Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  She kissed him on the forehead, and leapt from her seat in horror, for there was another voice in the room, with a hurt cry.

  “Oh, Gilbert! Gilbert!”

  Beatrix was reeling on her feet, and caught the curtain, lest she fall, and her face of agony was still turned toward the two, as they stood together. Gilbert sprang forward, when he understood, and caught the girl in his arms and brought her to the light, trembling like a falling leaf. Then she started in his arms and struggled wildly to be free, and twisted her neck lest he should kiss her; but he held her fast.

  “Beatrix! You do not understand — you did not hear!” He tried to make her listen to him.

  “I heard!” she cried, still struggling. “I saw! I know! Let me go — oh, for God’s sake, let me go!”

  Gilbert’s arms relaxed, and she sprang back from him two paces, and faced the Queen.

  “You have won!” she cried, in a breaking voice. “You have him body and soul, as you swore you would! But do not say that I have not understood!”

  “I have given him to you, soul and body,” answered Eleanor, sadly.

  “Might I not even bid him good-by, as a friend might?”

  “You are false — falser each than the other,” answered Beatrix, in white anger. “You have played with me, tricked me, made me your toy—”

  “Did you hear this man say that he did not love me, before I bade him good-by?” asked Eleanor, gravely, almost sternly.

  “He has said it to me, but not to you, never to you — never to the woman he loves!”

  “I never loved the Queen,” said Gilbert. “On my soul — on the Holy

  Cross—”

  “Never loved her? And you saved her life before mine—”

  “And you said that I did well—”

  “It was all a lie — a cruel lie—” The girl’s voice almost broke, but she choked down the terrible tears, and got words again. “It would have been braver to have told me long ago — I should not have died then, for I loved you less.”

  Eleanor came a step nearer and spoke very quietly and kindly.

  “You are wrong,” she said. “Sir Gilbert is sent by the King to take me as a prisoner, that I may be carried away to Jerusalem this very night. Come, you shall hear the voices of the soldiers who are waiting for me.”

  She led Beatrix to the door and lifted the curtain, so that through the wooden panels the girl could hear the talking of many voices, and the clank of steel. Then Eleanor brought her back.

  “But he would not take me,” she said, “and he warned me of my danger.”

  “No wonder — he loves you!”

  “He does not love me, though I love him, and he has said so to-night.

  And I know that he loves you and is faithful to you—”

  Beatrix laughed wildly.

  “Faithful! He? There is no faith in his greatest oath, nor in his smallest word!”

  “You are mad, child; he never lied in all his life to me or you — he could not lie.”

  “Then he has deceived you, too — Queen, Duchess; you are only a woman, after all, and he has made sport of you, as he has of me!” Again she laughed, half furiously.

  “If he has deceived me he has indeed deceived you,” answered Eleanor, “for he has told me very plainly that he loves you. And now I will not stand between you and him, even in the mistake you made. I love him, yes. I have loved him enough to give him up, because he loves you. I love him so well that I will not take his warning and save myself from the King’s anger, and I know not what he and his monks will do to me. Good-by, Sir Gilbert Warde — Beatrix, good-by.”

  “This is some comedy,” answered the girl, exasperated.

  “No — by the living truth, it is no comedy,” answered the Queen.

  She looked once more into Gilbert’s face, and then turned away, stately and sad. With one movement she drew aside the great curtain, and with the next she opened wide the door, and the loud clamour of the knights and men-at-arms came in like a wave. Then it ceased suddenly, as Eleanor spoke to them in clear tones.

  “I am the King’s prisoner. Take me to him!”

  There was silence for a moment, and then the Gascons who had fought with the King and his men cried out fiercely.

  “We will not let you go! We will not let our Duchess go!”

  They feared some evil for her, and were loyal men to her, hating the King. But Eleanor raised her hand to motion them back, for their faces were fierce, and their hands were on their swords.

  “Make way for me, if you will not take me to him,” she said proudly.

  Then Sanzay, her kinsman, stepped before the rest, and spoke.

