"Now at last," he said, "I trust we may see more of you, now your missions are all done and the peace secured. Once before we hoped for it, and no sooner had we followed you into Gwynedd than you must be for ever wandering out of it. You became such a great traveller, there was no keeping pace with you. Now you and I are in the same service, with time and ease to live close and brotherly."
I said that David might be returning to his old lands in due time, and would certainly require his old following. This with mild malice, seeing he had deserted David's service for his own advantage, and not at all out of any devotion to Llewelyn. But he laughed openly at that, sure that where the master's treason was wiped out the man's would not be allowed to count against him, especially as it could be represented as loyalty to the higher power.
"That will be a new beginning, for both high and low," he said, "with old scores wiped out. I don't know but there's something to be said for living in Lleyn." And I think he began then, in cold blood, to weigh the advantages, as ready to leave one lord as another. "I hear there's talk," he said, "of the Lord Edward making a rich match for David, now we're all at peace. There's some little kinswoman of his own, left widowed after one of Earl Simon's barons, before she's even properly a wife. They say he has it in mind to give her to David, along with the English knighthood he's already bestowed on him. If he sets up with a noble English wife, she'll need a household of her own. And David thinks highly of Cristin, and would be glad to have her companion to his bride. But it would be shame," said Godred, wantonly smiling and son-voiced at my shoulder, "to take her even so far from you as Neigwl, now you're home."
We were nearing the maenol then, and the women came out to greet us and bring us home in triumph, and I was so intent on looking for her among them that I made him no response, and hardly heeded his baiting. Yet I heard him whisper even more stealthily into my ear, a thread of sound, like a sharp knife slicing through the shouting and singing: "You know, do you not, that she chose to come north with the old dame only for your sake?"
If I had not known it I might have made him some sign then of the depth of that wound, but I did know it, from her own lips, and there was no way he could move me. Moreover, I found her at that moment, a star among her fellows, half-grave, half-bright, wholly beautiful, all the more because she had found me first, and her eyes, like irises wide-open and glowing in sunlight, were waiting to embrace me.
Into that liquid light I fell and drowned, drawn into her being and one with her. How many times have I not died that blessed death! I think I did not halt nor check, nor did my face change, and I do not know how much Godred saw of what we two became before his eyes, or heard of what we spoke to each other in silence. But when I drew back into my body the soul she gently returned to me, and opened my own eyes to those about me, Llewelyn at my right hand rode softly with his chin upon his shoulder, and his gaze wide and deep and reflective upon me, as darkly brown and still as the peat-pools of his own mountains. When he saw me awake and aware he stirred and looked before him, and spoke me freely and cheerily, putting the moment by. But there was nothing he had not seen.
After the feasting and the mirth and the singing of the bards in Aber that night, I went out into the mild darkness of the courtyard, and there was so golden a moon that the sight of it was like a benediction. I walked through the cool stillness to the chapel, and there made my prayers, for that night was to me a home-coming of such power and magic that nothing on earth seemed out of my reach, not even my love, Cristin, Godred's wife. I had only to wait and be still, and everything would be added to me. Yet in humility I consented to forgo what I might not desire, having the inexpressible bliss of what was already granted. For she loved me, and no other. And I prayed passionately grace and mercy for Godred, my brother, who had not that bliss, and only by its bestowal on me had learned to covet and begrudge it.
When I had done, I rose from before the lamp that burned on the altar, and turned towards the darkness, and there was a still and man-shaped shadow in the open doorway, that moved towards me as I moved, as the image advances in a mirror. So used was I to meeting my demon that I halted where I stood, and called him by his name: "Godred!" Not dreading nor questioning, only in recognition, that he might have peace, if there was the means of peace in him.
"Not Godred," said the shadow, very low, "but Llewelyn."
He came towards the light, and took shape as he came, and within reach of me he stayed. I think he had hardly touched mead or wine all that evening long, the burning within him was the fire of one aim achieved, and one still distantly beckoning.
"I did not follow you," he said, "but it was in my mind to send for you. And you were here before me. The dagger that strikes at me strikes also at you, the stars of our birth shone on us both. I have been blinded by my own concerns, but now I see. Forgive me that I did not see from the beginning. I must have cost you dear in your silence many a time."
I told him what was true, that he had no need to reproach himself or compassionate me, that I had no complaint against man or God that I would not change my fate if I could, that there was but one thing lacking to me, and that was not my love's love, for that I had in fullest measure.
"I know it," he said. "I saw her face, also. Did I say we shared one fate? Come here to the light, look on this face. I have shown it to no one but you."
He laid a hand upon my arm, and drew me with him to the small, steady lamp upon the altar, and there he slid from the breast of his gown and laid beneath the light a small silver circlet, the size of a woman's palm, threaded upon a cord that he wore about his neck. The disc was enamelled with soft, bright colours and gleamed like a jewel, and I knew it for the talisman Earl Simon had given him beside the road to Hereford, a year and a half ago.
