Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  When he was within the gate, Gilbert saw three broad roads before him, stretching downward from the higher land on which the city wall was built. Vast and magnificent, Constantinople lay at his feet, a rich disorder of palaces and churches and towers. On the left, the quiet waters of the Golden Horn made a broad, blue path to meet the Bosphorus in the hazy distance before him; on the right, the Sea of Marmara was dazzling white under the morning sun, where its mirror-like reflections could be seen between the towers of the sea-wall. The air was full of light and colour, and the smell of late roses and autumn fruits and the enchantment of sights altogether new took hold of the young man’s senses. Far before him and, as it seemed, near the end of the central street, a dome rose above the level of the surrounding city, raising its golden cross to the deep sky. Without hesitation Gilbert chose that road and followed it nearly a full hour before he stood at the gate of Saint Sophia’s church.

  He stood still and looked up, he had heard much of the great cathedral and had wished to see it and the treasures it contained; but now, by an impulse which he followed without attempting to understand it, instead of going in he turned on his heel and went away. He said to himself that there would be plenty of time for visiting the church, and possibly the idea of leaving the beautiful daylight for the dark aisles and chapels of an ancient cathedral was distasteful. In his change of intention there seemed not to be that little element of chance that makes a man turn to the right rather than to the left when there is no choice of ways. He went on skirting the buttresses and outbuildings and following the steep descent by the northwest side of the cathedral. Here, to his surprise, he found the life of the city going on as usual, and as yet none of the Crusaders had found their way thither. The tide of business at that hour set toward the great markets and warehouses, to the north of which one of the Emperor’s smaller palaces was built amid shady gardens that ran down to the water’s edge. Gilbert was carried along by the stream of hurrying men, who, seeing that he was a stranger and alone, jostled him with little ceremony. He had too much wit and perhaps too much self-respect, to rouse a street brawl on his own behalf, and when any one ran against him with unnecessary roughness he contented himself with stiffening his back and holding his own in passive resistance. He had reached his full strength and was a match for many little Greeks, yet the annoyance was distasteful to him, and he was glad to find himself pushed into a narrow lane between high walls and crossed by a low covered bridge; and at the end, under overhanging branches, he saw the blue light of the sea. He followed the byway down to the water, supposing that there must be some beach or open space there, where he might be alone. But, to his surprise, both walls were built out on little piers into the sea, shutting off the view on each side. Looking straight before him, he saw the trees and white houses of distant Chalcedon, within the Sea of Marmara, but Chrysopolis was hidden on the left. The lane ended in a little beach, some six feet wide, and a skiff lay there with a pair of oars, half out of water, and made fast by a chain to a ring in the masonry. A cool breeze drew in through the narrow entrance, and the clear salt water lapped the clean sand softly, and splashed under the stern and along the wales of the half-beached boat.

  Gilbert rested one hand against the wall and looked out, breathing the bright sea air with a sort of voluptuous enjoyment, and letting his thoughts wander as they would. The march had been long and full of hardships, mingled often with real bodily suffering, and those who had escaped without disease were reckoned fortunate. The war was still before them, but no imaginable combat with men could be compared with the long struggle for existence through which the Crusaders had won their way to Constantinople. It seemed as if the worst were altogether past and as if rest-time had come already.

  In the cool and shady retreat from the crowd to which Gilbert’s footsteps had led him, an Italian might have lain dreaming half the day, and an Oriental would have sat down to withdraw himself from the material tedium of life in the superior atmosphere of kef. But Gilbert was chilled to a different temper by the colder and harder life of the North, and the springs of his nature could not be so easily and wholly relaxed. In a few moments he grew restless, stood upright and began to look about him, letting his hand fall by his side from its hold on the wall. The walls were solid from end to end of the narrow lane, and not less than three times a man’s height. The stones of the masonry were damp for six or seven feet above the ground, showing that the earth was at a higher level behind them than in the lane, and the trees of which the branches overhung the way were of the sort found in Eastern gardens, a cedar of Lebanon on the one side, a sycamore on the other; and with the light breeze there came to Gilbert’s nostrils the aromatic scent of young oranges still green on the trees. It flashed upon him that the lane divided the imperial gardens and that the walls were built out into the water in order to prevent intrusion. One end of the boat’s chain was shackled to a ring-bolt in the bows, and the other was made fast to the ring in the wall by one of those rude iron padlocks which had been used in Asia since the times of Alexander. Gilbert had heard wonderful tales of the gardens at Constantinople, and he resented the idea of being so near them and yet so effectually excluded. He tried to wrench the boat’s chain from the bows, and, failing, he tried to force the lock, but the iron was solid and the lock was good; moreover, the chain was too short to allow the skiff to float to the end of the wall, if he had launched it. The idea of seeing into the garden became a determination as soon as he found that there were serious obstacles in the way, and by the time he had persuaded himself that the boat could not help him he would have readily risked life and limb for his fancy. A few moments’ reflection showed him, however, that there need be no great danger in the undertaking, for the defence had a weak point. The foundations on which the walls stood were above water by several inches and were wide enough to give him a foothold if he could only keep himself upright against the flat surface. The latter difficulty could easily be overcome by using one of the oars from the boat, and he began to attempt the passage at once, cautiously putting one foot before the other and steadying himself with the oar against the opposite wall. It did not occur to him that to get into the Emperor’s gardens by stealth might be looked upon as a serious matter. In a few moments he had reached the end and was getting back to the land on the other side.

