Love Among the Ruins Part 16

Stairway, bower, and gallery were behind her. She stood in Fulviac's parlour, where the lamp burnt dimly, and harness glimmered on the walls.

The door of the room stood ajar. She stole to it, and peered through the crack left by the clumsy hingeing, into the lights and shadows of the room beyond.

At the lower end of a long table the two guards sat dicing, sprawling greedily over the board, the l.u.s.t of hazard writ large in their looks.

The dice kept up a continuous patter, punctuated by the intent growls of the gamesters. By the sloping wall of the cavern, palleted on a pile of dirty straw, lay the Lord Flavian of Gambrevault, with his hands shackled to a staple in the rock. He lay stretched on his side, with his back turned towards the light, so that his face was invisible to the girl behind the door.

She watched the man awhile with a curious and dark-eyed earnestness.

There was pathos in the prostrate figure, as though Hezekiah-like the man had turned to the bare rock and the callous comfort despair could give. Once she imagined that she saw a jerking of the shoulders, that hinted at something very womanish. The thought smote new pity into her, and sent her away from the cranny, trembling.

Yeoland withdrew into Fulviac's room, and thence into the murk of the gallery leading to her bower. A sudden sense of impotence had flooded into her heart; she even yearned for some shock of Fate that might break the very bonds that bound her to her vengeance, as to a corpse. On the threshold of her room, a sudden sound brought her to a halt like a hand thrust out of the dark to clutch her throat. She stood listening, like a miser for thieves, and heard much.

A curse came from the guard-room, the crash of an overturned bench, the tingling kiss of steel. She heard the scream as of one stabbed, a smothered uproar, an indiscriminate scuffling, then----silence. She stood a moment in the dark, listening. The silence was heavy and implacable as the rock above. Fear seized her, a l.u.s.t to know the worst. She ran down the gallery into Fulviac's room. The door was still ajar; she thrust it open and entered the great cavern.

Her doubts elapsed in an instant. At the long table, a man sat with his head pillowed on his arms. A red rivulet curled away over the board, winding amid the drinking horns, isleting the dice in its course. On the floor lay the second guard, a smudge of crimson oozing from his grey doublet, his arms rigid, his hands clawing in the death-agony. At the end of the table stood the Lord Flavian of Gambrevault, free.

Three cubits of steel had tangled the plot vastly in the pa.s.sing of a minute. The climax was like a knot of silk thrust through with a sword.

The two stood motionless a moment, staring at each other across the length of the table, like a couple of mutes over a grave. The man was the first to break the silence.

"Madame," he said, with a certain grand air, and a flippant gesture, "suffer me to condone with you over the lamentable tricks of Fortune.

But for gross selfishness on my part, I should still be chastening myself for the unjust balancing of our feud. G.o.d wills it, seemingly, that I should continue to be your debtor."

Despite her woman's wit, the girl was wholly puzzled how to answer him.

She was wickedly conscious in her heart of a subtle grat.i.tude to Heaven for the sudden baulking of her malice. The man expected wrath from her, perhaps an outburst of pa.s.sion. Taking duplicity to her soul, she stood forward on the dais and tilted her chin at him with dutiful defiance.

"Thank my irresolution, messire," she said, "for this reprieve of fortune."

He came two steps nearer, as though not unminded to talk with her in open field.

"At dawn I might have had you slain," she continued, with some hastening of her tongue; "I confess to having pitied you a little. You are young, a mere boy, weak and powerless. I gave you life for a day."

The man reddened slightly, glanced at the dead men, and screwed his mouth into a dry smile.

"Most harmless, as you see, madame," he said. "For your magnanimity, I thank you. _Deo gratias_, I will be as grateful as I may."

She stood considering him out of her dark, long-lashed eyes. The man was good to look upon, ruddy and clean of lip, with eyes that stared straight to the truth, and a pose of the head that prophesied spirit.

The sunlight of youth played sanguine upon his face; yet there was also a certain shadow there, as of premature wisdom, born of pain. There were faint lines about the mouth and eyes. For all its sleek and ruddy comeliness, it was not the face of a boy.

"Messire," she said to him at last.

