But it would have been impossible to say what it was in the man’s form or face that made him so utterly different and distinct from other men. It was not alone the Christlike brow, nor the noble features inherited from a line of heroes; it was not the ascetic air, the look of bodily suffering, nor the fine-drawn lines of pain which, as it were, etched a shadowy background of sorrow upon which the spiritual supremacy blazed like a rising star: it was something beyond all these, above name and out of definition, the halo of saintship, the glory of genius, the crown of heroism. Of such a man, one’s eyes might be filled, and one might say, ‘Let him not speak, lest some harsh tone or imperfect speech should pierce the vision with sharp discord, as a rude and sudden sound ends a soft dream.’ Yet he was a man who, when he raised his hand to lead, led millions like children; who, when he opened his lips to speak, spoke with the tongue of men and of angels such words as none had spoken before him — words which were the truth made light; one who, when he took pen in hand to write to the world’s masters, wrote without fear or fault, as being the scribe of God, but who could pen messages of tenderest love and gentlest counsel to the broken-hearted and the heavy-laden.
Gilbert’s eyes followed the still, white glory of the monk’s face, till the procession turned in a wide sweep behind the wing of the palace, and even then the tension of his look did not relax. He was still kneeling with fixed gaze when the Queen was standing beside him. The scorn was gone from her lips and had given place to a sort of tender pity. She touched the young man’s shoulder twice before he started, looked up, and then sprang to his feet.
“Who is that man?” he asked earnestly.
“Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux,” answered the Queen, looking far away. “I almost worshipped him once, when I was a child, — it is the will of Heaven that I should lose my heart to monks!”
She laughed, as she had laughed from the window.
“Monks?” Gilbert repeated the word with curiosity. “Are you one of those persons for whom it is necessary to explain everything?” asked Eleanor, still smiling and looking at him intently. “I think you must be half a monk yourself, for I heard you singing the psalms as sweetly as any convent scholar.”
“Even if I were not half a monk, but one altogether, I should not wholly understand your Grace’s speech;” Gilbert smiled, too, for he was immeasurably far from guessing what was in her mind.
“So I have thought, in all these weeks and days while we have been together.”
Her eyes darkened as she looked at him, but his were clear and calm.
“Do you understand this?” she asked, and she laid her two hands upon his shoulders.
“What?” he asked in surprise.
“This,” she said, very softly, drawing herself near to him by her hands.
Then he knew, and he would have straightened himself, but her hands sprang to meet each other round his neck, and her face was close to his. But the vision of his own sinful mother rose in her eyes to meet him.
She held him fast, and three times she kissed him before she would let him go.
CHAPTER VIII
GILBERT HAD REACHED Paris in the train of Duke Geoffrey in September; the Christmas bells were ringing when he first caught sight of the walls and towers of Rome. As he drew rein on the crest of a low hill, the desolate brown waste of the Campagna stretched behind him mile upon mile to northward, toward the impenetrable forests of Viterbo, and Rome was at last before him. Before him rose the huge half-ruined walls of Aurelian, battered by Goth and Saracen and imperial Greek; before him towered the fortress of Hadrian’s tomb, vast, impregnable, ferocious. Here and there above the broken crenellation of the city’s battlements rose dark and slender towers, square and round, marking the places where strong robbers had fortified themselves within the city. But from the point where Gilbert halted, Rome seemed but a long brown ruin, with portions standing whole, as brown as the rest under the bright depths of vaulted blue, unflecked by the least fleece of cloud, in the matchless clearness of the winter’s morning. Profound disappointment came upon him as he looked. With little knowledge and hardly any information from others who had journeyed by the same road, he had built himself an imaginary city of unspeakable beauty, wherein graceful churches rose out of sunlit streets and fair open places planted with lordly avenues of trees. There, in his thoughts, walked companies of men with faces like the face of the great Bernard, splendid with innocence, radiant with the hope of life. Thither, in his fancy, came the true knights of the earth, purified of sin by vigils in the holy places of the East, to renew unbroken vows of chastity and charity and faith. There, in his dream, dwelt the venerable Father of Bishops, the Vicar of Christ, the successor of Peter, the Servant of the servants of God, the spotless head of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. There, in his heart, he had made the dwelling of whatsoever things are upright and just and perfect in heaven, and pure and beautiful on earth. That was the city of God, of which his soul was the architect, and in which he was to be a dweller, in peace that should pass understanding.
