Chapter 7

THE NIGHT AND THE DAWNING

I

When Wardo had delivered his charges to the superintendent of the mine and received a receipt for them from him, he started back, with his assistants, on his homeward journey. But at Bibracte, where they would leave the main road and turn due south toward the villa, ten Roman miles away, he bade his men wait for him at the station until his return. Instead of striking across country for the villa, he kept along the main road, riding swiftly and steadily, as one who pursues a definite plan. He crossed the Tamesis at Pontes, after a night's rest, and at evening of the next day rode through the marsh-ford at Thorney.

Here he met with one who also was on horseback, splashed to the waist with mud, for even the high-roads were heavy with the springtime thawing out of the frost. He was muffled in a cloak, and his spurs were bloodstained. He hailed Wardo in Latin tinged strongly with a foreign accent.

"Can you tell me, friend, if there be an inn in this place where soft beds and good food may be found?"

Wardo was moved to curiosity.

"For yourself?" he asked, spurring up to the stranger's side.

"Nay, for my lord and his wife and daughter. I am sent ahead to find lodging for them. They are on the road to Rutupiæ, to take ship for Gaul, and travel by way of Londinium, where my lord hath affairs to settle; but the women have given out and vow that they will go no farther. So do the chickens break for cover when the hawk swoops."

His voice was slightly contemptuous. He turned his face, covered with a wiry red beard, upon Wardo. His eyes, small and light, glinted from a network of wrinkles under reddish brows.

"You are no Roman," he said abruptly.

"Why, no," said Wardo, somewhat surprised, "I am Saxon."

"Like myself," said the stranger, grandly. "Men call me Wulf, the son of Wulf."

"There is an inn here," said Wardo, without returning information. "I will show you, if you like. It is kept by Christians, and it is clean."

"Then it will be poor," Wulf grumbled, "and the wine will not be fit for decent men."

"There you are wrong," said Wardo. "It is where my lord Eudemius stops with his train when he passeth through here."

"So!" Wulf's glance held awakening curiosity. "The lord Eudemius of the white villa south of Bibracte?"

"That same," said Wardo, with the pride of a servant in a well-known master.

"One hears tales of that house these days," said Wulf, casually. "See, friend, when I have made arrangement for my lords and brought them hither, is there not a place where we might find a mouthful of good Saxon ale?"

Wardo hesitated.

"I fear my time is too short," he answered. "Even now I am late--"

"For the maid who awaits thee?" said Wulf, with a chuckle. "Well, I'll not keep thee then. But this much I'll tell thee now. When my lord sails with his familia from Rutupiæ, it will be without Wulf, the son of Wulf. I have it in mind to stay here longer; there will be fat pickings for Saxons by and by, when these Roman lords are crowded out. Hast heard that?"

"Ay," said Wardo. "I have heard it."

"And it is in my mind also to try for some of these same fat pickings," said Wulf, and laughed. "Why not I, as well as any man?"

"If you wait for these Roman lords to be crowded out, as you have it," said Wardo, "it will be some time before these fat pickings fall to your lot."

"Perhaps not so long time as one might think," Wulf retorted. "Hast heard of what happened at Anderida?"

"Oh, ay," said Wardo. "The lord governor of Anderida fled to the house of my lord."

Wulf's glance became all at once as keen as a gaze-hound which sights its prey.

"Had he his son, called Felix, with him, a cat-eyed rascal, who was wounded?"

"Yes," said Wardo, quite proud to tell his news. "And on the evening of the feast the lord governor and his men rode away again. But he left his son behind him."

A gleam shot into Wulf's light eyes.

"So?" he said pleasantly. "Perhaps, then, this son Felix is still a guest of your lord?"

"Ay, so he is," Wardo returned. "Which is to say that he was there when I rode away, and that is now six days ago." In his turn he shot a glance at the red-beard from his steely eyes. "Now why should you ask these things, friend gossip? What concern is this son Felix of yours?"

"Merely that all men like to know what is happening these days. What else? But know you how the man got his wound? Nay, I thought not. Perhaps you know that the leader of that band of Saxons and those insurgent Romans, called Evor, was slain in that affair at Anderida?"

"No," said Wardo. "I did not know that. Who slew him?"

"Felix," answered Wulf.

Wardo looked somewhat startled.

"Then this is why he remained behind!" he exclaimed. His face awoke to a new thought. "Why, death of a dog! if this Evor's men pass through the Silva Anderida and hear that this lord Felix is at the villa, there may be trouble for my lord."

"Ay," said Wulf. There was a certain grimness in his tone. "The son of Evor hath sworn to have the blood of his father's slayer; therefore it is quite likely."

"How come you to know these things?" Wardo demanded. The stranger's manner was always casual to indifference, and Wardo was not over keen to see what he was not looking for. His question came more from curiosity than from suspicion, although of this there was something also.

"News travels fast these days," Wulf said briefly. "I got it from a carter who saw something of the business. I hope you do not think that I was there? Now where is this inn of yours? I must find it and hasten back to my lord."

By now they had reached a cobbled street no wider than an alley, running at right angles to the main street, which led from ford to ford. Down this they rode abreast, and there was room for no other horseman to pass them. Bare-shouldered girls laughed down at them from upper windows; bent crones hobbled from door to door with baskets of fish or produce; children and dogs scampered from under their horses' feet. The evening sunshine fell in long slanting shadows down the dusty street, stabbing shafts of golden light into dark doorways.

Wardo saw Wulf to the door of the "cleanest inn on Thorney," watched him enter, and wheeled his horse. Back again then he rode, with no more than a glance for the long-haired girls who leaned to him from windows, and with a recklessness which sent the dogs and children flying. He turned into the main street, back toward the marsh-ford, and galloped the length of it until he reached a house which stood the third from the end, next to a half-burnt ruin where cattle had been stalled, with a narrow door in a blank wall which betrayed nothing.

Before this he flung his horse back upon its haunches, leaped lightfoot to the ground, and hammered on the door. The wicket was opened a space and closed; then the door was opened. He entered, and it closed after him.

Two hours later Wulf, the son of Wulf, came down the street in the dim twilight, on foot, walking with a swagger. Out of the saddle he was seen to be short and stunted, with legs badly bowed. His breath proclaimed loudly that he had stopped at sundry wine-shops on the way. He was passing unconcernedly, when a whinny from a horse standing before a door caught his ear, and he stopped.

"Light of my eyes, I've seen this beast before," he muttered, going closer to look. "Why, sure, he's the horse of that long-legged yellow-head of mine. Ay, here's the brand I noted on the shoulder. So--we shall see what we shall see."

He knocked boldly upon the door. The wicket opened.

"What will you?" a woman's voice asked from within.

"A friend of mine entered here a little time ago," Wulf began glibly.

"Many have entered here," said the voice. "Who is your friend?"

Wulf's laugh covered a moment of embarrassment.

"Why, in truth, I do not care to name his name aloud," he said. "If you will let me in, I will see if he be still here."

The door opened. Wulf stepped inside, confronting a tall girl, full-throated, long-limbed, with face of purest Grecian outline. Wulf's single keen glance took in the girl, her attire, and the room behind her. His manner changed at once.

"Your friend may not be here," said the girl.

Wulf advanced.

"In truth, I shall not miss him overmuch. Might a weary man purchase food, and a drop of wine, and perhaps a lodging for the night?" He jingled coins in the pouch which hung at his leathern belt.

The girl eyed him.

"You know that you may," she said, very wearily, and crossed the room and opened a door into an inner chamber.

Here the air was heavy with the smell of food and the fumes of wine. There were many people in the room,--men and women; yet in the first glance he cast around Wulf saw his long-legged yellow-head reclining at ease upon a couch, his arm around a slim golden beauty who sat beside him. In his free hand Wardo clutched a brazen beaker, which the girl filled constantly from a fat-sided ampulla on her knee. From time to time she stroked back the fair hair on his temples, and each time he raised his half-drunken head to kiss her shapely arm.

Wulf nodded to one or two men in the room, his face betraying no surprise that he found them there. He bade the dark-haired Greek girl bring wine and two cups. While she was gone a man and a woman slipped away through one of the several side doors, leaving vacant the place next to Wardo. At once Wulf possessed himself of it, without glancing at his neighbor. The Greek returned, and he pulled her down beside him, had her drink with him, kissed her arms and hands with his red-bearded mouth, made love to her with jests and laughter unnecessarily loud. Soon Wardo's attention was caught. He sat upright, steadying himself on the girl's arm, and looked across at Wulf.

"Not too drunk to talk, I hope!" Wulf muttered.

"Holla, Wulf, son of Wulf!" Wardo called, in a voice somewhat thickened by wine. "How didst find the way to Chloris?"

"Who but knows the house of Chloris?" said Wulf, pleasantly. "I did not look to find thee here."

"I? Oh, I am always here. Is it not so, Sada? Am I not always with thee, girl of my heart?"

"Ah, not always!" said the golden-haired girl. "Not so often as I would have thee."

"Drink with us, thou and thy lady," Wulf invited.

The golden-haired girl leaned over.

"Nay, Wardo, thou hast drunk enough. Already the wine is in thy head," she murmured; and Wulf, keen-eared, caught the words.

But Wardo was already holding out his beaker, which the Greek filled at a sign from Wulf.

"Nay, sweet, my head is iron," said Wardo, half indulgent, half in scorn. "Here I pledge thee, friend Wulf, the son of Wulf: 'A long life and a rousing one, a quick death and a merry one!'" He drank deeply.

"That is the motto of my lord master," quoth Wulf. "And light of my eyes, but he lives up to it! There is a man who spends gold as wine floweth through a _colum_."

"Ay, but promise you my lord spends faster!" said Wardo, with great pride.

"So?" said Wulf. He gave the Greek a sign to keep the wine-cups filled. "Then must he indeed be wealthy. In truth, I have heard something of a feast he gives at his villa even now."

"The marriage feast of our lady Varia and the lord Marius," said Wardo.

"Men say that the gifts are of a richness beyond all counting," said Wulf. "Of course, being there, thou couldst see it all, and judge."

"Ay," said Wardo. "I saw it all."

With the wine, his tongue began to wag. His eyes sparkled; he drained his cup and set it down with a thump. "In that house is the ransom of an emperor, ay, of forty emperors!" he cried. "No lord in the island could gather such hoard of treasure, not even yours, Wulf the son of Wulf, and I shall fight you if you say so! No man hath seen such jewels, such vessels of gold and silver. There be a million golden cups set about with rubies; an hundred thousand vases of silver; and every woman hath a fan of gold, set with gems. And the jewels he hath loaded on our lady--man, thine eyes have never seen the like! She wears a girdle that blazes like that pharos at Dubræ, which I have seen; she goes belted with flame that dazzles the eyes. On her arms are an hundred bracelets--"

"Of a truth, I do think the wine is in thine eyes, Wardo mine," said Wulf. His laugh was careless, but his eyes were keen.

Wardo flushed angrily.

"Not so!" he cried. "For these six months and more have not goods been coming to us from all the world?" He boasted vaingloriously.

Wulf nodded.

"I have heard that that is so. There must indeed be great store of plunder--of wealth within thy master's house."

"Verily!" said Wardo, somewhat appeased. He told all that he knew, and much that he did not know, fired with eagerness to impress upon this casual stranger the magnificence of the lord whom he served. From mere loquacity he became argumentative, finally quarrelsome. But Sada wound white arms about his neck and soothed him.

But by now the wine was reaching Wulf's head also, although compared to Wardo he was sober.

"That house of thy lord's will be fat pickings for the men of Evor when they come to claim the blood of Felix for the blood which he hath shed. Light of my eyes! it would be worth--"

"What is this thou sayest?" Wardo demanded. He strove to sit upright, but fell back against Sada in drunken laxity. "Speak louder, thou! There be a million bees that buzz within my head."

Wulf waved the women away.

"Leave us, pretty ones, awhile. Is it the first time men have left your arms to discuss affairs?"

Eunice, the tall Greek, went willingly, but Sada clung to her lover and would not go.

"Nay, I'll not leave thee. Speak as ye will--what is it to me? I have no call to remember."

"See, friend, I like thee, and I see no reason why we should not be comrades, for the better gain of both," said Wulf, with all frankness. "We be of one nation, as against these haughty Roman lords who soon must yield to us the field. Oh, but I long for a half-hundred kindred souls to take with me this chance! What chance, say you?--the chance of gain, of wealth and fortune past all dreams. Why should they have all, these haughty lords, while we have nothing? Why should not something of their wealth profit us?"

Wardo shook his muddled head solemnly over this problem old as the ages.

"They have gained it," he muttered, with an air of profound wisdom.

"They have gained it, quotha! Ay, truly, but how? By rapine, taxation, wars, plunder! Therefore why shall not others use like means? If it be fair for them, I say it is fair for us!" Wulf brought down his fist upon the table with a blow that made the cups rattle. "Therefore now is our chance, say I! All is confusion; the lords fight amongst themselves; we are slowly gaining the ground they lose--let us also gain wealth with it!"

He discoursed at great length, repeating himself incessantly, losing himself in endless trains of argument which nobody contradicted. It was not very clear what he wanted, even to himself, it would seem. But he was quite convinced that existing conditions were altogether wrong and something should at once be done about it. What the something should be he did not take the trouble to state. Wardo dozed peacefully, his head on Sada's breast. No one in the room paid the least attention to them.

Wardo roused, in time, reaching out blindly for his cup, and caught a word of Wulf's oration:

"... Gold for the taking. Had I but a half hundred--"

"Gold! That is a good thing to have!" Wardo muttered. He pulled Sada's head down to him. "When I have gold, I shall buy thee from thy mistress. Wilt go with me?"

The girl's fair face flushed.

"Ay, thou knowest I will go," she answered. "Wheresoever thou wilt take me."

"If thou wouldst have gold, my friend, come with me, and it shall be thine in plenty," Wulf cried eagerly.

Wardo looked at him with awakening interest.

"How so?"

"Thus," said Wulf. "We shall take for ourselves what should be ours by right, what is wrung from us by infamous greed. What would suffice us would not be missed by those who have more than plenty, yet even this they will not give us. We must get it for ourselves."

Wardo nodded.

"That will be a good thing to do. Where shall we find it?"

"Why should we show mercy to them?" Wulf declaimed. "What mercy have they shown us? Do they not grind us into the earth; do we not pay in sweat and blood for their idle pleasures? And with all of this, have they not sought to force us to our knees before any new god they choose to perch upon a pedestal? I, for one, will not worship because one man says 'Bow down!' And I do not care who knows it. I am as good as the next man, and I will have my rights."

Wardo, who had never heard anything like this before, was impressed deeply.

"I say so too," he exclaimed with great earnestness. "Let us take what is our own. Then if thou hast rights, _I_ have rights also. And I will have my rights!"

"Of course! I see thou art a clever fellow, and a man after mine own heart. Drink more wine. See, then, I will tell thee a thing. This lord of thine, who oppresses thee and vouchsafes thee no rights, who wrings from thee what should be thine--thou hast him in thy hand. He hath committed a grievous crime in giving shelter to a murderer. Does he think that his guest will not be demanded of him by those whom that guest hath wronged? For this does he not deserve punishment?"

Wardo nodded, much bewildered at the rapid changes of subject he was called upon to follow. Gods, gold, oppression, murderers, and all at once--and his mind was taxed with one thing at a time.

"Then I see plainly that thou art chosen to execute justice and to claim thy full reward!" cried Wulf, in sonorous prophecy.

"Oh, no--not on my lord!" said Wardo, firmly. "Or, look you, it would be I who should be executed." And chuckled at his cleverness in discovering this point.

"You do not understand," Wulf assured him, patiently. "There is no danger in it for you--none at all. All you will do is to answer these questions I shall ask you now. Tell me then, first, how many men can your lord summon to--let us say, protect this lord Felix when his enemies find him out?"

"With his familia, and the coloni and casarii who own him lord, he can call out near a thousand; though it would take time to gather all of these from his estates. But, my friend, how may the enemies of this lord Felix find him out when they know not where he is?"

Again he chuckled at the point which he had made.

"True," Wulf admitted smoothly. "I but suppose the case. For they are roaming far and wide, and if they find him not, it will not be for lack of searching."

"Now I must tell my lord of this, that he may be prepared," Wardo muttered. He pressed his hands to his temples. "My head is buzzing with your questions, and I am weary, for I have ridden far. Pray you, let me sleep."

"Not yet!" Wulf said hastily, in alarm, as Wardo's head sank lower. "See, friend, you are trusted in your lord's household, I doubt not. Is there a rear door, even a very little one, of which you know where the key is hung?"

Wardo jerked his head upright, his eyes half closed.

"What is this you say?" he asked angrily. "What would you with a--a--little key?"

"Give me a key, and I will give you as much gold as you can carry on your back," said Wulf, low and eagerly, his caution forgotten in the fever of his greed.

Wardo opened his eyes with effort to their fullest extent and stared at him. His voice was thick and stuttering.

"A key? to my lord's house? _Deae matres!_ What should I do that for? I am my lord's man!"

"You shall come to no harm!" Wulf urged desperately, fearful lest the man fall asleep before he could gain what he would. But at last Wardo understood. He staggered off the couch, clutching at Sada's shoulder for support, reeling and blind with drink, and towered over Wulf.

"Look you, sirrah!" he shouted, so that men turned to look at him in surprise, "I am no traitor to my lord! I am his man, blood and body, and his will is my law and his faith is my faith. I have served him loyally, and so shall I continue to serve. What is this you would have me do? Turn rascal, even as you? Holy gods, I'll show you, knave and varlet--"

Unexpectedly he stooped, and caught Wulf by the collar of his tunic. Wulf struggled, but Wardo dragged him across the floor, shook him, and flung him outside the door and slammed it. He turned to Sada, demanding her applause with drunken self-satisfaction at his prowess, dropped on the nearest couch in abject prostration, and was instantly asleep.

After uncounted hours he roused, to find Sada dashing cold water in his face and calling his name in great distress. They were alone in the room, and the sun was shining through the window.

"What hast thou?" Wardo grumbled. "Let me sleep!"

She shook his shoulder.

"Hasten, Wardo, and undo the mischief thou hast done while there may yet be time. For hours I have tried to wake thee!"

"Harm? What harm?"

"Thou hast told that evil man all he would know of thy lord's defences, of the treasures within his house, and of the lord called Felix who is there. And when thou wert asleep he, being drunken also, did tell Eunice, who bade him render payment for his wine, that it would not take long to send word to these men who search for this lord Felix, and that then he would give her gold and jewels in plenty. Hasten, Wardo, and warn thy lord, or it will be too late!" She wrung her hands.

"_I_ have done this thing?" Wardo exclaimed, pointing a finger at his own broad chest. "Nay, girl, thou'rt joking!"

"Never that!" cried Sada, with impatience. "Thou wert drunk, I tell thee, and he got out of thee what he would. Thy lord is betrayed, and through thee!"

"Betrayed!" The word stabbed through his dull sodden wits and sent him starting from the couch, his face gray with horror. He sank back with a groan of sheer physical sickness, and tried again, his teeth set, the sweat starting on his forehead. His legs trembled under him, and his eyes were dazed, but he got to the door and leaned against it, his hands over his face.

