Love Among the Ruins

by Warwick Deeping

  IV

  The stems thinned about them suddenly, and the sky grew great beyond amore meagre screen of boughs. To the west, breaking the blood-redcanopy with an edge of agate, rocks towered heavenwards, smitinggolden-fanged into a furnace of splendour. Waves of light beat in sprayupon the billowy masses of the trees, dying in the east into a majesticmask of gloom.

  Yeoland and the man in red came forth into a little glade, hollowed bythe waters of a rush-edged pool. A stream, a scolloped sheet of foam,stumbled headlong into the mere, vanishing beyond like a frail whiteghost into the woods. A fire danced in the open, and under the treesstood a pavilion of red cloth.

  The man dismounted and held the girl's stirrup. A quick glance roundthe glade had shown her bales of merchandise, littering the green carpetof the place, horses tethered in the wood, men moving like gnomes aboutthe fire. Even as she dismounted, streaks of steel shone out in thesurrounding shadows. Armed men streamed in, and piled their pikes andbills about the pines.

  At the western end of the glade, a gigantic fir, a forest patriarch,stood out above the more slender figures of his fellows. The grotesqueroots, writhing like talons, tressled a bench of boughs and skins.Before the tree burnt a fire, the draught sweeping upwards to fan thefringe of the green fir's gown. The man in the black harness tookYeoland to the seat under the tree. The boughs arched them like acanopy, and the wood fire gave a lusty heat in the gloaming.

  A boy had run forward to unhelm the knight in the red cloak. Casque andsword lay on the bench of boughs and skins. The girl's glance framedfor the first time the man's face. She surveyed him at her leisureunder drooping lids, with a species of reticent interest that escapedboldness. It was one of those incidents to her that stand up above theplain of life, and build individual history.

  She saw a bronzed man with a tangle of tawny-red hair, a great beak of anose, and a hooked chin. His eyes were like amber, darting light intothe depth of life, alert, deep, and masterful. There was a rugged andindomitable vigour in the face. The mouth was of iron, yet not unkind;the jaw ponderous; the throat bovine. The mask of youth had palpablyforsaken him; Life, that great chiseller of faces, had set her tool uponhis features, moulding them into a strenuous and powerful dignity thatsuited his soul.

  He appeared to fathom the spirit of the girl's scrutiny, nor did he takeumbrage at the open and critical revision of her glances. He inferredcalmly enough, that she considered him by no means blemishless infeature or in atmosphere. Probably he had long passed that age when thesanguine bachelor never doubts of plucking absolute favour from the eyesof a woman. The girl was not wholly enamoured of him. He was rationalenough to read that in her glances.

  "Madame is in doubt," he said to her, with a glimmer of a smile.

  "As to what, messire?"

  "My character."

  "You prefer the truth?"

  "Am I not a philosopher?"

  "Hear the truth then, messire, I would not have you for a master."

  The man laughed, a quiet, soundless laugh through half-closed lips.There was something magnetic about his grizzled and ironical strength,cased in its shell of blackened steel. He had the air of one who hadlearnt to toy with his fellows, as with so many strutting puppets. Theworld was largely a stage to him, grotesque at some seasons, strenuousat others.

  "Ha, a miracle indeed," he said, "a woman who can tell the truth."

  She ignored the gibe and ran on.

  "Your name, messire?"

  The man spread his hands.

  "Pardon the omission. I am known as Fulviac of the Forest. My heritageI judge to be the sword, and the shadows of these same wilds."

  Yeoland considered him awhile in silence. The firelight flickered onhis harness, glittering on the ribbed and jointed shoulder plates,striking a golden streak from the edge of each huge pauldron. Mimicflames burnt red upon his black cuirass, as in a darkened mirror. Thenight framed his figure in an aureole of gloom, as he sat with hismassive head motionless upon its rock-like throat.

  "Five years ago," she said suddenly, "you rode as a noble in the King'strain. Now you declare yourself a thief. These things do not harmoniseunless you confess to a dual self."

  "Madame," he answered her, "I confess to nothing. If you would be wise,eschew the past, and consider the present at your service. I am namedFulviac, and I am an outlaw. Let that grant you satisfaction."

  Yeoland glanced over the glade, walled in with the gloom of the woods,the stream foaming in the dusk, the armed men gathered about the furtherfire.

  "And these?" she asked.

  "Are mine."

  "Outcasts also?"

  "Say no hard things of them; they are folk whom the world has treatedscurvily; therefore they are at feud with the world. The times are outof joint, tyrannous and heavy to bear. The nobles like millstones grindthe poor into pulp, tread out the life from them, that the wine ofpleasure may flow into gilded chalices. The world is trampled underfoot. Pride and greed go hand in hand against us."

  She looked at him under her long lashes, with the zest of cavilslumbering in her eyes. Autocracy was a hereditary right with her, eventhough feudalism had slain her sire.

  "I would have the mob held in check," she said to him.

  "And how? By cutting off a man's ears when he spits a stag. Bysplitting his nose for some small sin. By branding beggars who thievebecause their children starve. Oh, equable and honest justice! Godprevent me from being poor."

  She looked at him with her great solemn eyes.

  "And you?" she asked.

  He spread his arms with a half-flippant dignity.

  "I, madame, I take the whole world into my bosom."

  "And play the Christ weeping over Jerusalem?"

  "Madame, your wit is excellent."

  A spit had been turning over the large fire, a haunch of venison beingbasted thereon by a big man in the cassock of a friar. Certain ofFulviac's fellows came forward bearing wine in silver-rimmed horns,white bread and meat upon platters of wood. They stood and served thepair with a silent and soldierly briskness that bespoke discipline. Thegirl's hunger was as healthy as her sleek, plump neck, despite the day'shazard and her homeless peril.

  Dusk had fallen fast; the last pennon of day shone an eerie streak ofsaffron in the west. The forest stood wrapped in the stupendousstillness of the night. An impenetrable curtain of ebony closed theglade with its rush-edged pool.

  Fulviac's servers had retreated to the fire, where a ring of rough facesshone in the wayward light. The sound of their harsh voices came up tothe pair in concord with the perpetual murmur of the stream. Yeolandhad shaken the bread-crumbs from her green gown. She was comforted inthe flesh, and ready for further foining with the man who posed as hercaptor.

  "Sincerity is a rare virtue," she said, with a slight lifting of theangles of her mouth.

  "I can endorse that dogma."

  "Do you pretend to the same?"

  "Possibly."

  "You love the poor, conceive their wrongs to be your own?"

  Fulviac smiled in his eyes like a man pleased with his own thoughts.

  "Have I not said as much?"

  "Well?"

  "I revere my own image."

  "And fame?"

  He commended her and unbosomed in one breath.

  "Pity," he said, "is often a species of splendid pride. We toil, wefight, we labour. Why? Because below all life and effort, there burnsan immortal egotism, an eternal vanity. 'Liberty, liberty,' we cry,'liberty and justice man for man.' Yet how the soul glows at the soundof its own voice! The human self hugs fame, and mutters, 'Lo, what agod am I in the eyes of the world!'"