He had left behind him in Paris another vision and one that might well have dazzled him — such favour as falls to few; such hopes as few can plant in their lives and still fewer can rear to maturity; such love as few indeed could hope for — the love of supreme and royal beauty.
When he had ridden out of the castle on the island, older by some months, richer by such gifts as it was no shame for him to take of Duke Geoffrey and young Henry Plantagenet, he had believed himself wiser, too, by half a lifetime.
He was confident in his own strength, in his own wisdom, in his own endurance; he fancied that he had fought against a great temptation, where he had in truth been chilled and terrified by the haunting vision of another’s evil; he imagined that the little sharp regret, which stung his heart with longing for the sweetness of a sin that might have been, was the evil remnant of a passion not wholly quenched, whereas it was but the craving of a natural vanity that had not been strong enough to overcome a repugnance which he himself only half understood.
He seemed in his own eyes to have made the sacrifice of his worldly future for the sake of his knightly ideal; but in truth, to a man without ambition, the renunciation had been easy and had been made in acquiescence with his real desires, rather than in opposition to them.
And now he looked upon the city of his hope, and it crumbled to a dusty ruin under his very hand; he stood on ground made reverent by the march of history and sanctified by the blood of Christians, and it was but one great wilderness, of which he himself was the centre. His heart sank suddenly within him, and his fingers clutched at the breast of his tunic under his surcoat, as though the pain were bodily and real. Long he sat in silence, bending a little in the saddle, as if worn out with fatigue, though he had ridden only three hours since daybreak.
“Sir,” said his man Dunstan, interrupting his master’s meditations, “here is an inn, and we may find water for our horses.”
Gilbert looked up indifferently, and then, as there was no near building in sight, he turned inquiringly to his man. A sardonic smile played on Dunstan’s lean dark face as he pointed to what Gilbert had taken for three haystacks. They were, indeed, nothing but conical straw huts standing a few steps aside from the road, thirty yards down the hill. The entrance to each was low and dark, and from the one issued wreaths of blue smoke, slowly rising in the still, cold air. At the same entrance a withered bough proclaimed that wine was to be had. A ditch beyond the furthest hut was full of water, and at some distance from it a rude shed of boughs had been set up to afford the horses of travellers some shelter from winter rain or summer sun. As Gilbert looked, a man came out, bowing himself almost double to pass under the low aperture. He wore long goatskin breeches and a brown homespun tunic, like a monk’s frock, cut short above the knees, and girdled with a twisted thong. Shaggy black hair thatched his square head, and a thin black beard framed the yellow face, which had the fever-stricken look of the dwellers in the Campagna.
Besides his own men he had with him the muleteer who acted as guide and interpreter, and without whom it was impossible for a foreigner to travel in Italy. The peasant bowed to the ground, and led Gilbert to the entrance of the hut where he usually served his customers with food and drink, and in the gloom within Gilbert saw a rough-hewn table and two benches standing upon the well-swept floor of beaten earth. But the Englishman made signs that he would sit outside, and the scanty furniture was brought out into the open air. The third hut was a refuge and a sleeping-place for travellers overtaken at nightfall on their way to the city.
“The monk is asleep,” said the peasant host, lifting his finger to his lips because Gilbert’s men were talking loud near the entrance.
Gilbert understood as much as that without his interpreter; for in those days the Provencal tongue was an accomplishment of all well-born persons, and it was not unlike certain dialects of Italy.
