Masters of the Guild Part 6

Eleanor knew that story. It gave her a feeling of enormous admiration and awe when she thought of it, but love--for a grandmother who had commanded a garrison, on scanty rations, besieged by fierce and bloodthirsty pirates--seemed a little out of place.

It was certainly far pleasanter, having Roger for a playmate. Eleanor thought it was better than having a sister. He taught her to run, to fish, to play bowls, nine-men-morris, and draughts. The dismal stone hall was not half so grim with Roger in her corner.

These diversions did not, however, interrupt the daily lessons, the task in spinning, or the newly-begun tapestry. To her great satisfaction Eleanor found that Roger liked the tapestry chamber nearly or quite as well as she did. When he saw Eleanor's tapestry he persuaded Sir Hugh l'Estrange to spend a rainy morning in making sketches for it.

"Father has been to Egypt and the other places," he explained, "and knows just how they look. You never saw a dragon, though, father?" he added doubtfully.

"Not exactly, but I have seen a beast rather like one," laughed the knight, and he drew a very fair picture of a crocodile, adding wings and a fiery breath and fearsome talons by way of establis.h.i.+ng its dragons.h.i.+p. "I have seen the place where they say the monster was killed. And did you know that Saint George is said to have helped the Allies under G.o.dfrey in the First Crusade, at the battle for Jerusalem?" While the children looked on in fascinated wonder, he sketched in a battle-scene--rather cramped for s.p.a.ce because of the narrow linen web--showing G.o.dfrey de Bouillon cheering on his knights, the saint on his great white horse leading the charge, and the banner of the Cross rising above the host. From the tapestried walls Sainte Genevieve and her people looked on with kindly interest at the little group.

When the two fathers had gone away life settled into a quiet but pleasant order. Roger shared some of Eleanor's lessons, and when she was at her spinning or needlework he was often by, with a bow to shape, a spear to polish or some other in-door work to do, while they listened to Lady Philippa's stories. To him nearly all of them were new.

As the spring advanced the three spent much time in the garden. A drain was needed in one place, and Roger retrieved a spade from the gardener's quarters and went at it. He had heard Lady Philippa say that she should like to have a "mount" there--an artificial hill made of packed earth and stones--and as he dug he threw the dirt inward and tramped it down. He explained that this was the way a castle mount was made if the hill selected was not high enough. The one at Lewes that William de Warenne had made was a hundred and fifty feet high.

Eleanor caught the enthusiasm, brought stones and helped tread them down with her stout little leather shoes, and old Jehan's grandson with his sabots helped also.

"Wouldn't it be beautiful if we could build a castle on the top?" Eleanor suggested as they stood looking at it.

"Perhaps we can--if your mother is willing. Ask her if we may have all the stones we pick out of the garden--if we don't harm the plants--will you, Eleanor?"

Eleanor climbed the winding stairs to the tapestry chamber, and came flying back with the glad permission. Then the small building force went to work in deep earnest.

"I know exactly how to build it, for I saw the building of our castle from the very first," Roger explained.

"We lived in a tent all summer until it was done--part of it--so that we could have a room. First they dig a ditch, just like this one, around the mount, and they make a palisade of forest trees--whole trunks set close together--to keep off enemies. When they have time to build a stone wall, of course the wooden wall is taken down.

"Now here, on the most solid side of the mount, is the place for the keep.

We use the biggest stones for that. The bottom storey of father's keep is partly cut right out of the rock, and the walls are twenty-five or thirty feet thick. n.o.body can knock down that wall with a battering-ram! Here we'll make a great arched door, so that the knights can ride right in without dismounting when they're hard pressed by the enemy. Here's the drawbridge--" Roger hastily whittled off a piece of bark--"and this line I've scratched inside the outer wall is for the wall round the inner bailey. We'll have a watch-tower here--and here--and here. Father says that a good builder places his towers so that each one protects one or two others, and in the end every one is protected.

"In the storey above will be the great hall. These walls don't need to be so thick--not more than eighteen feet. Here on this side we'll cut a little room out of the thickness of the wall, for the private chamber of my lord and lady--"

"The tapestry chamber!" cried Eleanor.

