The Battle Of The Strong: Chapter 14

Chapter 14

       "Oh, give to me my gui-l'annee,
         I pray you, Monseigneur;
        The king's princess doth ride to-day,
         And I ride forth with her.
        Oh! I will ride the maid beside
         Till we come to the sea,
        Till my good ship receive my bride,
         And she sail far with me.
         Oh, donnez-moi ma gui-l'annee,
          Monseigneur, je vous prie!"

The singer was perched on a huge broad stone, which, lying athwart other
tall perpendicular stones, made a kind of hut, approached by a pathway of
upright narrow pillars, irregular and crude. Vast must have been the
labour of man's hands to lift the massive table of rock upon the
supporting shafts--relics of an age when they were the only architecture,
the only national monuments; when savage ancestors in lion skins, with
stone weapons, led by white-robed Druid priests, came solemnly here and
left the mistletoe wreath upon these Houses of Death for their adored
warriors.

Even the words sung by Shoreham on the rock carried on the ancient story,
the sacred legend that he who wore in his breast this mistletoe got from
the Druids' altar, bearing his bride forth by sea or land, should suffer
no mischance; and for the bride herself, the morgen-gifn should fail not,
but should attest richly the perfect bliss of the nuptial hours.

The light was almost gone from the day, though the last crimson petals
had scarce dropped from the rose of sunset. Upon the sea beneath there
was not a ripple; it was a lake of molten silver, shading into a leaden
silence far away. The tide was high, and the ragged rocks of the Banc des
Violets in the south and the Corbiore in the west were all but hidden.

Below the mound where the tuneful youth loitered was a path, leading down
through the fields and into the highway. In this path walked lingeringly
a man and a maid. Despite the peaceful, almost dormant life about them,
the great event of their lives had just occurred, that which is at once a
vast adventure and a simple testament of nature: they had been joined in
marriage privately in the parish church of St. Michael's near by. As
Shoreham's voice came down the cotil, the two looked up, then passed on
out of view.

But still the voice followed them, and the man looked down at the maid,
repeating the refrain of the song:

          "Oh, give to me my gui-l'annee,
          Monseigneur, je vous prie!"

The maid looked up at the man tenderly, almost devoutly.

"I have no Druid's mistletoe from the Chapel of St. George, but I will
give you--stoop down, Philip," she added softly, "I will give you the
first kiss I have ever given to any man."

He stooped. She kissed him on the forehead, then upon the lips.

"Guida, my wife," Philip said, and drew her to his breast.

"My Philip," she answered softly. "Won't you say, 'Philip, my husband'?"

She shyly did as he asked in a voice no louder than a bee's. She was only
seventeen.

Presently she looked up at him with a look a little abashed, a little
anxious, yet tender withal.

"Philip," she said, "I wonder what we will think of this day a year from
now--no, don't frown, Philip," she added. "You look at things so
differently from me. To-day is everything to you; to-morrow is very much
to me. It isn't that I am afraid, it is that thoughts of possibilities
will come whether or no. If I couldn't tell you everything I feel I
should be most unhappy. You see, I want to be able to do that, to tell
you everything."

"Of course, of course," he said, not quite comprehending her, for his
thoughts were always more material. He was revelling in the beauty of the
girl before him, in her perfect outward self, in her unique personality.
The more subtle, the deeper part of her, the searching soul never to be
content with superficial reasons and the obvious cause, these he did not
know--was he ever to know? It was the law of her nature that she was
never to deceive herself, to pretend anything, nor to forgive pretence.
To see things, to look beyond the Hedge, that was to be a passion with
her; already it was nearly that.

"Of course," Philip continued, "you must tell me everything, and I'll
understand. And as for what we'll think of this in another year, why,
doesn't it hold to reason that we'll think it the best day of our
lives--as it is, Guida?" He smiled at her, and touched her shining hair.
"Evil can't come out of good, can it? And this is good, as good as
anything in the world can be. . . . There, look into my eyes that
way--just that way."

"Are you happy--very, very happy, Philip?" she asked, lingering on the
words.

"Perfectly happy, Guida," he answered; and in truth he seemed so, his
eyes were so bright, his face so eloquent, his bearing so buoyant.

"And you think we have done quite right, Philip?" she urged.

"Of course, of course we have. We are honourably disposing of our own
fates. We love each other, we are married as surely as others are
married. Where is the wrong? We have told no one, simply because for a
couple of months it is best not to do so. The parson wouldn't have
married us if there'd been anything wrong."

"Oh, it isn't what the clergyman might think that I mean; it's what we
ourselves think down, down deep in our hearts. If you, Philip--if you say
it is all right, I will believe that it is right, for you would never
want your wife to have one single wrong thing like a dark spot on her
life with you--would you? If it is all right to you, it must be all right
for me, don't you see?"

He did see that, and it made him grave for an instant, it made him not
quite so sure.

"If your mother were alive," he answered, "of course she should have
known; but it isn't necessary for your grandfather to know. He talks; he
couldn't keep it to himself even for a month. But we have been regularly
married, we have a witness--Shoreham over there," he pointed towards the
Druid's cromlech where the young man was perched--"and it only concerns
us now--only you and me."

"Yet if anything happened to you during the next two months, Philip, and
you did not come back!"