“A monk?” repeated Gilbert, indifferently.
“He calls himself one, and he wears a grey frock,” answered the other. “But we are glad when he comes, for he brings us good fortune. And you may see that I speak the truth, since he came late in the night, and your lordship is the first guest at the huts this morning.”
“Then you know him well?”
“Every one knows him,” answered the man.
He turned, and Gilbert saw him lift up a hurdle of branches and disappear underground. His cellar was deep and cool, one of the many caverns which communicate with the catacombs and riddle the Campagna from Rome to the hills. Gilbert seated himself upon the smaller of the two benches at the end of the table; his three men took the other, and laid aside their caps out of respect for their master. The horses were tethered under the shed of boughs till they should be cool enough to be watered. The southern side of the hut was sunny and warm, and the place smelled of dry grass, of clean straw, and, faintly, of smouldering fire.
Gilbert was hardly conscious that he was thinking of anything as he stared out at the rolling waste, folding his hands together upon the hilt of his long sword. Just then a man emerged from the third hut, drew himself up facing the sun, and rubbed his eyes before he looked toward the party at the other table. When he saw them, he hesitated for a moment, and then came up to Gilbert with the apparent intention of addressing him.
Above the height of average men, the figure looked unnaturally tall by its gauntness, and the heavy folds of the grey woollen frock fell together below the breast as if they covered a shadow. Long, bony hands, that seemed woven of sinews and leather, but which were not without a certain nervous refinement, hung from loose-jointed brown wrists left bare by sleeves that were too short. The head was so roughly angular that even the thick masses of dark brown hair which fell to the shoulders could not make the angles seem like curves, and the face displayed the fervent features of a fanatic — dark, hollow cheeks, deep-sunk, blazing eyes, the vast lines of an ascetic mouth, a great jaw scarcely fringed by the scant black beard. Gilbert saw before him a face and figure that might have belonged to a hermit of Egypt, an ascetic of the Syrian desert, a John the Baptist, an Anthony of Thebes. The man wore a broad leathern girdle; a blackened rosary, with beads as large as walnuts, hung from his side and ended in a rough cross of wrought iron.
Gilbert half rose from his seat, moved to one end of the short bench, and invited the stranger to sit beside him. The monk bent his head slightly, but not a feature moved as he took the proffered place in silence. He folded his great hands on the edge of the rough-hewn board and stared at the ruinous brown city to southward.
“You are a stranger,” he said in Provencal, after a long pause and in a singularly musical voice, but without turning his eyes to Gilbert.
“I have never seen Rome before,” answered Gilbert.
“Rome!” There was a sort of almost heartbroken pity in the tone of the single syllable that fell from the lips of the wandering monk.
“You have never seen Rome before? There it lies, all that is left of it — the naked bones of the most splendid, the most beautiful, the most powerful city in the world, murdered by power, done to death by popes and emperors, by prefects and barons, sapped of life by the evil canker of empire, and left there like a dead dog in the Campagna, to be a prey to carrion beasts and a horror to living men.”
The gaunt stranger set his elbows upon the table and bit his nails savagely, while his burning eyes fixed themselves on the distant towers of Rome. Then Gilbert saw that this man was no common wandering friar, begging a meal for his frock’s sake, but one who had thoughts of his own, and with whom to think was to suffer.
“It is true,” said Gilbert, “that Rome is less fair to see than I had supposed.”
“And you are deceived of your hopes before you have entered her gate,” returned the other. “Are you the first? Are you the last? Has Rome made an end of deceiving, and found the termination of disappointment? Rome has deceived and disappointed the world. Rome has robbed the world of its wealth, and devoured it, and grown gaunt to the bone. Rome has robbed men of their bodies and of their lives, and has torn them limb from limb wantonly, as a spoiled hawk tears a pheasant and scatters the bright feathers on the ground. Rome has robbed men of their souls and has fed hell with them to its surfeit. And now, in her turn, her grasping hands have withered at the wrists, her insatiable lips are cracking upon her loosening teeth, and the mistress of the world is the sport of Jews and usurers.”
