Via Crucis

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[Illustration: "SO GILBERT FIRST MET THE QUEEN"]

VIA CRUCIS

A Romance of the Second Crusade

BY

F. MARION CRAWFORD

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"So Gilbert first met the Queen"

"Perhaps that is one reason why I like you"

"Crosses! Give us Crosses!"

Beatrix and Gilbert

"He ... held, while earth and sky whirled with him"

The Knighting of Gilbert

"For a space Gilbert answered nothing"

The Way of the Cross

CHAPTER I

The sun was setting on the fifth day of May, in the year of our Lord's
grace eleven hundred and forty-five. In the little garden between the
outer wall of the manor and the moat of Stoke Regis Manor, a lady
slowly walked along the narrow path between high rose bushes trained
upon the masonry, and a low flower-bed, divided into many little
squares, planted alternately with flowers and sweet herbs on one side,
and bordered with budding violets on the other. From the line where the
flowers ended, spiked rushes grew in sharp disorder to the edge of the
deep green water in the moat. Beyond the water stretched the close-
cropped sward; then came great oak trees, shadowy still in their spring
foliage; and then, corn-land and meadow-land, in long, green waves of
rising tilth and pasture, as far as a man could see.

The sun was setting, and the level rays reddened the lady's golden
hair, and fired the softness of her clear blue eyes. She walked with a
certain easy undulation, in which there were both strength and grace;
and though she could barely have been called young, none would have
dared to say that she was past maturity. Features which had been coldly
perfect and hard in early youth, and which might grow sharp in old age,
were smoothed and rounded in the full fruit-time of life's summer. As
the gold deepened in the mellow air, and tinged the lady's hair and
eyes, it wrought in her face changes of which she knew nothing. The
beauty of a white marble statue suddenly changed to burnished gold
might be beauty still, but of different expression and meaning. There
is always something devilish in the too great profusion of precious
metal--something that suggests greed, spoil, gain, and all that he
lives for who strives for wealth; and sometimes, by the mere absence of
gold or silver, there is dignity, simplicity, even solemnity.

Above the setting sun, tens of thousands of little clouds, as light and
fleecy as swan's-down, some dazzling bright, some rosy-coloured, some,
far to eastward, already purple, streamed across the pale sky in the
mystic figure of a vast wing, as if some great archangel hovered below
the horizon, pointing one jewelled pinion to the firmament, the other
down and unseen in his low flight. Just above the feathery oak trees,
behind which the sun had dipped, long streamers of red and yellow and
more imperial purple shot out to right and left. Above the moat's broad
water, the quick dark May-flies chased one another, in dashes of
straight lines, through the rosy haze, and as the sinking sun shot a
last farewell glance between the oak trees on the knoll, the lady stood
still and turned her smooth features to the light. There was curiosity
in her look, expectation, and some anxiety, but there was no longing. A
month, had passed since Raymond Warde had ridden away with his half-
dozen squires and servants to do homage to the Empress Maud. Her court
was, indeed, little more than a show, and Stephen ruled in wrongful
possession of the land; but here and there a sturdy and honest knight
was still to be found, who might, perhaps, be brought to do homage for
his lands to King Stephen, but who would have felt that he was a
traitor, and no true man, had he not rendered the homage of fealty to
the unhappy lady who was his rightful sovereign. And one of these was
Raymond Warde, whose great-grandfather had ridden with Robert the Devil
to Jerusalem, and had been with him when he died in Nicaea; and his
grandsire had been in the thick of the press at Hastings, with William
of Normandy, wherefore he had received the lands and lordship of Stoke
Regis in Hertfordshire; and his name is on Battle Abbey Roll to this
day.

During ten years Stephen of Blois had reigned over England with varying
fortune, alternately victor and vanquished, now holding his great
enemy, Robert of Gloucester, a prisoner and hostage, now himself in the
Empress's power, loaded with chains and languishing in the keep of
Bristol Castle. Yet of late the tide had turned in his favour; and
though Gloucester still kept up the show of warfare for his half-
sister's sake,--as indeed he fought for her so long as he had breath,--
the worst of the civil war was over; the partisans of the Empress had
lost faith in her sovereignty, and her cause was but lingering in the
shadow of death. The nobles of England had judged Stephen's character
from the hour in which King Henry died, and they knew him to be a brave
soldier, a desperate fighter, an indulgent man, and a weak ruler.