  “Madam,” he said, “the Duchess of Gascony cannot be prisoner to the

  King of France, while there are Gascons. If your Grace will go to the

  King, we will go also, and we shall see who is to be a prisoner.”

  At this there was a great shout that rang up to the vault of the lofty vestibule, and down the stone steps and out into the courtyard. Eleanor smiled serenely, for she knew her men.

  “Go with me, then,” she said, “and see that no bodily harm comes to me.

  But in this matter I shall do the King’s will.”

  In the room behind, the words echoed clearly, and Beatrix turned to

  Gilbert.

  “You see,” she said, “it is but a play that you have thought of between you, and nothing more.”

  “Can you not believe us?” he asked reproachfully.

  “I shall believe you when I know that you love me,” she answered, and turned away, towards the door of the inner apartments.

  Gilbert followed her.

  “Beatrix!” he cried. “Beatrix! Hear me!”

  She turned once more, with a face like stone.

  “I have heard you, I have heard her, and I do not believe you,” she answered.

  Without another word she left him and went out. He stood looking after her for a moment, while his calm face darkened slowly; and his anger was slow and lasting, as the heating of a furnace for the smelting. He stooped and picked up his cap, which had fallen to the floor, and then he, too, followed the Queen, through the vestibule and stairs and courtyard, to the King’s presence.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  THAT NIGHT THEY left hastily and went down to the sea with torches; but it was dawn when they were on board one of the great ships, and the hawsers were cast off, and the crew began to heave up the anchor. In his anger, Gilbert had called his men, and had gone on board also, and many hours passed before he realized what he had done. Then he began to torment himself.

  His angry manhood told him that he was just and that he should not bear a girl’s unbelief when he was manifestly in the right; and his love answered that he had left Beatrix without protection and perhaps at the mercy of her father, since he might come by sea at any moment and claim her from Count Raymond, who would give her up without opposition. He wondered also why Sir Arnold had not appeared, and whether, having sailed from Ephesus, he had been shipwrecked. But his thoughts soon turned back to his work, and he sat on the low rail by the main-rigging, looking down at the blue water as the ship ran smoothly along. What was there in Beatrix to hold him, after all? It was nothing but a boyish memory, revived by a mistaken idea of faith.

  But suddenly he felt within him the aching hollow and the grinding hunger of heart that the loved woman leaves behind her, and he knew well that his anger was playing a comedy with him, as Beatrix had accused him and the Queen of playing a play in the past night.

  It was hard that she should not have believed him; and yet when one has seen and heard, it is harder still to believe against sight and hearing. If she had loved him, he said to himself, she could not have doubted him. He would never have doubted her, no matter what he might have seen her do. But at this he began to realize and understand; for in order to persuade himself, he pictured her sitting as the Queen had sat, and a man bending over her and kissing her and calling her the love of his
life and heart, and he felt another sort of anger rising fiercely in him, because the imagined sight was vivid and bad to see. Thereupon he grew calmer, seeing that she was not wholly wrong, and he began to curse his evil fate and to wish that he had not followed the Queen, but had stayed behind at Antioch.

  But it was too late now, for Antioch was gone in the purple distance, and it was towards evening.

  The day dawned again, and darkened, and days after that, while he perpetually blamed himself more and more and began to find a fault in every doing of his life, and the gloom of the northern temper settled upon him and oppressed him heavily, so that his companions wondered what had happened to him.

  During all that time the Queen never showed herself, but remained in her cabin with the Lady Anne, who had come with her and would not be denied. For Eleanor hated to see the King, and she was afraid to see Gilbert, whom she knew to be in the ship’s company, and she was very sad, also, and cared not for the daylight nor for men’s voices. It made it worse that she had tried to sacrifice herself for the woman Gilbert loved, since it had been in vain, and she had not been believed, and since he had after all come with her, she knew not why. As for the King, he sat all day long on the quarter-deck under an awning, telling beads, and praying fervently that the presence of the woman of Belial might not distract his thoughts when he should at last come to the holy places; for before anything else he considered his own soul as of great importance.

