Love Among the Ruins Part 17

His voice shook, for all its sanguine strength.

"Ah, madame, tell me one thing before I go."

"Messire."

"Have I your pardon?"

"If you love life, messire, leave me."

"Have I your pardon?"

"Go! ere it is too late."

Like a ghostly retort to her appeal came the sound of armed men thundering over the bridge. Their rough voices rose in the night's silence, smitten through with the clash and clangour of arms. Fulviac had caught John of Brissac's company in the woods by Gilderoy. There had been a b.l.o.o.d.y tussle and much slaughter. Triumphant, they were at the gate with Prosper the Preacher in their midst.

The pair in the cavern stared at each other with a mute appeal.

"Fulviac," said the girl in a whisper.

"The door!"

"It is barred."

They were silent and round-eyed, as children caught in the midst of mischief. Mailed fists and pike staves were beating upon the gate. A babel of impatience welled up without.

"Adrian, Gregory!"

"Lazy curs!"

"Unbar, unbar!"

Mocking silence leered in retort. Yeoland and the Lord of Avalon were still as mice. The din slackened and waned, as though Fulviac's men were listening for sound of life within. Then came more blows upon the gate; fingers fumbled at the closed grill. The man Gregory lay and stared at the rocky roof; Adrian sat with his face pooled by his own blood.

A fiercer voice sounded above the clamour. It was Fulviac's. The girl s.h.i.+vered as she stood.

"Ho, there, Gregory, Adrian; what's amiss with ye?"

Still silence, mocking and implacable. The lull held for the moment; then the storm gathered.

"Break down the gate," roared the voice; "by G.o.d, we will see the bottom of this d.a.m.ned silence."

The Lord Flavian of Avalon had stood listening with the look of a man cooped in a cavern, who hears the sea surging to his feet. He glanced at the dead guards, and went white. To save his soul from purgatory it behoved him to act, and to act quickly. A single lamp still burnt in the oratory of hope. He went near to the girl on the dais, and held up the crossed hilt of his sword.

"By the Holy Cross, mercy!"

She cast a frightened glance into his eyes, and continued mute a moment.

The thunder grew against the gate, the crash of steel, a rending din that went echoing into all the pits and pa.s.sage-ways of the place.

Fulviac's men had dragged the trunk of a fallen pine up the causeway, and were charging the gate till the timber groaned.

The man, with his sword held like a crucifix, stood and pleaded with his eyes.

"Mercy!" he said; "you know this warren and can save me."

"Are you a craven?"

"Craven? before G.o.d, no, only desperate. What hope have I unharnessed, one sword against fifty?"

For yet another moment she appeared irresolute, dazed by the vision of Fulviac's powerful wrath. He was a stark man and a terrible, and she feared him. The timbers of the gate began to crack and gape. Flavian of Avalon lifted up his voice to her with a pa.s.sionate outburst of despair.

"G.o.d, madame, I cannot die. I am young, look at me, life is at its dawn. By your woman's mercy, hide me. Give me not back to death."

His bitter agitation smote her to the core. She looked into his eyes; they were hungry as love, and very piteous. There could be no sinning against those eyes. Great fear flooded over her like a green billow, bearing her to the inevitable. In a moment she was as hot to save him as if he had been her lover.

"Come," she said, "quick, before the gate gives."

She led him like the wind through Fulviac's parlour, and down the gallery to her own bower. It was dark and lampless. She groped to the postern, fumbled at the latch and conquered it. Night streamed in. She pushed the man out and pointed to the steps.

"The forest," she said, "for your life; bear by the stars for the north."

A full moon had reared her silver buckler in the sky. The night was sinless and superb, drowned in a mist of phosphor glory. The man knelt at her feet a moment, and pressed his lips to the hem of her gown.

"The Virgin bless you!"

"Go----"

"I shall remember."

He descended and disappeared where the trees swept up with wizard glimmerings to touch the cliff. When he had fled, Yeoland pa.s.sed back into the cavern, and met Fulviac before the splintered gate with a lie upon her lips.

PART II

XIII

Fra Balthasar rubbed his colours in the chapel of Castle Avalon, and stared complacently upon the frescoes his fingers had called into being.

A migratory friar, Fra Balthasar had come from the rich skies, the purple vineyards, the glimmering orange groves of the far south. Gossip hinted that a certain romantic indiscretion had driven him northwards over the sea. A "bend sinister" ran athwart his reputation as a priest.

Men muttered that he was an infidel, a blasphemous vagabond, versed in all the d.a.m.nable heresies of antiquity. Be that as it may, Fra Balthasar had come to Gilderoy on a white mule, with two servants at his back, an apt tongue to serve him, and much craft as a painter and goldsmith. He had set up a _bottega_ at Gilderoy, and had cozened the patronage of the magnates and the merchants. Moreover, he had netted the favour of the Lord Flavian of Avalon, and was blazoning his chapel for him with the lavish fancy of a Florentine.

Fra Balthasar stood in a cataract of sunlight, that poured in through a painted window in the west. He wore the white habit of Dominic and the long black mantle. A golden mist played about his figure as he rubbed his palette, and scanned with the egotism of the artist the _Pieta_ painted above the Lord Flavian's state stall. That gentleman, in the flesh, had established himself on a velvet ha.s.sock before the altar steps, thus flattering the friar in the part of a sympathetic patron.

The Lord of Avalon had dedicated his own person to art as an Eastern King in the splendour of Gothic arms, kneeling bare-headed before the infant Christ.

Fra Balthasar was a plump man and a comely, black of eye and full of lip. His shaven chin shone blue as sleek velvet. He had turned from the _Pieta_ towards the altar, where a triptych gleamed with ma.s.sed and brilliant colour. The Virgin, a palpitating divinity breathing stars and gems from her full bosom, gazed with a face of sensuous serenity at the infant lying in her lap. She seemed to exhale an atmosphere of gold. On either wing, angels, transcendant girls in green and silver, purple and azure, scarlet and white, made the soul swim with visions of ruddy lips and milk-white hands. Their wings gleamed like opals. They looked too frail for angels, too human for heaven.