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Read books online » Fiction » The Fortunes of Garin by Mary Johnston (romantic novels in english .txt) 📖

Book online «The Fortunes of Garin by Mary Johnston (romantic novels in english .txt) đŸ“–Â». Author Mary Johnston



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the inaccessible wall of Roche-de-FrĂȘne. Black Tower and Eagle Tower seemed among the stars. There was a gulf between them and those small, hidden, defended entrances. The strained gaze could see naught but some low, out-cropping bushes and a trailing vine. Up there the men who had brought them to that side of the gulf might yet be gazing outward, listening with bated breath for any token that that dragon was awake and aware; but they could not tell if it were so. Up there was the friendly world, down here the hostile. Up there might be troubadour-knight and princess, down here stood jongleur and peasant.

They stood yet a moment at the foot of the crag, then she who was dressed as a worker among the vines or a herd to drive and watch the flocks turned in silence and began to descend the moonlit boulder-strewn declivity. She was light of foot, quick and dexterous of movement. Garin, who was now Elias of Montaudon, moved beside her. They came down the steep hill, bare and blanched by the moon. The dragon had no outpost here; did he plant one, the[290] archers upon the town wall might sweep it away. But the shafts would not reach to the wood—there perhaps they might hear the dragon’s breathing. They went without speech, and with no noise that could be helped of foot against stone.... Here was a slight fringe of pine and oak. They stood still, listened—all was silent. They looked back and saw Roche-de-FrĂȘne and the castle of Roche-de-FrĂȘne bathed by the grey night.

“Cap-du-Loup and his men hold in this quarter,” said the woman in a low voice. “We had a spy forth who got back to us three days since. Cap-du-Loup’s tents and booths are thrown and scattered, stony ground and seams in the earth between the handfuls. He does not keep stern watch, not looking for anything of moment to descend this way. Hereabouts is the ravine of the brook of Saint Laurent, and half a mile up it a medley of camp-followers, men and women.”

She had not ceased to move as she spoke. They were now in the midst of a spare growth of trees, under foot a turf burned by the sun and ground to dust by the tread, through half a year, of a host of folk. Some distance ahead the night was copper-hued; over there were camp-fires. They were now, also, in the zone of a faint confused sound. They moved aside from the direction of the strongest light, the deepest, intermittent humming, and came, presently, to the brook of Saint Laurent. It flowed through a shallow ravine with rough, scarped banks.[291] Down it, too, came faint light and sound, proceeding from the camp of followers.

“Our aim,” said she in peasant dress, “is to be found at dawn among that throng, indistinguishable from it, and so to pass to its outermost edge and away.”

They were standing above the murmuring stream. Overhead the wind was in the pine-tops. There were elfin voices, too, of the creatures of the grass and bush and bark. All life, and life in his own veins, seemed to Garin to be alert, awake as never before, quivering and streaming and mounting like flame.

“I am Elias of Montaudon,” he said. “I understand that, and how to play the jongleur, and that if peril comes and stands like a giant and questions us, I am no jongleur of Roche-de-FrĂȘne nor allied there—”

“Say that you are of Limousin.”

“I have not dropped from the sky into the camp of Cap-du-Loup, but have been singing and playing, telling japes and tales, merry or sad, vaulting and wrestling elsewhere in the host—”

“With the men of Aquitaine. Say that in Poitou Duke Richard himself praised you.”

“And should they question me of you?”

“I also am of Limousin. There I watched sheep, but now I am your mie and a traveller with you.”

“By what name am I to call you?”

“I am Jael the herd. You will call me Jael.”

They were moving this while up the stream. Did[292] any come upon them now, it would hardly be held that they had flown from the battlements of Roche-de-FrĂȘne. The ground was rough, the trees, crowding together, shut out the light from the moon, while the fires at the end of vistas grew ruddier. The muttering and humming also of the host in the night increased.

Jael the herd stood still. “It will not suit us to stumble in the dark upon some wild band! Here is Saint Laurent’s garden of safety. Let us rest on the pine-needles until cock-crow.”

They lay down, the jongleur wrapped in his mantle, the herd-girl in hers. “We must gather sleep wherever it grows,” said the latter. “I will sleep and you will watch until the moon rounds the top of that great pine. Wake me then, and look, Elias, that you do it!”

She pillowed her head upon the scrip or wallet which she carried slung over her shoulder, and lay motionless. The jongleur watched.... The barred moon mounted higher, the night wheeled, eastern lands were knowing light. Garin, resting against a pine trunk, lute and wallet beside him on the earth, kept his gaze from the sleeper, bestowed it instead upon the silver, gliding boat of the moon, or upon the not-distant, murky glare of unfriendly fires. But gaze here or gaze there, space and time sang to one presence! Wonder must exist as to this night and the morrow and what journey was this. Mind could not but lift the lanthorn, weigh likelihoods, pace[293] around and around the subject. That quest drew him, but it was not all, nor most that drew.... Jael the herd! Jael the herd! Here came impossibilities—dreams, phantasies, rain of gold and silver, impossibilities! He remembered clearly now a herd-girl, and that when he had asked her name she had answered “Jael.” Many shepherdesses trod the earth, and a many might be named Jael! Moreover sheer, clear impossibility must conquer, subdue and dispose of all this mad thinking. She who lay asleep was like that herd-girl—he saw it now—shape, colouring, voice—That and the name she had happened to choose—that and the torn, shepherdess garb—to that was owed this dizzy dreaming, this jewelled sleet of fancy, high tide of imagination, flooding every inland.... Things could not be different, yet the same—beings could not be separate, yet one—or in some strange, rich world, could that be so? But here was mere impossibility! Garin strove to still the wider and wider vibrations. The Fair Goal—The Fair Goal!... The moon rounded the top of the pine tree.

