Via Crucis: A Romance of the Second Crusade Part 11

And as he spoke the words, he had laid the red-hot point to his breast and had drawn it down and crosswise; and a little line of thin, white smoke followed the hissing iron along the seared flesh. He threw the bar down upon the threshold of his door and came to join the throng, the strange smile on his rough face and the light of another world in his fire-reddened eyes. But though the mult.i.tude sent up a great cry of praise and wonder, yet Bernard shook his head gravely and walked on, for he loved not any madness, not even a madness for good deeds, and the light by which he saw was as steady and clear and true as a life- long day.

Moreover, even while he had been speaking he had felt that fanatic deeds were not far off, and a deep sadness had fallen upon him, because he knew that true belief is the fulness of true wisdom and by no means akin to any folly.

Therefore, when he was alone that night, he was very heavy-hearted, and sat a long time by his square oak table in the light of the three- cornered brazen lamp which, stood at his elbow. The princ.i.p.al chamber of the presbytery was cross-vaulted and divided into two by a low round arch supported on slender double columns with capitals fantastically carved. The smaller portion of the room beyond the arch made an alcove for sleeping, which could be completely shut off by a heavy curtain; the larger part was paved with stone, and in one corner a low wooden platform, on which stood a heavy table before a carved bench fastened to the wall, was set apart for writing and study. On the table, besides the lamp, there stood a reading-desk, and above the bench a strong shelf carried a number of objects, including several large bottles of ink, a pot of glue for fastening leaves of parchment, and two or three jars of blue and white earthenware. On nails there hung a brush of half dried broom, a broad-brimmed rush hat, and a blackened rosary. On the other side of the table, and by the window, there was a small holy- water basin with a little besom. On the walls were hung pieces of coa.r.s.e linen roughly embroidered with small crosses flory, worked in dark red silk. The vault was blank and white, and rushes were strewn on the stone pavement. In the deep embrasures of the windows there were dark window-seats worn black with age.

The abbot had begun a letter, but the pen lay beside the unfinished writing, his elbow rested on the parchment, and he shaded his eyes from the light. The brilliancy was gone from his face and was succeeded by an almost earthy pallor, while his att.i.tude expressed both la.s.situde and dejection. He had done what had been required of him, he had fired the pa.s.sion of the hour, and one hour had shown him how completely it was to be beyond his control. He remembered how Peter the Hermit had led the vast advance-guard of the First Crusade to sudden and miserable destruction before the main force could be organized; he had seen enough on that afternoon to prove to him that the air was laden with such disaster, of which the responsibility would surely be heaped upon himself. He regretted not the thoughts he had preached, but the fact of having yielded to preach at all to such men and at such a time. He had begun to set forth all this and much more in a letter to Pope Eugenius, but before he had written a dozen lines the pen had fallen from his hand, and he had begun to reflect upon the impossibility of stemming the tide since it had turned to flood.

A soft step sounded in the outer hall beyond the curtained doorway, but Bernard, absorbed in his meditations, heard nothing. A jewelled hand pushed aside the thick folds of the hanging, and the most beautiful eyes in the world gazed curiously upon the unheeding abbot.

"Are you alone?" asked the Queen's voice.

Without waiting for an answer she came forward into the room and paused beside the low platform, laying one hand upon the table in a gesture half friendly, half deprecating, as if she still feared that she had disturbed the holy man. His transparent fingers fell from his eyes, and he looked up to her, hardly realizing who she was, and quite unable to guess why she had come. A dark brown mantle completely covered her gown, and only a little of her scarlet sleeve showed as her hand lay on the table. Her russet-golden hair hung in broad waves and lightened in the rays of the oil lamp. Her eyes, that looked at Bernard intently and inquiringly, were the eyes of old Duke William, whom the Abbot of Clairvaux had brought to confession and penance long ago, and who had gone from the altar of his grand-daughter's marriage straight to solitary hermitage and lonely death in the Spanish hills; they were eyes in which all thoughts were fearless and in which tenderness was beautiful, but in which kindness was often out of sight behind the blaze of vitality and the burning love of life that proceeded from her and surrounded her as an atmosphere of her own.

"You do not welcome me," she said, looking into his face. "Are you too deeply occupied to talk with me awhile? It is long since we have met."

