse with Galors."

"Ah, I had forgotten him," Prosper said.

She had spoken all this in a low voice through which ran a trembling, as when a great string on a harp is touched and thrills all the music. Prosper thought she would have said more if she dared. Although she spoke great scorn of herself and hid nothing, yet he knew without asking that she had been truthful when she told him she was pure. He looked at her again and made assurance double; yet he wondered how it could be.

"Tell me, Isoult," he said presently, "when thou sawest me come into the quarry, didst thou know that I should take thee away?"

"Yes, lord," said she, "when I saw your face I knew it."

"What of my face, child? Hadst thou seen me before that day?"

She did not answer this.

"It is likely enough," he went on. "For in my father's day we often rode, I and my brothers, with him in the Abbey fees, hawking or hunting the deer. And if thou wert gooseherd or shepherdess thou mightest easily have seen us."

Isoult said, "My lord, if I had seen thee twenty times before or none, I had trusted thee when I saw thy face."

"How so, child?" asked he.

For answer to this she looked quickly up at him for a moment, and then hung her head, blushing. He had had time to see that dog's look of trust again in her eyes.

"My wife takes kindly to me!" he thought. "Let us hope she will find Gracedieu even more to her mind."

They rode on, being now very near the actual forest. Prosper began again with his questions.

"What enmity," he said, "the Abbot had for thee, Isoult, or what lurking pity, or what grain of doubt, I cannot understand. It seems that he wished thy ruin most devoutly, but that being a Christian and a man of honour he sought to compass it in a Christian and gentlemanly way. Might not marriage have appeared to him the appointed means? And should I not tell him that thou art ruined according to his aspirations?"

"Lord," said she, "he will know it."

"Saints and angels!" Prosper cried, "who will tell him? Not Brother Bonaccord, who loves no monks."

"Nay, lord, but my mother will tell him for the ruin of Galors, who hates her and is hated again. Moreover, there are many in Malbank who will find it out soon enough."

"How is that, child?"

"Lord, many of them sought to have me."

"I can well believe it," said Prosper; and after a pause he said again--"I would like to meet this Galors of thine out of his frock. He looked a long-armed, burly rogue; it seemed that there might be some fighting in him. Further, some chastisement of him, if it could conveniently be done, would seem to be my duty, since he has touched at thy honour, which is now mine. I should certainly like to meet him unfrocked."

"Lord,"' answered the girl, "that will come soon enough. I pray that thine arm be strong, for he is very fierce, and a terrible man in Malbank, more often armed than in his robe."

"He must be an indifferent monk," Prosper said; "God seems not well served in such a man's life. Holy Church would be holier without him."

"He is a great hunter, my lord," said Isoult.

"It would certainly seem so," said Prosper grimly. "Where should I find him likeliest?"

"Lord, look for him in Martle Brush."

"Ah! And where is that?"

"Lord, it is here by," said Isoult.

Prosper looked about him sharply. He found that they had left the heath, and were riding down a smooth grassy place into a deep valley. The decline was dotted with young oak-trees, sparse at the top but thickening in clusters and ranks lower down. Between the stems, but at some distance, he could see a herd of deer feeding on the rank grass by a brook at the bottom. Beyond the brook again the wood grew still thicker with holly trees and yews interspersed with the oaks: the land he could see rose more abruptly on that side, and was densely wooded to the top of another ridge as high as that which he and Isoult descended. The ridge itself was impenetrably dark with a forest gloom which never left it at this season of the year. As he studied the place, Martle Brush as he supposed it to be, he saw a hart in the herd stop feeding and lift his head to snuff the air, then with his antlers thrown back, trot off along the brook, and all the herd behind him. This set him thinking; he knew the deer had not winded him. The breeze set from them rather, over the valley, from the north-east. He said nothing to his companion, but kept his eyes open as they began to descend deeper into the gorge. Presently he saw three or four crows which had been wheeling over the tops of the trees come and settle on a dead oak by the brook-side. Still there was no sign of a man. Again he glanced down at Isoult; this time she too was alert, with a little flush in her cheeks, but no words on her lips to break the silence they kept. So they descended the steep place, picking their way as best they could among the loose rocks and boulders, with eyes painfully at gaze, yet with no reward, until they reached a place where the track went narrowly between great rooted rocks with holly trees thick on either side. Immediately before them was the brook, shallow and fordable, with muddy banks; the track ran on across it and steeply up the opposite ridge. Midway of this Prosper now saw a knight fully armed in black (but with a white plume to his helmet), sitting a great black horse, his spear erect and his shield before him. He could even make out the cognizance upon it--three white wicket-gates argent on a field sable--but not the motto. The shield set him thinking where he could have seen it before, for he knew it perfectly well. Then suddenly Isoult said, "Lord, this is Galors the Monk."

"Ho, ho!" said Prosper, "is this Galors? I like him better than I did."

"Lord," she asked in a tremble, "what wilt thou do?"

"Do!" he cried; "are there so many things to do? You are not afraid, child?"

"No, lord, I am not afraid," she replied, and looked down at her belt.

"Now, Isoult," said Prosper, "you are to stay here on your beast while I go down and clear the road."

She obeyed him at once, and sat very still looking at Galors and at Prosper, who rode forward to the level ground by the ford. There he stopped to see what the other man would be at. Galors played the impenetrable part which had served him so well with the Abbot Richard, in other words, did nothing but sit where he was with his spear erect, like a bronze figure on a bridge. Impassivity had always been the strength of Galors; women had bruised themselves against it: but Prosper had little to do with women's ways.

"Sir, why do you bar my passage?" he sang out, irrepressibly cheerful at present. Galors never answered him a word. Prosper divined him at this; he was to climb the hill, and so be at the double disadvantage of having no spear and of being below him that had one. "The pale rascal means to make this a game of skittles," he thought to himself. "We shall see, my man. In the mean time I wish I knew your shield." So saying he forded the brook, stayed, called out again, "Whose shield is that, Galors?" and again got no reply. "Black dog!" cried he in a rage, "take your vantage and expect no more." Whereupon he set his horse at the hill and rode up with his shield before him.

The black knight feutred his spear, clapped spurs to his horse's flanks, and bore down the hill. He rode magnificently: horse and man had the impetus of a charging bull, and it looked ill for the man below. But Prosper had learned a trick from his father, which he in turn had had at Acre from the Moslems in one of the intervals of the business there. In those days men fought like heroes, but between whiles remembered that they were gentlemen and good fellows pitted against others equally happy in these respects.

The consequence was that many a throat was cut by many a hand which the day before had poured out wine for its delight, and nobody was any the worse. The infidels loved Mahomet, but they loved a horse too, and Baron Jocelyn was not the man to forget a lesson in riding. So soon, therefore, as Galors was upon him, Prosper slid his left foot from the stirrup and slipt round his horse almost to the belly, clinging with his shield arm to the bow of the saddle. The spear struck his shield at a tangent and glanced off. It was a bad miss for Galors, since horse and man drove down the incline and were floundering in the brook before they could stay. Prosper whipped round to see Galors mired, was close on his quarter and had cut through the shank of the spear, close to the guard, in a trice.

"Fight equal, my friend, and you will fight more at ease in the long run," was all he said. Galors let fly an oath at him, furious. He drew his great sword and cut at him with all his force; Prosper parried and let out at his shoulder. He got in between the armour plates; first blow went to him. This did not improve Galors' temper or mend his fighting. There was a sharp rally in the brook, some shrewd knocks passed. The lighter man and horse had all the advantage; Galors never reached his enemy fairly. He set himself to draw Prosper out of the slush of mud and water, and once on firmer ground went more warily to work. Then a chance blow from Prosper struck his horse on the crest and went deep. The beast stumbled and fell with his rider upon him both lay still.

"A broken neck," thought Prosper, cursing his luck. Galors never moved. "What an impassive rogue it is!" Prosper cried, with all his anger clean gone from him. He dismounted and went to where his man lay, threw his sword on the grass beside him, and proceeded to unlace Galors's hauberk. Galors sprang up and sent Prosper flying; he set his heel on the sword blade and broke it short. Then he turned his own upon the unarmed man. "By God, the man is for a murder!" Prosper grew white with a cold rage: he was on his feet, the flame of his anger licked up his poverty: Galors had little chance. Prosper made a quick rush and drove at the monk with his shield arm, using the shield like an axe; he broke down his guard, got at close quarters, dropt his shield and caught Galors under the arms. They swayed and rocked together like storm-driven trees, Prosper transported with his new-lighted rage, Galors struggling to justify his treachery by its only excuse. Below his armpits he felt Prosper's grip upon him; he was encumbered with shield and sword, both useless--the sword, in fact, sawing the air. Then they fell together, Prosper above; and that was the end of the bout. Prosper slipped out his poniard and drove it in between the joints of the gorget. Then he got up, breathing hard, and looked at his enemy as he lay jerking on the grass, and at the bright stream coming from his neck.

"The price of treachery is heavy," said he. "I ought to kill him. And there are villainies behind that to be reckoned with, to say nothing of all the villainies to do when that hole shall be stuffed. The shield--ah, the shield! No, monk, on second thoughts, I will not kill you yet. It would be dealing as you dealt, it would prevent our meeting again; it would cut me off all chance of learning the history of your arms. White wicket-gates! Where, under heaven's eye, have I been brought up against three white wicket-gates? Ha! there is a motto too." _Entra per me_, he read, and was no wiser. "This man and I will meet again," he said. "Meantime I will remember _Entra per me_." He raised his voice to call to Isoult--"Come, child; the way is clear enough."

She came over the brook at once, alighted on the further side, and came creeping up to her husband to kneel before him as once before that morning; but he put his hand on her shoulder to stay her. "Come," he said, smiling, "no more ceremony between you and me, my dear. Rather let us get forward out of the reach of hue-and-cry. For when the foresters find him that will be the next move in the game." To Galors he turned with a "By your leave, my friend," and took his sword; then having put Isoult upon her donkey and mounted his own beast, he led the way up the ridge wondering where they had best turn to avoid hue-and-cry. Isoult, who guessed his thoughts, told him of the minster at Gracedieu.

Sanctuary attached to the Church, she said, as all the woodlanders knew.

"Excellent indeed," Prosper cried; "that jumps with what I had determined on before. Moreover, I suppose that Gracedieu is outside the Malbank fee?"

"Yes, lord, it is far beyond that."

"And how far is it to Gracedieu?"

"It is the journey of two days and nights, my lord."

"Well," said he, "then those nights we must sleep in the forest. How will that suit you, child?"

"Ah, my lord," breathed the girl, "I have very often slept there."

"And what shall we do for food, Isoult?"

"I will provide for that, my lord."

CHAPTER IX

THE BLOOD-CHASE AND THE LOVE-CHASE

It was by this time high noon, hot and still. Having climbed the ridge, they found themselves at the edge of a dense beech-wood, to which there appeared no end. From their vantage-ground they could see that the land sloped very gradually away into the distance; upon it the giant trees stood like pillars of a church, whose floor was brown with the waste and litter of a hundred years. Long alleys of shade stretched out on all sides of them into the dark unknown of Mid-Morgraunt; there seemed either no way or countless ways before them, and one as good as the other. They rested themselves in sheer bewilderment, ate of the bread and apples which Isoult had brought with her; then Prosper found out how tired he was.

"Wife," said he, "if all the devils in Christendom were after me it would not keep me awake. I must sleep for half-an-hour."

"Sleep, sleep, my lord; I will take the watch," said Isoult, longing to serve him.

He unlaced his helm and body-armour without more ado, and laid his head in the girl's lap. She had very cool and soft hands, and now she put one of them upon his forehead for a solace, peering down nervously to see how he would take such daring from his servant. What she saw comforted her not a little, indeed she thought herself like to die of joy. He wondered again that such delicate little hands should have been reared on Spurnt Heath, and endured the service of the lowest; it was a half-comical content that made him send her a smiling acknowledgment; but she took it for a friendly message between them, and though the laughter in his eyes brought a mist over hers she was content. Prosper dropped asleep. Through the soft veil of her happiness she watched him patiently and still as a mouse. She was serving him at last; she could dare look tenderly at him when he was asleep--and she did. Something of the mother, something of the manumitted slave, something of the dumb creature brought up against a crisis which only speech can make tolerable,--something of these three lay in her wet eyes; she wanted ineffably more, but she was happy (she thought). She was not apt to look further than this, that she was in love, and suffered to serve her master. The dull torment of her life past, the doubts or despair which might beset and perplex her life to come, were all blurred and stilled by this boon of service, as a rosy mist makes beautiful the space of time between a day of storms and a dripping night. When the roaring of the wind dies down and the sun rays out in a clear pool of heaven, men have ease and forget their buffetings; they walk abroad to bathe their vexed souls in the evening calms. So now Isoult la Desirous, with no soul to speak of, bathed her quickened instincts. She felt at peace with a world which had used her but ill so long as she was in touch with all that was noble in it. This glorious youth, this almost god, suffered her to touch his brow, to look at him, to throne his head, to adore him. Oh, wonderful! And as tears are never far from a girl's eyes, and never slow to answer the messages of her heart, so hers flowed freely and quietly as from a brimming well; nor did she check them or wish them away, but let them fall where they would until they encroached upon the privileged hand. _Lèse majesté!_ She threw her head back and shook them from her; she was more guarded how she did after that.

Then she heard something over the valley below which gave her heart-beats a new tune. A great ado down there, horses, dogs, voices of men shouting for more. She guessed in a moment that the foresters had come upon the body of Galors, knew that hue-and-cry was now only a question of hours, and all her joys at an end. She took her hand from Prosper's forehead, and he awoke then and there, and smiled up at her.

"Lord," said she, "it is time for us to be going, for they have found Dom Galors; and at the Abbey they have many slot-hounds."

"Good, my child," he answered. "I am ready for anything in the world. Let us go."

He got up instantly and armed himself; they mounted their animals and plunged into the great shade of the beeches. All the steering they could do now was by such hints of the sun as they could glean here and there. Prosper by himself would have been fogged in a mile, but Isoult had not lived her fifteen years of wild life for nothing: she had the fox's instinct for an earth, and the hare's for doubling on a trail. The woods spoke to her as they spoke to each other, as they spoke to the beasts, or the beasts among themselves. What indeed was this poor little doubtful wretch but one of those, with a stray itching to be more? Soul or none, she had an instinct which Prosper discovered and learned to trust. For the rest of the day she tacitly led the knight-at-arms in the way he should go.

