The Fortunes of Garin by Mary Johnston (romantic novels in english .txt) 📖

THE ABBEY OF THE FOUNTAIN

Morning broke. They rose and travelled on. This day they passed definitely from the dragon’s present reach, though yet they were in lands of Roche-de-Frêne, done into ruin by him, poisoned by his breath. Adventures they had, perils and escapes. These were approached, endured, passed. At night they came to a hermit’s cell where was no hermit, but on a stone hearth wood ready for firing. They closed the door, struck flint and steel, had presently a flame that reddened the low and narrow walls and gave the two, tired and cold, much comfort. The hermit’s cupboard was found, and in it dried fruit and pease and a pan or two for cooking. Without the cell was water, a bubbling spring among moss and fern.

The night was dark and windy. None came to strike upon the hermit’s door, no human voice broke in upon them. The wind shook the forest behind the cell and scoured the valley in front. It whistled around their narrow refuge, it brought at intervals a dash of rain against door and wall. But the two within were warmed and fed, and they found an ocean-music in the night. It rocked them in their dreams, it soothed like a lullaby. The princess dreamed of her father, and that they were reading[320] together in a book; then that changed, and it was her old, old nurse, who told her tales of elves and fays. Garin dreamed of the desert and then of the sea. Dawn came. They rekindled their fire and had spare breakfast, then fared forth through a high and stormy world.

Night came, day came, nights and days, beads of light and its doings, beads of dimness and rest. They kept no list of the dangers they entered and left, of the incidents and episodes of peril. They were many, but the two went through like a singing shaft, like a shuttle driven by the hand of Genius. Now they were forth from the invaded princedom, now they were gone from fiefs of other suzerains. Where they had faced north, now they walked with the westering sun.

When that happened, Jael the herd wore no longer the saffron cross. It had served the purpose, carrying her through Montmaure’s host, that else might not have let a woman pass.... The two had slept upon leaves in an angle of a stone wall, on the edge of a coppice. The wall ran by fields unharmed by war; they were out from the shadow. A dawn came up and unfolded like a rose of glory. The coppice seemed to sleep, the air was so still. The night had been dry, and for the season, warm. Cocks crew in the distance, birds that stayed out the year cheeped in the trees.

The herd-girl took her frieze mantle, and, sitting upon a stone, broke the threads that bound to it the[321] Church’s stigma and seal. The jongleur watched her from where he leaned against the wall. When it was free from the mantle, she took the shaped piece of saffron-dyed cloth and moving from the stone kneeled beside their fire of sticks and gave it to the flame. She watched it consume, then stood up. “It served me,” she said. “I know not if it ever served any upon whom it was truly chained. As I read the story, He who was nailed to the cross had a spirit strong and merciful. It is the spirits who are strong that are merciful.”

The rose in the east grew in glory. Colour came into the land, into the coppice, and to the small vines and ferns in their niches and shrines between the stones. Garin of the Golden Island stood in green and brown, beside him the red-ribboned lute. “As the first day from Roche-de-Frêne, so now again,” said Audiart, “you are the jongleur, Elias of Montaudon. I am your mie, Jael the herd.”

“Your will is mine, Jael the herd,” said Garin.

He bent and extinguished the fire of sticks. The two went on together, the sun behind them.... Once Vulcan had had a stithy in this country. Masses of dark rock were everywhere, old, cooled lava, dark hills, mountains and peaks. Chestnut and oak ran up the mountain-sides, the valleys lay sunken, there was a silver net of streams. Hamlets hid beneath hills, village and middling town climbed their sides, castles crowned the heights, in vales by the rivers sat the monasteries. The region[322] was divided between smiling and frowning. Its allegiance was owed to a lord of storms, who, in his nature, showed now and then a broad golden beam. At present no wild beast from without entered the region to ravage; there it smiled secure. But Duke Richard drained it of money and men; its own kept it poor. He drained all his vast duchy and fiefs of his duchy, as his brothers drained their lands and his father drained England. They were driving storms and waters that whirled and drew; one only was the stagnant kind that sat and brewed poison. This region was a corner of the great duke’s wide lands, but the duke helped himself from its purse, and the larger number of its men were gone to his wars.

