Part 15

He was silent.

“Martin, would you shame me, hold aloof as though I had tempted you?”

She caught his hands, and drew them from his face.

“Oh! I am wounded—if you have no faith!”

“Mellis!”

“Yes—wounded, to the heart! Oh! my dear love!”

He lifted her hands and kissed them almost fiercely.

“It shall be as you wish. This room is a chapel, its altar—where you sleep.”

He was over the threshold, and freeing a hand, she softly closed the door. Her breath came quickly, with a flutter of exultation.

“Oh, my dear lord, my man, is this not a great sacrament between us? Now—you have made me happy; is it not strange? See—you will lie here; there is bracken, and I will spread it; and here—is a wallet for a pillow.”

She glided about the room with innocent joy.

“Set your sword there. Now, we are in our castle, and I have no fear. Shall we pray, kneel down like children?”

She caught his hand, and they knelt down side by side. Their prayers were said in silence, such prayers as save this world of ours from the doom that it has earned.

She started up suddenly, took his face between her hands, and kissed him.

“Dear heart, good-night!”

Mellis stretched herself on the bed, and Martin went to his couch of bracken by the door. Neither of them spoke again, but they lay awake for a long while, listening to each other’s breathing.

_Chapter XXXV_

Martin Valliant was asleep when a man crawled up the stairs, groped his way to the closed door, lay there a moment listening, and then crawled back by the way he had come.

A number of figures showed black about a fire that had been lit in the center of the roofless hall. John Falconer was there, sullen, heavy-eyed—a man who found no pleasure in looking at his own thoughts; also Sir Gregory, skull-faced and ominous, with blue eyes that stared. A hot posset was going around in a big tankard. These gentlemen had but little to say to one another; they were waiting; the case had been heard, and judgment given.

The man who had gone a-spying up the tower came and stood before Sir Gregory.

“The priest is not this side of the door, lording.”

John Falconer’s sullen eyes seemed to catch the light of the fire.

“You lie!”

“See for yourself, Master Falconer. What’s more, he is asleep across the door, for I could hear a sound of breathing.”

A grim laugh went around the fire. Ironical looks were thrown at Falconer, who was frowning and biting his beard.

Sir Gregory spoke.

“Such insolence must be chastened; we must be rid of this bastard. Hallo, there! Axes for the breaking of a door.”

A little man with a sallow face and bright black eyes stood forward.

“The room has a window, sir.”

“Well?”

“Breaking the door is a clumsy device, and this Valliant is desperate strong. Why not use the window, gentlemen, and crawl in upon him while he is asleep?”

“Most excellent! But will God give us a ladder twenty feet long?”

“There is no need for a ladder. Strain a stout rope over the battlement so that it runs in front of the window, and men can slide down the rope.”

“Well thought of.”

John Falconer appeared to rouse himself from a sort of stupor.

“Wait, gentlemen. Let no violence be done this man. He has served us, and will suffer for it.”

“What would you, John Falconer?”

“Let him be taken, mastered, stripped of his harness and his arms, and turned out into the woods. His blood should not be upon our hands.”

“Plausible, very plausible!”

“I stand for that—or nothing.”

Sir Gregory chuckled.

“By my soul, such a punishment is better than blows. There is a certain subtlety about it. I put my seal to the document. Some one fetch the rope.”

The work was done noiselessly by men who crept about on bare feet, and without as much as a whisper. John Falconer and a dozen of his own fellows were ready on the stairs. Four men were to slide down the rope, enter by the window, and while three of them fell upon Martin Valliant, the fourth was to unbar the door.

Nature willed it that Mellis and her man should sleep heavily that night, solaced by the innocent sweetness of being so near each other, so full of a happy faith in their great love. They slept like children, Mellis on her bed, Martin lying across the door, his arms folded, his naked sword beside him.

He woke to a cry from Mellis.

“Martin—Martin! Guard yourself!”

The last man to enter by the window had slipped on the sill, and blundered against the man in front of him; and Mellis, opening her eyes, had seen him outlined dimly against the window.