But with all her help they made a slow pace. The forest grew more and more dense; there seemed no opening, no prospect of an opening. She knew what must be in store for them if the Abbot had uncoupled his bloodhounds, so she strained every nerve in her young body, listened to every murmur or swish of the trees, every one of the innumerable, inexplicable noises a great wood gives forth. She suffered, indeed, intensely; yet Prosper never knew it. He played upon her, quite unconsciously, by wondering over the difficulties of the road, the slowness of their going, the probable speed of the Abbot's dogs and foresters, and so on. Her meekness and cheerful diligence delighted him. The nuns of Gracedieu, he promised himself, should know what a likely novice he was bringing them. He should miss her, _pardieu_! after two or three days' companionship. So they struggled on.

Towards the time of dusk, which was very soon in that gloomy solitude, Isoult heard in the far distance the baying of the dogs, and began to tremble, knowing too well what all that meant. Yet she said nothing. Prosper rode on, singing softly to himself as his custom was, his head carried high, his light and alert look taking in every dark ambush as a thing to be conquered--very lordly to look upon. The girl, who had never seen his like, adored him, thought him a god; the fact was, she had no other. Therefore, as one does not lightly warn the blessed gods, she rode silent but quaking by his side, with her ears still on the strain for the coming danger, and all her mind set on the fear that Prosper would find out. Above all she heard a sound which shocked her more, her own heart knocking at her side.

Then at last Prosper reined up, listening too. "Hush!" he said, "what is that?"

This was a new sound, more hasty and murmurous than any girl's heart, and much more dreadful than the music of the still distant hounds; it was very near, a rushing and pattering sound, as of countless beasts running. Isoult knew it.

"Wolves!" she said; "let be, there is no harm from them save in the winter."

As she spoke a grey bitch-wolf came trotting through the trees, swiftly but in pain, and breathing very short. She was covered with slaver and red foam, her tongue lolled out at the side of her mouth long and loose, she let blood freely from a wound in the throat, and one of her ears was torn and bleeding. She looked neither to right nor left, did not stay to smell at the scent of the horse; all her pains were spent to keep running. She broke now and again into a rickety canter, but for the most part trotted straight forward, with many a stumble and missed step, all picked up with indescribable feverish diligence; and as she went her blood flowed, and her panting kept pace with her padding feet. So she came and so went, hunted by what followed close upon her; the murmur of the host, the host itself--dogs and bitches in a pack, making great pace. They came on at a gallop, a sea of wolves that surged restlessly, yet were one rolling tide. Here and there a grinning head cast up suddenly out of the press seemed like the broken crest of some hastier wave impatient with his fellows; so they snarled, jostled, and snapped at each other. Then one, playing choragus, would break into a howl, and there would be a long anthem of howls until the forest rang with the terror; but the haste, the panting and the padding of feet were the most dreadful, because incessant; the thrust head would be whelmed, the sharp voice drowned in howls; the grey tide and the lapping of it never stopped.

The fugitives watched this chase, in which they might have read a parable of their own affair, sweep past them like a bad dream. In the dead hush that followed they heard what was a good deal more significant for them, the baying of the dogs.

"What now?" said Prosper to himself, "there are the dogs. If I make haste they can make it better; if I stay, how on earth shall I keep my convoy out of their teeth?"

It was too late to wonder; even at that moment Isoult gasped and caught at his arm, leaning from her saddle to cling to him as she had done once before. But this was a danger not to be shamed away by a man armed. He followed her look, and saw the first dog come on with his nose to the ground. A thought struck him. "Wait," he said.

Sure enough, the great dog hit on the line of the wolves and got the blood in his nostrils. He was puzzled, his tail went like a flag in a gale as he nosed it out.

Prosper watched him keenly, it was touch-and-go, but never troubled his breath. "Take your choice, friend," he said. The dog beat to and fro for some long minutes. He could not deny himself--he followed the wolves.

"That love-chase is like to be our salvation," said Prosper. "Wait now. Here are some more of the Abbot's friends." It was as good as a play to him--a hunter; but to Isoult, the wild little outcast, it was deadly work. Like all her class, she held dogs in more fear than their masters. You may cajole a man; to a dog the very attempt at it is a damning proof against you.

As Prosper had predicted, the dogs, coming on by twos and threes, got entangled in the cross-trail. They hesitated over it, circled about it as the first had done, and like him they followed the hotter and fresher scent. One, however, in a mighty hurry, ran clean through it, and singled out his own again. They saw him coming; in his time he saw them. He stopped, threw up his head, and bayed a succession of deep bell-notes at them, enough to wake the dead.

"I must deal with this beast," Prosper said. "Leave me to manage him, and stay you here." He dismounted, ungirt his sword, which he gave to Isoult to hold, then began to run through the wood as if he was afraid. This brought the dog on furiously; in fifty yards he was up with his quarry. Prosper went on running; the dog chose his time, and sprang for his throat. Prosper, who had been waiting for this, ducked at the same minute; his dagger was in his hand. He struck upwards at the dog as he rose, and ripped his belly open. "That was your last jump, my friend," quoth he, "but I hope there are no more of you. It is a game that not always answers."

It was while he was away upon this errand that Isoult thought she saw a tall woman in a black cloak half-hidden behind a tree. The woman, she could have sworn, stood there in the dusk looking fixedly at her; it was too dark to distinguish anything but the white disk of a face and the black mass she made in her cloak, yet there was that about her, some rigid aspect of attention, which frightened the girl. She turned her head for a moment to see Prosper homing, and when she looked again into the trees there was certainly no woman. She thought she must have fancied it all, and dismissed the thought without saying anything to Prosper.

They took up their journey again, safe from dogs for the time. The music had died away in the distance; they knew that if the wolf-pack were caught there would be work enough for more hounds than the Abbey could furnish. Then it grew dark, and Isoult weary and heavy with sleep. She swayed in her saddle.

"Ah," said Prosper, "we will stay here. You shall sleep while I keep watch."

"It is very still, my lord. Wilt thou not let me watch for a little?" she asked.

Prosper laughed. "There are many things a man's wife can do for him, my dear," he said, "but she cannot fight dogs or men. And she cannot sleep with one eye open Eat what you have, and then shut your pair of eyes. You are not afraid for me?"

Isoult looked at him quickly. Then she said--"My lord is--," and stopped confused.

"What is thy lord, my girl?" asked he.

"He is good to his servant," she whispered in her low thrilled voice.

They ate what bread was left, and drank a little water. Before all was finished Isoult was nodding. Prosper bestirred himself to do the best he could for her; he collected a heap of dried leaves, laid his cloak upon them, and picked up Isoult to lay her upon the cloak. His arms about her woke her up. Scarce knowing what she did, dreaming possibly of her mother, she put up her face towards his; but if Prosper noticed it, no errant mercy from him sent her to bed comforted. He put her down, covered her about with the cloak, and patted her shoulder with an easy--"Good-night, my lass." This was cold cheer to the poor girl, who had to be content with his ministry of the cloak. It was too dark to tell if he was looking at her as he stooped; and ah, heavens! why should he look at her? The dark closed round his form, stiffly erect, sitting on the root of the great tree which made a tent for them both, and then it claimed her soul. She lost her trouble in sleep; he kept the watch all night.

CHAPTER X

FOREST ALMS

Towards the grey of the morning, seeing that the whole forest was at peace, with no sign of dogs or men all that night, and now even a rest from the far howling of the wolves, Prosper's head dropt to his breast. In a few seconds he slept profoundly. Isoult awoke and saw that he slept: she lay watching him, longing but not daring. When she saw that he looked blue and pinched about the cheekbones, that his cheeks were yellow where they should be red, and grey where they had been white, she knew he was cold; and her humbleness was not proof against this justification of her desires. She crept out of her snug nest, crawled towards her lord and felt his hands; they were ice. "Asleep he is mine," she thought. She picked up the cloak, then crept again towards him, seated herself behind and a little above him, threw the cloak over both and snuggled it well in. She put her arms about him and drew him close to her bosom. His head fell back at her gentle constraint; so he lay like a child at the breast. The mother in her was wild and throbbing. Stooped over him she pored into his face. A divine pity, a divine sense of the power of life over death, of waking over sleep, drew her lower and nearer. She kissed his face--the lids of his eyes, his forehead and cheeks. Like an unwatched bird she foraged at will, like a hardy sailor touched at every port but one. His mouth was too much his own, too firm; it kept too much of his sovereignty absolute. Otherwise she was free to roam; and she roamed, very much to his material advantage, since the love that made her rosy to the finger-tips, in time warmed him also. He slept long in her arms.

She began to be very hungry.

"He too will be hungry when he wakes," she thought; "what shall I do? We have nothing to eat." She looked down wistfully at his head where it lay pillowed. "What would I not give him of mine?" The thought flooded her. But what could she do?

She heard the pattering of dry leaves, the crackle of dry twigs snapt, and looking up, saw a herd of deer feeding in a glade not very far off.

Idly as she watched them, it came home to her that there were hinds among them with calves. One she noticed in particular feed a little apart, having two calves near her which had just begun to nibble a little grass. Vaguely wondering still over her plight, she pictured her days of shepherding in the downs where food had often failed her, and the ewes perforce mothered another lamb. That hind's udder was full of milk: a sudden thought ran like wine through her blood. She slid from Prosper, got up very softly, took her cup, and went towards the browsing deer. The hind looked up (like all the herd) but did not start nor run. A brief gaze satisfied it that here was no enemy, neither a stranger to the forest walks; it fell-to again, and suffered Isoult to come quite close, even to lay her hand upon its neck. Then she stood for a while stroking the red hind, while all the herd watched her. She knelt before the beast, clasping both arms about its neck; she fondled it with her face, as if asking the boon she would have. Some message passed between them, some assurance, for she let go of the hind's neck and crawled on hands and knees towards the udder. The deer never moved, though it turned its head to watch her. She took the teat in her mouth, sucked and drew milk. The herd stood all about her motionless; the hind nuzzled her as if she had been one of its own calves; so she was filled.

Next she had to fill her cup. This was much more difficult. The hind must be soothed and fondled again, there must be no shock on either side. She started the flow with her mouth; then she knelt against the animal with her head pressed to its side, took the teat in her hand and succeeded. She filled the cup with Prosper's breakfast. She got up, kissed the hind between the eyes, stroked its neck many times, and went tiptoe back to her lord and master. She found him still sound asleep, so sat quietly watching him till he should wake, with the cup held against her heart to keep it warm.

Broad daylight and a chance beam of sun through the trees woke him at last. It would be about seven o'clock. He stretched portentously, and sat up to look about him; so he encountered her tender eyes before she had been able to subdue their light.

"Good-morning, Isoult," said he. "Have I been long asleep?"

"A few hours only, lord."

"I am hungry. I must eat something."

"Lord, I have milk for thee."

He took the cup she tendered, looking at her.

"Drink first, my child," he said.

"Lord, I have drunk already."

He drained the cup without further ado.

"Good milk," he said when he had done. He took these things, you see, very much as they came.

His next act was to kneel face to the sun and begin his prayers. Something made him stop; he turned him to his wife.

"Hast thou said thy prayers, Isoult?"

"No, lord," said she, reddening.

"Come then and pray with me. It is a good custom."

She obeyed him so far as to kneel down by his side. He began again. She had nothing to say, so he stopped again.

"Dost thou forget thy prayers since thou art a wife, Isoult?"

"Lord, I know none," said she with a shameful face.

"Thou art not a Christian then?"

"If a Christian prays, my lord, I am not a Christian."

"But thou hast been baptized?"

"Yes, lord."

"How knowest thou?"

"The Lord Abbot once reproached me before my parents that I had disgraced Holy Baptism; and my father beat me soundly for it, saying that of all his afflictions that was the hardest to bear. This he did in the presence of the Lord Abbot himself. Therefore I know that I have been beaten for the sake of my baptism."

Prosper was satisfied.

"It is enough, Isoult. Thou art certainly a Christian. Nevertheless, such an one should pray (and women as well as men), even though it may very well be that he knows not what he is saying. Prayer is a great mystery, look you. Yet this I know, that it is also a great comfort. For remember that if a Christian prays--knowing or not knowing the meaning of the act and the upshot of it--he is very sure it is acceptable to Saint Mary, and through her to God Almighty Himself. So much so, indeed, that he is emboldened thereafter to add certain impertinences and urgent desires of his own, which Saint Mary is good enough to hear, and by her intercession as often as not to win to be accepted. Some add a word or two to their saint or guardian, others invoke all the saints in a body; but it is idle to do one or any of these things without you have prayed first. So you must by all means learn to pray. Sit down by me here and I will teach you."

She sat as close to him as she dared on the trunk of the beech, while he taught her to say after him, _"Pater noster qui es in coelis"_, and _"Ave Maria gratia plena."_ In this way they spent a full hour or more, going over and over the Latin words till she was as perfect as he. In the stress of the task, which interested Prosper vastly, their hands met more than once; finally Prosper's settled down over hers and held it. In time he caught the other. Isoult's heart beat wildly; she had never been so happy. When she had all the words pat they knelt down and prayed together, with the best results.

"Now, child," said Prosper, "you may add what you choose of your own accord; and be sure that our Lady will hear you. It is a great merit to be sure of this. The greater the Christian the surer he is. I also will make my petition. You have no patron?"

"No, lord, I have never heard of such an one."

"I recommend you to Saint Isidore. His name is the nearest to yours that I can remember. For the rest, he is very strong. Ask, then, what you will now, my child, and doubt nothing."

Isoult bent her head and shut her eyes for the great essay. What could she say? What did she want? She was kneeling by Prosper's side, his hand held hers a happy prisoner.

"Mary, let him take me! Saint Isidore, let him take me--all, all, all!" This was what she panted to Heaven.

Prosper prayed, "My Lady, I beseech thee a good ending to this adventure which I have undertaken lightly, it may be, but with an honest heart. Grant also a good and honourable end to myself, and to this my wife, who is a Christian without knowing it, and by the help of thy servants at Gracedieu shall be a better. _Per Christum dominum_, etc."

Then he crossed himself, and taught Isoult to do the same, and the great value of the exercise.

