Via Crucis: A Romance of the Second Crusade Part 5

"Wait," she said, before he spoke. "I am coming down."

With an almost imperceptible gesture, like a greeting, she disappeared.

Gilbert began to walk up and down, his hands behind him, his eyes on the ground, and he did not see the tennis-ball which Henry had lost until he almost stumbled over it. The boy's words had roused an entirely new train of ideas in his mind. Perhaps no man could be so free from vanity as not to be pleased, even against his will, with the thought that the most beautiful living woman, and she a queen, was in love with him. But whatever satisfaction of that sort Gilbert may have felt was traversed in an opposite direction by the cool sense of his own indifference. And besides, that was a simple age in which sins were called by their own names and were regarded with a sort of semi- religious, respectful abhorrence by most honest gentlemen; and what was only the general expression of a narrow but high morality had been branded upon Gilbert's soul during the past months in letters that were wounds by the ever-present memory of his own mother's shame.

The confusion of his reflections was simplified by the appearance of Queen Eleanor. At the window of the lower story, which opened to the ground, she stepped out, looked up and down the deserted yard, and then came towards him. Gilbert had been long enough in Paris to understand that Queen Eleanor had not the slightest regard for the set rules, formal prejudices, and staid traditions of her husband's court; and when King Louis gravely protested against her dressing herself in man's mail, bestriding his own favourite charger, and tilting at the Saracen quintain in the yard, she hinted with more or less good or ill nature, according to her mood, that her possessions were considerably more extensive than the kingdom of France, and that what she had been taught to do by William of Aquitaine was necessarily right, and beyond the criticism of Louis Capet, who was descended from a Paris butcher.

Nevertheless, the Englishman had some reasonable doubts and misgivings at finding himself, a humble squire, alone in that quiet corner with the most beautiful and most powerful of reigning queens. But she, whose quick intuition was a gift almost beyond nature, knew what he felt before she had reached his side. She spoke quite naturally and as if such a meeting were an everyday occurrence.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "PERHAPS THAT IS ONE REASON WHY I LIKE YOU"]

"You did not know that the window was mine?" she said quietly. "I saw how surprised you were when I looked out. It is a window of a little hall behind my room. There is a staircase leading down. I often come that way, but I hardly ever look out. To-day as I was pa.s.sing I heard that silly child's angry voice, and when I saw his face and heard what he said, I could not help laughing."

"The young Count is in earnest," said Gilbert, quietly, for it would have seemed disloyal to him to join in the Queen's laughter.

"In earnest! Children are always in earnest!"

"They deserve the more respect," retorted the Englishman.

"I never heard of respecting children," laughed the Queen.

"You never read Juvenal," answered Gilbert.

"You often say things which I never heard before," answered the Queen.

"Perhaps that is one reason why I like you."

She stopped and leaned against the penthouse, for they had reached the corner of the court, and she thoughtfully bit a sprig of rosemary which she had picked from her window in pa.s.sing. Gilbert could not help watching the small white teeth that severed the little curling grey leaves like ivory knives, but the Queen's eyes were turned from him and were very thoughtful.

Gilbert deemed it necessary to say something.

"Your Grace is very kind." He bowed respectfully.

"What makes you so sad?" she asked suddenly, after a short pause, and turning her eyes full upon him. "Is Paris so dull? Is our court so grave? Is my Gascony wine sour, that you will not be merry like the rest, or"--she laughed a little--"or are you not treated with the respect and consideration due to your rank?"

Gilbert drew himself up a little as if not pleased by the jest.

"You know well that I have no rank, Madam," he said; "and though it should please you to command of me some worthy deed, and I should, by the grace of G.o.d, deserve knighthood, yet I would not have it save of my lawful sovereign."

"Such as teaching me to play tennis?" she asked, seeming not to hear the end of his speech. "You should as well be knighted for that as for any other thing hard to do."

"Your Grace is never in earnest."

"Sometimes I am." Her eyelids drooped a little as she looked at him.

"Not often enough, you think? And you--too often. Always, indeed."

"If I were Queen of France, I could be light-hearted, too," said Gilbert. "But if your Grace were Gilbert Warde, you should be perhaps a sadder man than I."

And he also laughed a little, but bitterly. Eleanor raised her smooth brows and spoke with a touch of irony.

"Are you so young, and have you already such desperate sorrows?"