Bernard pa.s.sed his hand over his eyes as if to brush away some material veil.

"I am at your Grace's service," he said gently, and he rose from his seat as he spoke.

"I ask no service for myself," she answered, setting her foot upon the platform and coming to his side. "Yet I ask something which you may do for others."

Bernard hesitated, and then looked down.

"Silver and gold have I none," he said, quoting, "but such as I have I give unto thee."

"I have both gold and silver, and lands, and a crown," answered the Queen, smiling carelessly, and yet in earnest. "I lack faith. And so, though my people have swords and armour, and have taken upon them the Cross to succour their brethren in the Holy Land, yet they have no leader."

"They have the King, your husband," answered Bernard, gravely.

Eleanor laughed, not very cruelly, nor altogether scornfully, but as a man might laugh who was misunderstood, and to whom, asking for his sword, a servant should bring his pen.

"The King!" she cried, still smiling. "The King! Are you so great in mind and so poor in sense as to think that he could lead men and win?

The King is no leader. He is your acolyte--I like to see him swinging a censer in time to your prayers and flattening his flat face upon the altar-steps beatified by your footsteps!"

The Queen laughed, for she had moods in which she feared neither G.o.d, nor saint, nor man. But Bernard looked grave at first, then hurt, and then there was pity in his eyes. He pointed to the window-seat beside the table, and he himself sat down upon his carved bench. Eleanor, being seated, rested her elbows on the table, clasped her beautiful hands together, and slowly rubbed her cheek against them, meditating what she should say next. She had had no fixed purpose in coming to the abbot's lodging, but she had always liked to talk with him when he was at leisure and to see the look of puzzled and pained surprise that came into his face when she said anything more than usually shocking to his delicate sensibilities. With impulses of tremendous force, there was at the root of her character a youthful and almost childlike indifference to consequences.

"You misjudge your husband," said the abbot, at last, drumming on the table nervously and absently with the tips of his white fingers. "They who do their own will only are quick to condemn those who hope to accomplish the will of Heaven."

"If you regard the King as the instrument of Divine Providence,"

answered Eleanor, with curling lip, "there is nothing to be said.

Providence, for instance, was angered with the people of Vitry.

Providence selected the King of France to be the representative of its wrath. The King, obedient as ever, set fire to the church, and burned several priests and two thousand more or less innocent persons at their prayers. Nothing could be better. Providence was appeased--"

"Hush, Madam!" exclaimed Bernard, lifting a thin hand in deprecation.

"That was the devil's work."

"You told me that I was condemning one who is accomplis.h.i.+ng the will of Heaven."

"In leading the Crusade, yes--"

"Then my husband works for both parties. Today he serves G.o.d; to-morrow he serves Mammon." Eleanor raised her finely pencilled eyebrows. "I believe there is a parable that teaches us what is to become of those that serve two masters."

"It applies to those who try to serve them at the same time," answered the abbot, meeting her contemptuous look with the quiet boldness of a man sure of power. "You know as well as I that the King took oath to lead a Crusade out of repentance for what he did at Vitry."

"A bargain, then, of the very kind against which you preached to-day."

The Queen still smiled, but less scornfully, for she fancied herself as good as Bernard in an argument.

"It is a very easy thing to fence with words," Bernard said. "It is one thing to argue, it is quite another to convince your hearers."

"I do not desire to convince you of anything," answered Eleanor, with a little laugh. "I would rather be convinced."

She looked at him a moment and then turned away with a weary little sigh of discontent.

"Was it without conviction that you took the Cross from my hands to- day?" asked Bernard, sadly.

"It was in the hope of conviction."

Bernard understood. Before him, within reach of his hand, that great problem was present which, of all others, Paganism most easily and clearly solved, but with which Christianity grapples at a disadvantage, finding its foothold narrow, and its danger constant and great. It is the problem of the conversion of great and vital natures, brave, gifted and sure of self, to the condition of the humble and poor in spirit. It is easy to convince the cripple that peace is among the virtues; the sick man and the weak are soon persuaded that the world is a sensuous illusion of Satan, in which the pure and perfect have no part nor share; it is another, a greater and a harder matter, to prove the strong man a sinner by his strength, and to make woman's pa.s.sion ridiculous in comparison of heaven. The clear flame of the spirit burns ill under the breath of this dying body, and for the fleeting touch of a loving hand the majesty of G.o.d is darkened in a man's heart.