But for all that, the jongleur and the herd-girl met a many people and saw towns that to them from Roche-de-Frêne seemed at ease, relaxed, and light of heart. Baron and knight and squire and man were gone to the wars, but baron and knight and squire and man, for this reason, for that reason, remained. Castle drawbridges rested down, portcullises rusted unlowered. The roads, bad though they were, had peaceful traffic; the fields had been harvested, and the harvest had not gone to feed another world. The folk that remained were not the fiercer sort, and they longed for amusement. It rested not cold, and folk were out of doors. The country-side, mountain and hill and valley, hung softened, stilled, wrapped in a haze of purple-grey.

Jongleur’s art, human voice at its richest, sweetest,[323] most expressive—such was wanted wherever now they went. They had jongleur’s freedom in a singing time. Travelling on, they made pause when they were called upon. The jongleur sang the heart out of the breast, the water into the eyes, high thoughts and resolves into the upper rooms of the nature. The dark-eyed, still girl, his companion and mie, sat on doorstep, or amid the sere growth of the wayside, or stood in castle hall or court, or in the market-place of towns, and listened with the rest to the singing voice and the song that it uttered. The few about them, or the many about them, sighed with delight, gave pay as they were able, and always would have had the jongleur stay, sing on the morrow, and the morrow’s morrow. But jongleurs had license to wander, and no restlessness of theirs surprised. Day by day the two were able, after short delays, to take the road again.

They came to Excideuil.

“Is the duke here?”

“No. He was here, but he has gone to Angoulême.”

Elias of Montaudon brought that news to Jael the herd. She listened with a steady face. “Very well! In ways, that suits me better. There are those at Angoulême whom I know.”

The jongleur sang in the market-place of Excideuil. “Ah, ah!” cried many, “you should have been here when our duke was here! He had a day when there sang six troubadours, and the prize was[324] a cup of gold! And yet no troubadour sang so well as you sing, jongleur!”

A week later, crown of a hill before them, they saw Angoulême. The morning light had shown frost over the fields, but now the sun melted that silver film and the day was a sapphire. Wall and battlement, churches, castle, brilliant and spear-like, stood out from the blue dome: beneath spread a clear valley and clear streams. Other heights had lesser castles, and the valley had houses of the poor. Travel upon the road thickened, grew more various, spiced with every class and occupation. The day carried sound easily, and there was more sound to carry. Contacts became frequent, and these were now with people affected, in greater or less degree, by the sojourn in Angoulême of Duke Richard. The air knew his presence; where he came was tension, energy held in a circumference. From the two that entered Angoulême spread another circle. Garin felt power and will in her whom he walked beside, felt attention. The force within him rose to meet hers and they made one.

The town grew larger before them, walls and towers against the sky.

“Ask some one,” said Audiart, “where is the Abbey of the Fountain?”

He asked.

“The Abbey of the Fountain?” answered the man whom he addressed. “It lies the other side of the hill. Go through the town and out at the[325] west gate, and you will see it below you, among trees.”

They climbed the hill and entered Angoulême, thronged with life. To the two who kept the picture of Roche-de-Frêne, wrapped in clouds of storm and disaster, Angoulême might appear clad like a peacock, untroubled as a holiday child. Yet was there here—and they divined that, too—grumbling and soreness, just anger against Richard the proud, coupled with half-bitter admiration. Here was wide conflict of opinion and mood. Life pulsed strongly in Angoulême.

Jongleur and herd-girl threaded the town, where were many jongleurs, and many women with them lacking church’s link. They regarded the castle, and the Leopard banner above it. “Richard, Richard!” said the herd-girl, “I hope that a manner of things are true that I have heard of you!”

They came to the west gate and left the town by it. Immediately, when they were without the walls, they saw in the vale beneath groves of now leafless trees and, surrounded by these, the Abbey of the Fountain. Jael the herd stood still, gazing upon it. “I had a friend—one whom I liked well, and who liked me. Now she is abbess here—the Abbess Madeleine! Let us go down to the Abbey of the Fountain, and see what we shall see.”

They went down to the vale. Great trees stretched their arms above them. A stream ran diamonds and made music as it went. Now there came to Garin[326] the deep sense of having done this thing before—of having gone with the Princess Audiart to a great house of nuns—though surely she was not then the Princess Audiart.... He ceased to struggle; earthly impossibilities seemed to dissolve in a deeper knowledge. He laid down bewilderment and the beating to and fro of thought; in a larger world thus and so must