“You speak bitterly,” said Gilbert, looking curiously at his new acquaintance.
The monk sighed, and his eyes softened wonderfully as he turned to the young man. He had been speaking in a tone that slowly rose to shrillness, like a cry of bodily pain. When he spoke again his voice was low and sweet.
“Bitterly, but for her sake, not for mine,” he said. “If I have given my life for her, she will not give me hers. Though I have laid at her feet all that I had, she shall put nothing into my hand nor give me anything but a ditch and a handful of earth for my bones, unless some emperor or pope shall leave them upon a gallows. But I have asked of her, for herself and her own sake, that she should do by herself honourably, and draw her neck from the yoke and shake off the burdens under which she has stumbled and fallen. I have asked of her to stand upright again, to refuse to eat from the hand that has wounded her, and not to hearken to the voice of violence and cursing. I have asked that Rome should cast out the Stranger Emperor, and cast down the churchman from the king’s throne, and take from him the king’s mask. I have asked Rome to face her high robbers whom she calls barons, her corruption, her secret weakness, as a brave man faces his sins and confesses them and steadfastly purposes to offend God no more, All this I have asked, and in part she has heard; and I have paid the price of my asking, for I am an outcast of many kingdoms and a man excommunicated under the Major Interdiction.”
A gentle smile, that might have been half indifference, half pity, wreathed the ascetic lips as he spoke the last words. They were not empty words in those days, and unawares Gilbert shrank a little from his companion.
“I see that you are a devout person,” said the friar, quietly. “Let my presence not offend you at your meal. I go my way.”
But as he began to rise, Gilbert’s hand went out, and his fingers met round the skeleton arm in the loose grey sleeve.
“Stay, sir,” he said, “and break your fast with us. I am not such a one as you think.”
“You shrank from me,” said the stranger, hesitating to resume his seat.
“I meant no discourtesy,” answered Gilbert. “Be seated, sir. You call yourself an outcast. I am but little better than a wanderer, disinherited of his own.”
“And come you hither for the Pope’s justice?” asked the friar, scornfully. “There is no Pope in Rome. Our last was killed at the
head of a band of fighting men, on the slope of the Capitol, last year, and he who is Pope now is as much a wanderer as you and I. And in Rome we have a Republic and a Senate, and justice of a kind, but only for Romans, and claiming no dominion over mankind; for to be free means to set free, to live means to let live.”
“I shall see what this freedom of yours is like,” said Gilbert, thoughtfully. “For my part I am not used to such thoughts, and though I have read some history of Rome, I could never understand the Roman Republic. With us the strongest is master by natural law. Why should the strong man share with the weak what he may keep for himself? Or if he must, in your ideal, then why should not the strong nation share her strength and wealth with her weak neighbour? Is it not enough that the strong should not wantonly bruise the weak nor deal unfairly by him? The Normans can see no more harm or injustice in holding than we see in taking what we can; and so we shall never understand your republics and your senates.”
“Are you a Norman, sir?” asked the friar. “Are you a kinsman of Guiscard and of them that last burnt Rome? I do not wonder that the civilization of a republic should seem strange to you!”
Gilbert was listening, but his eyes had wandered from the friar’s face in the direction of the dusty road that led to Rome, and between his companion’s words his quick ear had caught the sound of hoofs, although no horses were yet in sight but his own. Just as the friar ceased speaking, however, a troop of seven riders appeared at the turn of the road. They were rough-looking men in long brown cloaks that were in tatters at the edge; they wore round caps of mail on their heads, with a broad leathern strap under the chin; their faces were dark, their beards black and unkempt, and they rode small, ragged horses, as ill cared for as themselves.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 928