"If I have done this thing thou sayest," he said hoarsely, "my life is rightly forfeit, and I shall give it into my lord's hand. I do not understand--I am my lord's man, and loyal." He turned to her in stunned appeal. "Sada girl, am I drunk, that thou shouldst fill me with this madness?"

Her eyes filled with tears.

"Nay," she answered sadly. "Thou art sober now."

The fresh air aided what the shock of her words had begun. He mounted, heavily, yet in feverish desperate haste, whirled his horse about with scarcely a word of farewell to her, and struck the heavy spurs deep. The beast sprang forward, with a shower of sparks from the cobbles.

Sada, returning from the door, ran into the arms of a thin slip of a girl, white-faced and with burning eyes, who caught her and cried desperately:

"What said he of Nicanor? What have they done to him? Does he live still?"

"Peace, child!" said Sada. "Now he hath thought for nothing but this thing which he hath done, and I with him. But last night he did tell me that this friend of his, thy lover, hath been sent to the mines, and that he had been of the guard."

"And I not to know!" cried Eldris, bitterly. "He might have told me how he looked and what he said; and now he hath gone, and I may not ask him--"

"Ay, and I think that I shall never see him more. For surely his lord will slay him when he knows what he hath done," said Sada.

Suddenly she put her head on Eldris's shoulder and wept; and Eldris, by way of showing sympathy, having love sorrows of her own, put her arms about her and wept also.

II

The lord Eudemius laid himself upon his couch of ebon and carved ivory with the air of a man whose work has been well done. Midnight was long gone, the great house was quiet, and the desire of his heart stood forth in fulfilment. He had a son; his dying house was propped with fresh strength and vigor, and the gods of the shades might claim him when they would. One week ago had the marriage been celebrated. Each night since there had been feasts, with at every feast new dishes contrived, new sports and entertainments offered, new souvenirs of price distributed, to provide the jaded senses of his guests with fresh gratification. Now the festivities were nearly over; already some of the lords had gone. Among them was Count Pomponius, with his Wardens of the Eastern Marches, for it was reported that Saxons were again harrying and burning along the coast.

In the mellow light of the bronze lamps the face of Eudemius showed softer, less inscrutable, with eyes more kindly. On it was great weariness, but also a great content. He put forth a hand and touched the bell on the stand beside his couch. The strain under which he had labored was lifting; he could afford to relax. The silvery tinkle of sound had scarcely fallen into the quiet of the room when Mycon, chief of the eunuchs, entered, parting the curtains, with his arms crossed before his face.

"Bid Cyrrus bring hither his lyre," said Eudemius.

Many and many a day had gone since their dark lord had given such command; the cries and groans of his slaves had been music enough for him. Mycon bowed in silence and went. Before five minutes had fled, word of the miracle had gone from end to end of the ranks of those whose duty it was to watch the house by night; and weary men and women smiled and blessed their little lady, who perhaps had bought for them the dawn of a happier day.

Cyrrus the musician entered, a slender Greek boy; and the low light was caught by the silver frame of the lyre he bore, and rippled on its strings. He put himself where he should not be too much under his lord's eyes, and played; and as though the instinct of his art had taught him what to do, the music he played was plaintive and low and soothing. Eudemius lay with arms behind his head and stared at the painted ceiling where naked nereids sported. By slow degrees, still more his hard face softened; under the spell of the music and of his thoughts his thin lips parted to a smile. Slow and soft the melody rippled into the quiet room, singing of placid waters smiling in the sun, with lilies floating on their bosom, of young fleecy clouds and tender shadows. Again it changed, with dropping notes like tears, and whispered of the yearning hopes of men, of world pain and heart's peace, of longings unfulfilled and prayers unanswered. Two tears, the slow and difficult tears of age, stole down Eudemius's gray furrowed cheeks and lost themselves in his silken pillow.

"My child!" he whispered. "My little, little child!"

In that moment the pathetic unloved beauty of her came nearer to touching him than ever before. He forgot that he had sold her into bondage; forgot that her happiness might not lie along the road of his. She had done what he would have her do; she had been a dutiful daughter, and at the last he rejoiced in her.

Varia, at that hour, sat alone in her chamber, awaiting the coming of her lord. There were traces of tears upon her cheeks; her lids drooped with weariness and sleep. They had taken away her robes of state, in which she had sat by Marius's side through interminable hours of merrymaking, when a thousand eyes had stared at her from a swimming sea of lights, and she had shrunk and trembled beneath their glances. They had put upon her a thin robe of Seres silk of rose, with no ornament or jewel upon it. With bare neck and arms, and warm white throat bending with the drooping flower of her head, she looked more than ever a child. To all that they had done to her throughout the endless days of festival, she had submitted docilely, dazed, if she could have told it, by the excitement of those around her. Faces, scenes, events, had passed before her in a blurred confusion, in which she could neither think nor see clearly. She had repeated words of whose meaning she had no knowledge; she had drunk wine and only been distressed that a drop had fallen upon her royal robe; she had broken a cake of bread and only wondered why her little black slave was not there to gather up the crumbs. Of her lord she had seen little, save upon one fearful night of which the memory still sent burning shudders through her frightened heart. She drifted upon a gray sea of loneliness, torn from her old shelters, given nothing to which she might turn and cling.

She got up from the chair covered with rugs of white fur, in which she had been nestling like a great rose, and went to the window which looked upon the garden, all her movements restless, like some shy creature caged. Now the garden lay deserted, desolate in the mistiness of the moonlight. She held her arms out to it in vague yearning.

"I would I were out there now!" she cried softly. "Where the trees whisper and the lake sleeps, and none but may hear the music of one voice. He is gone--he is gone from me, and I know not where they have taken him. And I long for him; I would I could creep into his arms and rest upon his breast forever, for then I should not be frightened. Now I am left alone--I know not where to turn for very fear--my head it burneth and my hands are cold. And I fear to be alone--and the night is dark--so dark!"

A gust of wind rose slowly through the trees, like the flapping of unseen wings, and Varia shivered. The moon was now and again obscured under vast driving clouds; through the gloom trees massed themselves into blots of sinister shadow. When the wind's voice died, the earth hung silent, in suspense, so that Varia held her breath in sheer unconscious attunement to it. In the garden she saw a black shape flying with quick darting swoops. She knew it for a bat, but her eyes dilated with nervous fright. It was so very still--in all the world there was no sound at all. She glanced fearfully over her shoulder. Even the lighted room was not reassuring; it also held the same waiting stillness which she dared not break by so much as a sigh. Only the flame from the perfumed lamps flickered wanly in the draught. Her wide eyes fixed themselves upon the window, striving to pierce the mystery of the dark without; she yielded helplessly to the sway of the vast unnamed forces around her, a child frightened in the night. She sank upon the floor by the window, hiding her face.

"Nerissa!" she called in a small and shaken voice, and wept, more frightened at the little cry drowned in the tense stillness. Never had she been so alone in her life; never so frightened. She clung to the window, crouched as small as possible, not daring to look up.

And across the night a sound grew out of the void and came to her, and her face blanched, and she caught at her throat with shaking hands. Faint, elusive, coming from very far away, to be felt rather than heard, it was now like the distant trampling of the feet of many men, now like the rush of water over stones, now like the whisper of the wind in trees, scarcely a thing apart from the silence which enfolded and engulfed it. It was a voice from nowhere, warning her straining senses of unknown and sinister things to come.

"Why, sweetheart, art hiding from me?" a voice said almost at her ear, and Varia, taken unawares and startled out of all control, screamed aloud and shrank lower into her corner, sobbing violently.

Marius stooped over her and took her hands away from her face.

"What is wrong?" he demanded. "Why these tears, little wife?"

"It was so dark!" Varia wailed. "And there was no sound at all, and then there was a sound--"

She wept again, her fresh terrors submerging even her fear of him.

Marius picked her up in his arms, carried her to the couch, and laid her there, and a moment she clung to his hand desperately. He was something human to hold to; so she would have clung to Nerissa, or even to Mycon.

"Afraid of the dark!" Marius scoffed gently. "Well, I am here now, and there is nothing shall harm thee. Of a truth, I did begin to think the feast would never have an end. The more I burned to be done with it and come to thee, the more the minutes dragged. I pictured thee, awaiting me here in thy secret bower; thy flushing face and the veiling shadow of thy hair, thy denying hands and averted glances--and thy father's guests might well have thought me a love-sick fool, thinking of nothing but his secret hope that his mistress might prove kind."

Varia sat upright on the couch and put her feet upon the floor, and his eyes followed the gracious outlines of her form beneath its drapery of rose. She pushed her hair back from her eyes and looked at him. Slow crimson spread from throat to brow; her glance wavered and fell. Quite suddenly she put both hands to her face, hiding her eyes from his, and turned her face away. It was a gesture of a child, infinitely touching, all-betraying in its pure artlessness. He started toward her, his dark eyes keen; and she sat quite still, passive to this fate of hers from which flight no longer might avail her. But with the touch of his hand upon her shoulder there came a soft insistent knocking at the door.

Marius smothered a curse and strode to open it. Mycon stood upon the threshold, and in the lamplight his face showed gray. He stammered like one caught in guilt.

"Lord, thy pardon! There is trouble without, and the master sends to ask my lord's presence. We be encompassed by barbarians who have crept upon us."

"Tell thy lord I come," said Marius. Varia was forgotten; scarcely had the slave vanished down the corridor when Marius was after him, leaving his bride alone.

Now in the villa were to be heard the first sounds of people aroused from sleep to find themselves in the midst of unknown dangers. Voices, frightened and impatient, echoed back and forth along the corridors; lights gleamed across the courts. Men and women, half dressed, began to appear, questioning feverishly, delivering themselves of theories to any who would listen.

"They say that if he will surrender Felix they will depart at once in peace."

"How came they to know that he was here? Who told them?"

"He will not surrender Felix--"

"If he does not--holy gods!--we shall all be slain and plundered."

And above all, a woman's voice:

"I will not stay to be robbed! I shall leave this house at once!"

In the great court men had gathered about Eudemius and Marius, who held hasty consultation. Felix, pale, nursing carefully his wounded arm, was on the outskirts of the group. His face all unconsciously betrayed his state of mind. It was white and flaccid; and at every yelp of the hounds outside who clamored for his life, he cringed and quivered. But he was very quiet, and the talk surged over his head as though he had not been there. Men cast glances of scorn unveiled upon him, but he was long past caring what they thought. He wanted his life; his eyes craved protection. In his face was a desperate dumb reliance on the pride and honor of Eudemius, which would not allow him to surrender one who had claimed his hospitality; craven himself, he yet recognized and centred all his faith upon this stern and scornful pride which must uphold its traditions at whatever cost.

Several of the younger lords who had been or were then in military service came forth, offering themselves, not at all averse, it would seem, to such variation in the entertainment. A handful of drunken barbarians--what were these? Upon them and upon Marius the defence of the villa devolved. Marius gave his orders swiftly, and one by one his lieutenants sped away. All slaves capable of bearing arms were to be equipped at once from the armory. Men were already stationed at intervals along the outer walls to guard against surprise. The house seethed with uproar, which no efforts of discipline could quench. Women wept and clung together, terrified each by the others' terror. They huddled in bunches around the walls, catching at every man who would pause to speak with them. Yes, there had been a barbarian even within the hall, a great fellow, tall as the house, who spat fire and spoke Latin as no Roman had ever heard Latin spoken before. Ay, truly, all the gods might witness that he had spat fire. And then he had left, taking back to his dogs of comrades their lord's refusal to yield up his guest. So there would be an attack, and men had many other things to do than to be stopped and chattered to by foolish women. Mingled always with the lamentations of these was men's shouting, a trampling of many feet, a swift confusion. The lights, continually fanned by the passing of people, began to take on a lurid glare. In the wind which blew about the crowded court, cressets flared horribly, with very evil-smelling smoke. Their light fell waveringly on jewels and golden collars and rich robes, and on burnished weapons in the hands of slaves. Long since had the porter fled from his lodge, and his place was taken by a score of eager defenders.

Marius snatched a moment from the importunities of those who would know the precise state of their danger, and exactly how long it must be before they should all be slain, and ran up the stairs which led to the upper rooms. He felt his way through the darkness until he came upon a window, very narrow and small, so high that he could overlook the rest of the house and by leaning out see something of what went on in front. And at what he saw he gave an exclamation, sharp and low, and his eyes glittered like those of a warhorse which scents battle. For all below him were lights which glinted in and out across the night; and to his trained ears rose the stamp and snort of stallions held in check, and the stir and rustle of many men. How many he could not tell, for the moon, fighting her way through a smother of clouds, gave scarce light to see, and in the trees the shadows were delusive.

A man's voice shouted; other voices took it up, until a seething bubble of sound, hoarse and significant, eddied around the house and lost itself in distance. A stealthy stir and movement heaved itself from among the shadows; there was the clank of a weapon against an iron stirrup; vague forms seemed to circle more closely about the house. The voice shouted again and was answered by a scurry of horses' feet.

"There be more than I had thought," Marius muttered, and turned to go. "And they are not all mounted. Also I think that they will try to take the door by storm. Well, they can try! More than two may play at that game!"

In time, those without began an attempt to batter their way in, so that Marius proclaimed them very drunk and more foolish. He said nothing of his suspicion that this was merely intended to mask an attack in some other quarter, and was inclined to be scornful of this untried foe. So that some of the old men, taking no consideration of the fact that although his words were light his actions were prompt and well-planned, became timid, and the shrieks of the women redoubled at every assault upon the door. He strove to assure them that if their besiegers did break in, they could get no further for the bristling hedge of swords and spears which waited. But to this the timid ones replied with reason that they did not want them in at all. Various guests began to take it in their heads that this was not the entertainment they had come for; and in an access of the strange panic which is liable to plunge even the most sober crowd into blind folly, if nothing worse, collected their valuables and their attendants and prepared incontinently to fly from the house. Greatly their wrath raged when Marius refused to let them out. They muttered that the heads of upstarts were easily turned by a little power, and they had rather be slain in the open than butchered like rats in their hole.

And at this, the first hint of insubordination among his forces, Marius became no longer the easy-going gallant whom most of them had known, but a being new and strange. He sprang to the mastery of the situation by, as it were, divine right, a right which was his by grace of the power that had trained him to face and control crises such as these. He treated these high-born lords and ladies as though they had been squads of mutinous recruits; he lashed them with his glance; he no longer requested, he ordered. His voice held a rasp which none had ever heard, and which brought them from displeased dignity to instant and abject obedience. He spared none,--faded voluptuary, whining graybeard, nor restive youth; in an hour he had bullied and frightened them into working like galley-slaves, and all the house was under the iron discipline of his camp.

* * * * *

In her chamber, Varia, in all her terror and loneliness, was forgotten. About her was an insistent clamor of confusion; she stood in the middle of the room, dazed and overwhelmed by it, the light flowing softly over her. Now and again a shouted order was flung across the tumult; with this there began presently to mingle sounds from without. In the corridor words flew by her, whose meaning she scarcely comprehended.

"They have taken a tree to batter down the door--"

"My lord Marius saith we are _not_ to use the boiling pitch until he gives command."

"He was crossing the court and an arrow fell from heaven and smote him."

"Thou liest, fool! It came in at a window!"

And almost in her ears, so close it seemed, a masterful voice shouted:

"Where is that fat beast Hito who hath the keys?" and was gone like smoke.

And Hito's name was taken up and tossed from hall to hall; she heard it now near, now far, in the midst of the rush of hasty footsteps and the tangle of voices. A scream pierced through the clamor and hung a moment above all other sounds; someone was wounded. She had a vision of Claudius the physician brushing by her half-open door. As from a mist of terror she saw the flying of his skirt and the gleam of his silver beard. The actual point of attack was too far away for her to know what went on. She began to draw her breath in small gasping sobs, glancing this way and that, as one who longs to flee and dares not.

A sound in the garden caught her ears; from where she stood she strained her eyes to see. Only the armed man on guard behind the little narrow door, vine-hung, which led to the outer world. The man, though she could not see him for the darkness, was short and fat, and his little pig's eyes were glazed with fear. But there came other sounds; and a black figure heaved itself above the wall, on the outer side, against the starlight, and tottered insecurely there. And then that armed man squealed, and cast his weapon on the ground, and knelt; and this also she could not see. Nor could she hear the words which the black figure on the wall flung down, nor what was answered, abjectly, with prayers and promises. She did not see the dark bulk slide scrambling down the wall, landing cat-like on its feet; she did not see it struggle a moment with the kneeling man who tried to rise and flee, and thrust him forward on his face. Again new sounds reached her out of all the uproar on the other side of the house; the grating of a key, the thud of feet upon the sward. Black figures came headlong out of the night; there was a clash of spurs on the marble steps; and one man, and another, and a third, leaped into the lighted room.

First of them all was a short man, bowed in the legs, with a red scrub of beard and yellow eyes which gleamed at her. And those behind him were great and blond and bearded, with drawn daggers, and round shields of bull's hide on their left arms. They crowded on the heels of the foremost, and stopped short, staring in the brilliant light at the palpitating figure of rose.

Until then Varia had shrunk and wept and trembled, a terrified child, alone, with no hand to cling to. But as the first barbarian crossed her threshold, she faced him, a desperate, tender thing at bay. Unknown, unreckoned with, there lurked within her the strange race-instinct, born of blood in which was no drop of craven blood, and of caste which was greater than that of kings. She was the product of her day and her environment; but she was the product also of her mighty past, of great men who had fought and ruled their world, and great women who had ruled with them. It was instinct, dumb and blind, but it held her on her feet, facing them, though her eyes were frozen with terror; and she obeyed it because she had no sense or will to disobey.

For one heart-beat there was no sound but the heavy panting of men's breath. Then a man snatched a golden cup rimmed with rubies, which stood on a stand near the window, and thrust it into his breast. With his first motion the two others started upon Varia where she stood, rose and white, in the middle of the chamber. Midway, the larger man pushed the smaller red-bearded one aside; he recovered, with a vicious pass of his knife, which the other gave aside to parry.

"I entered first!" the red one shouted. "Hands off, thou son of swine! Said we not that I, Wulf, who brought thee hither, should have first choice? Call you the others; thus we shall catch them front and rear."

"Call yourself!" said the other. He sprang forward, clutching at Varia, slipped on the polished floor, and plunged headlong at her feet. Varia screamed in terror; and as Wulf overleaped his prostrate comrade and caught her in his arms, screamed again. Her head was crushed against Wulf's leather-clad breast, but she struggled and cried aloud as a hare cries when the hounds have brought it down.

There was a rush from the corridor outside, a long-drawn shout of warning and triumph, answered by yells from the garden, where more black figures came leaping. Wardo, grimed from head to foot, dashed into the room at the head of his men as a crowd of invaders surged through the long window. He lunged at Wulf with the short broad sword he carried, and the point came away red. Wulf gurgled and fell, dragging Varia with him; and the fight closed over them both as water closes over a cast stone.

And as Life had entered the garden by that little narrow door, so Death also entered, bringing with it what Death must bring.

III

When dawn washed the first faint streak of gray across the night sky, the barbarians, beaten back and baffled, retreated to the great Wood from which they had come, and lurked darkly there.