He crossed to the sleeper’s side, knelt, and spoke low. “My liege—” She stirred, opened her eyes. “My liege, the moon begins to go down the sky.”

With her hand pressed against the pine-needles she rose to a sitting posture. “I slept—and, by my faith, I wanted sleep! Now it is your turn. Do not again call me liege or lady or princess or Audiart. The wind might carry it to Cap-du-Loup. Say always[294] to me, ‘Jael.’ And now lie down and sleep. I will wake you when the east is grey.”

Garin slept. The Princess Audiart rested against a tree, and now watched the moon, and now the fires kindled by her foe and Roche-de-FrĂȘne’s, and now she watched the sleeping man. The attire which she wore, the name she had chosen for the simple reason that once before she had chanced to take it up and use it, brought brightly into mind a long-ago forest glade and a happening there. But she did not link that autumn day with the man lying wrapped in Elias of Montaudon’s cloak, though she did link it with Jaufre de Montmaure who had kindled those fires in the night. It came, a vivid picture, and then it slept again. There was, of need, a preoccupation with this present enterprise and its chaplet, necklace, girdle, and anklets of danger, no less than with its bud of promise which she meant, if possible, to make bloom. Her own great need and the need of Roche-de-FrĂȘne formed the looming presence, high, wide, and deep as the night, but, playing and interblending with it, high, wide, and deep as the day, was another sense.... She gazed upon Garin of the Golden Island lying wrapped in the jongleur’s cloak, and the loss of him was in the looming night, and the gain in the bud of promise and the feeling of the sun. To-night, her estate seemed forlorn enough, but within she was a powerful princess who did not blink her own desires though she was wise to curb and rein and drive them rightly.

[295]

CHAPTER XXII

THE SAFFRON CROSS

Moon and stars began to pale. The camp-followers up the stream had poultry with them, for from that direction a cock crew and was answered. The herd-girl waked the jongleur. “I have black bread in my scrip,” she said. “Look if you have not the same.”

He found a portion of a loaf; they sat by the brook Saint Laurent and he cut the bread with his dagger and they ate and drank of the water.

Light strengthened, it became grey-pearl under the pines. “Chill! chill!” said the herd-girl. “Often I think of how it would be to lie out under the sky, winter, spring, summer and now! So many thousands do.—Now, we will be going.”

They moved along the bank of the stream. “We go north,” said Garin’s mind. “Will she go to the King at Paris?” But he waited without question until she was ready to say. Jongleur and herd-girl, they walked through the grey and dewy world. The trees now stood further apart, they were coming to open ground. To their right the east showed stripes of carnation. The cocks crew again; the mutter and murmur of the night suddenly took height and depth, became inarticulate clamour of the day and an encamped, huge host. The light strengthened.[296] Between the stems of trees they saw, at no great distance, huts and booths of autumn branches. They stood still for a little in the flush of the brightening dawn—divers regarding the sea into which they were to plunge, the sea whose every wave was inimical. They looked, then, each turning a little, their eyes met. It was but for a moment; immediately they went forward.

Elias of Montaudon was all dusk and green of garb, and dusk of brow and cheek. But his dagger hung in a gilt sheath and his lute by a red ribbon, and his eyes were grey with glints of blue. Jael the herd, too, was hued like a Martinmas leaf, and her hair hung over her bosom and to her knee, in long, dusk braids. The jongleur had a vision of dark hair loosened and spread in elf-lock and wave, half hiding a face more girlish than this face, but as this face might have been, eight years agone. Impossibilities—dreams, phantasies, magic somewhere, impossibilities!

They were now almost clear of the broken ground and the remnant of wood. They looked back and saw Roche-de-FrĂȘne lifted against the solemn sky; stood still and for a minute or more gazed, and as though the walls were glass, viewed the tense life within.

“Did you ever see Richard of Aquitaine?” asked the herd-girl.

“No,” answered the jongleur, and felt a momentary wonder, then the dawn of a conjecture.

[297]

The herd-girl turned again to their wandering and he followed her, then walked beside her.... Leaving the last group of trees, they came with suddenness upon a little pebbly shore of the stream and upon half a dozen women, kneeling and beginning the washing of clothes. Several ragged children sat by a fire of sticks and made an outcry when the two came from the wood. The women looked up. “Hù! a jongleur!” cried one. “Come trill me a love-lay while I wash my sergeant’s one shirt!”

Elias and Jael came near, sat by the fire of sticks, and felt the warmth pleasant. The first drew his hand across the strings of his lute and sang:—

“Sweet May, come! the lovers’ sweet season.
In May Love seems the height of reason!
Try your love when the year grows older,
The birds depart and the earth is colder.—”

He stopped. “Saint Michael! the mist is yet in my throat. Your fire, gossips, is the sweet, crackling singer—”

One of the women sat back upon her heels, and, hands on hips, regarded the two. “From what camp are you? You are not of our camp?”

“No. We have been over yonder—near to the young count.”

“If Cap-du-Loup saw you he would have your lute broken and you sent to wait on fighting men! Cap-du-Loup loatheth jongleurs and monks! Your douce there he might take—but no, I think that he[298] would not. She is not fair, and she has the look of one with claws—”

“I have claws, sister,” said Jael. “But I know how to keep them sheathed.” She yawned. “This good fire makes you sleepy. Pretty children, let me rest my head upon that log for a bit! Play to us, Elias, if you cannot sing.”

She put her head down,

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