Love Among the Ruins

by Warwick Deeping

  XXVII

  Gilderoy had risen.

  It was midnight. A great bell boomed and clashed over the city, with aroar of many voices floating on the wind, like the sullen thunder of arising sea. Torches flashed and ebbed along the streets, with hundredsof scampering shadows, and a glinting of steel. Knots of armed menhurried towards the great piazza, where, by the City Cross, Sforza theGonfaloniere and his senators had gathered about the red and whiteGonfalon of the Commune. All the Guild companies were there with theirbanners and men-at-arms. "Fulviac," "Saint Yeoland," "Liberty and theCommune": such were the watchwords that filled the mouths of the mob.

  Cressets had burst into flame on the castle's towers, lighting a luridfirmament; while from the steeps of the city, where stood the palaces ofthe nobles, smoke and flame began to rush ominously into the night.Waves of hoarse ululations seemed to sweep the city from north, south,east, and west. Trumpets were clanging in the castle, drums beating,fifes braying. Through the indescribable chaos the great bell smote on,throbbing through the minutes like the heart of a god.

  It will be remembered that the Lord Flavian was in Gilderoy for thepurchasing of arms. At midnight you would have found him in his statebed-chamber in the abbot's palace, tugging at his hose, fumbling at hispoints and doublet, buckling on his sword. He was hardly awake with thesingle taper winking in the gloom. The shrill ululations of the mobsounded through the house, with the clash of swords and the crash ofhammers. The Lord Flavian craned from the window, saw what he could,heard much, and wondered if hell had broken loose.

  "Fulviac and the Commune!"

  "Saint Yeoland!"

  "Down with the lords, down with the priests!"

  The man at the window heard these cries, and puzzled them out in hisperil. Certainly he was a lord; therefore unpopular. And Yeoland!Wherefore was that name sounding on the tongues of brothel-mongers andcooks! Was he still dreaming? Certes, these rallying-cries carried acertain blunt hint, advising him that he would have to care for his ownskin.

  Malise, his page, knelt at the door with his ear to the key-hole. Theboy was in his shirt and breeches, and trembling like an aspen. Flavianstood over him. They heard a rending sound as of a gate giving, a roaras of water breaking through a dam, a yelp, a scream or two, a confusedmedley of many voices.

  Flavian told Malise to open the door and look out into the gallery. Hedid so. A man, more zealous than the rest, sprang out of the dark andstabbed at the lad's throat. He fell with a whimper. Flavian plungedhis sword home, dragged Malise within, barred the door again. Verytenderly he lifted the boy in his arms. Malise's hands clung about hislord's neck; he moaned a little, and was very white.

  "Save yourself, messire!"

  Flavian bore him towards a door that stood open in the panelling. Hefelt the lad's blood soaking through his doublet; entreaties were pouredinto his ears.

  "I die, I die; oh, the smart, the burn of it! Leave me, messire; let melie still!"

  "Nonsense----"

  "It is no use; I have it deep, the man's knife went home."

  Flavian felt the lad's hands relax, saw his head droop on his shoulder.He turned and put him down on the bed, and knelt there, while Malisepanted and strove to speak.

  "Go--messire."

  Flavian was trying to staunch the flow from the boy's neck with a cornerof the sheeting. His own doublet was drenched with blood. In a minutehe saw the futility of such unconscious heroism; the flickering taper bythe bed told that Malise's life would ebb before its own light would begutted. Blows were being dealt upon the door. Flavian kissed the lad,took the taper, and passed out by the panel in the wainscotting.

  A stairway led him to a little gate that opened on the abbot's garden.He more than thought to find the passage disputed, but the placestretched quiet before him as he came out with sword drawn. The scentof the flowers and fragrant shrubs was heavy on the night air, and theshouts of the mob sounded over the black roofs, and rang in his earswith an inspiriting fury.

  There was a gate at the far end of the garden, opening through a stonewall into a narrow alley, and Flavian, as he scoured the paths, couldsee pike points bobbing above the wall, and a flare of torches. Menwere breaking in even here, and he was caught like a rat in a corner.In an angle of the wall he found a big marrow bed, and crawling underthe leaves like a worm, he smeared dirt over his face and clothes andawaited developments. In another minute the garden gate fell away, anda tatterdemalion rout poured in, strenuous and frothy as any tavernpack. They spread over the garden towards the house, shouting andblaspheming like a herd of satyrs. Flavian saw his chance, plunged fromhis dark corner, and joined the mob of moving figures. Dirty face anddirtier clothes were in kindred keeping. He shouted as lustily as any,and by dint of gradual and discreet circumlocutions, edged to the gateand escaped into the now-deserted alley.

