"And John and Rosalind, will they too have close friends among young lovers in the years to come? Without doubt they will, for the company of the young knights who ride out into the world to suffer and to learn is a close-knit company, and so is that of the maidens to whom the slow years teach their patience. Another young man will sing the chant of the plough over the hills, where john sings it now in the years of his fulfillment, and another woman will come to the farmhouse door in the twilight as Rosalind does, a child held upon her hip, the firelight streaming out behind her, and will listen for the footstep of a man returning home.
“It was in the Chapel of St. Michael that first saw john. Through all these years it has been my habit, upon the vigil of the nativity of St. Johan the Baptist, whose name my friend and I both took when we renounced the world, to visit the Chapel of St. Michael and pray there through the night. And because it is a joyful occasion take two lanterns, that I think of as two souls, and set them burning in the two niches in the northern wall.
“Upon a certain vigil only a few years after the dissolution of the Abbey, the night though warm was clouded and dark. After I had entered the chapel I could see nothing at all, and I had to grope my way to the niches. As I stood thus, lighting the two lanterns, there came to me the knowledge that I was not alone in the chapel; but the sense of being not alone comes to me very often in that holy place, and so I did not look about me but turned at once to the rough-hewn altar of gray stone and kneeled down to pray.
"I do not know for how long I prayed, for perhaps an hour or more, and then I was disturbed by a slight movement behind me. This time I did look around and saw a beautiful boy standing in the glow of the lantern light. He was tall and slender, yet strongly built, dark-eyed, and fine-featured with rough dark hair. He stood very erect and he had a sheep skin slung about his shoulders. Even so, in many old pictures, the young St. Johan stands watchfully behind the figures of Our Lady and the Child. For a moment we looked at each other and his eyes were wide with wonder, but he did not move.
" ‘Your name, young Sir?’ I asked him. Even as my lips formed the words, I marveled that I dared to speak, yet I had to know.
" ‘John,’ he answered gently.
"And then I bent my head before the first heavenly vision that had ever been vouchsafed me.
"Yes, they are from heaven, these visions, even though when we look more steadily at the blinding loveliness we find it to be of earth. A patch of blue gentian, a young boy’s beauty, a wild swan flying, what are they but the Word?
" ‘Sir!’ he said, ‘Sir!’ and it was the human distress in his voice that made me look up again and see him for what he was, a rather scared young lad who thought of me, too, as some vision of the night. And perhaps I was rather a frightening figure, for my beard and my hair had gone white, and I wore my tattered old monk’s habit with a rope ’round my waist. I went to him and gave him my hand, that he might feel it warm flesh and blood, and we sat down together upon the old gray rock that thrusts itself through the chapel floor.
" ‘Why are you here, my son?’ I asked.
“ ‘I came to pray,’ he said.
" ‘Are you troubled, my son?
"He did not answer, and his mouth set a little obstinately. I did not question him further, for youth has many tumultuous troubles of which it cannot speak to age, and which age can ease only by prayer. I said, ‘And when you had prayed, you slept?
" ‘Yes,’ he said, and then smiling at me with that same wonder, as though the grasp of my hand had not convinced him that I was flesh and blood, ‘I had doubted the truth of it.’
“ ‘Of what?’ I asked him.
" ‘The story of the man who was rescued from the storm and who built this chapel and prayed here for those in peril at sea.’
" ‘He lives,’ I said, ‘and you may yet be grateful for his prayers.’
"He looked at me again and the wonder in his eyes was clouded with sleep. ‘You are only half awake, my son,’ I said. ‘Lie down and finish your rest.’
“He lay down and in a moment he was asleep. I watched him for a little, marveling at his beauty, and I saw that by his side there lay a small carved huntsman’s horn with a silver band round it. Towards morning, after I had prayed again, I extinguished the lanterns and left the chapel. The boy was still asleep. I knew that when he woke he would think me only a dream.