"Now, child," he said, "I have done thee a better turn in teaching thee to pray and sign thyself meekly and devoutly than ever I did by wedding thee in the cottage. Thy soul, my dear, thy soul is worth a hundred times thy pretty person. Saint Bernard, I understand, says, 'My son, think of the worms when thou art disposed to cherish thyself in a looking-glass.' It is to go far. Saint Bernard was a monk, and it is a monk's way to think of nastiness; but he was right in the main. Your soul is the chief part of you. Now to finish: when we are at Gracedieu thou shalt confess and go to Mass. Then thou wilt be as good a Christian as I am."

"Lord, is that all I must do?" she asked meekly.

Prosper grew grave. He put his hand on the girl's shoulder, as he said--

"Deal justly, live cleanly, breathe sweet breath. Praise God in thy heart when He is kind, bow thy head and knees when He is angry; look for Him to be near thee at all times. Do this, and beyond it trust thy heart."

"Lord, I will do it."

"Thou art a good child, Isoult. I am pleased with thee," he said, and kissed her. She turned her face lest he should see that she was crying. Soon afterwards they set off towards Gracedieu.

The day, the night, the next morning found them on the journey. They had to travel slowly, could indeed have made better pace on foot; for Mid-Morgraunt is a tangle of brush and undergrowth, and the swamps (which are many and of unknown depth) have all to be circled.

There seemed, however, to be no further pursuit; they could go at their ease, for they met nobody. On the other hand, they met with no food more solid than milk. There were deer in plenty. Isoult was able to feed herself and her husband, and keep both from exhaustion, without suspicion from him or much cost to herself. The second time of doing it, it is true, she went tremblingly to work, and was like to bungle it. What one may do on the flood one may easily miss on the ebb; moreover, it was night-time, she was tired, and not sure of herself. Nevertheless, she was fed, and Prosper was fed. Next morning she was as cool as you choose, singled out her hind as she walked into the herd, went on all fours and sucked like a calf. She grew nice, indeed. The beast she tried first had rough milk; this would do for her well enough, but my lord must have of the best. She chose another with great care, played milk-maid to her, and drew Prosper full measure.

He, her sovereign, took every event with equal mind, and placidly, whether it was a wedding, a fight, or a miraculous fountain of milk. If she had drawn his food from herself he would not have questioned her; if it had been her last ounce of life he would not have thanked her the more. You cannot blame him for this. To begin with, he knew nothing of her or her doings when he was asleep or on the watch. And a young man is a prodigal always, of another's goods besides his own, while a young woman is his banker, never so rich as when he overdraws. Deprived of him by her own act, his wife in name, she was his servant in reality. His servant and, just now, his sumpter-beast. Very wistfully she served him, but very diligently, only asking that he should neither thank nor blame her. It very seldom occurred to him to do either; but so sure as he threw a "good child" at her, she had a lump in her throat and smarting eyes. True, she had her little rewards, to be enjoyed when he could not guess that her heart was all in a flutter, or see that her cheeks were wet. Night and morning they said their _Pater Noster_ and _Ave Maria_, out of which (although she understood them as little as he did) she did not fail to suck the comfort he had promised her. She learned also to speak familiarly to Saint Isidore and Madonna. This served her in good stead later in her career. Meantime, night and morning they knelt side by side, their arms touched, sometimes their hands strayed and joined company. Then hers ended by resting where they were, as in a warm nest. Pray what more could a girl ask of the Christian faith?

By sunset of the second day passed in this fashion they were before the great west front of Gracedieu Minster, knocking at the Mercy Door. It opened. They were safe for the present, and Prosper felt his horizon enlarged.

CHAPTER XI

SANCTUARY

After Vespers that day Prosper demanded an audience of the Lady Abbess, and had it. He found her a handsome, venerable old lady, at peace with all the world and, so far as that comported with her religion, a woman of it. She had held high rank in it by right of birth; she knew what it could do, and what not do, of good and evil. Now that she was old enough to call its denizens her children, she folded her hands and played grandmother. Naturally, therefore, she knew Prosper by name; for that, as much as his frank looks, she made him welcome. She did not ask it, but he could see that she expected to be enlightened upon the subject of Isoult--doubtful company for a knight; so having made up his mind how much he could afford to tell her, he did not waste time in preliminaries.

"Madam," said he, after the first greetings of good company, "a knight adventuring in this forest cannot see very far before his face, and may make error worse by what he does to solve error. If by mischance such a thing should befall him, he must not faint, but persist until he has loosed not only the knot he has tied himself, but that as well which he has made more inexorable."

The Lady Abbess bowed very graciously, waiting for him to be done with phrases. Prosper went on--

"I found this damsel in the hands of a knave, who offered her a choice of death or dishonour. I took her into my own, and so far have spared her either. The rascal who had her now lies with a split gullet many leagues from here, in such a condition that he will trouble her no more I hope. Add to this, that I have questioned her, and find her honest, meek, and a Christian. She is, as you, will see for yourself, very good-looking: it was near to be her undoing. I cannot tell you, nor will you ask me, first, her name (for I am not certain of it), second, the name of her enemy (for that would involve a great company whereof he is a most unworthy member), nor third, what means I employed to insure immunity for her body, and honour for my own as well as hers; for this would involve us all. In time I shall certainly achieve the adventure thus thrust upon me, but for the present my intention is for High March Castle, and the Countess of Hauterive, who was a friend of my father's, and is, as I know, one of yours. If you will permit it I will leave Isoult with you. She will serve you well and faithfully in a hundred ways; she is very handy and quick, a good girl, anxious to be a better. If you can make a nun of her, well and good: by that means the adventure will achieve itself. I leave you to judge, however; but if you cannot help me there, let her stay with you for a year. After that I will fetch her and achieve the adventure otherwise."

The Abbess smiled at the young man's judicial airs, which very ill concealed the elevation of his mind. She only said that she would gladly help him in the honourable task he had set himself, and doubted not but that the girl would prove a good and useful servant to the convent. But she added--

"It is easy to see, sir, that as a Christian your part is of the Church militant. I would remind you that a nun is not made in a year."

"I mentioned a year because it was a long time, and for the sake of an example of what I had designed," said Prosper calmly. "However, if it takes longer, and you think well of it, I shall not complain."

"And what does the girl say?" the Abbess inquired. "For some sort of vocation is necessary for the religious life, you must understand."

"I have not yet spoken to Isoult about it," he replied. "She will do what I tell her. She is a very good girl."

"I think I should speak to her myself," said the Abbess, not without decision.

"So you shall," Prosper agreed; "but it will be better that I prepare her. If you will allow me I will do so at once, as I should leave early to-morrow."

"There goes a young man who should climb high," said the Lady Abbess, as her guest paid his respects.

Prosper went into the cloister, and found Isoult sitting with the mistress of the novices and her girls who were at work there. She looked tired and constrained, but lit up when he came in, firing a girl's signals in her cheeks. As for her eyes, the moment Prosper appeared they never wavered from him.

He excused himself to the nun, saying that he had business with Isoult, which by leave of the Abbess he might transact in the guest chamber. One of the novices conducted him; Isoult followed meekly.

Once alone with her, Prosper sat down by the fire and told Isoult to fetch a stool and sit by him. She did as she was bid, sat at his knee, folded her hands in her lap, and waited for him to begin, looking thoughtfully into the fire. Prosper laid a hand upon her shoulder.

"Isoult," he said, "We have got our sanctuary, as you see, and for all that appears need neither have sought nor claimed it. We have had no pursuit worthy the name. It is evident to me that they have calculated the deserts of Master Galors at Malbank, and put it at our figure. Nevertheless, I am glad to be at Gracedieu, for I had decided upon it before ever we met and drubbed that monk. When I saved you from being hanged I saved your body; now I shall think of your soul's health, which (the Church tells us) is far more precious. For it would seem that a man can do without a body, but by no means without a soul. Now, I have married you, Isoult, and by that act saved your body; but I have not as yet done any more, for though I have heard many things of marriage, I never heard that it was good for the soul. Moreover, for marriage to be tolerable, I suppose love is necessary,"--Isoult started,--"and that we certainly know nothing about it." Isoult shivered very slightly, so slightly that Prosper did not notice it. "I have thought a great deal about you, my child," he continued, "since I married you, and something also of myself, my destinies, and duties as a knight and good Christian. I have decided to go at once to High March, where I shall find the Countess Isabel. She, being an old friend of my family's, will no doubt take me into her service. I shall fight for her of course, I shall win honour and renown, very likely a fief. With that behind me I shall go to Starning and trounce my brother Malise, baron or no baron. I shall bring him to his knees in a cold sweat, and then I shall say--`Get up, you ass, and learn not to meddle again with a gentleman, and son of a gentleman.'

"In addition to that business I have a certain matter to inquire into concerning a lady whom I met in the purlieus of this forest, and a dead man she had with her. I do not like the looks of that case. Certainly I must inquire into it, and do what pertains. There may be other things needing my direction, but if there are I have forgotten them for the moment.

"You will think that in all this I have also forgotten you, child. Far from it. Listen now. You cannot of course go to High March. You would not be happy there, nor am I in a position to make you happy. No, no; you shall stay here with the good nuns, and be useful to them, and happy with them. You shall learn to serve God, so that in time you may become a nun yourself. You know my thoughts about monks, that I do not like them. But nuns are quite otherwise. Our Lord Jesus was served by two women, of whom Mary was assuredly a nun, and Martha a religious woman equally, probably of the begging order--a sister of Saint Clare, or of the order of Mount Carmel. The point is, I believe, still in doubt. So you see that you have excellent examples before you to persevere. When I have put my affairs in train at High March I will come and see you; and as you are my wife, if any trouble should come about you, any sickness, or threatening from without, or any private grief, send me word, and I will never fail you. Moreover, have no doubts of my fidelity: I am a gentleman, Isoult, as you know. And indeed such pranks are not to my taste."

He stopped talking, but not patting the girl's shoulder. It was almost more than she could endure. At first her blank and sheer dismay had been almost comical; she had looked at him as if he was mad, or talking gibberish. The even flow of his reasoning went on, and with it a high satisfaction in all his plans patent even to her cloudy intellect; gradually thus the truth dawned upon her, and as he continued she lost the sense of his spoken thoughts in the mad cross-tides of her own unuttered. Now her crying instinct was for rescue at all costs, at any hazard. Prayers, entreaties, cravings for reprieve thronged unvoiced and not to be voiced through every fibre of her body. Could he not spare her? Could he not? If she could turn suddenly upon him, clasp his knees, worm herself between his arms, put her face--wet, shaking, tremulous, but ah, Lord! how full of love--near to his! If she could! She could not; shame froze her, choked not speech only but act; she was dumb through and through--a dumb animal.

"Well, Isoult, what do you say?" he asked in his cheerful voice. He could hardly hear her answer, it came so low.

"I will do thy pleasure, lord," she murmured.

He stooped and kissed her forehead, not noticing how she shook.

"Good child," he said, "good child! I am more than satisfied with you, and hope that I may have proved as pleasant a traveller as I have found you to be. My salute must be for good-night and farewell, Isoult, for to-morrow morning I shall be gone before you have turned your side in bed. That is where you should be now, my dear. Your head is very hot--a sign that you are tired. Forget not what I have said to you in anything; forget not to trust me. They will show you your bed. Good-bye, Isoult."

She muttered something inaudible with her lips, and went out without looking at him again. Every bone in her body ached so cruelly that she could hardly drag herself along. She could neither think nor cry out; what strength she had went towards carrying this new load, which, while it paralyzed, for the present numbed her as well. The mistress of the novices was shocked to see her white drawn face, heavily-blacked eyes, and to hear a dead voice come dully from such pretty lips.

"My dear heart," said the good woman, "you are tired to death. Come with me to the still-room; I will give you a cordial." The liquor at least sent some blood to her face and lips, with whose help she was able to find her bed. For that night she had for bedfellow a fat nun, who snored and moaned in her sleep, was fretful at the least stir, and effectually prevented her companion from snoring, in turn, if she had been afflicted with that disease. Isoult stirred little enough: being worn out with grief entirely new to her, to say nothing of her fatigue of travel, she lay like a log and (what she had never done before) dreamed horribly. Very early, before light, she was awake and face to face with her anguish again. She lay in a waking stupor, fatally sensible, but incapable of responsible action. She had to hear Prosper's voice in the courtyard sharply inquiring of the way, his words to his horse, all his clinking preparations; she heard his high-sung "Heaven be with you; pray for me," and the diminishing chorus of Saracen's hoofs on the road. She trembled so much during this torment that she feared to shake the bed. Very weakness at last took pity on her; she swooned asleep again, this time dreamless. The fat nun getting up for Prime, also took enough pity upon her to let her he. So it was that Prosper left Gracedieu.

CHAPTER XII

BROKEN SANCTUARY

Through the days of rain and falling leaves, when all the forest was sodden with mist; through the dark days of winter, hushed with snow, she stayed with the nuns, serving them meekly in whatever tasks they set her. She was once more milk-maid and cowherd, laundress again, still-room maid for a season, and in time (being risen so high) tire-woman to the Lady Abbess herself. Short of profession you can get no nearer the choir than that. It was not by her tongue that she won so much favour--indeed she hardly spoke at all; as for pleasantness she never showed more than the ghost of a smile. "I am in bondage," she said to herself, "in a strange house, and no one knows what treasure I hide in my bosom." There she kept her wedding-ring. But if she was subdued, she was undeniably useful, and there are worse things in a servant than to go staidly about her work with collected looks and sober feet, to have no adventurous traffic with the men-servants about the granges or farms, never to see nor hear what it would be inconvenient to know--in a word, to mind her business. In time therefore--and that not a long one as times go--her featness and patience, added to her beauty (for it was not long before the gentler life or the richer possession made her very handsome), won her the regard of everybody in the house.

The Abbess, as I have told you already, took her into high favour before Christmas was over--actually by Epiphany she could suffer no other to dress her or be about her person.

She loved pretty maids, she said, when they were good. Isoult was both, so the Abbess loved her. The two got to know each other, to take each other's measure--to their reciprocal advantage. Isoult was very guarded how she did; what she said was always impersonal, what she heard never went further. The Abbess was pleased. She would often commend her, take her by the chin, turn up her face and kiss her. A frequent strain of her talk was openly against Prosper's ideas: the Abbess thought Prosper a ridiculous youth.