"My dearest, dearest Guida," he answered, taking her hands in his, and
laughing boyishly, "in that case you will announce the marriage. Shoreham
and the clergyman are witnesses; besides, there's the certificate which
Mr. Dow will give you to-morrow; and, above all, there's the formal
record on the parish register. There, sweetest interrogation mark in the
world, there is the law and the gospel! Come, come, let us be gay, let
this be the happiest hour we've yet had in all our lives."

"How can I be altogether gay, Philip, when we part now, and I shall not
see you for two whole long months?"

"Mayn't I come to you for just a minute to-morrow morning, before I go?"

"No, no, no, you must not, indeed you must not. Remember your promise,
remember that you are not to see me again until you come back from
Portsmouth. Even this is not quite what we agreed, for you are still with
me, and we've been married nearly half an hour!"

"Perhaps we were married a thousand years ago--I don't know," he
answered, drawing her to him. "It's all a magnificent dream so far."

"You must go, you must keep your word. Don't break the first promise you
ever made me, Philip."

She did not say it very reproachfully, for his look was ardent and
worshipful, and she could not be even a little austere in her new joy.

"I am going," he answered. "We will go back to the town, I by the road,
you by the shore, so no one will see us, and--"

"Philip," said Guida suddenly, "is it quite the same being married
without banns?"

His laugh had again a youthful ring of delight. "Of course, just the
same, my doubting fay," said he. "Don't be frightened about anything. Now
promise me that--will you promise me?"

She looked at him a moment steadily, her eyes lingering on his face with
great tenderness, and then she said:

"Yes, Philip, I will not trouble or question any longer. I will only
believe that everything is all right. Say good-bye to me, Philip. I am
happy now, but if--if you stay any longer--ah, please, please go,
Philip!"

A moment afterwards Philip and Shoreham were entering the high road,
waving their handkerchiefs to her as they went.

She had gone back to the Druid's cromlech where Philip's friend had sat,
and with smiling lips and swimming eyes she watched the young men until
they were lost to view.

Her eyes wandered over the sea. How immense it was, how mysterious, how
it begot in one feelings both of love and of awe! At this moment she was
not in sympathy with its wonderful calm. There had been times when she
seemed of it, part of it, absorbed by it, till it flowed over her soul
and wrapped her in a deep content. Now all was different. Mystery and the
million happenings of life lay hidden in that far silver haze. On the
brink of such a sea her mind seemed to be hovering now. Nothing was
defined, nothing was clear. She was too agitated to think; life, being,
was one wide, vague sensation, partly delight, partly trepidation.
Everything had a bright tremulousness. This mystery was no dark cloud, it
was a shaking, glittering mist, and yet there rose from it an air which
made her pulse beat hard, her breath come with joyous lightness. She was
growing to a new consciousness; a new glass, through which to see life,
was quickly being adjusted to her inner sight.

Many a time, with her mother, she had sat upon the shore at St. Aubin's
Bay, and looked out where white sails fluttered like the wings of
restless doves. Nearer, maybe just beneath her, there had risen the keen
singing of the saw, and she could see the white flash of the adze as it
shaped the beams; the skeleton of a noble ship being covered with its
flesh of wood, and veined with iron; the tall masts quivering to their
places as the workmen hauled at the pulleys, singing snatches of patois
rhymes. She had seen more than one ship launched, and a strange shiver of
pleasure and of pain had gone through her; for as the water caught the
graceful figure of the vessel, and the wind bellied out the sails, it
seemed to her as if some ship of her own hopes were going out between the
reefs to the open sea. What would her ship bring back again to her? Or
would anything ever come back?

The books of adventure, poetry, history, and mythology she had read with
her mother had quickened her mind, sharpened her intuition, had made her
temperament still more sensitive--and her heart less peaceful. In her was
almost every note of human feeling: home and duty, song and gaiety,
daring and neighbourly kindness, love of sky and sea and air and
orchards, of the good-smelling earth and wholesome animal life, and all
the incidents, tragic, comic, or commonplace, of human existence.

How wonderful love was, she thought! How wonderful that so many millions
who had loved had come and gone, and yet of all they felt they had spoken
no word that laid bare the exact feeling to her or to any other. The
barbarians who raised these very stones she sat on, they had loved and
hated, and everything they had dared or suffered was recorded--but where?
And who could know exactly what they felt?

She realised the almost keenest pain of life, that universal agony, the
trying to speak, to reveal; and the proof, the hourly proof even the
wisest and most gifted have, that what they feel they can never quite
express, by sound, or by colour, or by the graven stone, or by the spoken
word. . . . But life was good, ah yes! and all that might be revealed to
her she would pray for; and Philip--her Philip--would help her to the
revelation.

Her Philip! Her heart gave a great throb, for the knowledge that she was
a wife came home to her with a pleasant shock. Her name was no longer
Guida Landresse de Landresse, but Guida d'Avranche. She had gone from one
tribe to another, she had been adopted, changed. A new life was begun.

She rose, slowly made her way down to the sea, and proceeded along the
sands and shore-paths to the town. Presently a large vessel, with new
sails, beautiful white hull, and gracious form, came slowly round a
point. She shaded her eyes to look at it.

"Why, it's the boat Maitre Ranulph was to launch to-day," she said. Then
she stopped suddenly. "Poor Ranulph--poor Ro!" she added gently. She knew
that he cared for her--loved her. Where had he been these weeks past? She
had not seen him once since that great day when they had visited the
Ecrehos.

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