"More than a year passed before I saw john again, and then it was once more at the chapel. It was early December, mild and warm, as that month so often is in the West Country. One late afternoon, just as twilight was deepening to night, I went to the chapel to pray. I was weary and sad that day and toiled up the path slowly, with bent head.
When I was nearly at the top I stopped to get my breath, and looked up, and the sight that I saw was so lovely that weariness and sadness dropped from me like a cloak. A fairy tree, I thought, a fairy tree trimmed with celestial light. But it was only the old storm-twisted yew tree that those days grew beside the chapel door, transformed by the witchery of the hour to a thing of beauty. Behind its dark branches was a sky of cool deep green, deepening to gentian blue, and the few stars that twinkled there shone through the branches like silver lights hung upon them. The sickle moon hung upon a branch too, or so I thought until I looked again and saw it was a bugle hanging there. Beneath the branch where the bugle hung stood a young boy and girl, the girl hardly more than a child. A lighted lantern set upon the ground beside them illumined the delicate beauty of their grave faces and the flowing color of the fairy-tale clothes they wore. They were the spirit of youth itself there beneath the tree, fragile, innocent, gone as soon as seen, like a rainbow or the flash of a kingfisher’s wing beside a stream.
“Yet their faces I did not forget, for the bewildered first grief of the young is a thing that age, witnessing it, can scarcely endure. The girl’s elfin face was blanched with sorrow under the dark cloud of her hair. Her cheek was laid against her lover’s breast, her face turned a little towards me so that I saw the poignant droop of her child’s mouth, her wide dark woman’s eyes tearless, but clouded with selfless fear. The boy’s arms were about her, her hands clung to his shoulders, but had he let go of her she would not, I think, have fallen. Though the lissom curves of her body, of her gown that flowed about them both, were all grace, there was a hint of strength in her figure. I had less fear for her in this sorrow of parting than for the boy. He was John, grown older, but still, I thought, a dreamer of dreams upon whom the stark realities of life would fall with a brutal force. Her face had the stillness that lies over reserves of strength like ice over deep water-his the strained intensity of strength that is taxed to the utmost. He began to whisper to her, ‘I will come back. I will come back. Do not forget, Rosalind. Do not forget She did not answer, but she turned to look up at him and lifted her hands with the gesture of a mother to pull his face down to hers. Shame woke in me. What was I doing here? I turned quickly that I might not see them kiss, and made my way back the way I had come. I had meant to keep vigil all night in the chapel, I kept it instead here in my tower room, and it was the first of many that I kept for the boy and girl beneath the fairy tree."
4
"It was three years before I saw them again, and once more it was December, but bitter cold this time, with a wild wind racing in from the sea. Yet I went to the chapel at nightfall, for all day I had been restless and full of dread, aware of the storm that was coming and tormented by a dream I had had in which I had seen John’s body rolling limply in the trough of a huge towering wave of green fire. The wave had had a devilish look about it, and had been white-fanged like some monster. When it had reared itself over John’s unconscious face I had waked up in my tower room crying out loud in horror and rage. The hours of the day were leaden, but at nightfall, with my lantern alight in one of the niches and my body in stillness before the altar, the hermit and his peace were with me and his prayer aflame in my soul was a flame of power.
"It was strange that the sound of her
light footstep could reach me through the sound of the rising wind, yet I did hear it, and turning I saw her standing framed in the doorway. How fair she was, this Rosalind! Tall now, and grown from a child to a maiden, yet still with the same elfin face, the same strength that gave to her slim body a look of resilience, like a silver birch that bends but will never break in the storm. The wind had whipped a faint color into her cheeks, and the hood of the blue cloak she wore had fallen back from her dark hair. Under her cloak her full skirts were deep crimson, and in the hollow of her neck a jewel glowed. Her tanned skin showed her country bred, but she was no peasant girl. She stood for a moment as a queen might do, then curtsied and bent her head.
"There was awe and bewilderment in her eyes when she rose from her curtsey and I wondered if she too, like John that first night, thought me a vision or a dream. But I could not wait to tell her who I was, for at sight of her there had come to me instant knowledge of what we must do. `
" ‘The storm that is coming tonight will be the worst since this chapel was built,’ I said, ‘and John’s ship will soon be out there in the bay. Have you the courage to come down to the shore and face the storm with me? His safety depends on you.’