"I think we are not yet through with them," said Marius. He had seen Saxons fight before.

With dawn, also, Eudemius sent forth a trusty slave westward to seek aid from the civil authorities and from his own people at the mine, the nearest point at which it might be obtained, and with the dawn was found the body of Hito, stabbed in the back, lying near the little garden door which led to the outer world.

Many of the guests chose to take their chances of attack, and left the villa hurriedly while yet the day was young. Eudemius could not hold them prisoners, and would not if he could. His own was enough to guard. But Felix did not go, and Eudemius could not order him forth. He dared not leave the villa, where he felt a measure of security; were he to do so, he knew that it would be his fate to be captured and killed before he could win to safety. So they shrugged their shoulders and left him.

That day the villa, unmolested and with half its inmates gone, seemed to sink into a calm of exhaustion, which, after the night that had passed, was like the calm of death. Marius and Eudemius themselves superintended the cleaning up of the house, the strengthening of barricades, the muster of the slaves for what further service might be needed.

"I trust the messengers whom I sent forth have not been waylaid," Eudemius said.

"Help could not come before to-morrow night," Marius answered. "It will go hard with us if we cannot hold out that long. This time it may be that we shall fare better; there will be no Hito to betray us."

"I shall have him buried at the crossroads with a stake through his evil heart!" said Eudemius. "There be eleven dead awaiting burial. This we shall do to-night. And Varia, my son, how fares she?"

"She is unhurt, but exhausted, and the old woman watches her," said Marius. "Sleep thou also, and I shall see to setting a watch about the house, and that those may take rest who can be spared."

Mycon entered, his arms before his face.

"Lords, there be a slave, Wardo the Saxon, who insists that he hath grave matters for thine ears. He is in very evil plight--"

"Let him stand forth," said Eudemius.

Wardo came, tall, grim, very dirty. A bloody rag bound his head; he limped, and one of his sandals was stained with blood. He crossed his arms before his face, and waited.

"Speak!" Eudemius commanded.

And Wardo spoke, standing erect, his blue eyes on his lord's face.

"Lord, it was not Hito who betrayed the household, as I hear men say. It was I. There is a little man, red like a fox, who came to a house on Thorney where was I. He also is Saxon. And I, being drunken with much wine, did boast to this one of my lord's greatness, and of the feasts which were made within this house, and the wealth which was herein. And when I was sober, after many hours, one told me of what I had done, and of how this red Saxon was gone to set his fellows upon my lord. So I rode until my horse fell with me and died, but I was too late to bring warning to my lord. When I reached this house last night, it was surrounded, with the door beaten down and men swarming within. So I, being Saxon, and not suspected in the dark, entered, shouting, with others. And in my lady's chamber found I that red Wulf, who is no wolf, but a sly thieving fox, and tried to slay him. But he got away. I am my lord's man."

"It is well that you have told me this," said Eudemius. "At sunset you shall be crucified. Go."

Wardo crossed his arms before his face and went.

When his work about the house was done, Marius entered softly the room where Varia lay, tended by Nerissa. The old woman slipped away, and Varia held out a slim hand to him in one of her sudden and unaccountable moods of coquetry. He kissed it gallantly.

"How fares my lady?"

Varia shivered.

"I do not wish to think of it! Were it not for Wardo--"

"Ay, that is true," said Marius, misunderstanding. "Well, by this night his fault will be punished. But how know you of what Wardo hath done?"

"How?" she echoed in surprise. "Was it not my life he saved? And what is he to be punished for? What hath he done?"

"Naught that in the least would interest thee," he told her.

"He shall not be harmed," she said firmly. "He saved me from two great men and one little one who would have slain me, and he is not to suffer for it."

"Now this is something new. Dost know, sweeting, that had it not been for this knave Wardo, no great men nor little would have come upon thee? It was he who betrayed us, and it is right that he should suffer for it."

Her eyes filled with tears.

"He saved my life, and I will not have him suffer! What is to be done to him this night?"

He tried to put her off.

"Never mind him, sweet one. Think of him no more."

But she repeated stubbornly:

"What is to be done to him this night?" She glanced at him, one of her strange and sidelong glances. "Is he to be--crucified?"

Marius started in spite of himself.

"Who told thee?" he demanded.

"None told me," she answered. She raised her hands to her temples. "I felt it--here. So, I say that he shall _not_ be crucified, nor harmed in any way at all. And thou must see to it!" She was like an imperious young empress, commanding her meanest slave.

"And if I will not?" said the slave, perversely.

Her child's mouth quivered.

"But thou wilt!" she pleaded. She laid a hand upon his bare sinewy arm, fingering the heavy golden armlet on it, and for a fleeting instant raised her eyes to his. "Thou wilt?" she repeated sweetly.

His dark face hardened against her wiles.

"The man hath played the traitor. He also is Saxon. Who knows but that he may set his fellows on again? Nay, lady wife; I fear thy man must die."

"Ah, no!" she begged. "It is the first request I make of thee--thou'lt not refuse it if I ask thee?"

"Ask it then," said Marius, his eyes on her, "in the right and proper way that a wife should ask her husband."

Rose-leaf color flushed her cheeks; she raised herself to her knees amid the draperies of the couch, and clasped her folded hands upon her breast, and closed her eyes, devout and meek and holy.

"Pray thee, let Wardo go, my lord!" she said softly, and opened her eyes quickly to see how he might take it. "Is it thus thou wouldst have me ask?"

He bent his head, sudden laughter in his eyes, and kissed her pleading lips.

"Who could resist thee, lady mine?" he cried gayly. "Sure never did unworthy man have so fair a lawyer. Ay, child, if he saved thy life--and thy account and his do tally--he shall go free."

Varia slipped out of his arms and clapped her hands.

"Go then--go quickly and tell my lord father so! He will do it for thee, as thou hast done it for me. Is it not so?"

So it came to pass that evening that the cross in the chamber of fate knew not its victim; and for this there were more reasons than a girl's tender wiles.

For while the flame of sunset again stabbed the dusk of night, came men out from the Wood of Anderida, fifteen miles away, some on foot and some on horseback, with at their head the red Wulf, astride a great bay horse. Wardo, from his station on the roofs, saw them from far off; saw also that many as they had been the night before, they were now fivefold more, an army bent on plunder, captained by lawlessness. And still no aid had come. Wardo told Marius, and Marius went up on the roofs to see, and came back square of jaw and with moody eyes. He sought out Eudemius, where the latter was going the rounds of their makeshift defences, and said:

"This red hound of hell hath come back upon us and brought his pack, five times as many as before. Thou knowest I am not one to turn tail when there is fighting to be done, but I can see what is to be seen. And we have women and children with us."

"You think, then, that we should fly from here?" Eudemius asked with sombre eyes.

"I think we are lucky to have the chance to attempt it," said Marius, curtly. "Were it not better to lose half rather than all? For an hour we might stand against them, scarcely more. Thy familia numbers five hundred souls; of these some are wounded and more are but incumbrances. If it pleaseth thee to stay, thou knowest that nothing will suit me better. A good fight against odds is worth risking much for. I but state the case as I have seen it."

"My fighting days are over," said Eudemius. "But I am not too old to run. And there are the women and the children. Be it as thou sayest, lad. This work is thy work--" he broke off to chuckle grimly--"and thou'rt a clever workman! We have chariots and horses, and I will give command to pack what papers and things of value I may."

Again the villa was in uproar. Chests were strapped on sumpter mules; chariots with pawing horses stood in the main courtyard, ready to be gone. Slaves ran here and there with scrolls and bundles in their arms; cooks left the meat turning on the spits; dancing girls, wrapped in cloaks and clinging to their treasures, huddled together, waiting for the start. The gates were opened, and all but certain of the stewards and body-slaves were permitted to depart. They swarmed from the villa like ants when their hill is crushed, and spread off to the west, away from the direction of the enemy. And always the slave stationed on watch cried down to those below the approach, near and ever nearer, of that enemy; and at every cry a spasm of increased activity shuddered through the house. It was each one for himself, and the hindmost would surely rue it.

"Should we be separated in the night, let us plan to meet at one spot," said Marius. He was strapping a bundle of food and a flask of wine to his saddle-bow, in the hurrying confusion of the courtyard, too old a campaigner to face a march without supplies. Eudemius nodded, his arms full of papers, which a slave was placing in a box.

"At Londinium, then, whence I shall sail for Gaul as soon as may be. We will wait there, each for the other. If the barbarians sweep the country widely, we may not at first be able to reach there."

"That is true," said Marius. "I have thought of that. Our best plan will be to hold west from here, make a half circle and gain the Bibracte road, and when the brutes are worrying the carcass here, return eastward, passing them by the road, and so reach Londinium. The gods grant that Ætius can spare me a legion!"

In the end they barely escaped. The slave on watch shouted warning; the stewards flung themselves on their horses and made off. Varia ran into the court, crying for Nerissa; without ado Marius lifted her into the chariot, of which Wardo held the reins. The chariot of Eudemius, driven by himself, was already rumbling through the gateway. There was a terrified scurry of slaves from under his horses' feet. He swung into the road and lashed the stallions to a gallop. Close at his heels Wardo followed, his grays leaping in the traces, with Varia, white-faced, crouched low in front of him. The hollow thunder of the wheels mingled with the pounding of hoofs as they dashed into the oak-bordered road. Marius swung himself to his horse's back as the beast reared with excitement, found his stirrups, and galloped hard after, his sword clapping against his greave. He did not see who followed through the gate, for as he caught up with the flying chariots, the first of the pursuers mounted the brow of the hill to the east of the house, not a quarter of a mile away.

Some of them rode their horses into the courtyard; others took up the trail of the fleeing Romans. But they were there for plunder; soon they gave up the chase and galloped back to strive for their share with the others. Those slaves who had been left behind or who were overtaken on the road were slain; as the sun went down there began in the stately halls an orgy which sounded to high heaven.

So when they had eaten and drunk until they could eat and drink no more, they fought among themselves over the division of the spoils; and between them all they killed their leader, Wulf the red son of Wulf. Also, in their drunken frenzy, they tried to set the villa on fire. In the midst of this, while they swept ravening through the rooms like devouring flame, while every court held its knot of drunken brawlers, who cursed and fought in darkness or under the flaring light of cressets, a detachment of milites stationarii, or military police, in whose hands was the maintenance of law and public order, rode over the western hills, coming hotfoot from Calleva, thirty miles away. They fell upon the barbarians, taking them by surprise; these forgot their quarrels and made common cause against this sudden foe. At once bloody battle was waged beneath the stars; the pillared halls rang to the clang of weapons and the thud of armed feet. Men in armor of bronze came crashing to the ground with their blood spreading from them darkly over the marble floors; in the courtyards men at every moment stumbled over bodies of the dead and dying.

And an hour before dawn there arrived from the west a body of footsore miners, armed for the most part with picks, which it appeared they were skilled in using in a variety of ways. These combined with the stationarii; for an hour red death swept through hall and court and chamber, to the tune of the yelling of the human wolf-pack loosed for blood. At the end of it the barbarians, harried before and behind, unable to rally, fell into panic and started to flee, laden with what spoil they could bear away. By dawn what was left of the villa was again in Roman hands, a wreck mighty in its desolation, epitome of the splendor that had been and the tragedy that was to come. The pendulum of Time had started on its inevitable downward course, and where had been power and grandeur were but the ashes of pomp and pride.

IV

Now, four days after that night when Wardo had betrayed his lord in the house of Chloris, men coming up from the mine, at sunset when the day's work was done, were herded by their overseers and guards into the bare open space at the mouth of the mine. The superintendent came among them, a grizzled man, hard-faced, as became his lot, and spoke. Beside him was a slave whom some there recognized as from the villa, travel-stained and dropping with fatigue, just arrived with letters from his lord.

"An attack hath been made upon the house of our lord by barbarians and insurgents," said the superintendent, glancing over the tablets he held. "It was repulsed, but with loss upon both sides. The barbarians came from the Silva Anderida, and it is thought that they are being reinforced by others, and will try again. My lord is hard pressed, for the house is crowded with guests gathered for the marriage feast of our lady. The attack hath been stubborn beyond belief; the barbarians demand that one lord Felix, who slew their chief at Anderida, be given up to them, and this my lord will not do. Also my lord saith that knowledge of the rich treasure in the house was betrayed to the barbarians by a drunken slave, and they are hot for plunder. Therefore he hath sent to me, as the nearest one to afford him help, commanding that I say to you in his name: Those of you whose crimes are not murder or against religion shall be returned to the house to take part in its defence, as many as can be singled out by to-morrow's dawn. For loyal service and obedience to orders, ye shall receive the freedom of _casarii_ and your sentence here shall be cancelled. To-night your records shall be looked up, and to-morrow those of you whose names and numbers are called will be sent forward as quickly as may be."

Half a hundred voices raised a tired cheer, not so much because their lord was in danger, as because there was prospect of release. The nightly rations of black bread and beans were served out. Some men took their portion to the huts where they slept, as beasts carry food to their lair; but these were for the most part condemned for murders and religious crimes and knew that they had no hope of freedom. The majority gathered in discussion about the fires, always with alert sentries hovering near at hand. All that night the air throbbed with expectation.

In the first dark hours of morning the blast of a brazen trumpet brought five hundred men into the open, eager to know their fate. The superintendent and his assistants appeared with lists of names which they had worked all night to complete. Men pressed close around him, eager not to lose a word; the overseers, whips in hand, mingled with the crowd to check incipient disturbances. A score of mounted guards were drawn up near by, waiting to escort the detail. Lanterns shone here and there through the thin gray mist which hung over the broken land.

Nicanor woke at the first brassy blare of the trumpet. His face was keen with his first conscious thought; there was no doubt that he would be of those chosen. He made his toilet with a shake of his tunic, and went outside. Around him, in the semi-darkness, figures were hurrying to where the superintendent, mounted on a keg, was calling the roll by the light of a lantern, with his hood pulled well over his face against the keen air of morning. His harsh voice, shouting names and numbers, rose above the stir and rustle of excited men.

Three rods from his hut, Nicanor was jostled violently by one who wheeled with an oath to see who had run against him.

"Have a care, Balbus!" Nicanor said shortly. "What is thy haste? Dost hope that thou wilt be chosen, man-killer? What wouldst give to be in my place? For I shall go, having neither religion nor blood upon my head."

Balbus snarled at the taunt. It had been flung at him before, with variations, until his temper was frayed to breaking-point. From Nicanor it was not to be endured; for since the day of the rat-fight encounters between the two had been frequent and bloody, in spite of the guards' whips. Now jealousy was added to the wrath of Balbus, and with this the devil in him broke its chains. But after his nature, he was treacherous. He said nothing, nor gave warning that his anger was more than skin-deep; and made as though to pass Nicanor and go his way. Nicanor went on, laughing carelessly. But he was scarcely past when Balbus wheeled around and struck. There was the glimmer of a blade, a smothered oath, and that was all. Nicanor turned as though to attack his assailant, who had sprung back, staggered, pitched forward, and fell, rolling down the slight declivity. He struggled a moment to rise, and lay down again, very quiet, and the slope of ground hid him from casual observation in the camp.

Balbus drove his weapon into the earth to clean it, hid it in his shirt, and hurried into the crowd of miners, who, as the roll-call progressed, were being divided into two groups.

"Nimus!" the superintendent called, and a man stepped forward and joined the smaller group. "Nico! Niger! Nicanor!"

And at this Balbus pressed forward, elbowing to the superintendent's side.

"Master, the man Nicanor hath been fighting, it would seem, although with whom I do not know. When I came by, I saw him lying dead upon the ground by the huts."

"Nonius! Ollus!" cried the overseer, and in the same breath--"When I have started these I will send men to bury him.--Ossian!"

Shortly after sunrise three hundred and fifty men were started under escort to their lord's assistance, equipped as well as might be with the means at hand.

When Nicanor struggled back to consciousness, after unmarked hours, the noise of the tramping of men had ceased, and again the world was dark. He tried to move, and a twinge of agony hot as flame shot through him, shocking him into full wakefulness. He sat upright, wincing with pain, and slowly felt himself all over. There was blood upon his head, where he had struck it against a stone in falling, but it was caked and dried. And his tunic was torn, on the left side, just behind and under the shoulder. It took him some time to reach around and find the place, for every movement was slow torture. The cloth at this place was stiff with what he knew was blood. So, then, this was where the knife of Balbus had gone home. He wondered if the wound were serious. The stars danced dizzily before his eyes, and he was faint from loss of blood. But there was a thing he had to do, a thing which all through unconsciousness had given him no rest. Across the deeps of night and of oblivion a voice was calling, and he must follow it while he had life to stand. He got to his feet and stood swaying uncertainly. By sheer force of will he steadied himself, and turning his back on the silent settlement, started walking across the rough and broken country straight eastward toward the road which led to his heart's desire.

Sometimes he walked; sometimes he fell and lay staring at the high sky and the wheeling stars, waiting without sound or motion until he could gather strength to rise. Sometimes he felt his tunic wet with fresh blood, and could not get at the wound to stanch it, and did not try; sometimes iron hammers, red-hot, beat upon his temples and left him blind and reeling with pain. Always one idea possessed him; he must get to her who called him. She was in danger; he cursed the gods who had held him back from starting to her rescue with his mates. Time lost--his chance gone--though he died for it, he would not let himself be beaten in this by Fate. Every ounce of the dogged sullen strength of him gathered itself to meet the demands of his stubborn will. And always, whether he walked in reason or in delirium, his course held eastward, straight as a homing pigeon for its loft.

In time, when the sun was high, he reached the road which crossed the Sabrina and led to the moor towns beyond. Here he entered the barge of a waterman about to leave the bank, and sat waiting to be ferried across, staring straight before him, with never an answer to the boatman's idle talk. The boat's nose poked into the further bank, and the boatman demanded his fare. Nicanor looked at him with eyes glittering with fever beneath his shaggy thatch of hair, and shook his head mutely, as at one who spoke an unknown tongue. He got out of the boat and walked up the road, and the man crossed his fingers in superstitious fright, muttered a prayer to the river-gods against ill luck, and let him go.

Once started again, Nicanor walked all that day, and at nightfall reached Corinium, five and twenty miles away. Here his overwrought strength gave out, and he slept as the dead sleep, in the fields outside the town. Hours before dawn he woke, haunted by the demon of unrest which rode him, begged food and a cup of milk at a farmhouse by the road, and started on again. All that day he walked, a mere machine dominated by a force which would drive it forward to the very verge of dissolution; and in the late evening he reached Cunetio. Here he did not know when he stopped, for he went to sleep on his feet, and woke and found himself on his back by the roadside, with the sun at high noon. Desperate for the time he had lost, he hastened on, and in an hour came upon one of the small stations threaded along the high-roads between towns which were more than ten Roman miles apart, kept as taverns by _diversores_ for the entertainment of travellers. There were folk stopping here, for outside the inn door stood horses, saddled and tethered. Nicanor selected the animal which best pleased him,--a tall roan,--mounted, and rode away without so much as a glance behind him for pursuit.