"Yes," Roger went on, "and here on the other side we have the well- chamber. There's a stone bason with a shaft that goes away down to the well in the lowest part of the castle, and the defenders can always get water by lowering a bucket when they're besieged. Up above is another storey for a guard-room, and a flat roof with battlements around it, where the sentinels can see for miles and miles across the country."

The two children gazed at their castle mount and almost believed the walls, eighteen, twenty, thirty feet thick--rising before their eyes.

"But that isn't all of the castle," said Eleanor at last.

"No; we'll build more towers after awhile, and have a banquet hall to entertain the King. And the soldiers and people will live in tents and wattled huts until the stonework is done. But the keep is the first thing to build, because, you see, you have to defend yourself from enemies no matter when they come."

Lady Philippa's garden was cleared of stones in a much shorter time than she had expected. But to build a stone wall simply by laying one stone upon another is less easy than it seems. Roger had done something of the sort before, but he had had fragments of stone from the masons' work instead of water-washed pebbles. And when the keep was actually built as high as the first floor above the foundation, a heavy rain came, streams tore out one side of the mount, and the stone-work tumbled into a hopeless ruin.

In the crystal brilliance of the morning after the storm Roger surveyed it ruefully. "Father says," he recalled, "that everything depends on the foundations. We'll do it over again and make the mount more solid."

"And when it is done," said Eleanor, never losing faith, "I'll beg some linen of mother and make tapestry for the walls of the little room and the great hall."

But the stones would not stay in place. Roger tried plastering them with mud, then with clay. Neither would hold when dry. Then he saw a workman repairing part of the garden wall, and in an evil moment borrowed some of the mortar while the man was gone to his dinner. He had just set it down near the mount when Collet came to call the children to their own dinner.

The bucket remained there, and Lady Ebba's old gray cat, chasing a hound she had discovered near the hole where her kittens were secreted, bounced off a wall and fell into the mortar--fortunately hind feet foremost. The indignant Jehan came searching for his bucket and kicked the pile of stones in all directions, Lady Ebba made stern inquiry into the misfortune which had come to her cat, and wall-building was abandoned.

For a week or more, Roger gardened, fished and practiced archery in a somewhat subdued fas.h.i.+on. Lady Philippa, watching Eleanor's brown head and the boy's tousled tow-colored mop, as they consulted over a boat Roger was making, smiled and sighed. She wished that Alazais were there to see them play together.

Not long after the disastrous building incident Sir Walter appeared one day with surprising news indeed. Sir Stephen Giffard, the elder brother, was about to marry and come to live in the old Norman chateau. The new chatelaine was a rich widow of Louvain. Sir Stephen and Lady Adelicia would be the lord and lady of the castle, and would have the tapestry chamber.

"Oh, moth-er!" cried Eleanor piteously. No other room in the castle would ever be so pleasant. She could not understand her mother's untroubled acceptance of the change.

"But my dear child," Lady Philippa went on, "we shall not be here; we are going away. King Henry has given your father a great estate in a wild country in the west of England, and he is building a castle for our home.

You will be an English maiden, sweetheart, and have your tapestry of Saint George for your very own room."

Eleanor's eyes were starlike. Then her mouth began to droop a little. "Is Roger to stay here?"

"Roger will be with us. His father's castle is only a few leagues from ours, and he is going to leave Roger at our home for a year or more while he is away."

This made it quite perfect. Roger rejoiced openly at the prospect of going back to England. In stray moments Eleanor wondered a little how Lady Ebba liked it. She rather doubted whether Lady Adelicia would be as content there as her mother.

When they rode away from the old Norman gateway for the last time Eleanor laughed gleefully: "I don't care where we go, mother," she whispered, "we've the roots and seeds from your garden, and we shall have a tapestry chamber!"

THE CASTLE

O the Castle of Heart's Delight!

The winds of the sunrise know it, And the music adrift in its airy halls, To the end of the world they blow it-- Music of glad hearts keeping time To bells that ring in a crystal chime With the cadence light of an ancient rime-- Such music lives on the winds of night That blow from the Castle of Heart's Delight!

O the Castle of Heart's Delight Where you and I go faring-- Heritage dear of love and toil, Guerdon of faith and daring.

For all may win to the ancient gate, Though some are early and some are late, And each hath borne with his hidden Fate,-- For never a man but hath his right To enter his Castle of Heart's Delight!

