Read Ebook: The Red Saint by Deeping Warwick

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Ebook has 2527 lines and 105894 words, and 51 pages

"Let me alone! Am I a fool of a girl?"

"Patience, brother."

"Patience be cursed! What is the use of an idiot saint if an arrow between the ribs is too much for her?"

Denise let the boy's hands fall; Aymery saw her bow her head, and heard her whisper words that he could not catch. Then Waleran came forward, swinging his arms as though to keep off Grimbald who towered beside him like a great ship. Waleran stopped at the foot of the litter, and stood staring at the shield that covered the dead boy's face. Some impulse drove him to his knees, and he began to feel for the arrow, breathing heavily through set teeth.

Denise's nearness seemed to come between him and the savage tenderness of a dog for its dead whelp. Her humility and her compassion were not tuned to the cry of nature.

"Get up," he said. "This is my affair."

He leant forward, and pushed her back with a rough thrust of the open hand. Aymery caught Denise, and drew her aside.

His arms lingered about her like the arms of a lover.

"Lord, I understand."

"That arrow has stricken two hearts."

Her eyes looked into Aymery's as he let her go.

"God have pity," she said.

Waleran had broken off the head of the arrow. He held it up in the moonlight, and his hood fell back from his face. The three who watched him saw his face contorted with laughter, though no sound came from the open mouth.

He ran the arrow's head through his cloak, as a woman pins her tunic with a splinter of bone.

"Here is a keepsake," he said. "Lord, but I shall cherish it! They have lit a candle for the boy, yonder. Some day I shall hang a bell on a rope, and ring him a passing."

He scrambled up, swaggering, and shaking his shoulders. It was his way of carrying the burden that the night had laid on him. He shouted to the men, roughly, and they came out from the shadows of the trees.

When they had lifted the litter, Waleran jerked himself on to it, and putting the shield aside, sat fingering his boy's face.

"A puff of wind, and the candle is out," he said.

The litter swayed under his weight.

"Spill me, you fools, and I shall have something to say to you. Off with you. To-morrow we must put this poor pigeon under the grass."

The men moved away, and Grimbald would have followed them, but Waleran ordered him back.

"Have I nothing better to do than to cut my own throat!" he said. "Shifts and cassocks are no good for me. The puppy is mine, by God! Let no one meddle between him and me."

Grimbald followed them no farther, and heard the swish of their feet die away through the dead leaves into the darkness.

In an hour from their first coming the beech wood was silent and empty, and Denise's cell lay with its dark thatch like an islet in the midst of a quiet mere. Not a ripple of sound played over the surface of the night. Aymery and Grimbald had gone to warn their own people that death was abroad on the White Horse. And Denise, sitting on her bed, wakeful, and filled with a great pity for Waleran and the lad, felt that the stealthy glamour of the moonlight was cold and unreal. If her compassion followed Waleran, a feeling more deep and more mysterious followed Aymery under the boughs of the beeches. Yet this feeling of Denise's was as miraculous as the moonlight which she thought so cold and mute.

The two men made their way through the wood by a broad green ride, and stood listening where the heathland began for any sound that might steal out of the vast silence of the night. Grimbald's great head, with its gaunt, eagle face, the colour of smoked oak, had the full moon behind it for a halo. Aymery of Goldspur stood a little below him on the hillside, leaning on his sword. His thoughts were back among the trees about Denise's glade, those towering trees whose boughs seemed hung with the stars.

Below them stretched wastes of whin and heather, hills black with forests, valleys full of moonlit mist. They could see the sea shining in the distance, a whole land beneath them, ghostly, strange, and still.

"It is all quiet yonder."

Grimbald's head was like the head of a hawk, alert and very watchful.

"They have done enough for one night," he said.

"To make us keep troth with the King!"

Both were silent for a moment. Grimbald spoke the thought that was uppermost in Aymery's mind.

"It is no longer safe for the girl alone, yonder," he said.

Aymery, that man with the iron mouth and the square chin, and eyes the colour of the winter sea, spread his shoulders as an archer spreads them before drawing a six-foot bow.