After that his way was easier. He met people, who stared at him and sometimes asked questions which he heard himself answering. Dimly, without at all taking it in, he understood that they were vastly excited about something, but it was not worth while to ask questions on his own account. They were mere shadows, without substance, which drifted by and were forgotten; only he and his desire in all the world were real. So he reached Calleva, in the open country amid the heather, where he stopped for an hour for food and to rest his horse. On again then for fifteen miles, and he rode through the station of Bibracte, and turned aside into the oak-lined by-road for the last ten miles of his journey--miles which stretched before him as the most endless of all. Again excitement burned in his veins like fever; he kicked his horse into a gallop which more than once threatened life and limb. They pounded up the last slope which hid the villa from view, spent horse and exhausted man, and gained the rise. And Nicanor flung the roan back upon its haunches with a jerk which all but broke its jaw.

"Holy gods!" he muttered; and then--"Holy gods! Am I mad--or do I dream again?"

The sight burst upon him in all its blinding suddenness and appalling hideousness,--a smoking ruin where had been the stately mansion of his lord; blank windows grinning at him like dead, open eyes; the garden of his dreams desecrated, its wall shattered, lying open, naked and despoiled, before the world. At the tinge of smoke which hovered like the breath of death above the place, his horse flung up its head and snorted. Nicanor lifted his arms to the high heaven which for him was empty, and brought them slowly down before his face.

"Oh, thou heedless god, whoever thou mayest be that hast done this thing!" he cried into the bitterness of the desolation before him, "smite thou me also, for there is naught left for me! The stars fight against me; I am cursed with unending bitterness, and all that I can do is of no avail."

The shock was as great as though he saw her whom he sought lying dead before him. For the first time he faltered, not knowing whither to go or what to do, not daring to search for what he feared to find. His horse, standing with legs spread wide and drooping head, heaved a great sob of exhaustion from its panting flanks. Nicanor, staring ahead of him with gloomy eyes, roused, picked up his loose reins, and rode down the hill. At the yawning doorway, where no porter challenged, he swung himself from the saddle and went into the great central court. Here was grass uprooted, a fountain wrecked; marble walks were stained with blood and the marks of feet; plants were torn up and broken. Through empty room after empty room he hurried,--to hers, his lady's, first of all. And at the threshold of her bedchamber he stumbled over a body,--Nerissa's, the old nurse; and behind her lay Mycon, chief of the eunuchs. The room was in confusion; chests were torn open and their contents rifled; furniture was upset and hacked. In the bathroom near by, the marble bath, sunken in the floor, was filled with water, and there were towels and unguents and perfumes ready at hand. A bronze strigil lay across the threshold, where it had been dropped in someone's hasty flight.

On from here he went, sick with fear of what might have been, and passed through other rooms. Here were the same signs of wanton destruction; mosaic floors cracked and defaced, statues overthrown, hangings torn down and swaying to the wind in rags. He found other bodies; Hito's huddled in the violated garden, amid the tangle of wrecked vines and trampled shrubbery; and those of many slaves. The storerooms had been looted, and broken amphoræ and the remains of food showed where drunken orgies had been held. In the Hall of Columns every article of gold or silver had been carried off. Priceless vessels in embossed and enamelled glass lay shattered into fragments; even some of the bronze lamps were gone. Velvet covers had been stripped from the couches; the table was drenched in spilled wine. A bust of the Emperor which had stood on its marble pedestal at the end of the hall lay upon the floor, mutilated almost beyond recognition--work of Romans, this, of the insurgents who refused to acknowledge the divinity of their temporal lord and sovereign.

Nicanor stood in the doorway, the lone living figure in a great desolation. All his fears and uncertainties were written in his face. When had this thing happened? What had become of his lord and his lord's guests? And his lady, what of her? Had the relief from the mine been in time, and why were there no signs of them? What had become of the invaders, and why had all living things so completely disappeared? And where were the stationarii, that they had not taken possession of the place in the name of the law?

He went back to those rooms which had been his lady's, torn with bitter doubt and dread. He walked reverently among the things which had been hers, as one who treads on holy ground, touching with his hands a chair over which was flung a rug of snowy furs, as though she had just left it--a table covered with bottles and perfume pots. And beside the couch where she had lain he dropped upon his knees and hid his face in the silken covers.

Heavy footsteps echoed outside in the empty corridor, and Nicanor started to his feet, a hand on his knife. A man entered, stepping over Nerissa's body, and stopped short. By his dress, his iron helmet, and short sword, Nicanor knew him for a stationarius. This one, recovering from his surprise, advanced quickly.

"So, fellow, I've caught you red-handed!" he cried, and grasped Nicanor's shoulder. Nicanor winced at the touch, but made no effort to get away.

"There is no need of that," he said quietly. "I am my lord's man, slave in this house until a month ago." His collar of brass, with its graven name, bore evidence to his words. "I pray you tell me of what hath happened here, and of my lord, and his--his people."

"That is another matter," said the stationarius, and let him go. "I thought thee of those roving reavers who have plagued us day and night. Thou hast indeed been out of the world not to know these things. Three nights ago this happened. We were sent down from Calleva as soon as the word was brought, but when we arrived the mischief had been done. The lords had fled; the barbarians were in possession, and wallowing in the havoc they had wrought. We gave them battle; in the midst of it came your lord's men from the mines, whom also he had sent for. The barbarians fled with what booty they could gather. Now the place is patrolled by stationarii. We have been burying bodies and saving what property we might, until your lord shall give command concerning it."

"And my lord?" Nicanor asked. "Whither hath he fled?"

"It is said to Londinium," the soldier answered. "Thence to Rutupiæ to take ship for Gaul. But of this I know not the truth. We are directed to send in our reports to his house in Londinium; that is all that hath been told us."

"Then have I no time to lose," said Nicanor.

Forthwith he remounted and rode eastward from the villa into the deepening dusk. He turned into the Noviomagus road which led northward to Londinium, down which he had been brought a prisoner so long a time before, when first he had entered into his slaveship. And here he saw that his lord's mansion had not been the only place to suffer.

For he found himself in the very track of the barbarians as they had spread out of the Silva Anderida, through a neck of which, fifteen miles ahead, the road passed. An acrid smell of smoke hung heavy in the twilight; when he reached the station of Noviomagus he found it all in flames, with dark figures which ran wildly in and out against the glare. Here he changed his exhausted horse for a riderless gray which came snorting with terror out of the smoke and gloom, ready to welcome a master's hand and voice. He caught it, left the good roan by the roadside, and hastened on. He met and passed people on the road fleeing from burning houses and wrecked homes; in his ears were the crackle of flames and the wailing of women who mourned their dead. From small hamlets scattered in the country, folk were seeking refuge in the larger towns. Yet when he had passed these heedless, scattered groups, he rode almost alone.

All through the scented night he rode, and the round yellow moon rode with him. Strange things were happening beneath that moon; in the crucible of destiny a new land was forming, a new order of things was rising on the ashes of the old. Change, long germinating in hidden depths, was in the air, blowing warm with the breath of the South; in the earth, stirring with the first quickening of Spring; in the hearts and minds of men. And it was in Nicanor's heart as he rode fast through the night, fostered in his long season of darkness, unconscious, and inevitable as the changes which were taking place around him.

Ahead of him the great road stretched white in the moonlight, a broad ribbon which lost itself among hills and in the shadows of trees. In his ears was the thunder of his horse's feet, pounding insistent clamor into the quiet of the night; the wind of the speed of his going swept cool against his face. The night was gray around him, a velvet moon-steeped darkness, odorous with the fragrance of breaking earth. Far away the deep-throated bay of a dog rose and died across the world. A bell note, thinned by distance to a faint dream-sound, stole over silent hill and valley; peace seemed to wrap the world around as in a cloister garden. Yet not so many miles away were blazing fires, and red wounds, and the black and bitter death of a battle lost. With every mile the scene unrolled itself before him; off in the wide rolling country, which stretched on either hand, lights twinkled here and yonder, wakeful eyes of watchfulness among the hills. He passed pale glimmering bogs where by day lonely herons brooded, and wide barren heaths over which the road led straight as an arrow's flight.

And as the miles reeled away under him his excitement began to mount with the sweep of his horse's stride. The exultation of rapid motion mingled with the rising fever of his wound; he wished to shout aloud, to sing. Vague forms seemed to slip by him in the shadows; in every bush beside the road he saw white faces lurking. Strange and half-formed impressions haunted him, of bearded men passing, who sometimes spoke an unknown tongue and sometimes vanished silently as ghosts. Later, he could not tell if he had seen them or if it had been but his fevered dreams; for always when he forced himself to rouse and look about him sanely, the road reached before him white and deserted.

All sense of pain left him, even all consciousness of the horse that he bestrode. He seemed floating miraculously through air, and was aware of vague surprise that he did not fall. He could not stop; an iron weight upon his shoulders crushed him to the earth, but at the same time a force against which he could not struggle drove him on. He became possessed of the idea that again he was working in the mines, under the overseer's lash; the sound of his horse's feet merged imperceptibly into the tapping of the picks, hideously loud, and the maddening rhythm of the sound pounded his brain into bruised torpor. Then he knew that he was on fire; from head to foot he burned, parched as a soul in hell. Balls of flame danced before his eyes; while he looked upon them they turned to faces grinning from out a blood-red mist. The faces drew closer and melted into one face, Varia's face, as he had seen it last, white, with scarlet lips and flaming poppies upon either temple.

Then the mist in his eyes cleared suddenly, and he saw the figure below the face, wreathed in a floating web of moonlight through which white limbs gleamed, with dusky hair that streamed behind it in a cloud; saw that it was flying from him upon a great white horse. And as it fled it looked back at him with laughing eyes which yet were Varia's eyes; and in its hand it bore a wan pale flame which was his soul, the essence of the genius in him which was his life. At once he knew the figure to be Life and Love, and all that men strive for and hold most dear; and all his being leaped to the fierce desire for conquest, and he shouted in triumph and pursued. But as fast as the good gray went, with ears laid back and neck outstretched and body flattened to its desperate headlong stride, that great white horse went faster, bearing ever just beyond his reach the slim figure, veiled in misty moonbeams, that laughed into his eyes yet fled from his embraces.

He laughed aloud in answer, caught up in the whirlwind of his furious speed; heaven and earth held nothing but the divine frenzy of his desire. Fire coursed through his veins; the chase was Life itself, full-blooded, reckless, exultant and sublime, rioting gloriously with untamed passion. He was a god, all-conquering in the fierce pride of his lusty youth and strength; Life was his, and Love was his, if he could seize them. Now the gray's head was at the white horse's shoulder; now he bent forward, laughing his hot triumph into those eyes which were Varia's eyes, his arm outstretched to grasp the mist-veiled figure that leaned away from him, flying from him yet ready to yield in his clasp, with the pale flame wavering in one hand and a white arm raised to ward him off. He had no eyes for the road ahead; a stride, and the prize would be in his eager arms. Ahead was the darkness of the great wood; a stride, and he was within its shadow. The moon was blotted out by the high blackness of trees; and in a heart-beat with its light were gone the white horse and the slim rider with its veil of gauze--gone like a wreath of smoke or a dream which is lost in darkness. He reeled in his saddle under the shock of it, and cried aloud in his disappointment; baffled, he thought that he had lost his quarry among the trees. The gray thundered on, with the reins hanging loose upon its neck, through the damp silence of the wood, where night hung heavy, and out into the open, where again the road gleamed white and empty beneath the moon.

And then the moon was gone, and light went out of the world, and he knew himself for a soul cast into outer darkness. His mind was blank; he knew not whether he lived or died, nor did he care. He lived in a nebulous void of gray unconsciousness, horribly empty of all thought and all sensation.

So he would have ridden, blindly, until his horse fell or he was halted. But through sheer exhaustion his fever burned itself out, and left him sane once more, and clinging to his horse's neck. His strength was gone; he was dazed and drunken. He came to himself abruptly, like a man starting from uneasy sleep, and stared about him, not knowing even how far he had been carried. He was on the break of the slope leading down to the marsh-ford, and the lights of Thorney glinted over the water in his eyes.

V

His horse stumbled, and he pulled it up with an oath. Now he was vividly conscious, every nerve strung taut, every sense alert, as a man will sometimes oddly waken from heavy slumber. They went down the slope at a lurching gallop, along the road churned into mire by the passing of many carts, and splashed into the muddy waters of the ford. And on the further bank the good gray stumbled again, tried gallantly to regain its stride, and came crashing to the ground with a coughing groan and a long sickening stagger. But Nicanor had saved himself from a falling horse before. He was on his feet almost as the beast was down, reeling with sheer weakness, but recovering with dogged persistence. He left the horse dying at the water's edge, and started running up the street which led across the island from ford to ford, and his black shadow raced beside him in the moonlight.

At the low cabin next to the house of Chloris he stopped and pounded on the door.

"Who comes?" cried a great voice within.

"It is I, Nicanor! Let me in!" said Nicanor, huskily, out of a throat parched and stiff, and still pounded.

The door opened with a rasping of bolts. The bulk of Nicodemus appeared, half undressed, his single eye glinting under its furze of brow.

"Thou, lad? In the name of the goddess mothers, what dost thou here at this hour? Not drunk again? Ha, so! Easy!"

Nicanor, with a hoarse and empty laugh, staggered forward even as his spent steed had done, and Nicodemus caught him and lowered him to the floor. He sat quite helpless, fully conscious, yet with the strength of his limbs gone from him for the moment utterly.

Nicodemus shouted for Myleia. She came, unkempt and kindly; between them the two got Nicanor to his feet and helped him to a bunk. A lodger, wakened by the noise, thrust out a tousled head, saw only a drunken wayfarer, and went to sleep again, all undisturbed. But at this point Nicanor resisted.

"Nay, not yet! I have first a thing to do.--Nico, hath there been trouble of sorts on Thorney these last three days?"

Nicodemus shook his great sides with laughter.

"Trouble? Yea, verily! Thorney hath been hopping to a mad dance these days, promise you!"

"And thou hast been dancing with the maddest," said Myleia, a hand upon his shoulder. "What quarrel is it of thine, my big ugly bear? Some day thou'lt be brought home to me dead, or else be haled away to be sold as slave."

"Never fear it, jewel of my heart," Nicodemus said tenderly. "Now see we to this battered one. See, here be a bruise upon his skull the bigness of a duck's egg. Get my shears, sweeting, and I'll clip this lion's mane of hair. It will lighten his head that that silver tongue of his may wag the better."

"No, you will not!" said Nicanor. "Give me wine and let my hair alone. Man, I tell you I've no time to lose. What happened here?"

"Out of the calm came forth a thunderbolt," said Nicodemus, watching as Myleia brought a bowl of water, with cloths and soothing herbs. She thrust the bowl into his hands, and he stood, great and hairy and patient, holding it for her while she cut away Nicanor's tunic, where it had stuck fast to the wound, and washed away the clotted blood and grime. "But not so long ago as thou hast said. Yester eve comes a cloud of dust over the hill by the marshes, and in the cloud as strange a sight as man may see. Chariots, with horses smoking in the traces, lords on horseback, slaves and rabble, all flying from the gods know what. A tall man, very pale, with a mouth set like the jaws of a trap; a younger one, to whom all turned for command and advice; a woman lovely as--er, that is to say, fair enough to please a taste not over-critical as mine, very pale, with red lips and the eyes of a little child in trouble. They stopped here, even at this house, it being nearest, and bought food and wine, resting for a time, for the woman was as one half dead from weariness. Then went they on once more, and took the road for Londinium. I made as much as five and twenty--"

Nicanor raised his head, and his eyes were full of a weary triumph.

"Nico, that pale lord is my lord, and that fair lady my lady, and I must follow them even across to Gaul."

"What use?" said Nicodemus. "They will not stay their passage for thee. Tarry rather with us, and be healed. In the wink of a cat's eye I'll have that collar from off thy throat, and no man be the wiser. We have no son, this old woman of mine and I; stay thou and be son to us. Thy lord will not miss thee, having other matters in his head. And it is long since we heard word from thee, lad."

"I had thought the girl would have told thee," Nicanor said. "And she--where is she?"

"Eh? What she?" Nicodemus asked blankly, and Myleia paused to listen.

"A girl, Eldris by name, half a Briton, I think, who escaped from my lord's house. I told her to come hither, that thou wouldst give her shelter until I could come. Hath she not been here?"

"Never hath such an one darkened these doors of mine," said Nicodemus, and Myleia nodded, adding quickly:

"Nay, or I should know!"

"She hath likely been captured and returned," Nicanor said, and let the subject drop.

In spite of all they could say to him, he borrowed a horse from Nicodemus, and at dawn set forth for Londinium, haggard and stubborn and ridden by haunting desire which would not let him rest. And toward evening he returned, and in his face was written failure. What he told them gave no clew to that which all men could read in him.

"My lord and his family sailed yester eve for Gaul. A ship was on the point of starting, and they were taken on board. This I learned from a waterman at the quays, who had helped to load their goods. And I know beyond doubt that they are gone, and that they will not return hither.... Now I am weary and would rest."

His voice was utterly dead, without life or spirit. Nicodemus, pierced by a glimmer of strange knowledge, laid a hand upon his shoulder. Very dearly he loved his shaggy teller of tales, even though he knew that whether he loved or not was small matter to his idol. His voice lowered to a husky growl of tenderness.

"Son, is all well with thee?"

A spasm, swift and sharp, passed over Nicanor's face, and was gone like a shadow. His eyes flinched as though a hand had touched a raw and quivering nerve.

"Nay," he answered, very quietly. "It is not well."

He wandered out, in time, away from their anxious questionings, across the marsh-ford, and toward the gray hills which rolled away to east and west, where the noise of the traffic could not follow. He threw himself upon the ground and stared upward at the gray misty skies, where no blue showed through and where black dots of birds went sailing. Here was the ground of his boyhood dreams,--he knew it with a tinge of bitterness,--dreams that had ended always under gray skies, upon the bleak hills of the uplands. Here, where the full shy heart of him had first known the secret of its power in those long-gone boyhood days, he had entered upon his heritage, thinking only of its joy, knowing nothing of its pain. And here he had returned. Then he had seen himself a soaring lark, singing out its life in pure joy and triumph in a fair world of dreams and sunshine. Now he knew that the lark was caged, doomed to beat its wings forever against bars stronger than iron, that the dreams were shattered and the world was dark. His life was empty; he had lost all, a slave without a master, a singer whose song was stilled. His face, unchanging, stared at the changeless sky; he lay stolid and motionless, and aching with dumb loneliness. Out of all the world he knew himself alone, set apart from his kind by that heritage which his ardent youth had thought all joy; alien, with his world not the world of those around him, and his way the way of loneliness.

In time, Nature had her way with him, and he slept, alone upon the hillside, in the dead slumber of exhaustion. The world thundered on around him; the web of Life unrolled endlessly from the distaff of the Second Fate; and he slept on, unheeding.

VI

In the late afternoon, when gray shadows were stealing westward over the quiet hills, came Eldris along the road toward Thorney, with an empty basket on her arm. She looked younger, rounder, better fed; her eyes were darkly blue and full of light, her skin as white as milk. Coming up a slight rise of ground, she saw the long figure lying against the hillside but a short distance away, and recognized it and stopped short, turning white, with a hand against her heart, all unprepared for what she had yearned to see. She went to him swiftly, and knelt beside him as he slept.