Her warning came too late. The fellows had thrown themselves on Martin before he could rise, and had dragged him from the door. One of them pulled out the bar, and threw the door open.

He shouted to those on the stairs, and Falconer’s voice took up the cry.

“Torches—torches! Forward! Up with you, and follow me.”

Mellis had slipped out of bed and was trying to find the sword that Martin had brought her out of the vault. She could hear men struggling in the room, but the light was too dim for her to see what was passing. A horror of helplessness seized her; she shrank back against the wall, with her hands pressed to her ears.

“Help, there—help!”

Martin had broken free and was on his feet. One man lay writhing with a bone in his throat broken; another had been thrown against the wall and stunned. Martin had another fellow lying bent across his knees and was choking him, while the fourth man clung to his feet.

Then Falconer and his torches came up the stairs; the doorway filled with smoke and glare and steel.

A sudden palsy seemed to strike all the players in that tragedy. Valliant let go of the man whom he was throttling, while the fellow who had been clinging to Martin’s ankles squirmed away toward the door. Martin stood motionless, like a wrestler touched by enchantment and turned into a statue; Mellis, her hands to her ears, her eyes two great black circles, leaned against the wall; Falconer, with torch and sword in the doorway, held back the men who were behind him.

Martin’s sword lay close to Mellis’s bed. His eyes looked at it, but he did not move.

Then Falconer spoke.

“Martin Valliant, no harm is meant you. Leave the sword lying there; it will not avail.”

Mellis’s lips moved, but no sound came from them. She moved forward into the room, and her eyes were on John Falconer’s face.

“Traitor!”

His mouth twitched; he looked at Martin, and passed her over.

“Valliant, we captains have sworn not to keep you as one of us. It is our right to choose; we have our reasons. No harm shall be done you; you shall go out into the Forest—as you came from it. Take your life, man; this room is no place for you, and no place for brawls and violence.”

Martin’s face was gray and haggard. The muscles stood out like cords in his throat, and he drew his breath heavily. He gave one glance at Mellis, and moved suddenly toward the door.

“Explicit,” he said, crossing his hands upon his chest. “God have mercy on us all, John Falconer.”

The men seized him and hurried him down the stairway, nor did he resist. In the courtyard they stripped him of his armor, leaving him nothing but his old cassock, a girdle and a knife. He was taken across the bridge and through the camp to the beech wood. A knight in black harness was waiting there, leaning on his sword. One of the men gave Martin a wallet full of food.

The knight—it was Sir Gregory—went close to Martin, and stared into his face.

“Let us not see you again,” he said. “Go—and take your shame and your sin away from us.”

He pointed with his sword into the gloom of the beeches.

“Show your face again, and there shall be no mercy for you, you thing of evil omen. Go!”

And Martin Valliant went from them into the darkness like a broken man carrying a curse.

John Falconer had cleared the men from the room, and set his torch in a rusty bracket on the wall, where it threw a wayward, draughty flare upon his face. Mellis stood by the window with her back turned to him, rigid, motionless, her hands at her throat.

“There will come a time when you will thank me for this.”

She was struggling for self-mastery, and against the bitter shame that they had thrust upon her, while her heart had gone out into the darkness with Martin Valliant, and in a way she was desperate, robbed of her love. She might have come through her anguish in silence had John Falconer been less of a dull and jealous fool.

“Now get you to bed, child; there will be peace in this house.”

“Peace!”

She flashed around on him with generous fury.

“Peace—for me, when you have treated me as though I were a harlot? Oh, you blind fools, you souls full of foul imaginings! That man was a saint, white as God’s own self. And you have robbed me of such a love as a man but seldom gives to a woman. Yes, he could have taken that sword and given death to many of your curs, but there was a nobleness, a humility, that did not touch you. He knew what was in your hearts, that you hated him, were jealous, breathed foul lies. He besought me to let him go. And I—I bade him stay. I would that he had taken all that a woman has to give; yes, my very body and soul. There is the truth; I fling it in your face, John Falconer, you sour and godly and grudging hound!”

Her anger scorched him like a flame. He answered her hoarsely.