  From the water’s edge three little terraces led up like steps to the level of the garden, where the trees grew thick and dark; and, although it was early autumn, each terrace was covered with flowers of a different hue — pink and soft yellow and pale blue. Gilbert had never seen anything made to grow in such orderly profusion, and when he reached the top by narrow steps built against the wall, he found himself treading on a fine white gravel surface on which not even a single dead leaf had been allowed to lie, and which extended some thirty yards inwards under the trees to a straight bank of moss that had a sheen like green velvet where the sun fell upon it through the parted leaves overhead. Very far away between the trunks of the trees there was the gleam of white marble walls.

  Gilbert hesitated a little, and then walked slowly forward toward the bank. As yet he had seen no trace of any living thing in the garden, but as he advanced and changed his position, he noticed a small dash of colour, like the corner of a dark blue cloak, beside the trunk of one of the larger trees. Some one was sitting on the other side, and he moved cautiously and almost noiselessly till he saw that the person was a lady, seated on the ground and absorbed in a book. He did not remember to have seen more than two or three women reading in all his life, and one of them was Queen Eleanor; another was Beatrix, who, as a lonely child in the solitude of her father’s castle, had acquired some learning from the chaplain, and delighted in spelling out the few manuscripts in her father’s possession.

  Gilbert Warde was as much a born sportsman as he was a fighter, and he had stalked the fallow-deer in Stortford woods since he had been old enough to draw an arrow’s head to his finger.

  Step by step, from tree to tre
e, with cat-like tread, he came nearer, amused by an almost boyish pleasure in his own skill. Once the lady moved, but she looked in the opposite direction, and then at last, when he was within a dozen yards of her, half-sheltered by a slender stem, she looked straight across toward him, and the light fell upon her face. He knew that she saw him, but he could not have moved from the spot if it had been to save his life, for the lady was Beatrix herself. In spite of a separation that had lasted two years, in spite of her final growth out of early girlhood, he knew that he was not mistaken, and her dark eyes were looking straight into his, telling him that she knew him, too. There was no fear in them, and she showed no surprise, but as she looked, a very lovely smile came into her sad face. He was so glad to see her that he thought little or not at all of her looks. But she was not beautiful in any common sense, and, saving the expression in her face, she could hardly have passed for pretty in the presence of Queen Eleanor and of most of her three hundred ladies. Her forehead was round and full rather than classic, and the thick dark eyebrows were somewhat rough and irregular, turning slightly upwards as they approached each other, a peculiarity which gave an almost pathetic expression to the eyes themselves; the small and by no means perfectly shaped nose was sensitively drawn at the nostrils, but had also an odd look of independence and inquiry; and the wide and shapely lips were more apt to smile with a half-humorous sadness than to part with laughter. Small and well-modelled ears were half covered by dark brown hair that had been almost black in childhood, and which fell to her shoulders in broad waves, in the fashion used by the Queen. While Gilbert looked and remained motionless, the girl rose lightly to her feet, and he saw that she was shorter than he had expected, but slight and delicately made. With one hand he could have lifted her from the ground, with two he could have held her in the air like a child. She was not the Beatrix he remembered, though he had known her instantly; she was not the solemn, black-eyed maiden of whom he sometimes dreamed; she was a being full of individual life and thought, quick, sensitive, perhaps capricious, and charming, if she could charm at all, by a spell that was quite her own.

  Half-frightened at last by his motionless attitude and his silence, she called him by name.

  “Gilbert! What is the matter?”

  He shook his broad shoulders as if waking to consciousness, and the smile in her face was reflected in his own.

  The voice, at least, had not changed, and the first tones called up the long-cherished record of childish years; for scent and sound can span the wastes of years and the deserts of separation, when sight is dull and even touch is unresponsive.

  Gilbert came forward, holding out both hands; and Beatrix took them when he was close to her, and held them in hers. The little tears had started in her eyes, that were glad as flowers at dewfall, and in her very clear, pale cheeks the colour lightened like the dawn.