"Thank God! He hath returned--he is alive and well!" she whispered. "I had feared--oh, I know not what I feared! How hath he escaped? Ay me, but he is changed! There is that in his face which was not there before, and there is something gone from it. So thin he is--sure he hath been ill."

She hung over him in rapt absorption of tenderness; she listened to his slow and heavy breathing; she longed to draw his rough black head into her arms. Yet she dared scarcely touch him, since even in sleep he was still too much his own; rosy and shy she leaned above him, her face transfigured. They were alone in the world, with gray empty skies above them and gray silent hills rolling upon either hand.

With one finger she touched a lock of his hair, rough and matted, and dearer to her than all silken tresses; and he lay as one dead, very far from her. She whispered his name, but not for him to hear; at the deepness of his slumber she became emboldened. She stroked the hair from his forehead with mother-tender hands; her eyes brooded over him. He was her god; out of his strength he had saved her when she was helpless, so she murmured, ready, womanlike, to glorify; now he lay broken at her feet, with lean lithe limbs relaxed, with lids down-dropped over the gray sombre eyes which never had looked love into her eyes, with lips still grim and set even in the unconsciousness of sleep. She bent her head and with her lips touched the hair that she had smoothed. He stirred, and she started, a guilty thing, crimsoned with shame; but he did not wake. Her ears caught a word, as though in sleep he had felt a warm presence near him.

"Beloved!"

And for a name she listened hungrily, but none came. Who had found a place in that deep stern heart of his?--so she asked herself with a small inward twinge of an emotion new and strange. For whom had his keen eyes softened? Who had listened thralled to the silver speech which was all his? Who had known the strength of his arms? Who had found the spell which would soothe his savage moods to stillness and unloose the flood-gates of his magic? Whose was the name so sacred that even in sleep his lips could guard it?

"That is what he wants," she murmured; "some one to love him, to understand and comfort when he is so black and bitter, and I think it is what he hath never found. Ah, pray God he may find that one!"

Because she loved, it was given her to understand. And, understanding, she caught a glimpse of the tragedy of the loneliness in which those souls must wander whose world is not the world of everyday life and love and death. Quick tears dimmed her eyes, of pity because she understood; and one fell warm on the quiet face at her knee.

Nicanor opened his eyes, without moving, but Eldris saw, and sat stiffened with fear, self-betrayed in her swift flush. He raised himself on an elbow and looked at her, smiling slightly.

"Thou?" he said, with no surprise in his voice, as though he had thought of nothing but to find her there. "I thought Nicodemus said thou hadst not come."

"I did not go to him," said Eldris. "I was at another house a little while. Now I am taken care of by the priests of Saint Peter's."

Nicanor nodded. His eyes had not left her face.

"Perhaps that is best. Why dost thou weep?"

Eldris flushed again. But his gray eyes were inexorable; they dragged truth from her in spite of all her will.

"I--thou wert sleeping, and I thought thee ill, and I--was sorry."

"I am not ill," he answered, and his voice was gentle. "But let us speak of thee. Now I have come, not so soon as I had thought to come. It was not mine to say what I should do."

"You mean--?" Eldris said quickly. "Tell me of it. Tell me all of it, I pray you!"

Nicanor's eyes changed with the quick sweet smile which at rare times had power to lighten his face as a shaft of sunshine lights a thundercloud.

"All?" he repeated indulgently. "So, then, this is the tale."

He sat rocking gently back and forth, hands clasped about his knees, looking not at her at all, but away over the billowing hills.

"When thou hadst slipped away from the door of that torture room, I and Hito amused ourselves. And when our game was ended, he had no thought of thee nor thy escape; me it was upon whom all his loving care was centred. So it was commanded that I be taken to the lowest dungeon cell, there to meditate upon the sins which were mine.... I think that in all the world no man knows darkness as do I. Night is not dark; it hath the silver stars above it, and in the world the red earth-stars of men. But I was in darkness which was the darkness of the grave made manifest; it pressed upon mine eyes like leaden weights, and numbed my brain, and was a cloak which smothered me. What hours rolled on I knew not. I was fed or I starved; all was one. There was no time, there was no life, there was no death; there was but a naked soul sitting in still darkness. Five paces is my cell from wall to wall; shoulder high above the floor is a jutting stone. I doubt not that it is red with blood, since each time I passed, it scored me if I had not care."

Her shiver brought his glance back to her; with a smile he woke to recollection of her presence.

"I cry not thy sympathy, sweet sister; for there were times, and these were many, when the door of that dungeon opened wide, and Hito himself could not take from me my freedom. When I was back upon the moors with shepherds, who listened while I spoke; when I was by the camp-fires of Thorney in the Fords and men left their business at my word; and there was no darkness then in all the world. Back on the hills, where the clouds sweep free and the wind calls; back in the press of life, amid the crowding feet of men; back in the Garden of Lost Dreams, where flowers bloomed and grass was green and tender, and brown birds sang of love and life and freedom. And Hito, fond fool, rubbed his hands and thought he held me caged!"

He was very far from her again, in his own strange world; and she sat and watched him, her soul in her shining eyes, if he had but seen it, and knew she could not enter with him. He spoke more quickly; his voice fell to a deeper note, and in it was a mystery at which Eldris caught her breath.

"And out of the darkness there came a Tale to me, and thereafter there was light. And the tale is not yet ended--but it grows, it grows! Night and day it rings within my head; always it is with me, mine and mine only. But there is that in it which eludes me, which I seek and cannot find. And until I find it, the tale is not yet done. And it is of a Child, a Babe who lay within his mother's arms and smiled at all the world."

Eldris started, and her eyes, fixed upon his face, widened and filled with light. And again at her motion Nicanor came back to her. He looked at her, and his own eyes were as she had seen them once before, when upon a day she had told him that the name men called him was the silver-tongued.

"Once thou didst tell that tale to me," he said, "and day or night it hath never left me since. When it is ended, and I have found this thing I seek, then I'll tell it thee."

He took up his speech again, and she hung upon his words, unafraid to watch him since his eyes were turned from her.

"So there was a gray rat within this my dungeon cell; and at such times when the light faded and I was back therein, I coaxed and fed him, and taught him how to fight. Eh, he was a gallant beast, and his scar is yet upon my hand. He, my gaunt gray rat, and this little Christ of thine were all that kept my brain from madness those days when I sat in darkness. And in time, I, with others, was sent off to the mines, and there we labored until word came that men were needed to help our lord, who was attacked in his household by barbarians. But I was left behind when these were started, wounded by one with whom I had a quarrel about this same gray rat. When I reached our lord's house, it was empty, sacked and spoiled, and stationarii patrolled it. So I came onward to Londinium and here again was I left behind. Our lord hath left the country, and we are free to live or die as we may. I had no plan for thee when I bade thee to come hither, for there was no time for planning with Hito's jaws agape for thee." He rose to his feet and stood looking down upon her. "Now we be both alone, and there is but one thing for it that I can see. Thou must come with me. I cannot promise thee ease nor even safety, but what I have, thou shalt have also."

"With thee!" Eldris repeated below her breath, and turned her face from him. It flushed and was radiant; love brimmed over in her eyes. Was she the one who might find her place in that stern, deep heart of his,--she who might learn the spell which would soothe those bitter moods of his to stillness? Her eyes glowed and drooped. And then, slowly, across her face there fell a shadow, and the shadow was of the cross. She knew nothing of evasion; as her heart, so her lips spoke.

"With thee!" she breathed again. A sob caught her throat. In her turn she rose and faced him. "Ah, I would so gladly--so gladly! But--I can go with thee in but one way, and that way as thy wife."

Nicanor looked at her.

"Why, thou knowest that may not be," he said gently, yet with some surprise. "I am a slave, and a slave hath no rights before the law, nor to lawful marriage. It is the law. But come thou!"

Eldris turned white.

"I am Christian!" she said painfully, "and that thing I may not do. Father Ambrose teacheth that Christ hath forbidden."

"I did not make the law," said Nicanor. "Could I do so, I'd give thee gladly the name of wife. But even thus, more of honor I could not give thee. It is not what I wish to do, but what I must do." He took her face between his hands. "Child, the law is made, not by man, but by men; and it is not for man only, but for men. Were it not found good by men, it could not be. And the law, in its wisdom, saith that a slave is a beast, a thing without rights; and I am a slave. There is no law which could marry me to thee.... I cannot give thee marriage,--I, a slave."

"And I, a Christian, cannot go without," said Eldris, very low. Two tears rolled from beneath her wan closed lids. Nicanor bent his tall head and kissed them away, with what tenderness a brother might give a sister dearly loved. But with sudden wild sobbing Eldris flung up her arms and clasped his neck, and hid her face against him.

"Oh, I would go with thee!" she wept. "Heart of my heart, I would follow to the world's end, wherever thy path might lead me. I love thee, Nicanor, oh, my man of the silver tongue! and I shall love thee even till I die. But go with thee I may not--I dare not! Is this right? Were thy law and my religion made for this, to wreak such woe upon those who follow them? It is cruel,--it is more cruel than death, and I would to God that I were dead!"

Nicanor stood a moment silent, stroking her dark hair gently.

"No man would hold thee less worthy, since the case is as it must be. Never have I heard of slaves who took thy view of this. All thy life shalt thou have honor and protection. Were it in my power to mend matters, and I did not, the fault would then lie with me. As it is, it is no man's fault, and we have the right to make the best we may of it."

She shook her head, struggling with her tears. His tone changed; it deepened and thrilled until she thrilled with it; in it she heard the concentration of all loneliness and all bitterness.

"Come to me, Eldris, for I need thee sorely! All my life have I gone chained, desiring what I could not win, longing for what lay beyond me. Must it be so again? Once one said: 'Seek thou the sanctuary while yet there may be time; and when thou art entered in all else shall be as nothing, for there thou shalt have peace.' Then I did not understand; now know I too well. That is what all my life I have never found, though I have sought in many places, and for a weary while. Therefore pray your God to pity me and all who are as I, for I am ridden by ten thousand devils--a flame consumes me which I cannot quench. An ambition is not all a blessing to him who hath it! Oh, the dreams that were mine, which the high gods gave to me, and which are gone,--gone as the smoke goes and shall never come again! The glimpse I have had of a world that should be mine and never can be mine hath shown me all that I have lost. I beat my hands against the bars, and what doth it avail? I am a slave--a slave was I born and a slave shall I die. There is beauty in the world, and I may not see it; there is knowledge in the world, and I may not share it; and my soul is sick with longing for what all men may have but I. There is a thing within me which cries panting for release, and rends me because I know not how to set it free. It is agony and delight, pain and joy beyond all naming; and once I thought it only joy. Thus ever hath it been: what I have thought would bring me peace hath brought me pain, and pain that I know not what I have done to deserve. It was not thus when I lived a brute's life among the brutes in far, gray, northern hills; there was I content, not knowing that I wanted something more. Now have I stretched my hands out to a star, and found it so far beyond my reach that for me its light is lost in darkness which will never lift. Yet the star is shining,--but not for me."

The torrent of his speech checked. His voice dropped from the strain of its hoarse passion. He gathered her two hands closer on his breast.

"We be two outcasts, thou and I!--thou shunning, I shunned. Yet we still have each the other. Now do I come seeking the sanctuary of thy love, thy balm and healing for the hands and heart I have beaten against my bars. Wilt thou deny? Must I be turned away? Eldris, come!"

"Oh!" cried Eldris, her heart in her stricken voice. Long she looked at him, with eyes drowned in tears and lips quivering, all her struggle in her torn face. But suddenly she drew her hands from his, and slipped to her knees before him, and hid her face in shaking fingers.

"Oh, God!" she prayed,--and once Nicanor had heard words babbling so from a man upon the rack who never knew that he had talked aloud,--"keep me from going with him! I want to so--oh, I want to so! Make me strong--never let me yield to what is sin! Keep me from going with him! I love him so that I would sin for him! Dear Jesus Lord, keep me from doing that! But make me strong very quickly, or I must go--how can I stay when he so sorely needs me? Oh, God, God, God, I could comfort him so well! We cannot help it, neither he nor I. Nay, I will not weaken,--I will be strong, quite strong,--but in pity Thou must help a little too! I love Thee and the little Jesus, but I love him more--oh, nay--not more! I did not mean it!" She raised her streaming face, turning at the last from the Power whence no help came, to the human strength beside her. "Oh, beloved, help me, for I cannot fight alone!"

So, at the need of one soul, into the world another soul was born, and the long travail of spirit rending flesh was ended.

"Dear heart, be strong!--thy will shall be my will. If it be sin to thee, thou shalt not sin through me!" Nicanor said, and knelt beside her.

Nerveless and shaken with strangling sobs, she crept into the shelter of his arms, trusting him wholly now that his word was hers, pleading unconsciously that he save her from herself and from him. He lifted her to her feet, soothing her with touch and voice, forgetting himself in her distress. Her religious scruples he could not comprehend; the gods of religion were to be invoked when one wanted material benefits from them, not held as mentors to dictate one's course in life. But since she had such scruples, and since he was learning new, strange tolerance for and sympathy with others, it was not his to blame her for them; rather to remember that though they might be nothing to him, they were all to her, and were therefore not to be held lightly. So, because he was slowly gaining the strength to think of others before himself,--and of strength this is the surest test,--and because the tenderness of a strong man is greater than all the tenderness of a woman, he soothed her and brought her peace; and, it may be, in bringing it he found a measure of it himself. She was very dear to him,--dear as one might be who was not enshrined above all her kind forever. Heart and soul he was another's, for all time and all eternity; yet life was his to live and to make the best of it, even though there was a locked and guarded chamber in it of which the key was lost....

Hand in hand they walked homeward in the faint twilight glow. He left her at the church gate, and himself turned away, back toward the house of Nicodemus, walking with bent head and broad shoulders bowed. But his face was not all sombre; something of the courage he had given her remained to him, and his eyes were softened with the new tenderness which still lived. For it is one of the compensations as well as of the penalties of life, that what one gives, one shall get again.

At the threshold sudden distaste seized him; after what he had been through, the thought of the well-meaning, brutish chatter of Nicodemus and his wife was not to be endured. He turned back again and went as far from them as he could get, down to the river-ford. Here he sat upon the beach, away from the passing of the people; and the waters rippled at his feet. The west had cleared; overhead the faint rose of the sky was paling, but across the broad river was splashed a pastel of orange and blue and crimson; and the red, misty ball of the sun was dipping below the world's dark rim.

"This is love also," Nicanor said aloud, as though one had been by to hear him. "As she loveth me, so I love. There is love of a man for a maid, and of husband for wife; and there is love of sire for child, and of a friend for a friend, and of these all are different. Yet it is all one love, touching life on every side.... Why, then, it takes in all the world!"

His voice changed and rang with quick and startled exultation.

"Gods of my fathers! I have found it--I have found that thing I sought! It is love, not fear, nor wrath, nor power, that gave that little Child his power! And because it takes in all the world, this little One of whom men tell hath this love, then, for all the world. Now this is strange! Oh, Little Brother, I have found my tale, and it shall be greater than any tale that I have made before!"

His eyes deepened and flashed to the quick surge of power which shook him; now well and truly should all men name him Nicanor of the silver tongue. He was a slave, yet men should bow before him. No iron bars might longer hold him down; Fate, that mocking Fate of his, could no longer keep him chained. But over all the triumph in his face there grew also the old awe as in those days of boyhood, long ago, when first he knew himself for but the tool with which the work was wrought. His face changed and grew longing; his keen eyes dimmed. Quite suddenly he rose to his knees, kneeling as he had seen Eldris kneel, and clasped his hands as Eldris had clasped hers.

"Oh, Little Brother of the World, if thou lovest all men, love me also, for I have no one else. When I have sought love, it hath ever turned from me, prospering nothing. But since it seemeth that all men must love something, woman, or fame, or gold, it may be that it is not for me to love one woman only, but all men. If it be that I must choose, I will lose love of woman, and love of friend, and love of child; I will live alone to the end of my days, if but this soul of mine, which singeth in my loneliness, may return to me and my lips be no longer dumb. Love hath chained them; let now love set them free. And this my tale shall be strong as the wind that calls across the hills, and pure as flame, and great as love which takes in all the world, to the end that it may be worthy. Mine it is, and mine only; I made it, and it is blood of my blood and flesh of my flesh, and none may take it from me. Yet it is all, and I am naught but the voice which speaks."

His voice sank. He sat in silence, looking beyond the sunset, his hands about his knees.

So slowly the waters closed over the sun, and the day died, and the shadow of night descended upon Thorney.

VII

Old oaks caught the sunlight in their reaching hands and dropped it down to earth in flakes of gold; beech and larch and linden reared their tall heads above the road, and vines clung to them in woven tapestries of living green. There opened from this road dim forest aisles, veiled in dusk in which sunbeams quivered, paths of mystery, winding toward strange twilight worlds where wild wood-creatures wandered. Warm earth-scents drenched the air; soft sibilant whisperings stirred overhead, and hidden birds chattered in the leafage.

Here Nicanor sat in the dusk and gold of the forest's afternoon, his back against a gray tree-trunk, his hands about his knees. Hither every day he wandered, drinking new life from Earth's brown bosom, with idle hands and weaving brain. Here, where he had lost his vision, he was drawn back as by enchantment. He wished to dream again; to conjure forth the flying figure from the void into which it had vanished. To him it was more real than reality; for want of the substance he strove to keep the shadow in his heart.

In the spirit he roamed world-wide, with the narrow life of Thorney, its petty din and traffic, fallen away from him and forgotten utterly. Always his wandering ended in a garden, whose every path of dusky green he knew by heart, where one waited for him in the still evening light. In the flesh he lived with Nicodemus and Myleia, letting himself be waited on, worried over, caressed, to their affectionate hearts' content. No mood of his was too wayward for their sympathy; when at nightfall, after long hours of brooding, he would chant strange tales by some crowded camp-fire, than theirs were no voices quicker in wonder and applause. That they understood not half of what he said mattered nothing to their fondness; yet to Nicanor it was this one thing which mattered all. Nor were they the only ones who listened and loved his words. Many a fretting soul he lulled to quiet by his magic; to many he gave pleasure whose pleasures were all too few. Once he had scorned them, these simple children of plain and forest, whose emotions he could mould as a potter moulds his clay; in his high pride he had thought that these were not the worlds he was born to conquer. Now he loved them; to bring a moment's brightness into some gray life, a moment's forgetfulness of pain to one who suffered--this it was his to do. For, as once he had thought to move the hearts of kings with his power, so now he knew that a king's heart is no more than man's heart, and only he may move the one who can move the other. And every heart that he won he laid in spirit at the feet of his lost lady, who had taught him the Master-word of the tongue of men and angels, without which faith and hope can profit nothing, nor can any heart be won.

A thicket of briars and underbrush hid him from the road. For drowsy hours he had looked through his tangled lattice upon the life that went up and down the highway, himself unseen,--a pedler, bent under the weight of the pack upon his shoulders, making wry faces at his blistered feet; a farmer, mounted on his clumsy two-wheeled cart, returning from the markets of Londinium; a chariot, gay with paint and gilding, with two young nobles arguing over the races at Uriconium; and between all these, long intervals of sun-steeped stillness, when the world drowsed and insects shrilled in the untrod grasses.

