Via Crucis: A Romance of the Second Crusade Part 13

"Is it so urgent?" The Queen laughed a little, and Gilbert started in surprise.

"Your Grace wrote urgently," he said.

"Then you are zealous only to obey me? I like that. You shall be rewarded! But I have changed my mind. If the letter were to be written again, I would not write it."

"It was the letter of a friend. Would you take it back?"

Gilbert's face showed the coming disappointment. In his anxiety he pressed nearer to her, resting his hand on the doorpost. The Queen drew back and smiled.

"Was it so very friendly?" she asked. "I do not remember--but I did not mean it so."

"Madam, what did you mean?" His voice was steady and rather cold.

"Oh--I have quite forgotten!" She almost laughed again, shaking her hooded head.

"If your Grace had need of me, I might understand. Beatrix is not here.

I looked at each of your ladies to-day, through all their ranks--she was not among them. I asked where she was, but you would not answer and were angry--"

"I? Angry? You are dreaming!"

"I thought you were angry, because you changed colour and would not speak again--"

"You were wrong. Only a fool can be angry with ignorance."

"Why do you call me ignorant? These are all riddles."

"And you are not good at guessing. Come! To show you that I was not angry, I will have you walk with me down through the village. It is growing late."

"Your Grace is alone?"

"Since you followed me, you know it. Come."

She almost pushed him aside to pa.s.s out, and a moment later they were crossing the dark open s.p.a.ce before the church. Gilbert was not easily surprised, but when he reflected that he was walking late at night through a small French village with one of the most powerful sovereigns in Europe, who was at the same time the most beautiful of living women, he realized that his destiny was not leading him by common paths. He remembered his own surprise when, an hour earlier, he had seen the Queen's unmistakable figure pa.s.s the open window of his lodging. And yet should any one see her now, abroad at such an hour, in the company of a young Englishman, there would be much more matter for astonishment. Half boyishly he wished that he were not himself, or else that the Queen were Beatrix. As for his actual position in the Queen's good graces, he had not the slightest understanding of it, a fact which just then amused Eleanor almost as much as it irritated her. The road was uneven and steep beyond the little square. For some moments they walked side by side in silence. From far away came the sound of many rough voices singing a drinking-chorus.

"Give me your arm," said Eleanor, suddenly.

As she spoke, she put out her hand, as if she feared to stumble. Doing as she begged him, Gilbert suited his steps to hers, and they were very close together as they went on. He had never walked arm in arm in that way before, nor perhaps had he ever been so close to any other woman.

An indescribable sensation took possession of him; he felt that his step was less steady, and that his head was growing hot and his hands cold; and somehow he knew that whereas the idea of love was altogether beyond and out of the question, yet he was spellbound in the charm of a new and mysterious attraction. With it there was the instantaneous certainty that it was evil, with the equally sure knowledge that if it grew upon him but a few moments longer he should not be able to resist it.

Eleanor would not have been a woman had she not understood.

"What is the matter?" she asked gently, and under her hood she was smiling.

"The matter?" Gilbert spoke nervously. "There is nothing the matter; why do you ask?"

"Your arm trembled," answered the Queen.

"I suppose I was afraid that you were going to fall."

At this the Queen laughed aloud.

"Are you so anxious for my safety as that?" she inquired.

Gilbert did not answer at once.

"It seems so strange," he said at last, "that your Grace should choose to be abroad alone so late at night."

"I am not alone," she answered.

At that moment her foot seemed to slip, and her hand tightened suddenly upon Gilbert's arm. But as he thought her in danger of falling, he caught her round the waist and held her up; and, as he almost clasped her to him, the mysterious influence strengthened his hold in a most unnecessary manner.

"I never slip," said Eleanor, by way of explaining the fact that she had just stumbled.

"No," answered Gilbert. "Of course not."

And he continued to hold her fast. She made a little movement vaguely indicating that she wished him to let her go, and her free right hand pretended to loosen his from her waist. He felt infinitesimal lines of fire running from his head to his feet, and he saw lights where there were none.

"Let me go," she said, almost under her breath; and accentuating her words with little efforts of hand and body, it accidentally happened that her head was against his breast for a moment.

The fire grew hotter, the lights brighter, and, with the consciousness of doing something at once terrible yet surpa.s.singly sweet to do, he allowed his lips to touch the dark stuff that hid her russet hair. But she was quite unaware of this desperate deed. A moment later she seemed to hear something, for she turned her head quickly, as if listening, and spoke in an anxious half-whisper.

"Take care! There is somebody--"

Instantly Gilbert's hand dropped to his side and he a.s.sumed the att.i.tude of a respectful protector. The Queen continued to stare into the darkness a moment longer, and then began to walk on.