  The man’s face was quiet, and his heart was in no haste, though he was so glad. He drew her toward him, as he had often done, and she seemed light and little in his hands. But when he would have kissed her cheek as in other times, she turned in his hold like a bow that is bent but not strung, and straightened herself again quickly; and something tingled in him suddenly, and he tried hard to kiss her; yet when he saw that he must hurt her, he let her go, and laughed oddly. Her blush deepened to red and then faded all at once, and she turned her face away.

  “How is it that I have never found you before now?” Gilbert asked softly. “Were you with the Queen at Vezelay? Have you been with her on all the march?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you not know that I was with the army?”

  “Yes; but I could not send you any word. She would not let me.” The girl looked round quickly in sudden apprehension. “If she should find you here, it would be ill for you,” she added, with a gesture of pushing him away.

  But he showed that he would not go away.

  “The Queen has always been kind to me,” he said. “I am not afraid.”

  Beatrix would not turn to him, and was silent. He was not timid, but words did not come easily just then; therefore, manlike, he tried to draw her to him again. But she put away his hand somewhat impatiently and shook her head, whereat he felt the tingling warmth in his blood again. Then he remembered how he had felt the same thing on that night in Vezelay, when the Queen had pressed his arm unexpectedly, and once before, when she had kissed him in the tennis-court, and he was angry with himself.

  “Come,” she said, “let us sit down and talk. There are two years between us.”

  She led the way back in the direction whence he had come, and when they had reached the bank of moss she seated herself and looked out under the trees, at the blue water. He stood still a moment as though hesitating, and then sat down beside her, but not quite close to her, as he would have done in earlier years.

  “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “there are two years between us. We must bridge them.”

  “And between what we were and what we are there is something more than time,” she answered, still looking far away.

  “Yes.”

  He was silent, and he thought of his mother, and he knew that Beatrix was thinking of her too, and of her own father. It had not occurred to him that Beatrix could resent the marriage as bitterly as he, nor that she could in any way be as great a loser by it as he was.

  “Tell me why you left England,” he said at last.

  “And you? Why did you leave your home?”

  She turned to him, and the little melancholy smile that was characteristic of her was in her face.

  “I had no home left,” he answered gravely.

  “And had I? How could I live with them? No — how could I have lived with them, knowing what I did, even had they been ever so kind?”

  “Were they unkind to you?”

  Gilbert’s deep eyes grew suddenly pale as they turned to hers, and his words came slowly and distinctly, like the first drops of a thunder shower.

  “Not at first. They came to the castle where I had been left all alone after they were married, and my father told me that I must call the Lady Goda my mother. She kissed me as if she were fond of me for his sake.”

  Gilbert started a little, and his teeth set together, while he clasped his hands over one knee and waited to hear more. Beatrix understood his look, and knew that she had unintentionally hurt him. She laid her hand softly upon his arm.

  “Forgive me,” she said. “I should not talk about it.”

  “No,” he said harshly, “go on! I feel nothing; I am past feeling there.

  They were kind to you at first, you said.”

  “Yes,” she continued, looking at him sideways. “They were kind when they remembered to be, but they often forgot. And then, it was hard to treat her with respect when I came to know how she had got your inheritance for my father, and how she had let you leave England to wander about the world. And then, last year, it seemed to me all at once that I was a woman and could not bear it any longer, for I saw that she hated me. And when a son was born to them, my father turned against me and threatened that he would send me to a nunnery. So I fled, one day when my father had ridden to Stoke and the Lady Goda was sleeping in her chamber. A groom and my handmaid helped me and went with me, for my father would have hanged them if they had stayed behind; so I took refuge with the Empress Maud at Oxford, and soon there came a letter from the Queen of France to the Empress, asking that I might be sent to the French court if I would. And something of the reason for the Queen’s wish I can guess. But not all.”

  She ceased, and for some moments Gilbert sat silent beside her, but not as if he had nothing to say. He seemed rather to be checking himself lest he should say too much.

  “So you were at Vezelay,” he said at last; “yet I sought your face everywhere, and I could not see you.”

  “How did you know?” asked Beatrix.

  “The Queen had written to me,” he answered; “so I came back from Rome.”

  “I understand,” said the
young girl, quietly.

  “What is it that you understand?”

  “I understand why she has prevented me from seeing you, when you have been near me for almost a year.”

  She checked a little sigh, and then looked out at the water again.

  “I wish I did,” Gilbert answered, with a short laugh.

  Beatrix laughed too, but in a different tone.

  “How dull you are!” she cried. Gilbert looked at her quickly, for no man likes to be told that he is dull, by any woman, old or young.

  “Am I? It seems to me that you do not put things very clearly.”