Some cunning artist had made this tiny image of a great beauty. A little face in profile, pure like a queen on a coin, with one large, confiding eye gazing before, a folded, dreaming mouth, and a braid of dark, gilded hair on her shoulder, the Lady Eleanor de Montfort, twelve years old, looked with a grave, high confidence into her future, towards a bridegroom and an estate fitting her nobility. A wonderful thing it was, but not wonderful enough, for it missed the warmth of her full-face gaze, that stopped the heart with its trust and its challenge.
"You have seen her," said Llewelyn in awe. "Is she truly so?"
I said: "This is but the half. She is more. If this image could turn its head and look you in the eyes, and speak to you, then you would know."
"And can this face," he said, rather to himself than to me, and brooding upon the little medallion in fascination and dread, "ever look upon me as I saw Cristin look upon you?"
It was not my response he wanted, nor even hers, for she was still barely fifteen years old, and a long way off in France, with more than distance, dividing her from him. Rather he longed for a sign from God that he had the right to believe and to hope. And when there was no sign, he took that for a sign in itself, that the duty was laid in his own hands. He took the medallion into his palm and held it before him in the little circle of reddish light, and the face flushed into rose, as if the blood stirred under her pearl-clear skin, and the movement caused the lamp to quiver, so that its light trembled briefly over her folded lips and caused them to smile. He saw it, and smiled in return, in the night of his triumph, with the golden talaith gleaming in his hair.
"There is nothing you or I can do but wait and trust," he said, "but that we have learned how to do. I had two vows registered in heaven, to win the acknowledgement of my right, the birthright of her sons, and to lay it at her feet. The first is done. The second, God helping me, I will do, though I wait life-long. You see her, the bud of a royal stem, and the daughter of that tremendous man, better than royal. From such blood, what princes will spring! If they took her away to the end of the world, I would not give her up. Her father pledged her to me, and I have pledged myself to her. The more spears they array between her and me, the more surely will I reach her at last. I have
waited but two years for her yet, and she is still hardly out of childhood. For Earl Simon's daughter I will wait as long as I must. Either I will have Eleanor de Montfort, or I will have none."
So he said, and so he kept. For however Goronwy and Tudor and all his council, thereafter, urged on him his duty to take a wife, and ensure the succession to that throne of Wales which was his own perfected creation, he smiled and passed on unmoved. And however they paraded before him the names and persons of all the noble ladies of Wales, any one of whom he might have had at will, still he never took his eyes from the image of Eleanor, that shone like a private star to him day and night. And still he saw her twelve years old and in profile, waiting, like himself, for the miraculous moment when the bud would blossom, and she would turn her head and look him in the eyes, and reach him her hand upon their marriage day.
THE HOUNDS OF SUNSET
CHAPTER I
In the autumn of the year of Our Lord, twelve hundred and sixty-nine, King Henry of England, third of that name, brought to a triumphant completion his great new church of Westminster, the dream and passion of his life. For such was his devotion to the Confessor that the dearest wish of his heart had always been to create a worthy tomb for the precious relics of that great king and saint, and house it in a splendid church, as a jewel in a casket. And though his long reign—for this was his fifty-third regnal year since his nobles set him on the throne, a child of nine—had been troubled and torn constantly by wars and dissensions and feuds, by entanglements with popes and kings and princes, and though power had slid in and out of his hands, and the winds of other men's wills blown him hither and thither like thistledown, for all these griefs and follies and misfortunes he had never relinquished that purpose and intent, but always returned to it as soon as he was master of his own actions.
As a child he had laid the foundation stone of the new work, when the monks in their ambitious zeal for their saint and their concern for the proper honouring of Our Lady grew dissatisfied with their old church and set out to rebuild, and in particular to add a great Lady Chapel at the eastern end behind the altar. Their plans outgrew their pockets, and devoured all the alms and grants within their reach, and when they despaired and owned their helplessness the king took the work upon himself as an act of piety. Certain follies of his own in the matter of Sicily, certain unattainable ambitions, certain exasperations of his nobles and people tore him away from the work again and again, and counted almost fifty years away before he came at last to this happy consummation. But in this year of his blessed achievement I think he saw all that procession of life and death as but a painted scene of judgment upon a chapel wall, to be contemplated in peace for its colours when its perils were no more than half-remembered dreams.
And we in Wales, who had contended with him life-long until the peace of Montgomery, then two years old, did not grudge him this victory, of all victories. Give him his due, in this passion at least he was not changeable, he who in all things else span with the wind and ebbed and flowed with the tide. He was happier building than fighting, and it showed in the quality of what he built.