"It was nothing," she said carelessly.

"I hear men singing," said Gilbert.

"I dare say," answered Eleanor, with perfect indifference. "I have heard them for some time."

One voice rose higher and louder than the rest as the singers approached, and the other voices joined in the rough chorus of a Burgundy drinking-song. Near the outskirts of the village, lights were flas.h.i.+ng and moving unsteadily in the road as those who carried them staggered along. To reach the monastery which was the headquarters of the court, the Queen and Gilbert would have to walk a hundred yards down the street before turning to the right. Gilbert saw at a glance that it would be impossible for them to reach the turning before meeting the drunken crowd.

"It would be better to go back by another way," he said, slackening his pace.

But the Queen walked quietly on without answering him. It was clear that she intended to make the people stand aside to let her pa.s.s, for she continued to walk in the middle of the street. But Gilbert gently drew her aside, and she suffered him to lead her to a doorway, raised two steps above the street, and darkened by an overhanging balcony.

There they stood and waited. A dense throng of grooms, archers and men- at-arms came roaring up the steep way toward them. A huge man in a dirty scarlet tunic and dusty russet hose, with soft boots that were slipping down in folds about his ankles, staggered along in front of the rest. His face was on fire with wine, his little red eyes glared dully from under swollen lids, and as he bawled his song with mouth wide open, one might have tossed an apple between his wolfish teeth. In his right hand he held an earthen jug in which there was still a little wine; with his left he brandished a banner that had been made by sewing a broad red cross upon a towel tied to one of those long wands with which farmers' boys drive geese to feed. Half dancing, half marching, and reeling at every step, he came along, followed closely by a dozen companions one degree less burly than himself, but at least quite as drunk; and each had upon his breast or shoulder the cross he had received that day. Behind them more and more, closer and closer, the others came stumbling, rolling, jostling each other, howling the chorus of the song. And every now and then the leader, swinging his banner and his wine jug, sent a shower of red drops into the faces of his followers, some of whom laughed, and some swore loudly in curses that made themselves felt through the roaring din. But loudest, highest, clearest of all, from within the heart of the drunken crowd, came one of those voices that are made to be heard in storm and battle. In a tune of its own, regardless of the singing of all the rest, it was chanting the Magnificat anima mea Dominum. Long-drawn, sustained, and of brazen quality, it calmly defied all other din, and as the crowd drew nearer Gilbert saw through the torchlight the thin white face of a very tall man in the midst, with half-closed eyes and lips that wore a look of pain as he sang--the face, the look, the voice of a man who in the madness of liquor was still a fanatic.

The hot close breath of the ribald crew went before it in the warm summer night, the torches threw a moving yellow glare upon faces red as flame, or ghastly white, and here and there the small crosses of scarlet cloth fastened to the men's tunics caught the light like splashes of fresh blood.

Eleanor drew back as far as she could under the doorway, offended in her sovereign pride and disgusted as gentlewomen are at the sight of drunkenness. By her side, Gilbert drew himself up as if protesting against a sacrilege and against the desecration of his holiest thoughts. He knew that such men would often be as riotous again before they reached Jerusalem, and that it would be absurd to expect anything else. But meanwhile he realized what a little more of disgust would be enough to make him hate what was before him. For a moment he forgot the Queen's presence at his side, and he closed his eyes so as not to see what was pa.s.sing before them.

A little angry sound, that was neither of pain nor of fear, roused him to the present. A man with a bad face and a shock head of red hair had fallen out of the march and stood unsteadily before the Queen, plucking at her mantle in the hope of seeing all her face. He seemed not to see Gilbert, and there was a wicked light in his winy eyes. The Queen drew back, and used her hands to keep her mantle and hood close about her; but the riot pressed onward and forced the man from his feet, so that he almost fell against her. Gilbert caught him by the neck with his hand; and when he had torn the cross from his shoulder, he struck him one blow that flattened his face for life. Then he threw him down into the drunken crowd, a bruised and senseless thing, as island men throw a dead horse from the cliff into the sea.

In a moment the confusion and din were ten times greater than before.

While some marched on, still yelling the tipsy chorus, others stumbled across the body of their unconscious fellow as it lay in the way; two had been struck by it as it fell, and were half stunned; others turned back to see the cause of the trouble; many were forced to the ground, impotently furious with drink, and not a few were trampled upon, and hurt, and burnt by their own torches.

Eleanor looked down upon a writhing ma.s.s of miserable human beings who were blind with wine and stupid with rage against the unknown thing that had made them fall. She shrank to Gilbert's side, almost clinging to him.