Love Among the Ruins Part 24

It was the face of the Lord Flavian of Gambrevault.

The girl stood and stared at him with unstinted astonishment.

"You," she said, "you?"

"Madame, I said that you should see my face again."

She conceived a sudden impetuous desire to turn and leave him on his knees, but some inner potency of instinct restrained her. She looked down at the man, with no kindling kindness upon her face. She did not know what to say to him, how to tune her mood. The first thought that rushed into her mind was seized upon and pressed into service, discretion or no discretion.

"Madman, they will kill you if they find you here."

"No woman ever loved a coward."

"For Heaven's sake, go away."

He rose from his knees and lifted up his frock. The girl saw harness and a sword beneath it. This young leopard of the southern sh.o.r.es had fettle enough, and spirit. He was a mixture of imperturbable determination and sanguine Quixotism, as he faced her under the trees.

"This dress is privileged; my bell warns folk away; who would fall foul of a miserable leper? If this frock fails me, I have my sword."

She looked at him with the solemnity of a child, hand folded in hand.

"I cannot understand you," she said.

"Not yet."

"Are you the man whose life I saved? That breath of death on your brow, messire, should have made you thoughtful of your soul."

"Let me plead a moment."

"For what?"

"My honour."

"Why your honour?"

"Because I want you to believe that I have a soul."

He was vastly earnest, and his eyes followed her, as though she were some being out of heaven. She had never seen such a look in a man's eyes before; it troubled her. She questioned her own heart, laughed emptily, and gave in to him.

"We are both mad," she said, "but go on. I will listen for one minute.

Keep watch lest any one should come upon us suddenly."

She sat down on the gra.s.s bank, while he stood before her, holding his lazar bell by the clapper.

"Look at this dress," he said.

"Yes?"

"It is how I feel in soul when I look at you."

She frowned visibly.

"If you wax personal, messire, I shall leave you."

"No, no, I will keep to my own carcase, and play the egotist. Well, I will be brief. Look at me, I am the first lord in the south, master of an army, one of the twelve knights of the Order of the Rose."

"Go on."

"When I was twenty years old, certain clever people found me a wife, a woman five years my senior in time, twenty years my superior in knowledge of the world. Well, six months had not pa.s.sed before I hated her, hated her with my whole soul. My G.o.d, what a thing for a boy to begin life with a woman who made him half the bounden va.s.sal of the devil!"

"You seem generous. The faults were all on her side."

"Madame, I say nothing against the woman, only that she had no soul. We were incompatible as day and night, fire and water. The thing crushed the youth out of me, made me desperate, and worse, made me old beyond my years. I have done my best. I have groped along like a man in the dark, knowing nothing, understanding nothing, save that I had a warm heart in me, and that life seemed one grim jest. The future had no fire for me; I drank the wine of the present, strove to please my senses, plunged into the abysses of the world. Sometimes I tried to pray.

Sometimes I played the cynic. The eternal beacon of love had gone out of my life. I had no sun, no inspiration for my soul."

She sprang up suddenly, breathing fast like one who is near tears.

"Why do you speak to me of this?"

"G.o.d knows."

His voice was utterly lonely.

"What am I to you? You have hardly seen me three hours in your life.

Why do you speak to me of this?"

He put a hand to his throat, and did not look at her.

"Madame, there are people who come near our hearts in one short hour, people who are winter to us to eternity. Do not ask me to explain this truth; as Christ's death, I know it to be true. I trust you. All the logicians of the world could not tell me why. I do not know that I could bring forward one single reason out of my own soul, save that you showed me great mercy once. And now--and now----"

He broke down suddenly, and could not speak. Yeoland appealed to him out of the quickness of her fear.

"Messire, messire, your promise."

"Let me speak, or I stifle."

"Go, for G.o.d's sake, go!"

He flung his hands towards her with a great outburst of pa.s.sion.

"Heaven and G.o.d's throne, you shall hear me to the end. Woman, woman, my soul flows to you as the sea ebbs to the moon; deep in the sky a new sun burns; the stars are dust, dust blown from the coffins of the dead who loved. Life leaps in me like another chaos. All my heart glows like an autumn orchard, and I burn. The world is red with a myriad roses.

G.o.d's in the heaven, Christ bleeds on quaking Calvary."

She ran to him suddenly and seized his wrist.

"GO----!"

"I cannot."