Bernard saw before him the incarnate strength and youth and beauty of her from whom a line of kings was to descend, and in whom were all the greatest and least qualities, virtues and failings of her unborn children--the Lion Heart of Richard, the heartless selfishness of John, the second Edward's grasping hold, Henry the Third's broad justice and wisdom; the doubt of one, the decision of another, the pa.s.sions of them all in one, coursing in the blood of a young and kingly race.

"You wish not to convince others, but to be convinced," Bernard said, "and yet it is not in your nature to yield yourself to any conviction.

What would you of me? I can preach to them that will hear me, not to those that come to watch me and to smile at my sayings as if I were a player in a booth at a fair. Why do you come here to-night? Can I give you faith as a salve, wherewith to anoint your blind eyes? Can I furnish you the girdle of honesty for the virtue you have not? Shall I promise repentance for you to G.o.d, while you smile on your next lover?

Why have you sought me out?"

"If I had known that you had no leisure, and the Church no room for any but the altogether perfect, I would not have come."

She leaned back in the window-seat and folded her arms, drawing the thin dark stuff of her cloak into severe straight lines and shadows, in vivid contrast with the radiant beauty of her face. Her straight and clear-cut brows lowered over her deep eyes, and her lips were as hard as polished coral.

Bernard looked at her again long and earnestly, understanding in part, and in part guessing, that she had suffered a secret disappointment on that day and had come to him rather in the hope of some kind of mental excitement than with any idea of obtaining consolation. To him, filled as he was with the lofty thoughts inspired by the mission thrust upon him, there was something horrible in the woman's frivolity--or cynicism. To him the Cross meant the Pa.s.sion of Christ, the shedding of G.o.d's blood, the Redemption of mankind. To her it was a badge, an ornament, the excuse for a luxurious pilgrimage of fair women living delicately in silken tents, and clothed in fine garments of a fanciful fas.h.i.+on. The contrast was too strong, too painful. Eleanor and her girl knights would be too wholly out of place, with their fancies and their whims, in an army of devoted men fighting for a faith, for a faith's high principle as between race and race, and for all which that faith had made sacred in its most holy places. It was too much. In profoundest disappointment and sadness Bernard's head sank upon his breast, and he raised his hands a little, to let them fall again upon his knees, as if he were almost ready to give up the struggle.

Eleanor felt the wicked little thrill of triumph in his apparent despair which compensates schoolboys for unimaginable labour in mischief, when they at last succeed in hurting the feelings of a long- suffering teacher. There had been nothing but an almost childish desire to tease at the root of all that she had said; for before all things she was young and gay, and her surroundings tended in every way to repress both gayety and youth.

"You must not take everything I say in earnest," she said suddenly, with a laugh that jarred on the delicate nerves of the overwrought man.

He turned his head from her as if the sight of her face would have been disagreeable just then.

"Jest with life if you can," he said. "Jest with death if you are brave enough; yet at least be earnest in this great matter. If you are fixed in purpose to go with the King, you and your ladies, then go with the purpose to do good, to bind up men's wounds, to tend the sick, to cheer the weak, and by your presence to make the coward ashamed."

"And why not to fight?" asked the Queen, the light of an untried emotion brightening in her eyes. "Do you think I cannot bear the weight of mail, or sit a horse, or handle a sword as well as many a boy of twenty who will be there in the thick of battle? And if I and my court ladies can bear the weariness as well as even the weakest man in the King's army, and risk a life as bravely, and perhaps strike a clean blow or drive a straight thrust for the Holy Sepulchre, shall our souls have no good of it, because we are women?"

As she spoke, her arm lay across the table, and her small strong hand moved energetically with her speech, touching the monk's sleeve. The fighting blood of the old Duke was in her veins, and there was battle in her voice. Bernard looked up.

"If you were always what you are at this moment," he said, "and if you had a thousand such women as yourself to ride with you, the King would need no other army, for you could face the Seljuks alone.

"But you think that by the time I have to face them my courage will have cooled to woman's tears, like hot vapour on a gla.s.s."

She smiled, but gently now, for she was pleased by what he had said.