  Running on, he skirted the abbey and came out into the square thatflanked the abbey church, and the great gate. A hundred torches seemedmoving behind the abbey windows. The square teemed and smoked withriot. Flavian went into the crowd with drawn sword, screeching out mobcries like any huckster, smiting men on the back, laughing and swearingas in excellent humour. His gusto saved him. As he passed through themob he saw heads, gory and mangled, dancing upon pikes; he saw womendrunk with beer and violence, waving a severed foot or hand, kissingmen, hugging each other, mouthing unutterable obscenities in the maddelirium of the hour. He saw whelps of boys scrambling and strugglingfor some ghastly relic; scavengers and sweeps dressed up in the habitsof the Benedictines they had slain. One man carried in his palm an eyethat had been torn from its socket, which he held with a leer in thefaces of his fellows. Further still, he saw half a dozen beggarsdragging the dead body of a lady over the stones by cords fastened tothe ankles, while dogs worried and tore at the flesh. He learntafterwards that it was the body of his own cousin, a young girl who hadbeen lately betrothed. Last of all, he saw a carcase dangling from agreat iron lamp bracket in the centre of the square, and understood fromthe crowd that it was the body of the abbot, his uncle. Men and womenwere pelting it with offal.

  And he, an aristocrat of aristocrats, dirty and dishevelled, rubbedshoulders with the scourings of the gutter, shouted their shouts, echoedtheir exultation. At first the grim humour of the thing smote him ingrosser farcical fashion; but the mood was not for long. He rememberedMalise, whimpering and quivering in his arms; he remembered the bodydragged about the square and worried by dogs; he remembered the carcaseswinging by the rope; he remembered the dripping heads and the fragmentsof flesh tossed about by the maddened and intoxicated mob. It was thenthat his eyes grew hot with shame and his blood ran like lava throughhis veins. It was then that the spirit of a vampire rushed into hisheart, and that he swore great solemn oaths by all the bones and relicsof the saints. God give him a hale body out of Gilderoy, and this cityscum should be scourged with iron and roasted by fire.

  He got across the square by dint of his noisy hypocrisy, and turnedmorosely into a dark alley that led towards the walls. Hot-heartedgentleman, the mere panic-stricken thirst for existence had cooled outof him, and he was in a fine, rendering passion to his finger-tips, astriding, blasphemous temper, that longed to take the whole city by thethroat and beat a fist in its bloated face. He wondered what had becomeof his knights, esquires, and men-at-arms. It was told him in later dayshow they died fighting in the abbey refectory, died with theBenedictines at their side, and a rare barrier of corpses to tell of theswing of their swords.

  Flavian dodged into a dark porch to consider his circumstances and thebaffling influence of the same. He had caught enough from the mob tocomprehend what had occurred, and what was to follow. Certainly formany months he had heard rumours, but, like other demigods, he hadturned a deaf ear and smiled like a Saturn. The largeness of theupheaval stupefied him at first; now, as he pondered it, it gave a moreheroic colour to his passions.

  To be free of Gildero
y: that was the necessity. He guessed shrewdlyenough that the gates would be well guarded. And the walls! He smotehis thigh and remembered where the river coursed round the rockyfoundations, and washed the walls. A big plunge, a swim, and he wouldhave liberty enough and to spare.

  He set off instanter down alleys and byways, through the mostpoverty-stricken quarter of the city. The place had a hundred stencheson a hot summer night. Naturally enough, such haunts were deserted,save for a few hags garrulous at the doorways, and a few fragments ofdirt, called by courtesy, children. The rats had gone marauding,leaving their offal heaps empty.

  Keen as a fox, he threaded on, and came before long to the walls, ablack mass, rising above the hovels packed like pigsties to the veryramparts. Avoiding a tower, he held along a lane that skirted the wall,looking for one of the many stairways leading to the battlements. Itwas here, in the light of a tavern window, that he came plump upon twosweaty artisans, rendered somewhat more gross and insolent by the fumesof liquor. The men challenged Flavian with drunken arrogance; they hadtheir password, to the devil. All the accumulated viciousness of an hourtingled in his sword arm. He fell upon the men like a Barak, kicked onecarcase into the gutter, and ran on.

  He was soon up a stairway, and on the walls, finding them absolutelydeserted. The city stretched behind him, a black chaos, emitting a grimuproar, its dark slopes chequered here and there with angry flame.Before him swept the river, and he heard it swirling amid the reeds.Further still, meadows lay open to the stars, and in the distance stoodsolemn woods and heights, touched with the silver of the sky.

  He moved on to where a loop of the river curled up to wash the walls.The water was in full flood at the place, and he heard it gurglingcheerily against the stones. Flavian took a last look at Gilderoy, itscastle red with burning cressets, its multitudinous roofs, its uproarlike the noise of a nest of hornets. He shook his fist over the city,climbed the battlements, jumped for it, plunged like a log, came upspluttering to strike out for the further bank.

  In the meadows the townsfolk kept horses at graze. Flavian, aglow to thefinger-tips, with water squelching from his shoes, caught a cob that washobbled in a field hard by the river. He unhobbled the beast, hung onby the mane, mounted, and set off bare-back for the road to Gambrevault.