  So they came to Ptolemais, which some called Acre, and they rode a weary way to Jerusalem, till the young King Baldwin of Jerusalem, the third of that name, came out to meet them with a very rich train. Then Gilbert lagged behind, for he had no heart in any rejoicing or feasting, seeing that he should not have been there at all, and had left Beatrix in anger. But Eleanor had come out of the ship to the shore, more beautiful than ever, and serenely scornful of the King, since he had not even dared to use the power she had put into his hands, in order to tell her his mind, and speak out his reproaches; and he was more ridiculous than ever in her eyes. From that time she paid no more attention to him than if he had not existed, for she despised a man who would not use the power he had.

  As for Gilbert, though he was in such melancholy mood, when he saw the walls and towers of Jerusalem at last, a hope of peace sprang up in him, and a certainty of satisfaction not like anything which he had known before; and it seemed to him that if he could but be alone in the holy places he should find rest for his soul. Therefore he rode in the rear of the train, though he was a man of consequence, and many young knights and squires looked up to him and kept him company, so that he could not escape altogether to an outward solitude.

  His eyes looked up before him, and he saw the holiest city in the world, like a vision against the pale sky, as the day sank; and his whole being went out to be there, floating before him in a prayer learnt long ago. Therein, as when he had been a child in his English home, he heard the voice of a guardian angel praying with him — praying for the good against the evil, for the light against the darkness, for the clean against the unclean, for the good self against the bad; and his heart made echoes in heaven.

  He heard not the sounds that came back from the royal train, the high talking and glad laughter; for that would have jarred on him and set his teeth on edge, and he had shut the doors of the body upon himself to be alone within. It mattered not that young Baldwin was riding by the Queen, already half in love, and making soft speeches within sight of the hill whereon Christ died, nor that he took a boy’s mischievous pleasure in interrupting the King’s droning litany, recited in verse and response with the priest at his side; nor that some of the knights were chattering of what lodging they should find, and the young squires, in undertones, of black-eyed Jewish girls, and the grooms of Syrian wine. They were as nothing, all these, as nothing but the shadows of the world cast by its own ancient evil at the foot of the Cross, and he only was real and alive, and the Cross only was true and high in the pure light.

  And in this he was not quite dreaming, for the train that rode up from Acre was not all of those true Crusaders of whom many had been with the army, both rich and poor, but of whom the rich had stayed behind in Antioch and the poor had perished miserably by the swords of the Seljuks or by the wiles of the Greeks, when they had tried to come on by land; and many of them had been sold into slavery, and not one reached Jerusalem alive, out of so many thousands. Of the forty or fifty who were first in sight of the City, scarcely three were in heartfelt earnest, and they were the Lady Anne of Auch, and Gilbert Warde, and the King himself. But with the King all faith took a material shape, which was his own, and the buying of his own salvation had turned his soul into a place of spiritual usury.

  The Lady Anne was calm and silent, and when young Baldwin spoke to her she hardly heard him, and answered in few words, little to the point. She had trusted that she might never see Jerusalem, for she had hoped to die of wound or sickness by the way, and so end in heaven, with him she had lost, the pilgrimage begun on earth. For she was a most faithful woman, and of the most faithful there is often least to tell, because they have but one thought, one hope, one prayer. And seeing that she had come through alive, she neither rejoiced nor complained, knowing that there was more to bear before the end, and trusting to bear it all bravely for the dear sake of her dead love. It may be, also, that she was the most earnest of all those who had taken the Cross, because all earthly things that had made her life happy had been taken from her.

  Yet of all men, Gilbert Warde had fought best and most, and in so far as bodily peril was counted, none had lived through so much as he; for many of his companions had been killed beside him, and others had taken their place, and even his man Dunstan had been wounded twice, and little Alric once, and many horses had been killed under him, but he himself was untouched, even after the great battle in the valley; and there were honours for him whenever he was seen. In this, too, he was high-hearted and thoughtless of himself, that when he saw the Holy City before him, he forgot the many risks of life and limb, and the hunger and cold and weariness through which he had passed, and forgot that he had won reward well and fairly, thinking only that the peace he felt came as a gift from Heaven.