"Child," she would say--and Isoult thrilled at the familiar word (Prosper's!)--"Child, you are too good-looking to be a nun. In due season we must find you a husband. Your knight seemed aghast at the thought that salvation could be that way. Some fine morning the young gentleman will sing a very different note. Meantime he is wide of the mark. For our blessed Lord loveth not as men love (who love as they are made), nor would He have them who are on the earth and of it do otherwise than seek the fairest that it hath to give them. Far from that, but He will draw eye to eye and lip to lip, so both be pure, saying, 'Be fruitful, and plenish the earth.' But to those not so favoured as you are He saith, 'Come, thou shalt be bride of Heaven, and lie down in the rose-garden of the Lamb.' So each loves in her degree, and according to the measure of her being; and it is very well that this should be so, in order that the garners of Paradise may one day be full."

This sort of talk, by no means strange on the old lady's part, sometimes tempted Isoult to tell her story--that she was a wife already. No doubt she would have done it had not a thought forborne her. Prosper did not love her; their relations were not marital--so much she knew as well as anybody. She would never confess her love for him, even to Prosper himself; she could not bring herself to own that she loved and was unloved. She thought that was a disgrace, one that would flood her with shame and Prosper with her, as her husband though only in name. She thought that she would rather die than utter this secret of hers; she believed indeed that she soon would die. That was why she never told the Abbess, and again why she made no effort nor had any temptation to run away and find him out. It seemed to her that her mere appearance before him would be a confession of deep shame.

But she never ceased for an hour to think of him, poor miserable. In bed she would lie for whole watches awake, calling his name over and over again in a whisper. Her ring grew to be a familiar, Prosper's genius. She would take it from her bosom and hold it to her lips, whisper broken words to it, as if she were in her husband's arms. With the same fancy she would try to make it understand how she loved him. That is a thing very few girls so much as know, and still fewer can utter even to their own hearts; and so it proved with her. She was as mute and shamefaced before the ring as before the master of the ring. So she would sigh, put it back in its nest, and hide her face in the pillow to cool her cheeks. At last in tears she would fall asleep. So the days dragged.

In February, when the light drew out, when there was a smell of wet woods in the air, when birds sang again in the brakes, and here and there the bushes facing south budded, matters grew worse for her. She began to be very heavy, her nightly vigils began to tell. She could not work so well, she lagged in her movements, fell into stares and woke with starts, blundered occasionally. She had never been a fanciful girl, having no nurture for such flowering; but now her visions began to be distorted. Her love became her thorn, her side one deep wound. More and more of the night was consumed in watchings; she cried easily and often (for any reason or no reason), and she was apt to fall faint. So February came and went in storms, and March brought open weather, warm winds, a carpet of flowers to the woods. This enervated, and so aggravated her malady: the girl began to droop and lose her good looks. In turn the Abbess, who was really fond of her, became alarmed. She thought she was ill, and made a great pet of her. She got no better.

She was allowed her liberty to go wherever she pleased. In her trouble she used to run into the woods, with a sort of blind sense that physical distress would act counter to her sick soul. She would run as fast as she could: her tears flew behind her like rain. Over and over to herself she whispered Prosper's name as she ran--"Prosper! Prosper le Gai! Prosper! Prosper, my lord!" and so on, just as if she were mad. It was in the course of these distracted pranks that she discovered and fell in love with a young pine tree, slim and straight. She thought that it (like the ring) held the spirit of Prosper, and adored him under its bark. She cut a heart in it with his name set in the midst and her own beneath. Ceremony thereafter became her relief and all she cared about. She did mystic rites before her tree (in which the ring played a part), forgetting herself for the time. She would draw out her ring and look at it, then kiss it. Then it must be lifted up to the length of its chain as she had seen the priest elevate the Host at Mass; she genuflected and fell prone in mute adoration, crying all the time with tears streaming down her face. She was at this time like to dissolve in tears! Without fail the mysteries ended with the _Pater Noster_, the _Ave_, a certain Litany which the nuns had taught her, and some gasping words of urgency to the Virgin and Saint Isidore. Love was scourging her slender body at this time truly, and with well-pickled rods.

On a certain day of mid-March,--it would be about the twelfth,--as she was at these exercises about the mystic tree, a tall lady in Lincoln green and silver furs came out of a thicket and saw Isoult, though Isoult saw not her. She stood smiling, watching the poor devotee; then, choosing her time, came quietly behind her, saw the heart and read the names. This made her smile all the more, and think a little. Then she touched Isoult on the shoulder with the effect of bringing her from heaven to dull earth in a trice. By some instinct--she was made of instincts, quick as a bird--the girl concealed her ring before she turned.

"Why are you crying, child?" said this smiling lady.

"Oh ma'am!" cried the girl, half crazy and beside herself with her troubles--"Oh, ma'am! let me tell you a little!"

She told her more than a little: she told her in fact everything--in a torrent of words and tears--except the one thing that might have helped her. She did not say that she was married, though short of that she gulped the shame of loving unloved.

"Poor child!" said the lady when she had heard the sobbed confession, "you are indeed in love. And Prosper le Gai is your lover? And you are Isoult la Desirous? So these notches declare at least: they are yours, I suppose?"

"Yes, indeed, ma'am," said Isoult; "but he is not my lover. He is my master."

"Oh, of course, of course, child," the lady laughed--"they are always the master. If we are the mistress we are lucky. And do you love him so much, Isoult?"

"Yes, ma'am," said she.

"Silly girl, silly girl! How much do you love him now?"

"I could not tell you, ma'am."

"Could you tell him then?"

"Ah, no, no!"

"But you have told him, silly?"

"No, ma'am, indeed."

"It needs few words, you must know."

"They are more than I can dare, ma'am."

"It can be done without words at all. Come here, Isoult. Listen."

She whispered in her ear.

Isoult grew very grave. Her eyes were wide at this minute, all black, and not a shred of colour was left in her face.

"Ah, never!" she cried.

Maulfry laughed heartily.

"You are the dearest little goose in the world!" she cried. "Come and kiss me at once."

Isoult did as she was told. Maulfry did not let her go again.

"Now," she went on, with her arms round the girl's waist and her arch face very near, "now you are to know, Isoult, that I am a wonderful lady. I am friends with half the knights in the kingdom; I have armour of my own, shields and banneroles, and halberts and swords, enough to frighten the Countess Isabel out of her three shires. I could scare the Abbot Richard and the Abbess Mechtild by the lift of a little finger. Oh, I know what I am saying! It so happens that your Prosper is a great friend of mine. I am very fond of him, and of course I must needs be interested in what you tell me. Well now--come with me and find him. Will you? I dare say he is not very far off."

Isoult stared at her without speaking. Doubt, wonder, longing, prayer, quavered in her eyes as each held the throne for a time.

"He told me to stay at Gracedieu," she faltered. It seemed to her that she was maiming her own dream.

"He tells me differently then," said Maulfry, smiling easily; "I suppose even a lover may change his mind."

"Oh! Oh! you have seen him?

"Certainly I have seen him."

"And he says--"

"What do you think he says? Might it not be, Come and find me?"

"He is--ah, he is ill?"

"He is well."

"In danger?"

"I know of none."

"I am to leave Gracedieu and come with you, ma'am?"

"Yes. Are you afraid?"

For answer Isoult fell flat down and kissed Maulfry's silver hem.

"I will follow you to death!" she cried.

Maulfry shivered, then arched her brows.

"It will not be so bad as all that," she said. "Come then, we will find the horses."

Isoult looked down confusedly at her grey frock.

"You little jay bird, who's to see you here among the trees? Come with me, I'll set you strutting like a peacock before I've done with you," said Maulfry, in her mocking, good-humoured way.

They went together. Maulfry had hold of Isoult by the hand. Presently they came to an open glade where there were two horses held by a mounted groom. As soon as he saw them coming the groom got off, helped Isoult first, then his mistress. They rode away at a quick trot down the slope; the horses seemed to know the way.

Maulfry was in high spirits. She played a thousand tricks, and enveigled from the brooding girl her most darling thoughts. Before they had made their day's journey she had learnt all that she wanted to know, or rather what she knew already. It confirmed what Galors had told her: she believed his story. For her part Isoult, having once made the plunge, gave her heart its way, bathed it openly in love, and was not ashamed. To talk of Prosper more freely than she had ever dared even to herself, to talk of loving him, of her hopes of winning him! She seemed a winged creature as she flew through the hours of a forest day. It pleased her, too, to think that she was being discreet in saying nothing of her marriage. If Prosper had not thought fit to reveal it to his accomplished friend she must keep the secret by all means--his and hers. Instead of clouding her hopeful visions this gave them an evening touch of mystery. It elevated her by making her an accomplice. He and she were banded together against this all-wise lady. No doubt she would learn it in time--in his time; and then Isoult dreamed (and blushed as she dreamed) of another part, wherein she would snuggle herself into his arm and whisper, "Have I not been wise?" Then she would be kissed, and the lady would laugh to learn how she had been outwitted by a young girl. Ah, what dreams! Isoult's wings took her a far flight when once she had spread them to the sun.

Journeying thus they reached a road by nightfall, and a little House of Access. To go direct to Tortsentier they should have passed this house on the left-hand, for the tower was south-east from Gracedieu. But there was a reason for the circuit, as for every other twist of Maulfry's; the true path would have brought them too nearly upon that by which Prosper and Isoult had come seeking sanctuary. Instead they struck due east, and hit the main road which runs from High March to Market Basing; then by going south for another day they would win Tortsentier. Isoult, of course, as a born woodlander would know the whereabouts of Maulfry's dwelling from any side but the north. She was of South Morgraunt, and therefore knew nothing of the north or middle forest. All this Maulfry had calculated. At the House of Access the girl was actually a day's journey nearer Prosper than she had been at the convent, but she knew nothing of it. Consequently her night's rest refreshed her, waking dreams stayed the night, and left traces of their rosy flames in her cheeks next morning. Maulfry, waking first, looked at her as she lay pillowing her cheek on her arm, with her wild hair spread behind her like a dark cloud. Maulfry, I say, looked at her.

"You are a little beauty, my dear," she thought to herself. "Countess or bastard, you are a little beauty. And there is countess in your blood somewhere, I'll take an oath. Hands and feet, neck and head, tell the story. There was love and a young countess and a hot-brained troubadour went to the making of you, my little lady. A ditch-full of witches could not bring such tokens to a villein. Galors, my dear friend, if I owed nothing to Master le Gai, I doubt if I should help you to this. 'Tis too much, my friend, with an earldom. She needs no crown, pardieu!"

She knew her own crown had toppled, and grew a little bleak as she thought of it. There was no earldom for her to fall back upon. She looked older when off her guard. But she had determined to be loyal to the one friend she had ever had. The worst woman in the world can do that much. Therefore, when Isoult woke up she found herself made much of. The sun of her day-dreaming rose again and shone full upon her. By the end of the day they had reached Tortsentier. Isoult was fast in a prison that had no look of a prison, where Galors was mending his throat in an upper chamber.

Maulfry came and sat on the foot of his bed. Galors, strapped and bandaged till he looked like a mewed owl in a bush, turned his chalk face to her with inquiry shooting out of his eyes. He had grown a spiky black beard, from which he plucked hairs all day, thinking and scheming.

"Well," was all he said.

Maulfry nodded. "The story is true. She has the feet and hands. She is a little beauty. You have only to shut the hole in your neck."

Galors swore. "Let God judge whether that damned acrobat shall pay for his writhing! But the other shall be my first business. So she is here--you have seen her? What do you think of her?"

"I have told you."

The man's appetite grew as it fed upon Maulfry's praise of his taste.

"Ah--ah! Dame, I'm a man of taste--eh?"

Maulfry said nothing. Galors changed the note.

"How shall I thank you, my dear one?" he asked her.

"Ah," said she, "I shall need what you can spare before long."

Then she left him.

CHAPTER XIII

HIGH MARCH, AND A GREAT LADY

In the weeping grey of an autumn morning, but in great spirits of his own, Prosper left Gracedieu for High March. The satisfaction of having braved the worst of an adventure was fairly his; to have made good disposition of what threatened to fetter him by shutting off any possible road from his advance; and to have done this (so far as he could see) without in any sense withdrawing from Isoult the advantages she could expect--this was tunable matter, which set him singing before the larks were off the ground. He felt like a man who has earned his pleasure; and pleasure, as he understood it, he meant to have. The zest for it sparkled in his quick eyes as he rode briskly through the devious forest ways. Had Galors or any other dark-entry man met him now and chanced a combat, he would have bad it with a will, but he would have got off with a rough tumble and sting or two from the flat of the sword. The youth was too pleased with himself for killing or slicing.

However, there was nobody to fight. North Morgraunt was pretty constantly patrolled by the Countess's riders at this time. A few grimy colliers; some chair-turners amid their huts and white chips on the edge of a hidden hamlet; drovers with forest ponies going for Waisford or Market Basing; the hospitality and interminable devotions of a hermit by a mossy crucifix on Two Manors Waste; one night alone in a ruined chapel on the top of a down:--of such were the encounters and events of his journey. He was no Don Quixote to make desperadoes or feats of endurance out of such gear; on the contrary, he persistently enjoyed himself. Sour beer wetted his lips dry with talking; leaves made a capital bed; the hermit, in the intervals of his prayers, remembered his own fighting days in the Markstake, and knew what was done to make Maximilian the Second safely king. Everything was as it should be.

On the third day he fell in with a troop of horse, whose spears carried the red saltire of the house of Forz on their banneroles. Since they were bound as he was for the Castle, he rode in their company, and in due course saw before him on a height among dark pines the towers of High March, with the flag of the Lady Paramount afloat on the breeze. It was on a dusty afternoon of October and in a whirl of flying leaves, that he rode up to the great gate of the outer bailey, and blew a blast on the horn which hung there, that they might let down the bridge.

When the Countess Isabel heard who and of what condition her visitor was she made him very welcome. The Forz and the Gais were of the same country and of nearly the same degree in it. She had been a Forz before she married, and she counted herself so still, for the earldom of Hauterive was hers in her own right; and though she was Earl Roger's widow (and thus a double Countess Dowager) she could not but remember it. So she did Prosper every honour of hospitality: she sent some of her ladies to disarm him and lead him to the bath; she sent him soft clothing to do on when he was ready for it; in a word, put him at his ease. When he came into the hall it was the same thing she got up from her chair of estate and walked down to meet him, while all the company made a lane for the pair of them. Prosper would have knelt to kiss her hand had she let him, but instead she gave it frankly into his own.