VI

THE FAIRIES' WELL

What a beautiful place this is," Lady Philippa said softly. She was standing with her husband near the great stone keep, looking out across a half-built wall at the hills and valleys of his wilderness domain. It was one of those mornings of early summer when the air is cool yet bright with suns.h.i.+ne, and the unfolding beauty of the world has something of heaven in it. Birds were singing everywhere, and the green of new leaves clothed the land in elvish loveliness. "Your England is very fair, Gualtier."

"It is good that you find it so, love," answered the knight. He had had misgivings a-plenty in bringing his gently-bred Provencal wife to this rough country. Often he had to be absent from dawn to moonrise, riding on some perilous expedition. He and his little force of men-at-arms and yeomen were doing police work on the Welsh border, and no one ever knew just when the turbulent chiefs of those mountains would attempt a raid.

Lady Philippa never complained. She ruled her household as he ruled his lands, wisely and well. She called her husband Gualtier instead of Walter, because he liked it, and sang to her lute the canzons and retronsas of her country, but she seemed to love his England as he did. She talked to the woodcutters' wives and the village women and farm people as if she had played in childhood about their doors. In fact the knight had a shrewd notion that if he had been a bachelor the taming of his half-British, half-Saxon peasantry would have been far less easy.

He had not wished to dominate and overawe the people, but to win them to true loyalty. He had known exactly what he wanted when he selected the place for his castle, and a man who knows his own mind can usually find men to do his work.

A castle in that place and time was a little town in itself, and it must be able to exist by itself when necessary, without markets or factories or outside help of any kind. Like most Normans the knight was a born builder, and had taken care to make his castle as proof against attack, and as scientifically built, as castle could be. Each landowner had to be his own architect. Certain general rules were followed, of course. The keep, the fosse, the inner and outer bailey, the general construction, were much the same in all fortresses of Normandy or Norman Britain. But no two sites were alike, and the work had to be planned not only according to the shape of the hill but with reference to the material to be had, the amount and quality of labor at hand, and the climate. This castle was on a hill not high originally, but made some fifty feet higher by heaping up earth and stone to bring the whole top somewhere near the level of the huge rock on which the keep was built. On that side the river flowed almost under the precipitous western face of the mount, so that a stone could be dropped from the battlements into the water. The young page, Roger, thought he could fish from his window if he could get a line long enough. The keep was still the living-place of the family, but the double line of stone wall encircling the mount was finished, and at exposed points small watch- towers were placed, known as the mill-tower, the armorer's tower, the smith's tower or the salt-tower, according to their use. If the castle should be attacked each one of these outworks would be the post of a small garrison and stubbornly defended, while the keep could be held almost indefinitely. The deep cellars would hold grain and salt meat enough for months, and there was a spring within the walls. Even the narrow windows were so shaped that an arrow aimed at one of them would almost certainly strike the cunningly-sloped side and rebound, instead of entering the building. The gate was of ma.s.sive timbers held together by heavy iron hinges and studded with nails, and above it was a projecting stone gallery connecting the two gateway towers. This gallery was machicolated, or built with a series of openings in the floor, through which the defenders could shoot arrows upon the besiegers, or pour boiling pitch down upon them.

This was a Saracen contrivance, and had been suggested and supervised by Sir Hugh l'Estrange, who had seen the like in Spain.

There was one place where all plans had gone wrong, and that was a part of the wall near the keep, almost under the windows of the well-chamber. It had been built three times, and always, before it was done, the stones would begin to slip and sink. Yesterday a section of wall had gone clean over into the river and carried a mason with it. Fortunately he could swim, and though n.o.body thought he would come out alive, he had scrambled up the bank very cold, somewhat bruised, and sputtering like a wet cat.

That brought the matter to a crisis. There were uneasy whispers of a curse on the mount, a tradition that no castle built there would ever be finished, an old custom of sacrificing some human being to be buried under the foundation of a castle for the pacifying of the ancient G.o.ds. And all of this uncanny terror was somehow connected with a hill some distance away toward the forest-clad mountains, where a low brown-tiled cottage crouched like a toad, under a poplar whose leaves were ever twinkling in the sun.