Later there came northward toward Londinium a funeral train, on the way to the cemeteries that lined the road outside the town, weaving in and out among the checkered shadows, stately and slow and solemn in its pomp of death. There was a bier, draped with a pall of sable velvet, and drawn by four white horses, pacing slow. Slaves and clients went on foot before and behind it; and beside it there walked a man, tall and of lordly bearing. His hand rested on the bier's edge; his face, bowed upon his breast, was scored with sorrow. There was dust upon the richness of his mourning cloak; and dust also on the plumed trappings of the horses, and the garments and the sandals of the slaves. This pilgrimage of love and sorrow had been no easy one, nor short. Nicanor, peering through the brambles at the sombre train, read the story in the man's face, where tragedy sat frozen. At once his mind's eyes saw, beneath the embroidered pall, a fair dead face, great eyes closed, and lashes drooping on a marble cheek, two hands folded on a pulseless breast. In a heart-beat it was as though a veil had lifted, and he probed the depths of one phase of the world's tragedy; through one man's sorrow he looked into the sorrows of all men. By his own pain he felt himself made kin to all those thousands of the earth who knew pain also. The feeling lasted but a moment, and was gone, leaving him with hushed breath and shining eyes.

"Here have I found another chord of life to play on," he said softly. "And when it is touched there is no human heart but must answer. So thou also hast lost her, O friend! And yet, perhaps, after all, thou art happier than I. There are things worse than death, as I have found. At least ... she is all thine!"

When the turn of the afternoon had come, and while he lay watching gnats dancing in a shaft of golden light that fell athwart the trees, his ears caught voices from the road, and the click of a horse's feet against a stone. A woman laughed; and again he parted the brambles and looked out. The road was splashed with sunshine and shadowed by the trees which arched above it and hid the sky. Down it, with faces turned from Thorney, two came toward him,--a girl, sitting sideways on a great bay horse, leaning to the man who walked beside it. She was fair, with long hair lying in a golden sheen upon her crimson mantle. She rode steadying herself to the horse's stride with a hand upon the man's shoulder. He, tall, fair also of hair and skin, with blue eyes laughing under flaxen brows, in a brown leathern jacket and brazen cap which caught the sun in small sliding gleams of light, led the horse by its bridle and looked up at her as she talked. Down the green forest way they came in the mellow shade and sunshine, fair as gods, radiant in their youth and life and happiness, with eyes for nothing, ears for nothing, save each other.

"It is Wardo!" said Nicanor, in surprise. "Sure I had thought him on the way to Gaul."

He pressed through the thicket and stepped into the road. Wardo saw him, and dropped the bridle with an exclamation, and ran forward.

"Thou!" he cried, and fell upon Nicanor in a storm of joy. "Thou great rascal, I had thought thee dead. Where hast been that thou didst not seek me? When didst leave the mines? Hast heard of what befell our lord? Oh, I have hungered for thee, to tell thee the good fortune which is mine!"

The horse came up to them, with the girl in the crimson mantle sitting stately on its back. Her eyes were blue and shining; her cheeks were flushed with the rose of life. Nicanor smiled at her and at his friend.

"So, Sada?" he said, with a note in his voice which neither caught. "All is then as it should be?"

"Ay, promise you that!" said Wardo, a hand on the girl's knee. She smiled down into his eyes. "She is mine now. This day did I take the gold to Chloris, and the cage-door opened, and my bird was free. My bird now, and no other man's."

"Thine!" she murmured, radiant.

"When our lord departed for Gaul, I was left behind in the confusion." So Wardo told his tale. "Well, perhaps I need not have been, had not the gods willed it so. Therefore I was my own man, and could not be held to account for it, since my lord ran away from me, not I from him. So I joined those East Saxons who are moving down upon us from the Fens, and henceforth my lot is cast with them. For some of these I repaired swords, bucklers, what not, since my old trade is not lost to me, and for my work they gave me gold--ay, much gold. And with the gold I bought Sada. Now we go forth to seek our nest; where, we care not. She is mine, and I am free. Ye holy gods, but it is fine for a man to own himself and call none other lord! No man ever more shall hold me slave to him. Henceforth we be rovers, this star of my life and I. Come thou with us, friend! If thou stay here, thou'lt be held no better than _erro_, a landless, masterless wanderer, who is fair game for the law and for all men. Had my lord stayed, thou knowest that I too should have remained faithful. He being gone, we must fend for ourselves as best we may."

Nicanor shook his head.

"Nay, I stay here. Go thou thy way, and may thy faring prosper. Now tell of our lord and his escape."

Wardo laughed.

"Ho, there was work which thou shouldst have seen!" He told of Wulf, and of the fighting which was done within the villa; of the flight from the house, the long ride by cart-track and highway to Calleva, with his lady crouched in front of him and her hair blowing over his hands. And here Nicanor broke in.

"Thou there with her, and I--Tell me, man, was she hurt or frightened? Did she swoon or weep?"

"How could I see?" said Wardo. "I stood, and she kneeled before me. And little did I care whether she wept or swooned, when the grays were plunging like to tear my arms from my body, and it was all I could do to keep upon two wheels. There went my lord ahead, and here pounded I after, and alongside rode my lord Marius, watching his wife and itching to be back and have it out with those reavers. I saw it in his eye. Eh, that was a wild night. We made the Bibracte road, and doubled back eastward, and so rode for Londinium. But at the second miliarium from Bibracte the grays gave out. So my lord Marius took my lady upon his saddle, and they all went on, bidding me follow as soon as might be. But by the grace of the gods, I was too late. When I reached the port, my lord and his people had set sail for Gaul. Well, then, if thou wilt not come with us, when things be settled, and a man may know better what to look for, I shall come and seek thee, and we will have a talk over old days together, and spill a drop or so to Bacchus. Until then, comrade o' mine, farewell."

They grasped hands, and Sada smiled a farewell at Nicanor. The two went on, then, and left him standing there, and he watched them pass away into the glinting light and shade until Sada's crimson mantle was lost in the green gloom of trees. He took his slow way back toward Thorney, musing as he walked.

"This day mine eyes have looked on life and death, and all that death mourns and life clamors is Love, Love, and again Love. Strange that something all men must love, who cannot live for themselves alone, no matter how they try."

He came down from his dreams at the stepping-stones of the marsh-ford, to find himself all but overrunning a child who stood upon the bank and wept because he feared to cross--a small atom of a man, with little tunic torn and puckered face of woe. At sight of Nicanor he ran, and flung himself against his legs, with the sure confidence of babyhood in all the new, strange world, and clamored to be taken home.

Nicanor stooped to him with a laugh, recognizing him as the son of one Julius the Tungrian, a field-hand belonging to the farmer Medor, whose estate lay between the hills a half-mile from Thorney.

"How now, manling? Why these tears at thy first venture into the world? How didst stray so far from mother's skirts? Dost wish to go home?"

"Ay, home!" wept young Julius. "Thou wilt take me home!"

"Come, then," said Nicanor, and swung him to his shoulder, and turned back from the ford to the road again.

It came upon him then that this was the first time that ever he had held a child in his arms. Always before had children run from him, learning, like their elders, to shun him: now he knew why. The softness of the round little body thrilled him oddly; the touch of the clinging hands, the baby weight upon his shoulder, called into life emotions such as he had never thought to know. A child, a little living child, her child and his.... The thought stirred him suddenly to his soul; and with the thought a fresh bit of the Scroll of Life unrolled before his eyes,--that Scroll which slowly he was learning how to read. His heart caught another phase of the old experience of the world, the high pride and joy of fatherhood. Again, as once before, he got a flash of new, strange light into the hearts and minds of all the world of men, as with the parting of a veil; found a new chord under his hand to be struck into pulsing life. All unaware that on a day his lady had said, "His son could I love, and be proud that he was mine," he marvelled at himself and at his feeling, and still more at the little one that had such power to wake it.

He reached the farm of Medor, and stopped at the cabin of Julius, whom he knew, which stood at the edge of the estate. Through the open doorway he could see, in the obscurity of the one poor room within, a woman's figure, bending to rub her man's back, bruised and raw from the harness of the plough, with ointment of herbs--a nightly proceeding regular as the evening meal. When she had done, he would take his turn in rubbing her; since it was not enough for women to be the bearers of children, but also they must be hewers of wood and drawers of water as well. She rose to straighten herself from her task, and saw the tall figure coming doorward, with the little one crowing upon his shoulder. At her exclamation, Julius, rugged and mossed as a sturdy hemlock, came to the threshold to look over her shoulder, stripped to the waist, his neck and arms shining with the grease.

"Here is thy son, O Kalia!" said Nicanor, halting. "He was by Thorney, weeping because the world was not large enough for his adventure."

The mother received her son with tender welcome, but he held his arms out to Nicanor, whimpering to be taken back.

"He runs away to play with boys while I am in the field, the wicked one!" she said.

Julius looked down at her and at his boy with proud eyes. When he was drunk he would beat his wife, but she loved him because he loved their child. Nicanor looked at the three.

"He is worth having," he said, very soberly, nor thought that his words might sound strange to them. He smiled at the boy, and left them, with the mother's thanks following him.

And Julius, watching him across the field toward the road, said:

"Mark you how the boy hath taken to him? Dost remember, before he went away from Thorney, how children ran from him, and even folk feared him and his gall-tipped tongue?"

"I remember," Kalia answered. "Even I have punished the child by saying, 'The black man Nicanor will get thee if thou stop not thy crying,' until for very fear he ceased. Never have I seen one so changed as he. Juncina, the fish-wife, with whom I spoke but yesterday on Thorney, saith that each day he goeth to lame Gallus, the blacksmith's son, who is dying of a fever, and telleth him tales until the little one sleeps. And when folk give him money for his tales, he will take it, though he never asketh it, and of it he will give half to those three old men whom each day he tendeth. It is not so long since he hath been back on Thorney, yet even so all men wonder at the change in him. Verily, I think that he must be in love."

"That is ever all you women think of!" Julius grumbled. "Were you to have your way of it, it would be love that worketh all the miracles, cureth all the illnesses, taketh the place of all the gods. Now come and rub; I am sore in every joint and sinew."

Nicanor went home in a brown study, seeing never Kalia's broad, homely face, untidy wisps of hair, brown bosom covered by her coarse gray kerchief, but that face, young and fair and tender, which in his dreams had become mingled with that Other Woman's face with holy eyes, who was the Virgin Mother of all love. When he thought of this one, it was to think of the other, no longer woman merely, but idealized and uplifted into all that he could imagine of purity, a something too fine for earth. In place of humble Kalia, he pictured that fair patrician face as his soul's eyes saw it, glorified with the mother-love upon it, brooding over a round little head in the hollow of her breast. Holy gods, the maddening, sweet mockery of it! He shook himself as one who throws off a weight upon him, and turned in at the house of Nicodemus, whistling, with aching throat and sombre eyes of pain.

It was later than he had thought, and the evening meal was over. This troubled him not at all, for in that house he was sovereign lord, and knew his power. Myleia and her ursine spouse served him quite as though they had been his slaves. A roasted pigeon hot from the coals, beans cooked in oil with garlic, a cake of barley-bread baked in the ashes, honey, and a pitcher of wine--no lord could have fared better than their idol.

Nicodemus carried an empty platter to Myleia in the kitchen, showing it to her with immense pride.

"He hath eaten all!" he rumbled in a rasping whisper. "The first time these three weeks. Come! that is doing better. We'll have him around yet, my girl--this spoiled baby of ours."

"Who spoileth him?" she retorted, pinching his ear gently. "Thou art worse over him than a mother whose babe hath cut its first tooth. Thou art foolish in thine old age, my great ugly bear."

"Soul of my heart, a man must find something to be foolish over!" he declared, vastly pleased. "And it is high time I left off being foolish over thee. Eh, sweeting, what sayest thou?"

He ruffled her hair with his great hand. Nicanor looked in upon them from the threshold.

"At it again, thou old lion and his mate? Thou also!" he said, and smiled at them. "I go down to the ford--there be a party of men riding over the hill. Wilt come, Nico?"

The two went forth into the evening, leaving Myleia to watch them with fond eyes of pride from the low doorway.

Along the street people had begun to gather, with more of curiosity to see what might be seen than of apprehension. Woodmen with bundles of fagots on their shoulders, fishermen with strings of fish, itinerant wine-sellers rattling strings of horn cups, with skins of cheap red wine, vendors of the black sticky sweetmeats made of the blood of beeves mixed with rice and honey,--all these ceased to cry custom for their evening trade in interest at the arrival of the strangers. It was long since such a crowd had descended upon Thorney; trade might be improving. Women, ragged, with more ragged children clinging to their skirts, came from the fisher-huts upon the beach to gaze across the marsh.

And across the ford, on the crest of the long gentle rise of hill over which the straight road ran, came riding a troop of horsemen, carelessly, without order, in a tangle of waving spears and gleaming helmets. No merchants or townsfolk were these; and a tingle went through the crowd at the sight of weapons. Those were days when none knew what to expect from hour to hour. The on-comers cantered down the hill and into the waters of the marsh-ford; and it could be seen that they were for the most part fair-skinned, and every man bore a round buckler of bullock's hide upon his arm. At once a whisper flew from end to end of Thorney:

"These be Saxons!"

The name had become a word with which to conjure. The crowd upon the beach increased. Nicanor and Nicodemus stood in the forefront of it and watched.

The leaders of the party--an old man with white drifting beard and hot blue eyes, and a young one, with tanned face and brown, curling hair--rode out upon the shingle with stern faces set straight ahead. Those behind them were more free and easy as to bearing; a man leaned from his saddle to scoop up water in his hand; there was joking in low tones, and deep-throated laughter. As they drew nearer to the people, waiting silent, it could be seen that they had with them a prisoner in their midst, bound upon his horse and wounded; and at sight of him a murmur fluttered through the crowd. For he went in the dress of a Roman noble, torn and stained with blood, his head sunk forward on his breast, his right arm in a sling--a pitiful object, were there those to pity.

With the crowd Nicanor and Nicodemus followed the Saxons as they rode along the main street. Questions flew from mouth to mouth:

"Who is this lord, their prisoner? Whither take they him? How did they capture him? For what come they here?" But to these no man could give an answer.

VIII

Thereafter Fate, the grim, smiling goddess, took into her own hand the shuttle of Destiny and sent it flying fast rough the warp and woof of Life. For when they came to the river's brink, the tide was in, and the waters of Tamesis, too deep to ford with safety since the moon was full, swirled past them in their swift rush from the sea.

The Saxons halted on the beach, dismounting, while the leaders conferred, and the prisoner drooped pallid in their midst; and the men of Thorney seized upon their chance for trade. An hundred mouths to feed was a boon not to be despised in those lean days. There sprang up a horde of wine-sellers, men with poultry, with produce, and with meats. The two leaders rode away to seek an inn, each attended by a servant. A fire was kindled on the beach, where in other days so many fires had blazed; for a brief while Thorney took on a semblance of its former thriving self. Mingled with the sounds of trade and barter there was heard the dry, thin rattle of a sistrum from a temple of Isis where priests and worshippers were gathered for hidden rites; the voices of men singing, the neighing of horses.

Here, on the river side of Thorney, the beach was wider than upon the marsh side. The houses grouped themselves in black, irregular masses behind this beach; and to the west, a short distance from the water's edge, rose the low stone wall which bounded the land of the Christian church. Fishermen's huts were crowded at the foot of this wall; and along the sand were strewn rotting spars and timbers, and there were boats drawn out of reach of the tide. Old houses, wrecked by fire and time, leaned their tottering walls above the alleys at strange angles, settling slowly into the ruin of age. The round moon hung stately, low in the eastern sky, drowning in radiance the garish glare of flames; houses stood out sharp-cut against its light, and strange shadows flung across the crooked cobbled streets. A broad path of silver glinted on the inky waters of the river. The smell of fish and tar rose strong above all other scents.

The Saxons, hungry and weary from their march, ate hugely and drank deep. Horns of mead and beer were drained and filled; white wine was as good as red. They talked with the men of Thorney, in strange Latin, with much gesticulation and interpolation of Saxon words. Among the many figures on the beach, black in the mingled light of moon and flame, was ceaseless motion, kaleidoscopic and bewildering. Thorney woke to a lusty gayety, born of deep drinking; of recklessness, even, such as she had known rarely since the old days of the legions. Laughter became louder; quarrels, short and fierce, arose as hot blood mounted with the fumes of wine. Into the air there crept a tension, the intangible effluvium of excitement which precedes the arousing of the crowd. Quite suddenly the spirits of people were raised to fever pitch; the boisterous vigor of the Saxons was infectious.

Nicanor soon lost sight of Nicodemus. He stood among the people, regarding the scene with eyes of detachment. As always in a crowd, an odd sense of impersonality possessed him, of aloofness; in it he was forgetful of his own presence, of his own corporeality; became as a Mind seeking out its own. Here and there he was recalled by a man's greeting; here and there also a woman spoke. Everywhere he was hailed cheerily, as one comrade by another. Jests were passed to him, for which he gave as good as he got. There was that in their intercourse with him which proved him one of themselves, an intimate sharer in their pleasures, their sorrows, their lives. Yet he was the man who not so many years before had in this place been baited as men bait a bear--the surlier, the better sport.

A red-lipped flower-girl, on the way home from her day's business in Londinium with her basket of remaining blossoms, was pressed against his shoulder in the outer edge of the crowd that watched the Saxons feed, as boys gather to see the wild beasts of the arena tear their meat. She turned, saw him, and laughed with gay raillery.

"Couldst even thou, O Silver-tongued, make of these great guzzling cattle a tale?"

He looked at her with quick artist joy in the vivid color and effect of her,--red lips, cheeks as brilliant as her roses, black eyes, midnight hair in which a crimson flower was tangled. In her laughing glance, her care-free joyous innocence, he caught a hint, gone as swiftly as it come, of that Other who held his soul. Now he understood the heart and inmost meaning of it; it was the all-compelling Womanhood, the sacred spark, guarded and precious, which set men's hearts aflame; and for him, henceforth, because of that one, it made all women sacred. He answered her, banter for banter.

"What would the world be without cattle, O Flower-maiden? And why not a tale? There is a tale in all things, if one but look to find it--in every bud and leaf and flower--in these Saxons--in thee, little sister to the rose!"

"That is pretty," she cried, dimpling. "Here is a bloom in payment; once it was as fragrant as thy words. May they never lose sweetness like a flower which fadeth!"

Reaching up, she thrust a flower behind his ear, as a young fop of the nobility would wear it, and sprang away into the crowd laughing.

"The wish of innocence should be good omen; the gods grant it!" said Nicanor. He pushed onward through the press to get a nearer view of the Saxons; and heard as he came a great voice shouting a rhythmic chant.

Over the shoulders of those in front he could see a ring of Saxons surrounding the man who sang. As they listened they drank, and as they drank grew more emphatic in applause. The singer was a bull-chested fellow, purple-faced with his exertions. He swung his sword, he roared, he heaved himself upon his toes; and Nicanor, fellow-craftsman and maker of words, eyed him and smiled a smile of pity.