"You are the son of my father's friend, Sir Prosper," she said, "and shall never kneel to me."

"My lady," said he, "I shall try to deserve your gracious welcome. My father, rest his soul, is dead, as you may have heard."

"Alas, yes," the Countess replied, "I know it, and grieve for you and your brothers. Of my Lord Malise I have also heard something."

"Nothing good, I'll swear," interjected Prosper to himself.

The Countess went on--

"Well, Sir Prosper, you stand as I stand, alone in the world. It would seem we had need of each other."

Prosper bowed, feeling the need of nobody for his part. Remember he was three-and-twenty to the Countess's thirty-five; and she ten years a widow. She did not notice his silence, but went on, glowing with her thoughts.

"We should be brother and sister for the sake of our two fathers," she said with a gentle blush.

"I never felt to want a sister till now," cried Master Prosper, making another bow. So it was understood between them that theirs was to be a nearer relationship than host and guest.

The Countess Isabel--or to give her her due, Isabel, Countess of Hauterive, Countess Dowager of March and Bellesme, Lady of Morgraunt--was still a beautiful woman, tall, rather slim, pale, and of a thoughtful cast of the face. She had a very noble forehead, level, broad, and white; her eyes beneath arched brows were grey--cold grey, not so full nor so dark as Isoult's, nor so blue in the whites, but keener. They were apt to take a chill tinge when she was rather Countess of Hauterive than that Isabel de Forz who had loved and lost Fulk de Bréauté. She never forgot him, and for his sake wore nothing but silk of black and white; but she did not forget herself either; within walls you never saw her without a thin gold circlet on her head. Even at Mass she, would have no other covering. She said it was enough for the Countess of Hauterive, whom Saint Paul probably had not in his mind when he wrote his epistle. Her hair was a glory, shining and very abundant, but brown not black. Isoult, you will perceive, was a warmer, tenderer copy of her mother, owing something to Fulk. Isoult, moreover, had not been born a countess. Both were inaccessible, the daughter from the timidity of a wild thing, the mother from the rarity of her air. Being what she was, twice a widow, bereft of her only child, and burdened with cares which she was much too proud to give over, she never had fair judgment she was considered hard where she was merely lonely. Her greatness made her remote, and her only comforter the worst in the world--herself. Her lips drooped a little at the corners; this gave her a wistful look at times. At other times she looked almost cruel, because of a trick she had of going with them pressed together. As a matter of fact she was shy as well as proud, and fed on her own sorrows from lack of the power to declare them abroad. It was very seldom she took a liking for any stranger; doubtful if Prosper's lineage had won her to open to him as she had done. His face was more answerable; that blunt candour of his, the inquiring blue eyes, the eager throw-back of the head as he walked, above all the friendly smile he had for a world where everything and everybody seemed new and delightful and specially designed for his entertainment--this was what unlocked the Countess's darkened treasury of thought.

Once loosed she never drew back. Brother and sister they were to be. She made him hand her in to supper; he must sit at her right hand; her own cup-bearer should fill his wine-cup, her own Sewer taste all his meats. At the end of supper she sent for a great cup filled with wine; it needed both her hands. She held it up before she drank to him, saying, "Let there be love and amity between me and thee." The terms of this aspiration astonished him; he accepted honours easily, for he was used to observances at Starning; but to be thee'd and thou'd by this lady! As he stood there laughing and blushing like a boy she made him drink from the cup to the same wish and in the same terms. When once your frozen soul opens to the thaw all the sluices are away, truly. Prosper went to bed that night very well content with his reception. He saw his schemes ripening fast on such a sunny wall as this. His head was rather full, and of more than the fumes of wine; consequently in saying his prayers he did not remember Isoult at all. Yet hers had been sped out of Gracedieu Minster long before, and to the same gods. Only she had had Saint Isidore in addition; and she had had Prosper. Hers probably went nearer the mark. Until you have made a beloved of your saint or a saint of your beloved--it matters not greatly which--you will get little comfort out of your prayers.

It was, however, heedlessness rather than design which brought it about, that as the days at High March succeeded each other Prosper did not tell the Countess either of his adventure or of his summary method of achieving it. Design was there: he did not see his way to involving the Abbot, who was, he knew, a dependant of his hostess, and yet could not begin the story elsewhere than at the beginning. Something, too, kept the misfortunes of his wife from his tongue--an honourable something, not his own pride of race. But he, in fact, forgot her. The days were very pleasant. He hunted the hare, the deer, the wolf, the bear. He hunted what he liked best of all to hunt, the man; and he got the honour which only comes from successful hunting in that sort-the devout admiration of those he led. So soon as it was found out where his tastes and capacities lay he had as much of this work as he chose. High March was on the northern borders of the Countess's country; not far off was the Markstake, stormy, debatable land, plashy with blood. There were raids, there were hornings and burnings, lifting of cattle and ravishment of women, to be prevented or paid for. Prosper saw service. The High March men had never had a leader quite like him-so young, so light and fierce, so merry in fight. Isoult might eat her heart out with love; Prosper had the love of his riders, for by this they were his to a man.

There were other influences at work, more subtle and every bit as rapacious. There were the long hours in the hall by the leaping light of the fire and the torches, feasts to be eaten, songs to sing, dances, revels, and such like. Prosper was a cheerful, very sociable youth. He had the manners of his father and the light-hearted impertinence of a hundred ancestors, all rulers of men and women. He made love to no one, and laughed at what he got of it for nothing--which was plenty. There were shaded hours in the Countess's chamber, where the songs were softer and the pauses of the songs softer still; morning hours in the grassy alleys between the yew hedges; hours in the south walk in an air thick with the languors of warm earth and garden flowers; intimate rides in the pine wood; the wild freedom of hawking in the open downs; the grass paths; Yule; the music, the hopes of youth, the sweet familiarity, the shared books, the timid encroachments and gentle restraints, half-entreaties, half-denials:--no young man can resist these things unless he thinks of them suspectingly (as Prosper never did), and no woman wishes to resist them. If Prosper found a sister, Isabel began to find more than a brother. She grew younger as he grew older. They were more than likely to meet half way.

CHAPTER XIV

A RECORDER

In these delicate times of crisis Isoult found an advocate, a recorder, if you will be ruled by me. It was none too soon, for the brother and sister of High March had reached that pretty stage of intimacy when long silences are an embarrassment, and embarrassments compact equally of pleasure and pain. As far as the lady was concerned the pleasure predominated; the pain was reduced to sweet confusion, the air made tremulous with promise. I do not say that for Prosper the relationship did more than put him at his ease--but that is a good deal. Say the Countess was a fire and High March an armchair. Prosper had settled himself to stretch his legs and drowse. Poor Isoult was the wailing wind in the chimney--a sound which could but add to his comfortable well-being. It needs more than a whimper to tempt a man to be cold in your company. The recorder was timely.

Prosper and his Countess were hawking in the fields beyond the forest, and the sport had been bad. They had, in fact, their birds jessed and hooded and were turning for home, when Prosper saw some fields away a white bird--gull he thought--flying low. He sprang his tercel-gentle; the same moment the Countess saw the quarry and flew hers. Both hawks found at first cast; the white bird flew towards the falconers, circling the field in which they stood, with its enemies glancing about it. It gradually closed in, circling still round them and round, till at last it was so near and so low as almost to be in reach of Prosper's hand. He saw that it was not a gull, but a pigeon, and started on a reminiscence. Just then one of the towering falcons stooped and engaged. There was a wild scurry of wings; then the other bird dropt. The Countess cheered the hawks: Prosper saw only the white bird with a wound in her breast. Then as the quarry began to scream he remembered everything, and to the dismay of the lady leapt off his horse, ran to the struggling birds, and cuffed them off with all his might. He succeeded. The wounded bird fluttered, half flying, half hopping, across the grass, finally rose painfully into the air and soared out of sight. Meantime Prosper, breathless and red in the face, had hooded and bound the hawks. He brought hers back to the Countess without a word.

"My dear Prosper," said she, "you will forgive me for asking if you are mad?"

"I must seem so," he replied. "But I suppose every one has his tender part which some shaft will reach. Mine is reached when two hawks wound a white bird in the crop."

He spoke shortly, and still breathed faster than his wont. The Countess was piqued.

"It seems to me, I confess, inconvenient in a falconer that he should be nice as to the colour of his quarry. There must be some reason for this. I will forgive you for making a bad day's sport worse if you will tell me your story."

Prosper was troubled. He connected his story with Isoult, though he could hardly say why. He had merely seen a white bird before his marriage; yet without that sequel the story could have no point. He did not wish to speak of his marriage, if for no other reason than that it was much too late to speak of it. The other reasons remained as valid as ever; but he was bound to confess the superior cogency of this present one. Meanwhile the Countess clamoured.

"The story, Prosper, the story!" she cried. "I must and will have the story. I am very sure it is romantic; you are growing red. Oh, it is certainly romantic; I shall never rest without the story."

Prosper in desperation remembered a hawking mishap of his boyhood, and clutched at it.

"This is my story," he said. "When I was a boy with my brothers our father used to take us with him hawking on Marbery Down. There is a famous heronry in the valley below it whence you may be sure of a kill; but on the Down itself are great flocks of sheep tended by shepherds who come from all parts of the country round about and lie out by their fires. One day--just such a windy morning as this--my father, my brother Osric, and I were out with our birds, and did indifferently well, so far as I can remember. I had new falcon with me--a haggard of the rock which I had mewed and manned myself. It was the first time I had tried her on the Down, and she began by giving trouble; then did better, but finally gave more trouble than at first, as you shall hear. Towards noon I found myself separate from our company on a great ridge of the Down where it slopes steeply to the forest, as you know it does in one place. The flocks were out feeding on the slopes below me, and their herds--three or four boys and girls--were lying together by a patch of gorse, but one of them stood up after a while and shaded her eyes to look over the forest. Then I saw a lonely bird making way for the heronry. I remember it plainly; in the sun it looked shining white. I flew my haggard out of the hood at her, sure of a kill. She raked off at a great pace, as this one did just now; but in mid air she checked suddenly, heeled over, beat up against the wind, stooped and fell headlong at the shepherds. I could not tell what had happened; it was as if the girl had been shot. But, by the Saviour of mankind, this is the truth: I saw the girl who was standing throw her arms up, I heard her scream; the others scattered. Then I saw the battling sails of my falcon. She was on the girl. I spurred my pony and went down the hill headlong to the music of the girl's screaming. Never before or since have I seen a peregrine engage at such a quarry as that. She had her with beak and claws below the left pap. She had ripped up her clothes and drawn blood, sure enough. The poor child, who looked very starved, was as white as death: I cannot think she had any blood to spare. As for her screaming, I have not forgotten it yet--in fact, the bird we struck to-day reminded me of it and made me act as I did. To cut down my story, I pulled the hawk off and strangled it, gave the girl what money I had, said what I could to quiet her, and left her to be patched up by her friends. She was more frightened than hurt, I fancy. As I told you, I was a boy at the time; but these things stay by you. It is a fact at least that I am queasy on the subject of white birds. Before I came to High March, indeed it was almost my first day in Morgraunt, I saw and rescued a white bird from two hen-harriers; and now I have been troubled by another. I seem beset by white birds!"

"It is fortunate you have other hues to choose from," said the Countess with a smile, "or otherwise you would be no falconer. But your story is very strange. Have you ever consulted about it?"

"I have said very little about it," Prosper replied, remembering as he spoke the forest Mass which he had heard, and that he had discoursed upon this adventure with Alice of the Hermitage.

"The hawk pecked at the girl's heart," said the lady.

"It did not get so far as that, Countess."

"You speak prose, my friend."

"I am no troubadour, but speak what I know."

"The heart means nothing to you, Prosper!"

"The heart? Dear lady, I assure you the girl was not hurt. She is a young woman by now, probably wife to a clown and mother of half-a-dozen."

"Prosper, you disappoint me. Let us ride on. I am sick of these shivering grey fields."

The Countess was vexed, for the life of him he could not tell why. He made peace at last, but she would not tell him the cause of her morning's irritation.

That was not the only reminder he had that day--in fact, it was but the first. In the evening came another.

He was in the Countess's chamber after supper. She was embroidering a banner, and he had been singing to her as she worked. After his music the Countess took the lute from him, saying that she would sing. And so she did, but in a voice so low and constrained that it seemed more to comfort herself than any other.

Prosper sat by the table idly turning over a roll of blazonry--the coats of all the knights and gentlemen who had ever been in the service of High March. It was a roll carefully kept by the pursuivant, very fine work. He saw that his own was already tricked in its place, and recognized many more familiar faces. Suddenly he gave a start, and sat up stiff as a bar. He looked no further, but at the end of the Countess's song said abruptly--

"Tell me, Countess, whose are these arms?"

She looked at the coat--sable, three wicket-gates argent. "There is a story about that," she said.

"I beg you to tell it to me," said Prosper; "story for story."

"That is only fair," she laughed, having quite recovered her easy manner with him. "Come and sit by the fire, and you shall hear it. The arms," she began, "are those which were assumed by a young knight after a very bold exploit in my service. He came to me as Salomon de Born, and I think he was but eighteen--a mere boy."

Prosper, from the heights of his three-and-twenty years, nodded benignly.

"So much so," said the Countess, "that I fear I must have wounded his vanity by laughing away what he asked of me. This was no less than to lead a troop of my men against Renny of Coldscaur, an enemy and slanderer of mine, but none the less as great a lord as he was rascal. However, he begged so persistently that I gave in, finding other things about him--a mystery of his birth and upbringing, a steadfastness also and gravity far beyond his years--which drew me to put him to the proof of what he dared. He went, therefore, with a company of light horse, some fifty men. He was away eight weeks, and then came back--with but six men, it is true; but youth is prodigal of life, knowing so little of it."

"Life is given us to spend," quoth Prosper here.

"He came back with six men. But he brought the tongue of Blaise Renny in a silver cup, and three wicket-gates, which took two men apiece to carry."

"He had saved just enough men. That was wise of him, and like the king his namesake," Prosper said, approving of Salomon.

"It was what he said himself", pursued the Countess, "that it was a fortunate circumstance."

"And how did he win his adventure, and what had the wicket-gates to do with the business?"