“It was for your sake I did it. For you are precious to us.”

“My sake! Ye gods! Is a woman’s love to be put in pawn by gray fools and wiseacres? I tell you I am his; I shall die his; I would that he had taken all that I had to give. And I am precious to you? Never, by my soul! I cast you off! I am your enemy henceforth, and every man here is my mortal foe. May disaster befall you all! May you be cut off, slain, trampled into the earth! Get you gone out of this room; my love has slept here, and you do foul it.”

She advanced on him, and he went back before her, covering his face with his arm.

“You will thank me—yet,” he said.

“Nay, I shall die before I thank you,” and she closed the door on him as he went out.

_Chapter XXXVI_

Martin Valliant had fallen into great darkness of soul.

The Forest lay about him, vast, silent, and mysterious; the sky was overclouded, and the moon obscured; and life seemed like the Forest, all black and without a purpose, a wilderness where wild beasts wandered and outcast men hid themselves from the law.

For a while he wandered about among the beech trees like a blind man who had lost his way, for in very truth he was blind of soul, so smitten through with anguish that he could neither think nor pray. A stupor gripped him, a stupor of misery and helplessness. It was as though a great hand had swept down and put out the white light that had burned within him; blackness, nothingness, remained.

As he went to and fro under the great trees, Martin Valliant struggled to break through this human anguish and all this coil and tumult of loving and being loved. He tried to stand as his old self, calm, patient, gentle, a watcher of other men’s lives. Things had been so quietly ordered in the old days; nothing had been able to master him, to send him like a blown leaf whirling with the wind.

But now—what had happened? Was God mocking him, or had he been cheated by the devil? Who was God, and who was the devil? What was this thing that men called sin? Was life only a huge fable, a piece of tapestry, behind which lay the burning, passionate reality, the being and becoming, the great glowing flux of fire?

He fell on his knees and clasped his head between his hands.

Who was calling him, and why did his heart answer?

“Mellis! Mellis! Mellis!”

She was in the darkness, she was among the stars, in the leaves of the trees, in the stillness of the night. She was light and shadow, sound and silence, colors and perfumes; she held the round world in her hands, and heaven was behind her eyes. He loved her, and her love was his. Where was the sin? Where was the shame?

Martin made a cloister of the beech wood all that night, pacing up and down between the black boles, sometimes lying prone in the dead leaves or the bracken. He saw nothing but Mellis—Mellis white and speechless, stretching out her hands to him, looking at him with eyes of anguish. She was a white flame burning in the darkness, and he could see nothing, think of nothing but her.

So Dame Nature, Mother of all the gods, led Martin to the deep waters and showed him in their blackness the image of a woman. And into these waters a man must cast himself naked, madman and rebel, leaving his manifold hypocrisies behind him, stripped of the shreds and the patchwork and the cap of the moral fool. Before dawn came Martin Valliant had taken that great plunge. He was a rebel, naked and unashamed, most bitterly refusing to surrender the great thing that was his, and ready to fight for it with savage fierceness against saints and devils, priests and men.

With the first grayness of the dawn Martin turned his face toward Woodmere, and stealing from tree to tree, worked his way slowly through the beech wood. There were no more than three or four great trees left between him and the open sky, and he could see the mere lying in the valley and the tower where Mellis had slept; the birds were singing; the camp still seemed asleep.

Something whirred past him and struck the trunk of a tree away on his left, and Martin threw himself flat, for he knew that a cross-bow bolt had been loosed at him. Though he raised his head cautiously, and peered about him, he could see nothing but the bracken below, the green gloom of the branches above, the great gray trunks standing like the pillars of a church. But the man who had fired the shot could still see Martin. A second bolt whizzed over his head and buried itself in the ground.

“Run, you dog! Off with you, or the next shot shall be in your body.”

The voice came from the fork of a tree, and Martin was shrewd enough to believe in the man’s sincerity. He sprang up, and dashed back into the deeps of the wood, furious at the thought that Falconer had set men to watch for him. He tried another part of the wood, but with no better luck. This time an arrow from a long bow drove into the ground within a yard of his feet, warning him that he was shadowed and that the Forest’s eyes were wide awake.