The shouting ceased; the man cast himself upon the ground and called for wine. Nicanor touched upon the shoulder one whose face showed that he understood the words.

"Friend, who is this dainty warbler, and what the burden of his song?"

"Who he is I know not," said the man, with a grunt of laughter. "What he sang was the greatness of his people, and their skill in war. Tell thou them a tale, Nicanor; these Saxons will listen all day to tales, and give good silver to the teller."

Nicanor shook his head.

"Nay; perhaps they understand not Latin over well, and I had rather that they understood than that they gave me silver. Now what are they going to do?"

Two men dragged the prisoner forward into the circle of the firelight. He was afoot, but the hand free of the sling was bound to his body. That the poor wretch knew what they would do with him was plain; he cringed, and cast hunted glances around the ring of fire-lit, curious faces.

"I am Felix of Anderida, a Roman lord!" he cried in a high voice, his pale eyes wide with fear. "If there be any Roman among ye who will free me from these Saxon wolves, I will give him gold as much as his back may carry!"

A Saxon raised his hand and smote the lord upon the mouth, so that blood began to trickle down his chin.

"Cease thy bleating, thou white-eyed sheep!" he growled in Latin.

"That is not right, to strike a man unarmed and bound," said the man beside Nicanor. "I think our backs could carry a goodly sum of gold, eh, friend? These fellows be half drunken; it should not be difficult to get him free of them, and after, make him pay. I am of the collegium of smiths in Londinium, and I see many of my fellows here who would stand with me. Also, we could summon the militarii unto us and let them settle the matter; it is not lawful that these Saxons make away with a Roman after this fashion."

"I can hold them, if thou canst summon thy fellows quickly," said Nicanor. His tone was quite assured. "But it must be done at once, before they have worked themselves up to mischief over him."

"Do thou so then, and I will shake a staff aloft when he is safe," said the man, and slipped away among the people.

Before Nicanor could make his way through to confront the Saxons, who were preparing for brutal sport with their prisoner, the horses of the two chieftains broke through the ring and the riders dismounted in the open space. The lord Felix twisted away from those who held him and ran to the younger chief.

"Call thy fellows from me!" he cried. "Each time when thou art not by they seek to torture me for their sport."

The brown-haired leader folded his arms across his chest and looked down upon his prisoner. He spoke, in Latin sufficiently fluent.

"Hast thou forgotten that I am Ceawlin, son of that Evor whom thou hast slain, and that my foot is upon thy neck and thy blood shall be let out in payment for my sire his blood? How then shouldst thou say what may or may not be done with thee, thou little toad?"

It was then that Nicanor came into the torchlit ring, walking carelessly, a song upon his lips. He stopped where the light fell fullest on him, facing the chieftains, shapely as a young pagan god in the strength and flower of his manhood, the red rose behind his ear. The speech of Ceawlin broke and stopped; his gaze fastened upon the intruder with the swift recognition of one strong man for another.

"Who is this man?" he said sharply. None answered; his own people did not know, and no one else seemed ready to stand sponsor. Ceawlin spoke again. "Who art thou, fellow? Art thou also of the Welsh?"

For as Briton was the Roman word, so Welsh, or wælisc, a foreigner, was the Saxon word, meaning merely one who was not of Teuton race, and given to those nations which spoke the Latin tongue.

"I am a Briton," said Nicanor. "Men call me the teller of tales, and I am come to buy from thee thy prisoner. What price wilt thou put upon him, O son of Evor?"

"How knowest thou me?" Ceawlin asked doubtfully. His voice became angered. "What price, quotha! No price that thou canst pay, sir teller of tales!"

"So? Didst ever hear of that ancient sea-king who put too high a price upon his spoils?" said Nicanor, with a laugh, choosing simple words that all might understand. Before Ceawlin had time to speak he swung around upon the listening men, standing tall in the ruddy light, his head thrown back to shake the hair from his eyes. "Listen, O friends, for it is a good tale, such as ye know how to love. Five black ships, dragon-prowed, rode out of the night, upon the black seas, upon the foam. Long were they, and lean, and swift as the vertragus, the hound that outspeeds the hart. Winds roared behind them; great birds swooped through the storm across their way; great waves rushed under them as they rode with rocking spars. Spray swept across the faces of those who manned them, as the hair of a woman sweeps across her lover's face; crashing they reeled through lifting seas, and swam to the crests of curling billows rimmed with pale fire, and the thunder of their going outroared the clamoring storm. Know ye the yell of the wind in the straining cordage, the heave and fall of the plunging deck beneath your feet? Know ye the sting of brine upon your lips, and the savor of the salt winds in your lungs, O ye sons of Evor?"

A deep breath went through the circle, as though a breath from the outer seas had filled men's nostrils. Ceawlin licked his lips as though he had thought to find them stiff with salt.

"Ay--we know!" he said deeply, his eyes alight. "Hast thou then been also upon the seas?"

Nicanor laughed low.

"Nay, never I!" he said. "But I see that ye do know."

"Go on!" spoke a voice, impatient, from the circle.

They were his, every man, and he knew it. In his first words he had struck the chord which answered true in them, these lawless sea-rovers; they were his to play upon as a musician on his lyre. The sure instinct of his art taught him to tell of those things which they themselves knew best, which were nearest to them, to their own lives. The ring held silent, awaiting his next word, bearded men who leaned upon their spears and iron swords, and listened. They had eyes for none other than he, this tall youth with the black hair and the eyes of steel, who stood before them in his careless pose of triumph, with his red rose thrust behind his ear; who knew what they knew, felt what they had felt, made them see what he saw, and held them in the hollow of his hand. Caught up in his swift imagery, even they forgot their prisoner, who, it seemed, was further to one side, less in evidence among his guards. By now the Romans had drawn closer to the ring of Saxons, so that there was one dense crowd about the open space--much narrowed now--where the chieftains and Nicanor stood.

Not for nothing had he listened to the talk of the deep-sea fishermen and the whalers who frequented Thorney, and stored in his memory all that they could give him. In his tale was the clamor of the wild north wind, the scream of wheeling gulls, the groan of straining timbers, the rush of bubbling foam beneath sharp prows. He told of swift battle fought over heaving waters, whose jaws yawned for their dead; and men hung upon his words. He told of the red medley of the fight; of the heavy fall and sullen splash of bodies into the grave which waited; of ships that grappled in their death-throes like wrestling men and sank locked in their grim embrace; of defeat and triumph, of high courage of men who lost, and the higher courage of mercy of men who won; and men's faces grew eager, who themselves had lived through scenes such as these, and themselves had watched the death of gallant ships.

Nicanor glanced over the ring and saw that the prisoner had disappeared, leaving not a ripple in the crowd to mark his trail. The absorbed faces of his hearers, and the sense of what was being done behind their backs, seized him, and he smothered a laugh. His voice flowed on, deep-toned, vibrant, working his magic upon them, talking against time.

Somewhere in the outskirts of the crowd a horse neighed loudly; there was a flurry among those people nearest the sound, and high over men's heads a staff was shaken. Nicanor's speech broke midway; this was the signal, and he no longer cared whether or not he held them. In that instant the spell was snapped; men stirred and whispered. And suddenly a shout of warning and anger went up--

"The prisoner! The prisoner hath gone!"

Forgotten were the tale and its teller; the inner group of Saxons surged into commotion and uproar. There was a rising storm of assertion and denial. Ceawlin strode to Nicanor, his link armor clashing softly as he moved.

"Now do I believe that thou hast had to do with this!" he cried in ready anger.

Nicanor laughed.

"Perhaps after all it had been better if thou hadst paid the price, lord Saxon!"

Swift words sprang to Ceawlin's lips, but the elder leader ran to them, shouting something in his own tongue. Ceawlin turned to answer, and Nicanor slipped away.

Face to face he came with a woman seldom seen beyond her jealous doors; a fat and shapeless bunch of garments topped by thin hair streaked with ruddy dye, a high white marble brow, an old face deeply lined. The woman was looking at him keenly, with boring vulture eyes. She spoke swiftly, in a voice clear-toned and silvery as a bell.

"I heard thee speak.... Once, long years ago, stood I in this place and heard a boy speak, an elfin, wolf-eyed child, who came out of the night and spoke with an un-childish tongue. Often since have I thought of him and the power within him, for though I was young in years yet was I old in knowledge, and I knew that never had I seen one like him. Into his hand I put a piece of silver, and I think it was the first that ever he had touched. Art thou that child?"

"Ay," said Nicanor. "That child was I. So it was thou who first didst teach me that silver could pay for souls." He thrust a hand into the pouch that hung at his belt and drew forth a broad piece of silver, holding it to her. "But I think it must be clean silver that pays for mine, O Chloris."

The woman flinched oddly. Both had forgotten the rising tide of excitement around them.

"Nay," she said. "I will not have it back. Canst not leave me the thought that there was one gift which I gave honestly--or is it with thee as ever with stony-hearted youth, swift to condemn, slow to understand?"

"Why should I condemn thee?" said Nicanor. "That is not mine to do until in me is nothing to condemn. Nay, rather could I pity thee."

The heavy lids opened slightly over Chloris's eyes.

"And wherefore?" she asked with a hard note in her flute-like voice. "If I pity not myself, why shouldst thou pity? Am I not loved, and have I not loved greatly? Have I not riches beyond thine imaginings?"

Nicanor laughed low and softly, his keen eyes on the old face.

"Love thou hast never known, O Chloris," he said gently. "In all thy long life of wanton ease, thy long life in which children might have leaned upon thy knees and children's voices might have called thee blessed, love thou hast never known. Who could not pity this? Or thy name would not be upon the lips of men in the market-place. When men love, think you they make common talk of what they love? When women love, keep they not themselves pure for love's pure sake? Ay, truly I could pity thee, because some day thou wilt so pity thyself, in spite of thy riches beyond mine imaginings. That is all."

"Thou art over strange," said Chloris. "And I would I had not spoken with thee. After all, what doth it matter? There is always the end, when darkness comes and the wax is wiped clean."

"Is there?" said Nicanor. "Is there an end to anything upon the earth?"

"Now thou art foolish," said Chloris. Her eyes were unchanged, but her voice was angry. "In truth there is an end, and the end is--death." She spoke with the deep-rooted and universal distaste of all Romans to the direct reference to death. "Must not all things be gathered to the shades? And is not that the end of them?"

"Believe it, then, for so long as thou canst, for thou wilt be the happier for believing," said Nicanor. "And if some day it come to pass that thou dost believe differently, remember then what others have found, that only love can save thee--the love which thou hast never known. Were it not wise, O Chloris, to seek it while yet there may be time?" He paused, and his eyes forgot her. "I am seeking now," he said below his breath, and turned away from her into the crowd.

Chloris looked after him a moment with lids half dropped over her changeless eyes.

"The breath of the gods hath breathed upon him, and he understands. Oh, ay! he understands." She laughed, a silver tinkle which was not wholly mirth. "Will it ever come to pass that Chloris, the greatly loving, will rejoice to know that there is one who pities her? We shall see!"

But meanwhile affairs had changed on Thorney, even during the moments of Nicanor's speech with Chloris. The throng upon the beach, no longer orderly, was heaving with excitement. The Saxons, spreading in all directions to search for their prisoner, were in no mood to care what offence they gave. They plucked brands from the fire, using them as torches, and started for the village, while men and women retreated before them, not knowing how far trouble might ensue. But before they reached the village, a body of militarii, hastily summoned, came forth from between the houses to meet them. The officer commanding them sprang upon a pile of lumber, shouting to the Saxons, who halted, as it were irresolute.

"While ye remain in this province it is right that ye should obey its laws! If this Roman whom ye have taken hath committed crime against your laws or ours, let him be tried by these laws. Otherwise will we not give him up to you. He is a freeborn Roman, and is not to be done away with as a slave. If ye make oath to grant him trial, we will deliver him unto you."

Ceawlin, the hot-headed young chieftain, pulled his long sword from its bronze sheath, pointing with it to the figure upon the lumber-pile. His face flamed with red rage; he shook his sword and shouted to his men behind him. There was a rush; before the Romans could prevent, a score of Saxons had leaped upon the pile, dragging down him who spoke; and the first blood on Thorney had been shed. It was the signal; like warring currents of the sea the two forces clashed. The beach was alive with figures, struggling, shouting, or swaying in deadly silence in each other's grip. Light flickered snakelike along uplifted blades which shot above the sea of heads. It was a fight hand to hand, primitive, blind with insensate rage, ever-smouldering, which wanted but the spark of excuse to flame into the full flare of battle. The resistance of the militarii was speedily overcome; outnumbered, lacking their leader, they broke and fled. The Saxons, with shouts of triumph, gave chase over the stony beach into the streets of the island, bent on the recapture of their prisoner, and on wreaking vengeance upon those who had dared oppose them.

IX

That night, in the house of Juncina the fish-wife, kneeled Eldris at the window of the loft where she slept, looking out upon the house-tops with her shoulders gleaming white through her loosened hair. Through the window moonlight drifted, showing the squalor of the loft, and the bed where Sosia, the daughter of Juncina, lay asleep.

Into the night she murmured love-words, happy in her dreaming, calling to her love across the darkness.

"Is he in the wine-shop of Nicodemus, or is he in the moonlight by the fords, telling his tales to those who crowd around him? Doth he think of me, whose thoughts are all of him? Or have I angered him over-deeply?--for never have I seen him since that day I said him nay. Ah, Nicanor, was it love that said thee nay? This hour might I have been lying in his arms, Love's happy handmaid--so happy! What if I had yielded? I so want his love! What would God care? Mary, Mother, keep me from these thoughts! I would that I could see him now--this same moon doth shine upon him somewhere. Thou old moon, how many maids hast thou looked down on since the beginning of the world, who have kneeled at windows, and thought of a man, and been foolish?"

Sosia, in the bed, awoke, turned on her back, and raised herself upon an elbow, showing her flat and heavy face above the blanket pulled to her chin. She spoke drowsily, in a voice thick with sleep:

"Hath the moon bewitched thee quite? In truth I think thee off thy wits with love. All these nights hast thou been foolish, and waked me from my sleep. Wilt not come to bed, thou cruel girl?"

Reluctantly Eldris undressed and got into bed beside Sosia, who slept again, heavily, with stertorous breathings. The night breeze blew freshly in the window; from the village dogs barked, and the distant voices of men reached her. Somewhere in that press was he, in the midst of the tide of hurrying life; and her heart went out to him.

So she slept, deeply. Once or twice she tried to waken, as one strives to rouse from dreams; but the black swoon of sleep held her fast; body and soul she was drowned in the soundless depths of oblivion. But suddenly she was awake, startled, and somewhat dazed. Her first thought was wonder as to what had waked her; her next, that it was not so late as she had thought, for the noise at the ford still continued. More, it seemed increased. And even in the first moment of full consciousness which followed her waking daze, a sound grew out of all the noises of the village; a long mellow note, like the note of a deep-toned hunting-horn, vibrant yet steady, filling every cranny of the air. At once she knew it was this that had awakened her. It hung a moment, sweet, unearthly, haunting; and dropped back into an outburst of fierce clamor that leaped at it as hounds leap at a stag. Eldris put out her hand and shook Sosia.

"Sosia--waken! Dost hear that strange sound? What is it? Never have I heard such a sound before."

She scrambled out of bed and went to the window, her feet shining white on the rough floor. She saw other faces appear at other windows and at doorways of dim hovels; there came black figures of men from lanes between the houses, running from the river-ford. The sharp clatter of the feet of a galloping horse clashed for a moment through other sounds.

"It is but a drunken brawl," said Sosia, sitting on the bed, a blanket about her bare shoulders. Her tone was indifferent; drunken brawls were no new things on Thorney. "Come back to bed."

"I think that something hath happened," said Eldris, and started to dress. "Dress thyself quickly, Sosia, and let us go out to see. It is not so late--the moon hath not left the window." This was true, although the wide pool of light upon the floor had narrowed to a silver bar.

But the room was lighted suddenly by a ruddy glare which leaped into it from without; a gust of voices swept beneath the window like the rising of a wind; there came the sound of many feet, as though a crowd had gathered before the house; cries, and the rattle of weapons. Again Eldris ran to the window. She cried over her shoulder in a frightened voice:

"Oh, blessed Peter! there be armed men entering all the houses in the lane! Haste thee, Sosia--let them not find thee naked here. I will go down and see--"

Below, the voice of Juncina cried:

"We harbor no fugitive here, I tell thee! Here be none but I and my two maids!"

Eldris, climbing down the ladder with hasty feet, saw that the room, fogged with gray smoke, was filled with half a score of men; saw Juncina struggling in a corner, held by two; saw others overturning the scanty furniture, slashing with their swords at fish-nets and bedding, thrusting their torches into every nook and corner. She would have stumbled up the ladder again out of their sight, but a shout told her that she was seen. A great fellow seized her, dragging her from the ladder; in his grasp she fluttered like a rag caught in a briar. Another pulled her from him; she was in the midst of mail-clad forms that towered over her, drink-flushed faces, brutal with greed, that leered down upon her, hairy hands that grasped at her. Her captor she eluded, and another, her breath coming in dry sobs of terror; at her desperate doublings, like a frightened hare, their shouts of laughter told that the sport was very well to their liking. The doorway, close at hand, broken open and unguarded, offered a chance. She darted through it into the night, into another world of terror, in which sinister sounds met her on every side.

In a blind panic of fright she ran, thinking at every step to feel a heavy hand upon her; in the narrow lane she ran, jostled by those who fled beside her. Flames from burning houses threw their glare over fights which occurred in every street and lane, in which wounded men and dying crawled from beneath the feet of combatants into the shelter of black doorways. A band of horsemen galloped up the lane, overriding those who crossed their path, with shouts of "Death to Britons!"

Eldris saw them coming; saw the mouth of an alley black on one side, a slit between houses scarce wide enough for a horseman to ride through. She dived into it, stumbling now and again into the gutter which channelled it. She began to sob with fright and exhaustion as she ran.

"Lord, let me find him, or I die of fear! He will save me--with him shall I be safe. Take me to him--let me find him, for my love is stronger than am I." Fear swept her from all the rationalities to which she had clung; out of the tumult and the terror in which she struggled, love rose like a wave and claimed her--the passion which was stronger than she. God was very strong, without doubt; but without doubt also He had many souls to guard that night, and it was the strength of a man's arm she wanted.

So she reached the end of the alley where it opened into the street of the fords, and crouched behind the elbow of a rambling wall, looking out warily, a hunted thing, to see if further faring might be safe.

The broad paved street was lighted by flames from a house blazing fiercely opposite her; and figures ran to and fro before it like imps gone mad. Other figures there were also, which lay very still upon the roadway in the crimson light, with their black shadows crouched behind them. There was a rending crackle from the heart of the fire, and shrieks and shouting from those around it; and under it all the dull roar from all Thorney which never ceased. And quite suddenly Eldris knew that she was listening to a sound that came out of the din around her, the sound of men's voices, singing in unison. In that hour and place it was to her more dreadful, more a thing of terror, than even the cries which it was drowning. The voices came nearer; and at that in them, for all her fear, the blood thrilled through her to her finger-tips.