"She did not ask me how I knew this, nor could I have told her if she had asked. She merely nodded and turned around again towards the storm from which she had come. I followed her and we climbed down the hill together.
" ‘John has been at sea, fighting the Spaniards,’ she said. ‘He has been away three years.'
" ‘And you have not forgotten him.’
" ‘He is unforgettable she answered proudly.
"Then the fury of the wind caught us and we did not speak again. Clinging together, we fought our way down to the shore. The waves were pounding thunderously on the beach, the blown spume stung our faces like fire, and it was bitterly cold. The clouds were like phantom horses in full gallop, trampling the stars as they fled across the sky. We found a little shelter behind an outcrop of rock and now and then, in the intervals of watching the sea, we crouched there and talked a little.
" ‘Down under the sea there is a forest buried,’ said Rosalind. ‘The fishermen bring up the musons of hartes in their nets. It is quiet down there, but the water is swaying a little now because of the storm above, and the bell of the church in the forest is ringing. We should hear it if the wind were not so loud. Once huntsmen rode through those woods, winding their horns, as John did once in the Berry Pomeroy woods.’
“ ‘There is a castle built upon a hill deep in those woods,’ I said.
" ‘I live there,’ she answered.
" ‘And not far from it I have seen a farmhouse set among orchards. Its windows look upon a green hill where sheep are folded.’
" ‘That’s John’s home,’ she said. ‘And before he went away, he kept the sheep on that hill.’
"There in the darkness of the storm, partly from what Rosalind told me and partly from the exercise of my own imagination and intuition, I pieced together the story that I
now set down. Later I verified some of it from the talk of the countryside, yet it came to me that night in a series of pictures so vivid that I could not doubt their truth any more than I had been able to doubt the truth of the picture of Johan opening his eyes to the vision of the gentians.
"The first picture that I saw was that of a young girl leaning out of a window high in a castle tower. Beneath her shimmered the springlike green of the woods, and down below the sea of leaves she could hear the hunt go by. She propped her chin in her hand, and looking down at the swaying green tree tops, with here and there the spire of a blooming wild cherry tree reaching up to the light, she thought them like tumbled green waves, foam-flicked and beautiful. And down below in the depths of the sea, the hunt went by. The sun was warm on her face and perhaps she dreamed a little, for the sound of a horn startled her awake. It was silvery clear and near at hand, and its music was like a stab of pain at her heart. Who was coming up the hill? A merman from the depths of the sea, riding upon a white horse? A fairy huntsman? The prince who had ridden through the wood to awake the sleeping beauty in her bower? Her cheeks were Hushed and her eyes bright as she watched and listened. The leaves parted, and he rode up out of the green sea, a sunburnt boy riding a dappled pony. He wore a sheepskin coat, and a horn was slung over his shoulder. He was singing as he rode up the green slope beneath the castle wall, but he did not look up. On the window sill beside
Rosalind was a bowl of spring flowers-gentians, star-of- Bethlehem, pinks, and bluebells. She took them out of the bowl and just as he rode beneath the window she dropped them on him. He shook his head as a young colt might do as the wet flowers fell about him, pulled his pony to a stand-still, and looked up laughing. But when he saw the girl at the window he did not laugh, and neither did she. For a full minute they looked at each other in silence, and then he asked her, ‘What is your name?
" ‘Rosalind.’
" ‘My name is John.’
"That was enough. With just the telling of their names to each other, they plighted their troth.
“ ‘Do you know Bowerly Hill’ he asked her.
“ ‘Is that the hill with the broken stone wall at the top? Someone is building a little house with the stones.’
“ ‘I am building a shepherd’s hut,’ said john. ‘I’ll be there tomorrow at sunset with the sheep'
"A handful of gentians and star-of-Bethlehem were scattered over his pony’s mane. Without looking at her again, he made a little posy of them and stuck them in his sheepskin coat, and then he rode away, down once more beneath the sea of green leaves, and she heard the sound of his horn dying away in the distance.