Martin took the lesson to heart, and turned back sullenly into the deeps of the wood. His wits were at work, offering him all manner of wild hazards, and the more desperate and foolish they seemed, the more bitter and dogged grew his resolution. He passed through the beech wood, crossed a stretch of open grassland, and plunged into a thicket of hollies that trailed down from the slopes of an oak-covered hill. Once under cover, he stood at gaze to see if he had been followed, and his shrewdness had its reward. A man in a doublet of Lincoln green showed himself for a moment on the edge of the beech wood, scanned the grassland, and then turned back into the woodshade as though he had no liking for following such a wild dog any farther.

Martin cut northwards into the oak wood where the trees stood well apart, with no scrub growing between them, their trunks rising from the green turf. He went at the double, keeping well in among the trees, bearing westwards along the hill that bounded Woodmere valley in the north. His need of a weapon asserted itself, for he had nothing but his knife, and coming across a young holly growing straight and clean, he felled it after five minutes’ hacking with his knife. With its boughs and top trimmed off, it made a heavy and notable club, and he went on with it on his shoulder, and in a temper that boded ill for any man who should give him battle.

It took Martin Valliant the best part of an hour to cast a half circle around Woodmere valley and approach it from the other side. A hazel copse proved friendly; he crawled into it, and plowed his way cautiously through the green cloud of branches. The copse ended in a great bank of furze that poured down the hillside like a flood.

Martin Valliant had the whole valley spread before him, all wet and washed with the morning’s dew, the sunlight slanting down on it with the calm beauty of a summer morning. Smoke rose straight and blue from the camp fires; the mere shone like glass; the tower, with its lichen-stained walls, was the color of gold. But if the woods and the valley breathed peace, man plotted war, and all the green hill beyond the water was astir with men running to arms.

Falconer and the Forest lords were preparing to march. Each captain was rallying his company, and there was much shouting and hurrying to and fro. The swarm of figures in their reds and greens, russets and blues, sorted themselves and gathered to their pennons and banners like a pattern of flowers. There were the archers, with bows on their backs, and bills in their hands; the common crowd of footmen with their pikes, partisans, scythes, axes, and oak cudgels; the gentry and their servants mounted and sheathed in steel, their lances rising straight and close together like pine trees in a wood.

Martin Valliant marked a little group of riders sitting their horses apart from the rest. They numbered about twenty lances, and a man in the midst of them carried a banner of blue and green. The sunlight splintered itself on their harness; they looked big men and stoutly armed, chosen for a purpose.

Two riders were crossing the grassland from the direction of the mere, and Martin Valliant’s eyes filled with a hungry, yearning light as he watched them. One was a woman, the other a man. The woman was distinguishable by her hair, that hung loose upon the suit of light harness that she wore, and by the cloak or apron of green fastened about her waist. She rode a white horse. The man, John Falconer, had her bridle over his arm. She was a prisoner. The twenty lances were to serve as her guard.

Martin Valliant knelt and watched her, leaning on his holly staff, his eyes shining like steel.

The trumpets blew. A swarm of archers and mounted men went scattering into the beech wood and were swallowed up by its shadows. The massed “foot” began to move in columns, like fat, brightly colored caterpillars crawling up the hill. The gentlemen and men-at-arms followed, with jogging spears and a glittering of harness. Last of all rode John Falconer, Mellis, and her guard.

Martin Valliant sprang up, and held his staff aloft as though challenging them. Then he turned back into the woods, a divine madman hunting an army.

_Chapter XXXVII_

Sir Gregory’s scouts had been watching Troy Castle, and my Lord of Troy’s spies had had their eyes on Woodmere. Both parties were kept well victualed with news; but Sir Gregory was no better than a round-headed butcher, a mere bullying, blasting Englishman, ever ready to think his enemy a fool; whereas Roger Bland had an Italian shrewdness and an imagination that made him something of a coward. A clever coward is worth any number of bull-headed fools. And in this game of hide-and-seek my Lord of Troy was too subtle and too cunning for the Foresters. He saw to it that they had false news, and no real knowledge of the power that he could bring against them.