For in them was the very spirit of the fight, of lust and blood and fierce exultant triumph; barbaric and pagan, they were reckless with a pitiless pride which feared neither gods nor men nor devils. Eldris crouched closer against the sheltering wall as though it had been a sentient thing to aid her. So she saw a line of men, on foot, approaching; and the line reached from side to side of the wide street. Each man walked with arms across his fellows' shoulders; and their song kept time with their swift marching feet. The red light of the burning houses fell upon them, on their reckless faces, and glinted on their shirts of link-mail which clashed as they moved, on their crested caps of metal, and on the weapons which hung at their sides. They swept all before them as they came; plunderers left their work of outrage and slaughter and fell in with them, taking up their song. The first line passed; and Eldris saw the reason of their triumph. For those in the rear dragged with them a prisoner, a small man, battered and bloody, with one arm hanging in a torn sling. She could not see his face, but her heart turned to water within her. The song sickened her with an overpowering sense of her own weakness against all that it signified of brutal male strength; it dominated her, and before it she shrank and shivered. But now her terror was not all for herself alone, but for that one who might be also in their hands, prisoner to them even as was this poor puppet prisoner. She started up, with a cry which was drowned in the rhythm of the terrible song as ever the cries of women have been drowned in the song of the fighting, and fell back in a huddle against the wall, with her face hidden on her knees, sobbing:

"Christ--oh, Christ, save him! Mary, save him, or let me die with him!"

When she found her way back to life, Thorney was wrapped in silence and illimitable gloom. The light of the burning houses had died; the shouts of men and shrieks of women and the fierce song of the Saxons had ceased. Yet there were other sounds which grew out of the darkness as she listened; a thin far wailing, like the ghost of grief, and close at hand a man's deep voice, very low, broken by sobbing.

"Soul of my heart, where art thou! All the night I have searched and cannot find thee, dead nor living. The curse of all evil be upon these Saxon swine! They have slain her--my woman!--and she is dead! No more will she lie beside me when the dark swims in the hut.--O light of my life, could I but hear thee call me once again thy great ugly bear! Eh, thy bear is a sad bear this night, my lamb!"

Eldris stumbled to her feet, covering her ears with her hands. She also was seeking and could not find. She started running from the dreadful sobbing voice, picking her way as best she might in the wreck and ruin of the Saxons' trail.

Long she searched, and everywhere met others, also seeking, and yet others who had found what they had lost. Torches flashed in and out like fireflies among the darkened lanes; from houses left unscathed came the wailing of women who had brought home their dead. The air was heavy with smoke, so that the eyes smarted and the throat stung.

Into the face of every man who passed her she looked with eager eyes of hope. Every man's body that lay in street or lane she hovered over with caught breath and eyes of fear, nerving herself to stoop, to turn the dead weight that settled sullenly into itself as her hands left it; to scan the face by the light of her flaring torch. And the light showed her as ghastly as what she looked on; black hair streaming like smoke behind her, eyes wide with fear, pinched face glimmering pallid. No joyful handmaiden of Love looked she, going to love's embraces, rather a wild thing, terror-ridden, possessed wholly by the frenzy of her love. Strange faces she looked on in her search among the living and the dead; bearded faces, boyish faces, but never that face she sought.

To a dead man's side she flitted, like a spirit of the night; and on her knees, holding her torch to a face with light staring eyes and open jaws that seemed still to shriek a last despairing curse at her, she caught her breath with a stifled scream. For the shock of thick hair, cut below the ears, was black and coarse; and the half-naked body, from which the tunic had been stripped, was long and lean. The torchlight cast quick shadows upon the fearful face; and sometimes to her eyes it was the face of her love, who had died terribly, and sometimes it was the face of a stranger. She began to shake.

"I cannot tell--oh, God, I cannot tell!" she wailed. "Is my mind gone, that I should not know thee? I must know--how can I go further until I know?"

With wild eyes she looked about her. She was in the open space of the market-place,--alone, save for the thing at her feet, and for other things huddled here and there around her,--a silent battleground from which the hosts had departed. The carcass of a horse lay near, and her torch struck points of light from the metal of its trappings. A dog ran by her on padding feet, its fangs dripping, its tail between its legs. Eldris thrust the torch into the earth, that it might stand erect. She knelt beside that silent screaming figure, and the light flashed from the white bared teeth of the open mouth, and showed dark smears of blood upon the face. She laid her hand on the shoulder, and the clammy cold of the dead flesh sent a spasm of sickness through her.

"If it is thou I will kiss thee," she moaned. "I will lie upon thy breast and put my mouth to that mouth of thine. And I must find out--what if I should pass and leave thee here? God give me strength--I must find out! Whose own mother could know him so?"

She wiped blood from the face with the skirt of her tunic; she forced the stiffened jaws together, so that the horror took again the likeness to a human face; while her breath whistled in sobbing gasps and her flesh crept and crawled with horror. She bent and peered into the poor face that no longer seemed to scream at her, holding the jaws shut with tense and shaking hands. And then she sat back upon her heels with a strangled sob of relief and nerves far overwrought, wiping her hands furiously upon her skirt and crying:

"It is not thou! Dear Christ in heaven! it is not thou! How thou wilt laugh when I tell thee, beloved--when I tell thee that a dead man screamed at me and I thought him thee! How thou wilt laugh--and I shall laugh with thee!"

Sobbing, she began to laugh, a laughter strange and cracked like the laugh of a very old woman, that mounted high and higher, welling from her throat as blood wells from a wound; and rocked herself to and fro and stared into the face of the dead stranger with wide eyes of unreason....

She took her torch and fled on, and the face that she had left behind seemed to scream its mockery with open jaws through the darkness after her.

X

Nicanor was half way up the beach when the stationarius went down and his men fell upon the Saxons. Instantly, nothing loath, he found himself in the midst of the fighting. He was unarmed, save for his knife; so that his first thought was to get within the length of the long swords of those attacking him, since at close range, these, built for thrusting, were as good as useless. This was not easy to do, for the Saxons, despite their bulk, were light upon their feet, and wary to keep their opponents at sufficient distance. But twice he did it, each time forcing his adversary to leave his sword-play and take to his dagger, the terrible seaxa which had won for the Saxons their name.

He went into battle joyously, cool-eyed, alert, heart and soul in the work ahead; yet ever with that other self within him, which stood apart as a spectator in the arena, and watched through the smoke and crimson light of battle the faces of those who fought,--the fierce delight of one, the black hate of another, red wounds, and the swift black swoop of Death. His heart sang its high song of triumph which his lips would fain have echoed, of thanksgiving in the clean strength of his manhood, in the power of his arm, which could uphold his own before all men. He stooped to catch a sword from one who needed it no longer; and heard the soft clashing of links of mail beside him and felt the breath of a great horse that stirred his hair. Above him the voice of Ceawlin cried:

"Thou tale-teller, thee I seek! This is thy work--that dead-eyed toad is gone, but it is thou shalt pay the price for him!"

He straightened up, the sword in hand, a laugh upon his lips; and a bolt of red fire entered into his side and seared him to the vitals. He fell; and the horse's tread jarred him and shook the world as it passed, spurred by its mail-clad rider with the blood-tinged spear.

At first he fought to keep his hold on consciousness; knew that the fight surged over and around him, but with those who fought he seemed suddenly to have no part nor lot. They faded into spectres, beings somehow set apart from him, in whose affairs he no longer had concern. He lay quiet, his eyes closed, the red flower behind his ear, the red flower of his life staining the trampled sands on which he lay. Quite suddenly he drifted into a gray empty world of twilight, in which he wandered seeking for what he did not know. He became aware, presently, that on the other side of this world, at the end of the road of Time, there was a little narrow door which would lead him into his Garden of Lost Dreams, and he thought that if he might reach it, all would be very well with him. But across the world, from out the twilight, there appeared a tiny point of light, ever growing, ever brighter. It came upon him as a rolling ball of fire, and he turned and would have fled from it; but it enveloped him in rose-red light that burned and blinded, and he knew that it was Pain. It lapped over him like water; it shrivelled him, soul and body; it entered into the marrow of his bones and twisted him in every joint and sinew. And suddenly he found his soul following the fight into the streets of Thorney; he was plunged amid the slaughter, in the smoke of burning houses. Yet through it all he knew, with strange inner knowledge drawn from the deeps below consciousness, that his soul was in his body, lying quiet on the sands in the dark and moonlight, and that the fight had passed him by.

Out of the flame-shot darkness of his oblivion a sound came to him; and the devil-lights that danced before his eyes ceased their wheeling to listen--a bell, deep-throated, majestic, that tolled once, and out of its sonorous, slow throbbing that lingered in the air, a voice intoning.

"_Ave Maria, gratia plena._"

The bell-note boomed again.

"_Benedicta tu in mulieribus._"

Again the heavy clanging shook the air.

"_Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis, Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae!_"

The voice drifted from him; yet the air seemed alive with the vibrations of the words. "_Ora pro nobis!_" Who was the Mary full of grace who could pray for one, to whom one could call as men called upon the gods? Who but the Mother of Jesus, the Little Brother of the World, sweet comrade of his black and bitter hour? He smiled as one who hears names well known and well beloved. "_Nunc et in hora mortis nostræ!_" Who was that mortal one for whom priests prayed in the silence before the dawning, for whom the hour of death was striking in the tolling of the bell? "In the hour of our death"--not one death only was prayed for, but all deaths. But then the words took upon themselves new and startling meaning. He knew that the hour had struck for him also in the great bell's voice; was that prayer for his death among all others--for his, the pagan's? With sudden lonely longing he wished it might be so, as one who starts upon a journey wishes for a friendly voice, a handclasp, for farewell. Would Mary pray for him; would the Little Brother bring him solace as in that bitter time before? If this were so, could not one go down into death, as one had gone through life, with a song upon his lips? What, after all, was death? For the first time the question of Life was launched at him from the vastness of infinity; and he, poor atom of mortality, with his bright tongue and his groping heart, his longings, his hopes and fears and ignorances, was called upon to answer. Was it full of terrors, the terrors at which men hinted and dared not speak? He knew that he was not afraid. Was it lonely? He did not feel alone.

But his thoughts were fluttering from him like birds rising from the grass; slowly darkness closed above him, in which he struggled as a drowning man to keep his head above the waters. Again he stood upon the edge of the gray twilight land, and saw that something was coming to him--a mist of light, cool and pure as pearl. It grew, and out of it there looked down on him a face, young and fair and tender, with holy eyes. It was the face of his lost Lady, yet her face transfigured as his eyes had never seen it,--the same and not the same. The mist grew brighter and he saw that in her arms there lay a babe that leaned its head against her breast and smiled at all the world. At once he knew them for his Dream made manifest, and his face lightened to adoration.

"O Best Beloved!" he whispered, "how mine eyes have hungered for thee in the dark days that are gone over! My lips would sing unto thee even as my heart is singing, but my tongue is black within my throat. I have found that who would seek for peace must pass through pain, and when pain hath ended, peace shall come. When therefore it cometh to my body, as it hath come upon my soul, then I shall sing my song to thee,--my song, which thou and little Jesus did teach me how to make, I will sing to-morrow when the moon shines on the fountains, in the garden."

His voice died; he saw his Lady lean to him from her mist of rose and pearl; cool as the dews of morning he felt her hand upon his head. Very softly then his fever left him; love's touch soothed the red flame of pain that ate his life away, as in the long ago love's touch had stilled the bitter soul within him. He smiled happily, for that soul's pain and body's pain had brought heart's peace. With no surprise, he knew that he had found the answer.

"I think it is the door of the garden," he said clearly.

X

A keen sweet wind blew over the world, first pure breath of the coming day, driving before it the reek of smoke and blood and death which hovered over Thorney as a pall. A tinge of gray light diffused itself like mist through the darkness; in this mist the forms of people wandered like dim restless ghosts seeking the graves from which the night had called them. Out of the stillness which had succeeded to the turmoil of the night, cocks began to crow, a homely sound, as though this dawning held no difference from the peaceful morn of yesterday. The ripples of the river woke, gurgling like a happy child that laughs itself out of dreams.

Eldris came out upon the beach from between the rows of tottering houses. She cast away her torch and stretched her hands to the east, where momently the earth was turning from black to gray, steeped in a haze as of twilight, the strange half-light of dawn.

"O day, come swiftly and give me back my own! I shall put my hands upon his breast and say, 'Take me, for I am all, all thine and love's, and where thou goest there will I go also, for my God is love. I am only woman, and weak and very weary, and I love thee. Ah, dear God! I would leave heaven and all the angels for thine arms!' And he will take me in his arms, and I shall fear nothing any more. O day, come swiftly!"

Along the beach she hastened, light-footed, and came to the lumber-pile, with no more than a glance for the Roman soldier who lay upon it, his duty done. And so, behind the lumber-pile, with but a strip of gray sand between his bed and the broad river, she found him, with the dawn-light upon his face.

As once before she had gone to him and knelt beside him as he slept, so she thought to go to him again. But this time she would not fear to wake him, for he, her lord, had called her, and her delight was to obey. She had come to yield herself his, body and soul forever, and in her face the bridal joy outshone the bridal terror. She would do this and that; thought to play with her joy to taste the sweetness of its savor; but suddenly all her thought was lost in the flood of love triumphant which rose to overwhelm her. She ran forward, her arms outflung to him, crying:

"Beloved, wake, for I am come to thee! All my soul is a flame of fire, and the fire is love which blindeth me to all in earth and heaven save only thee. Wilt thou not wake and take me?" On her knees she threw herself beside him.

But he did not move, nor did he speak in answer.

And even in the moment of her exaltation, Eldris understood. Her words broke; an instant she knelt with arms outstretched above him; she ceased to breathe, and her face froze into lines of stone. But suddenly she gave a cry, loud and sharp, and her hands fell upon him. Her eyes awoke into living terror; with desperate fingers she strove to turn his face further to the light. At the weight of him she shook and shuddered; she had felt that horrible dead weight before, that sullen settling into itself of his bulk as her hands left it. In the gray light of the slow dawning she turned his face toward her, gray, and smiling, and still. She looked down upon him and put her hands to her throat.

"I am glad, ay, glad, that thy mouth is not open and screaming at me!" she said aloud, in a dead voice.

The sense of her words smote her, and she closed her eyes with a long-drawn whispering moan.

Again she looked at him, scarcely believing; and once more the flood overwhelmed her. She wrung her hands and brought them down before her face.

"Oh, God, is this Thy punishment for that I said my God was love? Very well--punish Thou me, then--what canst Thou do that matters now?"

Her voice faltered; she lowered her hands to stroke the hair from his pale forehead. She sat upon the sands and drew his heavy head to her knees, and her voice sank to the crooning of a woman with her man-child that is dead.

"I am too late--too late--too late! In mine ears was the wailing of the women in empty houses--how knew I that my voice must cry among them? My love, that liest so quiet at my knee, thou art gone very far from me, and all my tears and pleading may not call thee back. O pale lips sealed forever, all thy magic dumb within thee, give me of thy power that I may mourn my love! O wandering feet that have strayed in lands of bright enchantment, thou walkest in the dim paths of the twilight places, and I would that my feet might follow! O strong hands that have wrought the work of men, why dost thou not answer to the clinging of my fingers? O heart that camest through bitter waters, was it good to rest? I and old Sorrow walk hand in hand; for the red flower of my lover's life which is withered here, we shall cover him with lilies. The young men and the maidens shall walk softly; the old shall mourn him saying 'Eheu! it is not well for the young to go before us.' And I--what is there that I may say? Dead--dead--dead--and my heart is breaking--Ah! bitter woe is mine! O ye Elder Gods, would ye have been more kind than the One who hath torn him from me?"

She bent over him so that her tears fell warm upon his face and the veil of her hair shrouded him; she kissed his lips as though she would breathe her own life into him.

"This my bridal kiss I give thee, O Nicanor, O my dear!--here on thy mouth, and thou canst never know--God have pity!--thou canst never know! Thy lips are cold--so cold--thou art all cold, and even my bosom may not warm thee. My love, who didst die with a flower in thy hair and a smile upon thy lips, why is thy face so bright with triumph? Peace lieth upon thee as a garment.... O Nicanor, Nicanor, give me of thy peace!"

There fell a voice upon her weeping:

"My daughter, what dost thou here?"

Thin-faced Father Ambrose stood before her, very gentle, very old, from Saint Peter's Church within the wall. On his arm he bore a basket filled with simple dressings; his brown frock, up-kilted, was stained with blood and mire. Perhaps all night he had done his work of mercy among the dying and the dead.

"I have found him!" said Eldris. She swept back her hair with one arm, showing her sorrow.

The priest knelt, touching here and there with skilful fingers.

"Is it not he whom men called Nicanor? Nay, daughter, weep not so bitterly! Is it not the death he would have chosen, being man? We have heard of him; we have seen that his power he hath striven to use for good, so that many loved him; we have thought that in God's own time the light would come upon him and he should be baptized into the Faith."

But Eldris broke in fiercely:

"Ye have heard--ye have seen--ye have thought--but can ye give him back to me? I knew not your God was a cruel God; ye have taught that He is the Father of all mercy and all love. What mercy is there in this that He hath done? I am Christian, for I wished to seek love from that God that is thy God; and this my love did I try to make Christian also. But since God hath done this thing unto him and me, I am glad that he was not Christian and hath not gone to God!"

Father Ambrose looked down upon her, smiling, and his face was holy.

"I think he was a better Christian than art thou, dear child, even though he did not know it. Can one be Christian, for all he cries 'God, God!' if he have not Christ within his heart as well as on his lips? What is a Christian, save one who dealeth gently, liveth cleanly, giveth of himself? And such an one, I think, whether he professeth all gods or no god, will our Father call 'my son.' Long have I lived, and very much have I seen, and I think that this is so."

He paused. Eldris's sobbing alone made answer.

"Daughter, thou sayest thou art glad he hath not gone to God. Loving him, wouldst thou not rather think of him with God than wandering lonely in the outer darkness?"

But Eldris flung out her hands with a bitter cry.

"Nay--nay--oh, Lord Christ, not that! I cannot bear to think he wanders lonely, as all his life he hath been lonely--anything but that! What have I said--what have I done! Oh, father, father, he must not be lonely! Pray thou that God will take him, even though he did not know! Dear God, let him into heaven--do not Thou be angered because he did not know! Mary Mother, pity him and let him not be lonely any more!"

She stretched her hands in desolate appeal over the still face at her knee. Father Ambrose gathered them into his.

"God hath taken him, dear child," he said gently. "Out of his darkness hath he entered into light; and I think that it is well with him."

A long time he looked down at the face that smiled in answer; at the long lithe limbs whose strength was dust. From his basket he took a cup, and went aside and filled it with water from the river, and offered it to God. Returning, he knelt, and with the water signed the cross on the pale forehead and the broad pulseless breast.

"So sign I and seal I thee with the Cross of Christ, that in His mercy thy Lord may receive thy soul. 'Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.'" He raised his hand, and Eldris dropped her face to the rough black hair and sobbed. "The Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make His face shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee. The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee and give thee peace."

His gentle voice ceased, and a moment the earth hung silent, awaiting the mystery of the dawn. Then the red misty sun shot up over the hills on the east of Thorney, and the bright new day was come.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's Nicanor - Teller of Tales, by C. Bryson Taylor