"She went to Bowerly Hill the next day at sunset, just ` when the gulls were flying home to the sea, and hidden by the gray stone wall of the shepherd’s hut that he was building they talked for a little, and then they kissed each other. That kiss gave them courage, and after that they rode about the countryside together, he on his dappled pony and she on her chestnut palfrey. They were both of them motherless children, and their preoccupied fathers knew nothing of what they did. If others saw them, they kept their counsel.
"They had two favorite meeting places, Bowerly Hill and the Chapel of St. Michael, where john believed he had once seen the old hermit in a dream. He had always loved this chapel. He had found it first when he was quite a small boy, and had run away from home after his hard and unloving father had given him a beating for no just cause. He had had a vague idea that he would run away to sea, but when he reached the coast at Torre he had seen the chapel on the hill, and had climbed up there to see what it was like inside. It had been peaceful and quiet in the chapel, and he had sat there and rested, and out of the quiet there had somehow come to him the knowledge that the time to go to sea was not yet. It would come later. Now he must go back and just endure his father’s injustice and his unloving home. And he had gone back, and had endured grimly, until the finding of Rosalind filled his life with joy.
"Because it was one of their meeting places he loved the chapel more than ever, and the shepherd’s hut that he was building on Bowerly Hill out of the stones of the old wall, ostensibly for the lambing season, became in his mind another chapel, and himself another hermit building it. To make it as like the other as he could, he dug up a young yew tree from the Weekaborough garden and planted it there, and to make it holy, like the churchyard yews, he cut the sign of the cross on its bark. And again to make it like the other chapel, he cut a gentian on one of the stones.
"It was about this time that he began to trim the garden yews into fantastic shapes. He was skilled in topiary, as in all garden crafts. His father cared nothing for the garden and did not mind what he did in it. He was the gardener, the beeman, the shepherd, and the singer of the ploughman’s chant over the hills, and his father attended to the cattle, the crops, and the business of the farm.
"A year passed, and the joy of his love for Rosalind began to turn to pain and bewilderment. She wa
s still hardly more than a child, but he was growing up, and he saw clearly that soon they would have to do one of two things, either part from each other or get married. But how could he marry her, when he was a farmer’s son and she a great lady? His mother, too, had been a great lady, who had run away from home to marry his father, and he had her blood in his veins, and the lovely hunting horn which had been one of her heirlooms; but still, he was only a farmer’s son.
"He went up to Bowerly Hill one warm summer night of moon and stars and sat down outside the half-built hut. Behind him his sapling yew stood like a tall spear planted in the ground, and in front of him a line of silver that was the quiet sea stretched along the horizon. And here he fought his battle and made his decision. He would do what he had tried to do as a young boy; he would go to sea. England was at war with Spain and had great need of seamen. He would go to Plymouth and join a ship there. If they doubted his usefulness he would tell them he was an expert drummer. He was. His father’s father had sailed to the Indies and back as ship’s drummer, and his drum was now in the Weekaborough attic, and almost since his babyhood John had practiced upon it. If he stayed here, sheltered within these green hills like a sheep in its fold, he would never be anything but just a dreaming shepherd boy, but if he went to sea and fought and saw the world, he might perhaps come back a man whom Rosalind would be allowed to marry.
"Though he was a humble boy, he was aware of latent powers within him. He knew that through his mother there had come to him a sensitiveness that his father could not begin to understand, and the capacity for fine manners and clear thought. And so he must go away, step outside the peaceful blindness of his fold and see life as it is in the place where the skies rip open and men see death and terror. But it was not an easy decision to make, for he loved this spot of earth passionately, and the thought of parting for years from Rosalind, a very young girl who might easily forget him, was almost unbearable. And he was not very brave, either. The fold was more to his taste than the unclosing skies. And so the battle that he fought on the hillside was the hardest of
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