It was in July, in the highest summer, when my lord Llewelyn's court was at Rhuddlan, that King Henry's messenger came, bearing a most cordial invitation to the prince of Wales to attend the festivities in October at Westminster, when the body of the Confessor was to be translated with great splendour and ceremony to the new tomb. It was an earnest of the easy relationship between these royal neighbours that the prince should be among the first to be bidden to the feast, and an even more marked sign of the times that the royal messenger should be that very Welsh clerk of the chancellery who had often served us, in the years of enmity, as our closest intelligencer to the English court. Cynan was not and never had been suspect, but before Montgomery he would never have been sent on the king's errands into Wales, his Welsh blood being reason enough for trusting him only close about the royal offices, and with the lowly work of copying, at that, whatever his ability. Now he came not as clerk and servant but as envoy in his own right, and with a groom to attend to his needs on the way. He did his formal office in hall with a beaming face but an earl's solemnity, but at meat at the high table afterwards he unbuttoned and was a boon companion, proving himself with a good clerkly voice when there was singing. This man I knew well from many meetings in old years upon Llewelyn's business, and to the prince himself Cynan's fine legal hand was familiar enough, but never before had they sat at one table together.
"I see," said Llewelyn, smiling as he complimented him, "that we made your fortune at Montgomery as well as our own. You may climb now in the king's favour with a good heart and a single mind."
Cynan shook his head at that, and said there were no gains without losses, for he grew fat and easy now that his best occupation was gone. And so in truth he did, for he had still that white smoothness about him, but as if somewhat swollen, with the first signs of a paunch under his gown. He had been an old young man, and in time would be a young old man, changing without much change. His brow was by some inches higher, and time was setting about giving him the tonsure I had coveted in my boyhood and never attained.
"I was meant always to be a good doer," he said, grinning a little wryly at setting himself among the stock we reared, "but there's no thin living can wear away the flesh like the fret of danger, or keep the neck lissome like the eternal need to be looking over a man's shoulder. Now I rest easy, and turn my victuals into fair, fat meat. Your peace, my lord, may have made my head more secure on my shoulders, but it looks like turning my body into a bladder of lard."
"God forbid," said Llewelyn, laughing, "that I should have to call out my guard again and break this land apart to keep you in hard condition. Are you so discontented with a quiet life? You talk like David. Where there's no mischief there's no sport! Though I think my brother's new little wife has broken him to harness, if her spell holds, and of that we may all be glad."
So lightly then he spoke of David, whom he had loved best of his three brothers, and who had twice deserted and betrayed him, and twice returned, half-grudging and half-famished, into his too lavish grace.
"And do you carry," he said, "the like invitation to David? I take it the Lord Edward would see to that." For King Henry's heir had grown up, until his thirteenth year, in close companionship with David, then ward at the English court, and that early alliance wrung them both, and had cost us pains enough before our two countries came to so arduous a peace.
"I do," said Cynan, "though what part the Lord Edward needed to play is more than I know. The king is happy, he wills less to no man. I think he calls every lord of his acquaintance to share his own blessedness."
"That I believe," said Llewelyn, and smiled in some wonder but little bewilderment at the image he had of King Henry, who in happiness would scatter his own substance of mind and body like largesse, and in apprehension or fright would strike out about him with feeble but inexhaustible malice, like a child. In both he was childlike. When he was wounded he would deal out wounds to any who ventured near, when he was in bliss he would spend himself like a fountain of love. But always he must be the centre and spring from which ban and blessing came. "Tell me," said Llewelyn, "of how things go with England."
This order, tendered in open hall and before the entire household of five hundred and more, Cynan understood as it was intended, and regaled us freely with all the current gossip and news of the court, but not yet with any deeper observation drawn from beneath that surface. The Lord Edward's preparations for his crusade, and the king's for the great celebration in honour of his favourite saint, said Cynan, between them had crowded every other interest out of court. The list of those who had taken the cross and intended to go with Edward to the Holy Land made a resounding catalogue of noble names, among them his brother Edmund, his cousin Henry of Almain, William of Valence, who was King Henry's half-brother, Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, Roger Leyburn, and many more of the young men w
ho frequented Edward's company.
"And the Lord Edward's wife intends," said Cynan, "to go to the east with him. She is as absorbed in this enterprise as he, and he thinks of nothing else."
"So I have seen," said Llewelyn, "when he came to meet me in Montgomery in May, in the matter of the dispute in Glamorgan. Truly I believe he was bent on being fair, and we did get some business done, but while his feet walked the Severn water-meadows, I doubt his head was in Jerusalem."
"Gloucester has taken the cross, no less than the rest," said Cynan mildly. But he did not pursue that subject until the prince had withdrawn from hall into the high chamber, and had only a few of his closest with him, Tudor ap Ednyfed, the high steward of Wales—for his elder brother Goronwy, who had held that office before him, was a year dead at that time—the royal chaplain, and myself, his private clerk and servant. Then there was open talk of the dispute my lord had with Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, the only matter of large significance then troubling the good relations we had with England. Not, indeed, the only source of disputation, for when peace is made after ten years and more of border fighting and civil war, when lands have changed hands ten times over, and large honours been dismembered into a number of lesser holdings, with the best will in the world to word the agreement fairly and honestly, there must still be a hundred plots of land hotly disputed at law, and with reasonably good cases on both sides. The only remedy is in arbitration and give and take, in goodwill on both sides to do justice and keep the peace. But land is land, and ambition is ambition, and all too often goodwill was in short supply when it came to sacrificing an acre or two of meadow or woodland.
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