"You shall hear. It seems that Coldscaur, which is in North Marvilion beyond the Middle Shires, stands on a fretted scarp. It is strongly defended by art as well as nature, for there are three ravines about it with a stepped path through each up to the Castle. These were defended about midway of each by a wicket-gate and a couple of towers. The gorges are so narrow that there is barely room for a man and horse to get through; the gates of course correspond."

"Fine defences," said Prosper.

"Very. Well, Salomon de Born with my fifty men seized and occupied a village at the foot of the scarp one night. In the morning there were his defences thrown up man-high, and my standard on the church tower. Renny was furious, and despatched a stronger force than he could afford to re-take the village. Salomon, counting upon this, had left two men in it to be killed; with the rest he scaled the scaur and waited in hiding to see what force Renny took out. He knew to a nicety the strength of the garrison, saw what there was to see, made his calculations, and thought he would venture it. He got over the rock, he and his men, by some means; came down the gorges from the top, secured the defences, and posted a couple of men at each wicket. With the rest he surprised the Castle. I believe, indeed, that all the men in it were killed as well as most of mine. Yet for three or four hours Coldscaur was in my hands."

"It should have been yours now," said Prosper, "with fifty of your men once in it."

"My friend, I didn't need Coldscaur. I have castles enough. But it was necessary to punish Renny."

"And that was done?"

"It was done. Salomon posted his men in the towers by the wicket-gates, and waited for Renny to return from the village. Luckily for him it grew dusk, but not dark, before he could be certain by which gorge Renny himself was coming in. When he had made sure of this he took all three wickets off their hinges, and sent six men to carry them home to High March. With the rest he waited for Renny. Finally he saw him riding up the stepped way, and, as his custom was, far ahead of his troop. You must know that these people are besotted with pride; the state they kept (and still keep, I suppose) was more than royal. No one must ride, walk, or stand within a dozen yards of Renny of Coldscaur. Salomon had calculated upon it. Well, it was dark before Renny reached the wicket. Someone (Salomon, no doubt) called for the word. Renny gave it; but it was his last. Salomon stabbed him at the same instant and pulled him off his horse out of the way. He sent the horse clattering up the hill. Renny's men followed it, nothing doubting. I might have had the better part of my men but for the subsequent foppery of the youth. He had Renny dead. He had Renny's tongue. He must needs have a silver dish to put it in, so as to present it honourably to me. He went to the Castle to get this. He got it; but he was discovered and pursued, and only he escaped--he and the six bearers of the wicket-gates. That is my story of the coat in return for yours of the bird. The hero of it took the name of Salomon de Montguichet after this performance, and my pursuivant devised him a blazon, with the legend, _Entra per me_."

"He did very well," said Prosper, "though he should have fought with Renny, and not stabbed him in the dark. But why did he bring the wicket-gates?"

"He said that since they had for once been held by honest men, he could not let them backslide. Moreover, they were in his way, and he knew not what else to do with them."

"And why did he take the man's tongue?"

"He said that the head must stay tongueless at Coldscaur to warn all traducers of me. True enough, the man has come to be remembered as Blaise Sanslang."

"I should have done otherwise," said Prosper.

"What would you have made of it, Prosper?"

"I should have brought the man alive to your feet; I should have advised you to give him a whipping and let him go."

"That would have been more merciless to Renny, my friend, than what Salomon de Montguichet did. I have told you that they are the proudest family in Christendom."

"I never thought of Renny," he answered; "I was thinking of myself in Salomon's place."

"Montguichet thought of me, Prosper."

"I also was thinking of you, Countess."

Presently he grew keen on his own thoughts again and asked--

"What became of Salomon de Born?"

"I cannot tell you," she replied, "except this, that he took service under the King of the Romans and went abroad. Of where he is now, or how he fares, I know nothing."

"I think he is dead," said Prosper.

"What is your reason?"

"I have seen another carrying his arms."

"But it may have been the man himself. A thin man, hatchet-faced, with hot, large eyes; a pale man, who looked not to have the sinew he proved to have."

Prosper looked thoughtful, a little puzzled too. "The description is familiar to me. I may have seen the man. But certainly it was not he who carried the Montguichet shield."

Suddenly he sprang up with a shout. He stood holding the table, white and shaky. The Countess ran to him and put her arm on his shoulder: "Prosper, Prosper, you have frightened me! What is your thought? Are you ill? I entreat you to tell me, Prosper."

He collected himself at once to reassure her.

"The man is dead," he said, "and I buried him. I remember his face; I remember a badge on his breast; I remember it all. But I do not understand--I do not see clearly as yet. I must think. I beg you to let me leave you for the present. To-morrow I will go to avenge Salomon de Montguichet."

The youth was quite wild and out of breath.

"Prosper!" cried the Countess, clinging to him, "I conjure you to tell me what this means. You will never leave me this night without a word. You cannot know--"

She could not finish what she longed to say. As for Prosper, he was in another world; it is doubtful whether he heard her.

"Countess," he said, "I can tell you nothing as yet. I know but half of the truth. But I must find out the whole, and to-morrow I will tell you what I mean to do. You must have me excused for this night."

She knew that she could say nothing more, although she had never yet seen him in this mood. But he reminded her strongly of his father; she felt that he and she had changed places and ages. So she bowed her head, and when she lifted it he was gone.

Pacing his room Prosper tried to reason out his tangle. This was not so easy as fighting, for he was pulled two different ways. Salomon de Montguichet was the dead man whom the lady had in the wood--that was clear. Galors had Salomon de Montguichet's arms--that too was clear. The trouble was to connect the two strings. What had Galors to do with the lady? Which of them had killed Salomon de Montguichet, or de Born, to give him his real name? How did this threaten Isoult? For the massed events of the long day drove him at last face to face with Isoult. He had sworn upon all knightly honour to save her neck. He thought he had saved it, but now he was not so sure. There was something undefinably sinister, some foreboding about the turn matters had taken (matters so diverse in their beginning) that day. Was he sure he had saved her? He must certainly be sure, he thought. Had he not sworn? And after all, she was his wife. That should count for something. He was not disposed to rate marriage highly; he knew very little about it, but he felt that it should count for something. The honour of the man's wife touched the honour of the man. Again, she was a very good girl. He recalled her--submissive, patient, recollected, pacing beside him on her donkey, as they brushed their way through brown beechwoods and stained wet bracken. He remembered her at her prayers--how kindly she took to the devotion. She was different from the hour she was a good Christian, he swore. Ah, so he had given her more than a free neck! He had given her pride in herself; nay, he had quickened a soul languid for want of spiritual food. And she looked very well praying. She was good-looking, he thought. Oh, she was a good girl!

But surely she was well where she was, could hardly be better. Galors had a split throat; he would be in Saint Thorn, crying _peccavi_ in chapter, and gaining salvation with every sting of the scourge. The woman in the wood he had distrusted from the first moment he saw her watching eyes. She was bad through and through; she might be a worse enemy than Galors, or a church-load of pursy monks. But it was impossible that she should have anything to do with Galors, clean impossible. And if she had--why, he was going to her to-morrow, and would find out. Meantime, he would go to bed. Yes, he might go to bed. Was not Gracedieu sanctuary? Ah, he had forgotten that! All was well.

He went to bed; but Tortsentier was not to see him on the morrow. All was not well. He had a dream which drew all the apprehensions and suspicions of the day into one head. The hidden things were made plain, and the crooked things straight; for the first time, it seemed, he was to see openly--when his eyes were shut. He had, in spite of himself, centred them one by one in Isoult, and now he dreamed of her as she was, and of them as they were. This was his dream. He and she were together, lying under the stars in the open wood with his drawn sword between them, set edgeways as it had always been. He lay awake, but Isoult was asleep, and moaning in her sleep. The sound was like voiced sighs which came quickly with her breath. He lay and watched her in the perfectly clear light there was, and presently the moaning ceased, and she opened her eyes to look at him. But though they were wide, they were blank; he knew that she slept still. She moved her lips to speak, but without sound; she strained out her arms to him, but he could not take her. And, leaning more and more towards him, the edge of the sword pressed her bare bosom, yet she seemed not to heed it; and presently it broke the skin, and she pressed it in deeper, as if glad of the sharp pain; and then the blood leapt out and flooded her night-dress. Her arms dropt, she sighed once, she closed her eyes languidly as if mortally tired. Then she lay very still, white to the lips, and Prosper knew that she was dead. So in his own dream he cried out and tried to come at her, but could not because of the red sword.

He woke in a cold sweat and lay trembling, blenched with fear. The dream had been so vivid that involuntarily he turned in his bed to look again at what haunted him, the dying eyes, the white body, and the blood. Terror, when once he had accepted the fact that she was dead, gave place to pity--a pity more intense than he had ever conceived. He had pitied her on the night of their marriage, but never to such a degree that he felt heart-broken at the mere knowledge of such things. And now, as the principal actor in a play, she grew in importance. He began to see that she was more than an incident; she was of the stuff of his life.

What was more odd was, that in the dream he had wanted her, as she him; and that he could look back upon it now and understand the desire. With all the shock that still crowded about him till the shadowy room seemed full of it, there was this one beam of remembrance, like sunlight in a dusty place. He too had held out his arms: he had wanted to take her, to hold her, white and unearthly though she might be--dying as she certainly was. Waking, this seemed very strange to him, for he had never wanted her before; and though (as I say) the remembrance brought a glow along with it, he did not want her in that way now. Supposing that she were alive and lying here, he knew that he should not want her. But the red sword! He shuddered and closed his eyes; there she was, pitifully dead of a wound in the breast. I suppose he was not more superstitious than most people of his day, but he knew that he must go to Gracedieu.

He got up at once to arm himself; he had made all his preparations before sunrise. Then he left word for the Countess that he would return in a day or two, and set out.

The journey could not be done under three days; that gave him two nights in the forest, each of which brought the same dream. He arrived at the convent late in the evening, and asked to see the Abbess at once. The tranquil monotony of the place, its bells and recurrent chimes, the subdued voices of the nuns chanting an office in choir, brought him like a beaten ship into haven. He was reassured before he saw the Abbess.

"Yes, indeed," said that lady in answer to his outburst of questions, "the child is well. Not so bright as during the winter season, it may be; but the spring is no easy time for young people. I may tell you, Sir Prosper, that we have grown very fond of her. Indeed, I am often saying that I wonder how to do without her. She is so diligent and of so toward a disposition. You will find her well cared for, sleek, and quite good-looking. We have great hopes for her future if she makes a happy choice. But you will wish to see her and prove my words. I will send for her this moment."

The Abbess had her hand-bell in her hand. If she had rung it she would have given Prosper justification of his hurry. But the complacent youth forestalled her.

"I beg you, mother, to do nothing of the kind," he said. "She is well, you tell me, she is happy: that is all I cared to know. I have no wish to unsettle her, but leave her cheerfully and confidently with you, being well assured that you will not fail to send me word at High March should need be."

"I understand you, sir, and agree with you. You may be quite easy about her. We are regular livers, as you may guess, and small events are great ones to us. So you return to High March? I will beg you to carry with you my humble duty to her ladyship the Countess. She is well?"

"She is very well," said Prosper, and took his leave.

A frantic Gracedieu messenger started half a night behind him, but was stopped on Two Manors Waste by a party of outlaws, robbed of his letters, and hanged. Prosper's dream visited him for two nights of his journey back, and four nights at High March; but as no word or other warning came from Gracedieu to give it point, he grew to have some strange liking for it, since he knew that it meant nothing. It gave him new thoughts of Isoult; it convinced him, for instance, that since the girl was so good she must be affectionate when you came to know her. His own share in the nightly performance he could now set in humorous comparison with his waking state. He found it difficult to believe in the self of his dream, and was almost curious to see Isoult that he might pursue his juxtapositions. At this rate she filled his waking thoughts as well as his nights. The Countess was not slow to perceive that Prosper was changed, and she affected. His songs came less willingly from him, his sallies were either languid or too polite to be from the heart of the youth, who could make hers beat so fast. Thinking that he wanted work, she devised an expedition for him which might involve some danger and the lives of a dozen men. But she counted that lightly. He went on the fourth day after his return from Gracedieu, and the expedition proved effectual in more ways than one.

The dream stopped, and he forgot it.

CHAPTER XV

THREE AT TORTSENTIER

At Tortsentier there was very little daylight, because the trees about it formed a thick wall. The branches of the pines tapped at the windows on one side; on the other they linked arms with their comrades, and so stood for a mile on all sides of the tower. Paths there were none, nor ways to come by unless you were free of the place. The winter storms moaned, lashed themselves above it, yet below were hushed down to a long sighing. The quiet visitations of the snow, the dripping of the autumn rains, the sun's force, the trap-bite of the frost, or that new breath that comes stealing through woodlands in spring, were all strangers alike to the carpet of brown needles about Maulfry's hold. No birds ever sang there. Death and a great mystery, the dark, air like a lake's at noon, kept fur and feather from Tortsentier, and left Maulfry alone with what she had.

Within, it was a spacious place. A great hall ran the whole height (although not the whole area) of it, having a gallery midway up whence you gained what other chambers there were. Below the gallery were deep alcoves hung with tapestry (of which Maulfry was a diligent worker), and thickened with curtains; between every alcove hung trophies of shields and arms. Mossy carpets, skins, and piled cushions were on the floor; the place smelt of musk: it was lighted by coloured torches and lamps, and warmed with braziers. It was by a spiral stair that you found the gallery and doors of the other rooms, or as many of them as it was fitting you should find. There were doors there which were no doors at all unless occasion served. These rooms had windows; but the hall had only a lantern in the roof, and its torches. From all this it will appear that Isoult was a prisoner, since a prisoner you are if, although you can go out, there is nowhere for you to go; if, further, your hostess neither goes out herself nor gives you occasion to leave her. Yet Maulfry made her guest elaborately free of the place.

"Child," she said, "you see how I live here. My trees, my birds--" she had many birds in cages--"my collections of arms and arras and odd books, are my friends for want of better. If you can help me to any such I shall be very much obliged to you. Other friends I have--yourself I may count among them, one other you know,--but they are of the world, and refuse to hang upon my walls. Sometimes they pay me a visit, stay for a little season, remonstrate, argue with me, shrug, and leave me gladder than I was to receive them. I am a hermit, my child, when all's said. These other friends, these more constant friends, on the other hand, suit me better. They talk to me when I bid them, are silent when I want to think. They have no vapours, unless I give them of mine, no airs but what I choose to find in them. And they are complaisant, they seek nothing beyond my entertainment. My friends from outside come to please themselves and to take what they can of my store. Sometimes they take each other. One of them (not unknown to my Isoult!) will come before long--he is overdue now--and find my store enriched. I doubt he will turn thief. You may well blush, child, for, apart that it becomes you admirably, thieving is a sin, and naturally you cannot approve of it. It is to be hoped he has rifled no treasury already. There, there, I have your word for it; but you know my way! Living alone in the woods at a distance from men, which makes them ants in a swarm for me, I become a philosopher. Can you wonder?"