But as she looked, his face changed, with that look of real and cruel suffering which none can counterfeit. He leaned back against the penthouse, looking straight before him. Then she, seeing that she had touched the nerve in an unhealed wound, glanced sidelong at him, bit upon her sprig of rosemary again, turned, and with half-bent head walked slowly along to the next b.u.t.tress; she turned again there, and coming back stood close before him, laying one hand upon his folded arm and looking up to his eyes, that gazed persistently over her head.

"I would not hurt you for the world," she said very gravely. "I mean to be your friend, your best friend--do you understand?"

Gilbert looked down and saw her upturned face. It should have moved him even then, he thought, and perhaps he did not himself know that between her and him there was the freezing shadow of a faint likeness to his mother.

"You are kind, Madam," he said, somewhat formally. "A poor squire without home or fortune can hardly be the friend of the Queen of France."

She drew back from him half a step, but her outstretched hand still rested on his arm.

"What have lands and fortune to do with friends.h.i.+p--or with love?" she asked. "Friends.h.i.+p's home is in the hearts of men and women; friends.h.i.+p's fortune is friends.h.i.+p's faith."

"Ay, Madam, so it should be," answered Gilbert, his voice warming in a fuller tone.

"Then be my friend," she said, and her hand turned itself palm upward, asking for his.

He took it and raised it to his lips in the act of bending one knee.

But she hindered him; her fingers closed on his with a strength greater than he had supposed that any woman could possess, and she held him and made him stand upright again, so that he would have had to use force to kneel before her.

"Leave that for the court," she said; "when we are alone let us enjoy our freedom and be simply human beings, man and woman, friend and friend."

Gilbert still held her hand, and saw nothing but truth in the mask of open-hearted friends.h.i.+p in which she disguised her growing love. He was young and thought himself almost friendless; a generous warmth was suddenly at his heart, with something compounded of real present grat.i.tude and of the most chivalrous and unselfish devotion for the future.

She felt that she had gained a point, and she forthwith claimed the privilege of friends.h.i.+p.

"And being friends," she said, still holding his hand as he stood beside her, "will you not trust me and tell me what it is that seems to break your heart? It may be that I can help you."

Gilbert hesitated, and she saw the uncertainty in his face, and pressed his hand softly as if persuading him to speak.

"Tell me!" she said. "Tell me about yourself!"

Gilbert looked at her doubtfully, looked away, and then turned to her again. Her voice had a persuasion of its own that appealed to him as her beauty could not. Almost before he knew what he was doing he was walking slowly by her left side, in the shade of the church, telling her his story; and she listened, silently interested, always turning her face a little toward his, and sometimes meeting his eyes with eyes of sympathy. He could not have told his tale to a man; he would not have told it to a woman he loved; but Eleanor represented to him a new and untried relation, and the sweet, impersonal light of friends.h.i.+p waked the dark places of his heart to undreamt confidence.

He told her what had befallen him, from first to last, but the sound of his own words was strange to him; for he found himself telling her what he had seen two and three years ago, in the light of what he had known but a few months, yet almost as if he had known it from the first. More than once he hesitated in his speech, being suddenly struck by the horror of what he was telling, and almost doubting the witness of his own soul to the truth. One thing only he did not tell--he never spoke of Beatrix, nor hinted that there had been any love in his life.

They turned, and turned again many times, and he was hardly aware that at the end the Queen had linked one hand in his right arm and gently pressed it from time to time in sign of sympathy. And when he had finished, with a quaver in his deep voice as he told how he had come out into the world to seek his fortune, she stopped him, and they both stood still.

"Poor boy!" she exclaimed softly. "Poor Gilbert!"--and her tone lingered on the name,--"the world owes you a desperate debt--but the world shall pay it!"

She smiled as she spoke the last words, pressing his arm more suddenly and quickly than before; and he smiled, too, but incredulously. Then she looked down at her own hand upon his sleeve.

"But that is not all," she continued thoughtfully; "was there no woman--no love--no one that was dearer than all you lost?"

A faint and almost boyish blush rose in Gilbert's cheek, and disappeared again instantly.

"They took her from me, too," he said in a low, hard voice. "She was Arnold de Curboil's daughter--when he married my mother he made his child my sister. You know the Church's law!"

Eleanor was on the point of saying something impulsively, but her eyelids suddenly drooped and she checked herself. If Gilbert Warde did not know that the Church granted dispensations in such cases, she saw no good reason for telling him.