Scouts had galloped back to Woodmere, greatly exulting.

“Troy is on the march. Fifty archers and a hundred men-at-arms. They have cannon with them. We can eat them up, lordings all.”

Such was the news, and the Forest captains rose to it, and set their trumpets blowing. But Roger Bland was no such facile fool. Sir Gregory’s scouts had watched Troy Castle, and the roads leading to it; they had reported faithfully, counted their men with honest precision, accurately judged the enemy’s strength. Yet no one appeared to remember that there might be another cloud in the sky, hidden from them by the tree-tops and the hills. My Lord of Troy had blundered, belittled the forces against him! He had marched out and camped for the night on Bracknell Plain with his cannon and a hundred and fifty men. That was how Sir Gregory and his captains viewed it, and they rushed out to attack my Lord of Troy, meaning to catch him on the march.

Roger Bland had not hurried himself. He was still camped on Bracknell Plain, though the sun had been up some hours. And that camp of his was very cunningly placed, with three great open woods sending out leafy capes within a quarter of a mile of it, good cover for an ambuscade. His camp had a rampart of brushwood and sharp stakes; his cannon were loaded and ready, the gunners lying beside them; his archers squatted behind the brushwood; gentlemen and men-at-arms were in full harness and ready to mass their spears. The horses were tethered outside the camp, half a furlong away; a sharp look-out was being kept. My Lord of Troy had baited his trap and sat down to wait for his prey.

It was a league and a half from Woodmere to the edge of Bracknell Plain, and Sir Gregory had halted his companies under cover of a heathy hill and waited for his riders to come in. John Falconer had the rear-guard, and Sir Gregory jogged back to speak with him, and to look with lustful eyes at a woman who was very beautiful.

“We should have good news, John. And how doth our sweet Mistress like the morning?”

Mellis had dismounted and was sitting in the heather, white, dark-eyed, and sullen, holding herself proudly because of these men and of the shame they had put upon her.

She did not look at Sir Gregory, or answer him.

“Tut, tut! Our sweet comrade is still wroth with us, John. Women are unreasonable.”

Falconer growled at him.

“Let the wench be! We have flayed her pride, and she hates us.”

A squire, very hot and dusty, came cantering down on them.

“News, sir—news!”

“Out with it.”

“My Lord of Troy is still camped on Bracknell Plain. They have not stirred, sir. Their horses are unharnessed, their sentries pushed out no farther than a furlong.”

“Ye gods! This Roger Bland was never a soldier. Why, we shall be on them before they can get to horse. Come, sirs, come.”

Away in the woods Martin Valliant was seeing strange things. He had followed the march of Sir Gregory’s men from Woodmere, and when they had reached the rolling heaths that led up to Bracknell Plain, he had drawn away among the pine thickets so that he could watch them without being seen. His course had led him toward one of those strips of woodland that jutted out into the plain toward my Lord of Troy’s camp, an open wood of beeches and Scots firs. The place seemed silent and empty, full of deep shadows and splashes of sunlight that played on the bracken and the trunks of the trees.

Then of a sudden he saw something that made him drop down in the bracken like a bird when a hawk is hovering overhead. A knight in armor was riding his horse through the wood. He reined in and remained motionless, spear on thigh, red plume trailing under the branches. He wore a red tabard embroidered with gold; his horse’s harness was of red leather studded with brass; his spear was painted black, and a bunch of white roses had been tied to its throat.

Martin, lying flat on his belly, grew aware of a strange, tremulous stirring in the deeps of the wood. It was as though some great monster were moving, ponderous and slow, the earth and the trees quivering as it moved. There was a shrilling of steel and the snorting of horses. The knight in the red tabard held up his spear, and the wood seemed to grow silent.

Martin had blundered into the midst of a mystery. He crawled backwards through the bracken, keeping his eyes on the knight in the red tabard; but that gentleman was staring through a woodland window out upon Bracknell Plain, and Martin Valliant escaped unseen.