To such harangues, delivered with a pretty air of mockery and extravagance, which was never allowed to get out of hand, Isoult listened as she had listened to the cheerful prophetics of the Abbess of Gracedieu, with her gentle smile and her locked lips. Maulfry talked by the hour together while she and Isoult sat weaving a tapestry. For the philosopher which it seemed she was, the subject of the piece was very pleasant. It was the story of Troilus and Cresseide, no less, wherein Sir Pandarus, (departing from the custom) was represented a young man of tall and handsome presence, and the triangle of lovers like children. Diomede was an apple-cheeked school-boy, Troilus had a tunic and bare legs, Cresseide in her spare moments dandled a doll. Calchas, for his part, kept a dame-school in this piece, which for the rest was treated with a singular freedom. Isoult, poor girl, was occasionally troubled at her part of the work; but the philosopher laughed heartily at her.

"What ails thee with the piece, child?" she would cry out in her hearty way. "Dost thou think lovers are men and women, to be taken seriously? It is to be hoped they are not, forsooth! For if they are not innocent, what shall be said of their antics?" and more to the same tune.

While affecting to treat her with freedom, Maulfry kept in reality a steady rein.

"Go out?" she would cry in mock dismay, at the least hint of such a wish from the girl--"why under the sun should we go out? To see a thicket of twigs and breathe rotten vapours? Or do you think we have processions passing in and out of the tree-trunks? Ah, minx, 'tis a procession of one you would be spying for! Nay, nay, never look big eyes at me, child. I know your processioner better than you. He will come in his time; and whether he come through the door or down the stairs I cannot tell you yet. Who taught you, pray, that he was in the wood? Not I, I vow. Why should he not be skulking in the blue alcove awaiting the hour? You look thither; how you kindle at a word! Well, well, go and see for yourself if he is in the blue alcove."

Poor trembling Isoult went on tiptoe, was fool enough to peep through the curtains, but good soul enough to take Maulfry's railing in fair part. She got as much as she deserved, and the joke was none too good perhaps; but as a trick, it sufficed to keep her on the fine edge of expectation. She dared not go out for fear of missing Prosper. She grew so tight-strung as to doubt of nothing. Had Maulfry told her he would be with them to supper on such and such a night, she would have come shaking to the meal, rosy as a new bride, nothing doubting but that the next lift of her shy eyes would reveal him before her. Thus Maulfry by hints in easy degrees led her on; and not only did she not dare to go out, but she lost all wish to peer for him in the wood, because she had been led to the conviction that he was actually in the tower--a mysterious, harboured visitant who would appear late or soon, obedient to his destiny. A door even was pointed at, smiled and winked at, passed by light-foot as they went along the gallery. Maulfry had a biting humour which sometimes led her further than she was aware.

She kept Isoult in a fever by her tricks; by this particular trick she risked a different fire--jealousy. For of the four persons who made up the household, she alone went behind that door. Vincent, the young page, brought food and wine to the threshold; Maulfry came out and took them in. But there she was perfectly safe. Isoult could never be jealous of Prosper; she would despair, but would resent nothing he might do. Jealousy requires two things exorbitantly--self-love and a sensitive surface. Isoult loved Love and Prosper--the two in one glorious image; and as for her surface, that, like the rest of her, body and soul, was his when Love allowed. Nor was she even curious, at first. Many thrashings, acquaintance with her world which was close if not long, and a deeply-driven scorn of herself threw her blindly upon the discretion of the only man she had ever found to be at once splendid and humane. What he chose was the law and what he declared the prophets. But she might get curious on other grounds, on grounds where destiny and suchlike mannish appendages did not hold up a finger at her. And in fact she did.

* * * * *

Meantime Maulfry took charge of her body and will. Isoult was obedient in everything but one. Maulfry, who always saw the girl undress and go to bed, objected to her prayers.

"Pray!" she would call out, "for what and to what do you pray? Pray to your husband when you have one, and he will give you according to your deserts, which he alone can appraise. Trust him for that. But to crave boons you know little of, from a God of whom you know nothing at all, save that you made him in your own image--what profit can that be?"

To which Isoult replied, "He told me always to pray, ma'am, and I cannot disobey any of his words."

"Ah, I remember he was given to the game. Hum! And what else did he tell you, child?"

"Deal justly, live cleanly, breathe sweet breath," Isoult answered in a whisper, as if she were in church: "praise God when He is kind, bow head and knees when He is angry, look for Him to be near at all times. Do this, and beyond it trust to thine own heart."

Maulfry pished and pshawed at this hushed oracle. "You would do better to eat well and sleep softly. 'Twould bring you nearer your heart's desire. Men like a girl to be sleek."

But in this Isoult had her way, though she said her prayers in bed. In all else she was meek as a mouse. Maulfry made her dress to suit her own taste, and let down her hair. The dress was of thin silk, fitted close, and was cut low in the neck. Isoult, who had known pinned rags, and had gone feet and legs bare without a thought, went now as if she were naked, or clothed only in her shame. But it was the fashion Maulfry adopted towards her own person, and there were no others to convict her. Nanno the old serving-woman and Vincent the page, who was only a boy, made up the household-except for the closed door. Nanno never looked at anything higher than the ground; and as for Vincent, he was in love with Isoult, and would sooner have looked at Christ in judgment.

Of those two people Nanno was believed to be dumb; Isoult, at least, never got speech of her. Vincent, who was treated by Maulfry as if he had been a mechanism, was a very simple machine. If Maulfry had been less summary with him she might have prevented the inevitable; but like all people with brains she thought a simpleton was an ass, and kicks your only speech with such. Vincent and Isoult, therefore, became friends as the days went on. Maulfry's cagebirds drew their heads together, and in Vincent's case, at any rate, it was not long before the blood began to beat livelier for the contact. Isoult was as simple as he was, and concealed nothing from him that came up in their talks together. She knew much more than he about birds, about the woods, the country beyond the forest--great rolling sheep-pastures, dim stretches of fen, sleepy rivers, the heaths and open lands about Malbank. Of all these things which came to him through her voice almost with a breath of their own roving air, he knew absolutely nothing, whereas there was very little county-lore which she did not know. She seemed indeed to him a woodland creature herself, in touch with the birds and beasts. She could put her hand into a cage full of them; the little twinkling eyes were steady upon her, but there was no fluttering or beating at the bars. Her hand closed on the bird, drew it out: the next minute it was free upon her shoulder, peeping into her sidelong face. She could hold it up to her lips: it would take the seed from her. The horses knew her call and her speaking voice. They would go and come, stand or start, as she whispered in their pricked ears. Vincent thought she might easily be a fairy. But, "No, Vincent," she would say to that, "I am a very poor girl, poorer than you."

One day Vincent disputed this point.

"You go in silks and have pearls on your head."

"They are not mine, Vincent."

"My mistress loves you."

"Oh, in love I am very rich," said the girl.

"Everybody would love you, I think," he dared.

But she shook her head at this.

"I have not found that. I am not sure of anybody's love."

"I know of one person of whom you may be very sure," said the boy, out of breath.

"But I never meant that when I said I was rich. I meant that I was rich in love, not in being loved. Ah, no!"

"You ask not to be loved, Isoult?"

"Oh, it would be impossible to be loved as I mean, as I love."

"I would like to know that. Whom do you love?"

"Why, my lord, of course! Must I not love my lord?"

"Your lord!" stammered Vincent, red to the roots of his hair. "Your lord! I never knew that you loved a lord." He gulped, and went on at random--"And where is your lord?"

"I cannot tell. He may be in this castle. I only know that I shall see him when his time comes."

"If he is in this castle, Isoult," said Vincent, sober again, "his time is not yet."

She caught her breath.

"How do you know that?" she panted.

"I know that there is a great lord in the Red Chamber, him that Madam Maulfry tends with her own hands."

"Ah, ah! You have seen him?"

"No, I have never seen him. He is very ill."

Isoult gazed at him, shocked to the soul. Ill, and she not near by!

"Oh, Vincent," she whispered. "Oh, Vincent!"

"Yes, Isoult,"--Vincent had caught some breath of her horror, and whispered,--"Yes, Isoult, he is very ill. He has been ill since the autumn, with bleeding and bleeding and bleeding. I know that is true, though I have never seen him since he was brought here swathed up in a litter; but I once saw Madam Maulfry bury something in the wood, very early in the morning. And I was frightened. Ah! I have seen strange things here, such as I dare not utter even now. So I watched my time and dug up what she had concealed. They were bloody clothes, Isoult, very many of them, and ells long! So it is true."

Isoult swayed about like a broken bough. Vincent ran to catch her, fearing she would fall. He felt the shaking of her body under his hands. That frightened him. He began to beseech.

"Isoult, dear Isoult, I have hurt you, I who would rather die, I who--am very fond of you, Isoult. Look now, be yourself again--think of this. He may not be ill by now; he is likely much better. I will find out for you. Trust me to find it all out."

"No, no, no," she whispered in haste; "you must do nothing, can do nothing. This is mine. I will find out."

"Will you ask Madam Maulfry?" said Vincent. "She will kill me if she knows that I have told you. Not that I mind that," he added in his own excuse, "but you will gain nothing that way."

"No," Isoult answered curtly. "I will find out by myself. Hush! Some one is coming. Go now."

Vincent went slowly away, for he too heard the sweep of Maulfry's robe. There was a long looking-glass in the wall, flickering over which Isoult's eyes encountered their own woeful image-brooding, reproachful, haunted eyes; this would never do for her present business. Determined to meet craft with craft, she wried her mouth to a smile, she drove peace into her eyes, took a bosomful of breath, and turned to be actress for the first time in her life. This meant to realize and then express herself. She was like to become an artist.

Towards the end of that night her brain swam with fatigue. She had had to study, first Maulfry, second, her new self, third, her old self. In studying Maulfry she began unconsciously to prepare for the shock to come--the shock of a free-given faith, than which no crisis can be more exquisite for a child. So far, however, she had no cause to distrust her châtelaine's honour, nor even her judgment. Both, she doubted not, were in Prosper's keeping.

Maulfry was in a gay, malicious humour. She pinched Isoult's cheek when she met her.

"Tired of waiting, my minion?" she began.

"No, ma'am, I am not tired at all."

"That is well. I went by the eye-shine. So you are still patient for the great reward! Well, build not too high, my dear. All men are alike, as I find them."

"My reward is to serve, ma'am, not to win."

"It is a reward one may weary of with time. There may be too much service where the slave is willing, child. But to win gives an appetite for more winning; and so the game goes on."

Again, later on, she said--

"I should like him to see you tonight, child. He would be more malleable set near such a fire. Your cheeks are burning bright! As for your big eyes, I believe you burnish them. Do you know how handsome you are, I wonder?"

"No one has ever told me that but you, ma'am," said Isoult, demure.

"Pooh, your glass will have told you. They don't lie."

"I never had a glass till I came here. Not even at the convent."

"And did you never get close enough to use somebody's eyes?" said Maulfry, with a sly look.

Isoult had nothing to say to this. Touch her on the concrete of her love, and she was always dumb.

"Well then, I will stay flattering you, and advise," Maulfry pursued. "When that august one chooses to unveil, do you present yourself on knees as you now are. In two minutes you will not be on your own, but on his, if I know mankind."

Isoult changed the talk.

"Do you know, or can you tell me, when my lord will come out, ma'am?" she ventured.

"Come out, child? Out of what? Out of a box?" Maulfry cried in mock rage. "'Tis my belief you know as much as I do. 'Tis my belief you have been at a keyhole."

Mockery gave way; the matter was serious.

"Remember now, Isoult, in doing that you will disobey a greater than I, and as good a friend. And remember what disobedience may mean."

Again she changed her tone in view of Isoult's collapse.

"You look reproaches," she said; "your eyes seem to say, like a wounded hare's, 'Strike me again. I must quiver, but I will never run.' So, child, so, I was but half in earnest. You are an obedient child, and so I will tell Messire, if by any chance I should see him first." And so on, until they went to bed.

When at last that breathing space came, Isoult was nearly choked with the fatigue of her artistic escapades; but there was no time to lose. As soon as she dared she got up in the dark, put her cloak over her night-dress, and crept out into the gallery. The door creaked as she opened it; she stood white and quailing, while her heart beat like a hammer. But nothing stirred. She went first to Maulfry's door and listened. She heard her breathing. All fast there. Then like a hare she fled on to the door she knew so well. There was a light under it: she heard a rustle as of paper or parchment. Whoever was there was turning the leaves of a book. In the silence which seemed to press upon her ears and throb in them, she debated with herself what she should do. She knew that there was indeed no question about it. If he was ill, everything--all her humility and all his tacit authority--must give way. There was but one place for a wife. Maulfry did not know she was his wife. She listened again. Inside the room she now heard some one shift in bed, and--surely that was a low groan. Oh, Lord! Oh, Love! She turned the handle; she stood in the doorway; she saw Galors sitting up in bed with a book on his knees, a lamp by his side. His sick face, bandaged and swathed, glowered at her, with great hollow eyes and a sour mouth dropped at one corner.

She stood unable to move or cry.

"All is well, dear friend," said Galors; "I did but shift and let a little curse. Go to bed, Maulfry."

Isoult had the wit to withdraw. What little she had left after that pointed a shaking finger at one thing only--flight. She had been unutterably betrayed. Her conception of the universe reeled over and was lost in fire. There was no time to think of it, none to be afraid; she did what there was to do swiftly, with a clearer head than she had believed herself capable of. She slipt back to her room without doubt or terror, and put on the clothes in which she had come from the convent, a grey gown with a leather girdle, woollen stockings, thick shoes--over all a long red hooded cloak. This done she stood a moment thinking. No, she dare not try the creaking door again; the window must serve her turn. She opened it and looked out. Through the fretty tracery of the firs she could see a frosty sky, blue-grey fining to green, green to yellow where the moon swam, hard and bright. There was not a breath of air.