  That evening, when there was a feast in Baldwin’s palace, the Lady Anne was not there; and when the King of France called for the Guide of Aquitaine to present him to the King of Jerusalem, he was not in the hall nor within the walls; and by and by the Queen herself rose and went out, leaving the two Kings at table.

  For Gilbert had gone fasting to the Holy Sepulchre, with Dunstan bearing his shield, and with a man to lead them. Then he went into the vast church which the crusaders had built to enclose all the sacred ground, and little lights broke the darkness here and there, without dispelling it, but the poor Christian who led Gilbert had a taper in his hand. The knight came first to the deep-red stone whereon Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea anointed the body of the Lord for burial, and there kneeling down, he set his shield and sword before him and prayed that he might yet use them well. Then the man took him to the Golgotha, and he laid down his arms before him and stood trembling, as if he were afraid, and the drops of sweat stood out upon his forehead, and his low voice shook like a little child’s when he prayed in the place where God died for man. Afterwards he knelt and touched the stones with his face, and spread out his arms crosswise, not knowing what he did. But when he had lain thus some time he rose and took up his shield and sword, and the man led him farther through the darkness to other places. So at last they brought him to the Tomb, and he sent away the man who had guided him, and bade Dunstan go back also; but he would not.

  “I also have fought for the Cross, though I be but a churl,” said the dark-faced man.

  “You are no churl,” answered Gilbert, gravely. “Kneel beside me and watch.”

  “I will watch with you,” said Dunstan, and he took his own sword and laid it next to Gilbert’s.

  But he knelt one step behind his master, on his left side
. More than forty burning lamps hung above the stone of the Tomb, and around the stone itself stood a grating of well-wrought iron having a wicket with a lock of pure gold.

  Then Gilbert raised his eyes, and looking through the iron fence, he saw that on the other side some one was kneeling also, and it was the Lady Anne of Auch, robed all in black, with a black hood half thrown back; but her face was white, with dark shadows, and her two white hands clasped two of the iron stanchions, while her sad eyes looked upwards fixedly, seeing a vision, and not seeing men. Gilbert was glad that she was there.

  So they knelt an hour, and another hour, and no sound broke the stillness, nor did they feel any weariness at all, for their hearts were lifted up, and for a time the world fell away from them. Then a soft sound of footsteps was in the church, ceasing at some distance from the Tomb, which was not then shut off within walls of its own. But none of the three turned to see who was there, and there was silence again.

  Eleanor had come alone to the Sepulchre, and stood gazing at the three, not willing to come nearer. As she looked, her sins rose in her eyes and passed before her, many and great, and where her good deeds were hidden in her soul there was darkness, and she despaired of forgiveness, for she knew her own pride, that it could never be broken in her. She looked on that most faithful woman, and on that maiden knight whom she so dearly loved, sinning daily in her heart for him, and yet for his sake fighting her loving thoughts; and she would not have dared to go forward and kneel beside the pure in heart, in the holy light. All alone she drew back, and when she was so far that they could not have seen her, had they looked, she knelt down by a pillar, and drew her dark veil over her face, folding her hands in the hope of forgiveness and peace, and in great loneliness.

  Some comfort she found in this, that for the great love of her life, the like of which she had not known nor was to know again, though she had wished evil and dreamed of sweetest sins, she had done a little good at the last, and that the man who knelt there praying had grown stronger and greater and of higher honour by her means. Yet the comfort was not of much worth in her loneliness, since she had given him to another, and none could take his place. Then she said prayers she knew, but they had no meaning, and she gazed from beneath her veil at the place where the Lord had lain; but she felt nothing, and her heart was as stone, believing what she saw, but finding no light of faith for her in the divine beyond.