"I will see to it," he said quietly. "Nothing must happen to Denise."

The little red spider of a man who pattered along beside Gaillard's horse, looked up from time to time into the Gascon's face, and thought what a great pageant life must be to a soldier who had such a body and so much pay. For the little red spider was a cripple, and nothing more glorious than a spy, a thing that crawled like a harvest bug, and might have been squashed without ceremony under the Gascon's fist. As for Gaillard he was a very great man, cock and captain of Count Peter's chickens, those most meek birds who scratched up obstinate worms, and kept their lord's land clean of grubs.

The little red spider thought Messire Gaillard a fine fellow. He had such limbs on him, such a voice, such a cheerful way of bullying everyone. The Gascon might have been made of brown wire, he was so restless, so sinewy, so alert; a rust-coloured man with red and uneasy eyes, a harsh skin blotched with freckles, hair that curled like a negro's, and a big mouth insolent under the aggressive tusks of its moustache. A vain man, too, as his dress and his harness showed, a man who put oil on his hair, wore many rings, and had a quick eye for a woman. He was just the lusty, headstrong animal, a born fighter, and a bully by instinct, inflammable, self-sufficient, a babbler, and a singer of love songs.

The waters of the bay were covered with purple shadows, and the marshlands brilliant as green samite when Gaillard's men came to the western gate of the castle, and rode two by two with drooped spears into the great outer bailey closed in by the old Roman walls. Gaillard came last, with the spy pattering beside his horse. The men went to their quarters, rough pent houses that had been built for them along the northern wall, for there was not room enough in Peter of Savoy's new castle within a castle for all those hired men from over the sea.

Pevensey would have astonished any rough Northumbrian baron, or the fiery Marcher Lords who fought the Welsh. For Peter of Savoy was a southerner, a compeer of the King's in his love of colour and of music. To dig a moat and build white towers was not enough for him, and the spirit of Provence had emptied itself within the Roman wall. A great part of the space had become a garden, shut in with thickets of cypresses and bays. The roses of Provence bloomed there in June. Winding alley ways went in and out, short swarded, and overhung by rose trees. There were vines on trellises, and banks of fragrant herbs. In the thick of a knoll of cypresses Count Peter kept two leopards in a cage, yellow-eyed beasts which glided silently to and fro.

Gaillard, skirting the cypresses of the pleasaunce, had his eyes on the window of the great tower where Peter of Savoy loved to sit playing chess with Dan Barnabo his chaplain, or listening to a woman singing to the lute. The lutanist sang to others as well as to Count Peter. Gaillard the Gascon knew the twitter of her strings, better perhaps, than Peter of Savoy himself.

The words were those of Etoile of the Lute, and Gaillard hummed them under the shade of the cypresses as he rode towards the inner gate. But some hand threw a clod of turf at him that morning, and threw it so cleverly that the thing hit Gaillard on the ear, and spattered his blue surcoat over with soil.

The Gascon turned sharply in the saddle, and saw a white hand showing between two cypress trees, and a wrist that betrayed the golden threads embroidering a woman's sleeve.

A voice laughed at him.

"Throw me a clod of turf, my desire, Give me a blow on the ear for a greeting!"

The arm put the boughs aside, and a face appeared, wreathed by the cypress sprays, a woman's face, white, mischievous, and alluring. Her black hair was bound up in a golden net. She showed her teeth at Gaillard, and put out the tip of a red tongue.

"Can I throw straight, dear lord?"

He turned his horse, glanced at the window in the tower, and then laughed back at her, opening his mouth wide like the beak of a hungry bird.

"Better at a man's heart, than at his head, dear lady."

"A Gascon has more head than heart, my friend."

"And a long sword, and a longer tongue!"

She tilted her chin, two black eyes laughing above a short, impudent nose, and a hard, red mouth.

"Go and have your gossip with good Peter. Barnabo has beaten him twice at chess, and he was ready to throw the board at me. The leopards are better tempered."

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