She climbed at once on to the window-ledge, and stood, holding to the jamb, looking down at the black below.

A great branch ran up to the wall at a right angle; it seemed made for her intent. Sitting with your legs out of the window it was easy to take hold of a branch. She tried; it was easy, but not in a cloak. So she sat again on the sill, took off her cloak, and tried once more. Soon she was out of the window, swinging by the branch. Then her feet touched another, and very slowly (for she was panic-stricken at the least noise) she worked her way downwards to the trunk of the great tree. Once there it was easy; she was soon on the ground. But she had no notion what to do next, save that she must do it at once--whither to turn, how to get out of the wood the best and safest way. Then another thing struck her. She would be chased, that was of course. She had been chased before, and tracked, and caught. Little as she could dare that, what chance had she, a young girl flying loose in this part of the forest, a young girl decently dressed, looking as she knew now that she looked; what chance had she indeed? Well, what was she to do? She remembered Vincent.

Vincent and Nanno did not sleep in the tower: that would have been inconvenient in Maulfry's view. They had a little outhouse not ten paces from it, and slept there. Thither went Isoult, jumping at every snapt twig; the door yielded easily, but which bed should she try? Nanno, she knew, snored, for Vincent had once made her laugh by recounting his troubles under the spell of it. Well, the left-hand bed was undoubtedly Nanno's at that rate; Isoult went to the right-hand bed and felt delicately with her hand at its head. Vincent's curls!

Then she knelt down and put her face close to the boy's, whispering in his ear.

"Whisper, Vincent, whisper," she said; "whisper back to me. Do you love me, Vincent? Whisper."

"You know that I love you, Isoult," Vincent whispered. "Hush! not too loud," said she again. "Vincent, will you get up and come into the wood with me? I want to tell you something. Will you come very quietly indeed?"

"Yes," said Vincent. The whole breathless intercourse worked into his dreams of her; but he woke and sat up.

"Come," said Isoult. She crept out again to wait for him.

Vincent came out in his night-gown. The moon showed him rather scared, but there was no doubt about his sentiments. Love-blind Isoult herself could have no doubt. She lost no time.

"Vincent, I must tell you everything. I shall be in your hands, at your mercy. I must go away at once, Vincent. If I stay another hour I shall never see the daylight again. They will kill me, Vincent, or do that which no one can speak of. Then I shall kill myself. This is quite true. I have seen something to-night. There is no doubt at all. Will you help me, Vincent?"

Vincent gaped at her. "How--what--why--what shall I do?" he murmured, beginning to tremble. "Oh, Isoult, you know how I--what I whispered--!"

"Yes, yes, I know. That is why I came. You must do exactly what I tell you. You must lend me some of your clothes, any that you have, now, at once. Will you do this?'

"My clothes!" he began to gasp.

"Yes. Go and get them, please. But make no noise, for the love of Christ."

Vincent tip-toed back. He returned, after a time of dreadful rummaging in the dark, with a bundle.

"I have brought what I could find. They are all there. I could not bring what I put on every day, for many reasons. These are the best I have. How will you--can you--? They are not easy to put on, I think, for a girl."

Poor Vincent! Isoult had no time nor heed for the modesty proper to lovers.

"I will manage," she said. "Turn round, please."

Vincent did as he was bid. He even shut his eyes. Presently Isoult spoke again.

"Could you find me a pair of scissors, Vincent?" She had been quick to learn that beauty must be obeyed. She would have asked Vincent for the moon if she had happened to want it, and would have seen him depart on the errand without qualm. Sure enough, he brought the scissors before her held-out hand had grown tired.

"Cut off my hair," she said, "level with my shoulders."

"Your hair!" cried the poor lad. "Oh, Isoult, I dare not."

It reached her knees, was black as night, and straight as rain. It might have echoed Vincent's reproach. But the mistress of both was inexorable.

"Cut it to clear my shoulders, please."

He groaned, but remembered that there would be spoils, that he must even touch this hedged young goddess. So as she stood, doubleted, breeched, and in his long red hose, he hovered round her. Soon she was lightened of her load of glory, and as spruce as a chamber-page.

"Now," she said, "you must tell me the way to the nearest shelter. There is a place called St. Lucy's Precinct, I have heard. Where is that?"

He told her. Keep straight away from the moon. It was just there: he pointed with his hand. As long as the moon held she could not fail to hit it. Beyond the pine-wood there was an open shaw; she could keep through that, then cross a piece of common with bracken cut and stacked. Afterwards came a very deep wood, full of beech-timber. You crossed a brook at Four Mile Bottom,--you could hear the ripples of the ford a half-mile away,--and held straight for the top of Galley Hill. After that the trees began again, oaks mostly. A tall clump of firs would lead you there. Beyond them was the yew-tree wood. The precinct was there. But the moon was her best lamp. He was talking to her in language which she understood better than he. She could never miss the road now.

She thanked him. Then came a pause.

"I must go, Vincent," said she. "You have been my friend this night. I will tell my lord when I see him. He will reward you better than I."

"He can never reward me!" cried Vincent.

She sighed and turned to go, but he started forward and held her with both hands at her waist. She seemed so like a boy of his age, it gave him courage.

"Isoult," he stammered, "Isoult!"

"Yes, Vincent," says she.

"Are you going indeed?"

"I must go at once."

"Shall I see you again?"

"Ah, I cannot tell you that."

"Do you care nothing?"

"I think you have been my friend. Yes, I should like to see you again, some day."

"Oh, Isoult--"

"What?"

"Will you give me something?"

"What have I, Vincent? If I could you know that I would."

He had her yet by the waist. There was no blinking what he wanted. Isoult stood.

"You may kiss me there," she said with the benignity of a princess, and gave him her hand.

The boy's mouth was very near her cheek. Something--who knows what?--checked him. He let go her waist, dropped on his knees and kissed the hand, turned little prince in his turn. Isoult was as near loving him then as she could ever be. This was no great way, perhaps, but near enough for immediate purposes. When Vincent got up she gave him her hand frankly to hold. They were two children now, and like two children kissed each other without under-thought. Then, as she sped away from the moon, Vincent crept back to his cold bed with an armful of black hair.

CHAPTER XVI

BOY AND GIRL

The woodland Mass in the yew-tree glade was served next morning by an acolyte in cassock and cotta. The way of it was this. Alice of the Hermitage was setting the altar in the light of a cloudy dawn, when she heard a step and the rustling of branches behind her. Looking quickly round, she saw a boy come out of the thicket, who stood echoing her wonder. He was a dark-haired slim lad, in leather jerkin and breeches, had crimson hose on his long legs, on his head a green cap with a pheasant's tail-feather in it. The cap he presently took off in salutation. He said his name was Roy. He had a simple direct way of answering questions, and such untroubled eyes; he was moreover so plainly a Christian, that when he asked Alice if he might serve the Mass she went advocate for him to the priest. So it came about that Isoult, having breakfasted, lay asleep in Alice's bed when a knight came cantering into the precinct followed by a page on a cob. His gilded armour blazed in the sun, a tall blue plume curtesied over his casque. He was so brave a figure--tall and a superb horseman--and so glittering from top to toe, that the old hermit, who came peering out to see, thought him a prince.

"What may your Highness need of Saint Lucy's poor bedesman?" said the hermit, rubbing his hands together.

"My Highness needs the whereabouts of a flitted lady," said the knight in a high clear voice.

Isoult, whom the clatter had awakened, lay like a hare in her form. At this time she feared Maulfry more than Galors.

"Great sir, we have no flitted ladies here. We are very plain folk." So much reproof of gilded armour and its appurtenances the hermit ventured on. But the knight was positive.

"She would have passed this way," he called out. "I know whither she would go. This hold of yours is dead in her road. So advise, hermit."

"I will call Alice," said the hermit.

"Call the devil if he will help you," the other replied.

Isoult heard Alice go out of the cottage.

"Child," said the hermit, "this gentleman seeks a flitted lady who should have passed by here on her way. Have you seen aught of such an one? Your eyes are better than most."

There followed a pause, which to the trembler in the bed seemed time for a death-warrant. Then the quiet voice of Alice told out--

"I have seen no lady. Wait. I will ask."

Isoult heard her returning step. When Alice came into the room she saw Isoult standing ready, all of a tremble.

"Oh, Alice," says she, clinging to her and speaking very fast, "I am the girl they are hunting. I am not a boy. I have deceived you. If they find me they will take me away."

"Will they kill you?"

"Ah, no! There is not enough mercy with them for that."

"Ah, you have done no ill?"

"I served God this morning. I could not have dared."

"True. Who is that knight?"

"I will tell you everything. No man could be so wicked as that knight. It is a woman, desperately wicked. She is in league with a man who would do the worst with me. Save me! save me! save me!" She began to wring her hands, and to blubber, without wits or measure left.

Alice put her hands on her. "Yes, I will save you. Get into bed and lie down. There is a page with the knight. Do you know him?"

"Yes, yes. He will do no harm. He is good."

"Very well. Lie down, and you shall be saved."

Alice went out again into the open.

"Sir knight," she was heard to say, "I have asked Roy, who came hither this morning early to serve our Mass. He has seen no one."

"Who is Roy?" said the knight sharply.

"He was server this morning. He is asleep after a long journey."

"Where?"

"Sir, we have little enough room. He is in my own chamber lying on my bed."

The knight gave a dry laugh.

"You mean that I may not venture into a lady's chamber, shameface? Well, a boy may go where a boy is, I suppose. Vincent, go and explore the acolyte."

"The page may come," said Alice, and watched him go, not without interest, perhaps not without amusement.

The unconscious Vincent was Isoult's next visitant, stepping briskly into the room. He came right up to the bed as in his right and element, a boy dealing with a boy's monkey tricks. One watchful grey eye, the curve of one rosy cheek peering from the blankets, told him a new story.

"Oh, Isoult," says he in a twitter, "is it you indeed?"

"Yes, hush! You will never betray me, Vincent?"

"Betray!" he cried. "Ah, Saints! My tongue would blister if I let the truth on you. But you are quite safe. The damsel won't let her in; she thinks she has a man to deal with. Me she let in!" Vincent chuckled at the irony of the thing. Then he grew anxious over his beloved.

"You had no mishaps? You are not hurt? Tired?"

"All safe. Not tired now. What will she do next?"

"Ah, there! She is for High March. That I know. She means to find you there. She means mischief. You must take great care. You have never seen her in mischief. I have. Oh, Christ!" He winced at the recollection.

"I will go advisedly," said Isoult. "Have no fear for me. I shall be there before she is."

Vincent sighed. "I must go. Good-bye, Isoult. I shall see you again, I am very sure."

"I hope you will. Good-bye."

He did not dare so much as touch the bed, but went out at once to make his report. He had questioned the boy--a dull boy, but he thought honest. Assuredly he had seen no lady on his way. His lies deceived Maulfry, who would have known better but for her proneness to think everybody a fool. Soon Isoult heard the thud of hoofs on the herbage; then Alice came running in to hear the story at large.

The two girls became very friendly. Their heads got close together over Prosper and Galors and Maulfry--the Golden Knight who was a woman! The escape savoured a miracle, was certainly the act of some heavenly power. An Archangel, Alice thought, to which Isoult, convinced that it was Love, assented for courtesy.

"Though for my part," she added, "I lean hardly upon Saint Isidore."

"You do well," said Alice, "he is a great saint. Is he your patron?"

"I think he is," said Isoult.

"Then it is he who has helped you, be sure. No other could know the ins and outs of your story so well, or make such close provision. The Archangels, you see, are few, and their business very great." Isoult agreed.

Of Prosper Alice could not get a clear image. When Isoult was upon that theme her visions blinded her, and sent her for refuge to abstractions. She candidly confessed that he did not love her; but then she did not ask that he should.

"But you pray, 'Give him me all,'" Alice objected.

"Yes, I want to be his servant, and that he should have no other. I cannot bear that any one should do for him what I can do best. That is what I tell the Holy Virgin."

"And Saint Isidore, I hope," said Alice gently; but Isoult thought not.

"It would be useless to tell Saint Isidore," she explained.

"He is a man, and men think differently of these matters. They want more, and do not understand to be contented with much less."

"Forgive me, Isoult. I know nothing of love and lovers. But if you marry this lord--as I suppose you might?"

"He might marry _me_," said Isoult slowly.

"Well, then, is there no more to look for in marriage but the liberty to serve?"

"I look for nothing else."

"But he might?"

"Ah, ah! If he did!"

"Well?"

"Oh, Alice, I love him so!"

"Darling Isoult--I see now. Forgive me."

The two friends cried together and kissed, as girls will. Then they talked of what there was to do. Isoult was resolute to go.

"She will ride straight to High March," she said. "I know her. My lord is there. If she finds not me, she will find him, and endanger his ease. I must be there first. She must follow the paths, however they wind, because she is mounted on a heavy horse. I shall go through the brakes by ways that I know. I shall easily outwit her in the forest."

"But you cannot walk, dearest. It is many days to High March."

"I shall ride."

"What will you ride, goose?"

"A forest pony, of course."

"Will you go as you are--like a boy, Isoult?"

Alice was aghast at the possibility; but Isoult, who had many reasons for it apart from her own safety (forgotten in the sight of Prosper's), was clear that she would. Prosper she knew was the guest of the Countess Isabel, a vaguely great and crowned lady; probably he was one of many guests. "And how shall I, a poor girl, come at him in the midst of such a company?" she asked herself. But if she went with a tale of being his page Roy he might admit her to some service, to hand his cup, or just to lie at his door of a night. The real Roy had done more than this; he would never refuse her so much. So she thought at least; and at the worst she would have space to tell her message.

At noon, the forest pony captured and haltered with a rope, she started. Alice was tearful, but Isoult, high in affairs, had no time to consider Alice. She gave her a kiss, stooping from the saddle, thanked her for what she had done on Prosper's account, and flew. She never looked back to wave a hand or watch a hand-waving; she was in a fever for action. Going, she calculated profoundly. There was a choice of ways. The great road from Wanmouth to High March skirted Marbery Down (where she had watched the stars and heard the sheep-bells many a still night), and then ran east by the forest edge to Worple. It only took in Worple by a wide divagation; after that it curved back to the forest, ran fairly clean to Market Basing, thence over ridges and coombs, but climbing mostly, it fetched up at High March. It was a military road. Well, she might follow Maulfry on this road till within a couple of days