"Madame."

"He who lurks over long in the wolf's den may meet the dam at the door."

He smiled at her, a frank flash of sympathy that was not devoid of grat.i.tude.

"Haste would be graceless," he said to her.

"How so?" she asked him.

"Ha, Madame Yeoland, have I not watched my arms at night before the high altar at Avalon? Have I not sworn to serve women, to keep troth, and to love G.o.d? You judge me hardly if you think of me as a butcher and a murderer. For the death of your kinsfolk I hold myself ashamed."

There was a fine light upon his face, a power of truth in his voice that was not hypocritic. The girl stared him over with a certain critical earnestness that boasted a gleam of approval.

"Fair words," she said to him; "you did not speak thus to me last eve."

"Ah!" he cried, beaming on her, "I was cold as a corpse; nor could I whine, for pride."

"And your shackles?"

He laughed and held up both hands; the wrists were chafed and b.l.o.o.d.y.

"It was ever a jest against me," he said, "that I had the hands of a woman, white and meagre, yet strong with the sword. Your fellows thrust a pair of wristlets on me fit for a Goliath, strong, but bulky. My hands have proved my salvation. I pulled them through while the guards diced, crept for a sword, gained it, and my freedom."

She nodded, and was not markedly dismal, though the wind had veered against her cause. The man with the grey eyes was a being one could not quarrel with with easy sincerity. Probably it did not strike her at the moment that this friendly argument with the man she had plotted to slay was a contradiction worthy of a woman.

The Lord of Avalon meanwhile had drawn still nearer to the girl upon the dais. His grey eyes had taken a warmer l.u.s.tre into their depths, as though her beauty had kindled something akin to awe in his heart. He set the point of the sword on the floor, his hands on the hilt, and looked up at the white face medallioned in the black splendour of its hair.

"Madame," he said very gravely, "it is the way of the world to feel remorse when such an emotion is expedient, and to fling penitence into the bottomless pit when the peril is past. I shall prove to you that mine is no such April penitence. Here, on the cross of my sword, I swear to you a great oath. First, that I will build a chapel in Cambremont glade, and establish a priest there. Secondly, I will rebuild the tower, refit it royally, attach to it cottars and borderers from mine own lands. Lastly, ma.s.s shall be said and tapers burnt for your kinsfolk in every church in the south. I myself will do such penance as the Lord Bishop shall ordain for my soul."

The man was hotly in earnest over the vow--red as a ruby set in the sun.

Yeoland looked down upon him with the glimmer of a smile upon her lips as he kissed the cross of the sword.

"You seem honest," she said to him.

"Madame, on this sword I swear it. It is hard to believe any good of an enemy. Behold me then before you as a friend. There is a feud betwixt us, not of my willing. By G.o.d's light I am eager to bridge the gulf and to be at peace."

She shook her head and looked at him with a sudden mysterious sadness.

Such a pardon was beyond belief, the man's pure ardour, nothing but seed cast upon sand. Fulviac, a tower of steel, seemed to loom beyond him--an iron figure of Fate, grim and terrible.

"This can never be," she said.

His eyes were honestly sorrowful.

"Is madame so implacable?"

"Ah!" she said, "you do not understand me."

He stood a moment in thought, as though casting about in his heart for the reason of her sternness. Despite her wrongs, he was a.s.sured by some spirit voice that it was not death that stalked betwixt them like an angel of doom. As he stood and brooded, a gleam of the truth flashed in upon his brain. He went some steps back from her, as though destiny decreed it that they should sever unabsolved.

"Your pardon, madame," he said to her; "the riddle is plain to me. I no longer grope into the dark. This man, here, is your husband."

She went red as a rose blus.h.i.+ng on her green throne at the coming of the dawn.

"Messire."

"Your pardon."

"Ah, I am no wife," she said to him. "G.o.d knows but for this man I should be friendless and without home. He has spread honour and chivalry before my feet like a snow-white cloak. Even in this, my G.o.dless vengeance, he has served me."

The man strode suddenly towards the dais, with his face turned up to hers. A strange light played upon it, half of pa.s.sion, half of pity.