Finding themselves confronted by a usurper who had no great talent to
recommend him, nor much political strength behind his brilliant
personal courage, their first instinct was to refuse submission to his
authority, and to drive him out as an impostor. It was not until they
had been chilled and disappointed by the scornful coldness of the
Empress Queen's imperious bearing that they saw how much pleasanter it
would be to rule Stephen than to serve Maud. Yet Gloucester was
powerful, and with his feudal retainers and devoted followers and a
handful of loyal independent knights, he was still able to hold Oxford,
Gloucester, and the northernmost part of Berkshire for his sister.

Now, in the early spring of this present year, the great earl had gone
forth, with his followers and a host of masons and labouring men, to
build a new castle on the height by Faringdon, where good King Alfred
had carved the great white horse by tearing the turf from the gravel
hill, for an everlasting record of victory. Broadly and boldly
Gloucester had traced the outer wall and bastions, the second wall
within that, and the vast fortress which was to be thus trebly
protected. The building was to be the work of weeks, not months, and,
if it were possible, of days rather than of weeks. The whole was to be
a strong outpost for a fresh advance, and neither gold nor labour was
to be spared in the execution of the plan. Gloucester pitched his
sister's camp and his own tent upon the grassy eminence that faced the
castle. Thence he himself directed and commanded, and thence the
Empress Maud, sitting beneath the lifted awning of her imperial tent,
could see the grey stones rising, course upon course, string upon
string, block upon block, at a rate that reminded her of that Eastern
trick which she had seen at the Emperor's court, performed by a
turbaned juggler from the East, who made a tree grow from the seed to
the leafy branch and full ripe fruit while the dazed courtiers who
looked on could count fivescore.

Thither, as to a general trysting-place, the few loyal knights and
barons went up to do homage to their sovereign lady, and to grasp the
hand of the bravest and gentlest man who trod English ground; and
thither, with the rest, Raymond Warde was gone, with his only son,
Gilbert, then but eighteen years of age, whom this chronicle chiefly
concerns; and Raymond's wife, the Lady Goda, was left in the manor
house of Stoke Regis under the guard of a dozen men-at-arms, mostly
stiff-jointed veterans of King Henry's wars, and under the more
effectual protection of several hundred sturdy bondsmen and yeomen,
devoted, body and soul, to their master and ready to die for his blood
or kin. For throughout Hertfordshire and Essex and Kent there dwelt no
Norman baron nor any earl who was beloved of his Saxon people as was
the Lord of Stoke; wherefore his lady felt herself safe in his absence,
though she knew well enough that only a small part of that devotion was
for herself.

There are people who seem able to go through life, with profit to
themselves, if not to others, by a sort of vicarious grace arising out
of the devotion wasted on them by their nearest and dearest, and
dependent upon the success, the honour, and the reputation of those who
cherish them. The Lady Goda set down to her own full credit the
faithful attachment which her husband's Saxon swains not only felt for
him, but owed him in return for his unchanging kindness and impartial
justice; and she took the desert to herself, as such people will, with
a whole-souled determination to believe that it was all her due though
she knew that she deserved none of it.

She had married Raymond Warde without loving him, being ambitious of
his name and honours, when his future had seemed brilliant in the days
of good King Henry. She had borne him an only son, who worshipped her
with a chivalric devotion that was almost childlike in its blindness;
but the most that she could feel, in return, was a sort of motherly
vanity in his outward being; and this he accepted as love, though it
was as far from that as devotion to self is from devotion to another--
as greed is far from generosity. She had not been more than sixteen
years of age when she had married, being the youngest of many sisters,
left almost dowerless when their father had departed on a pilgrimage to
the Holy Land, from which he had never returned. Raymond Warde had
loved her for her beauty, which was real, and for her character, which
was entirely the creation of his own imagination; and with the calm,
unconscious fatuity which so often underlies the characters of honest
and simple men, he had continued throughout his married life to believe
that his wife's affection, if neither very deep nor very high, was
centred upon himself and upon Gilbert. Any man a whit less true and
straightforward would have found out the utter emptiness of such belief
within a year. Goda had been bitterly disappointed by the result of her
marriage, so far as her real tastes and ambitions were concerned. She
had dreamt of a court; she was condemned to the country. She loved
gayety; she was relegated to dulness. Moreover the Lord of Stoke was
strong rather than attractive, imposing rather than seductive, and he
had never dreamed of that small coin of flattery which greedy and
dissatisfied natures require at all costs when their real longings are
unfed. It is their nature to give little; it is their nature and their
delight to ask much, and to take all that is within their reach. So it
came to pass that Goda took her husband's loving generosity and her
son's devotion as matters foregone and of course, which were her due,
and which might stay hunger, though they could not satisfy her vanity's
large appetite; and she took, besides, such other things, both good and
bad, as she found in her path, especially and notably the heart of
Arnold de Curboil, a widowed knight, cousin to that Archbishop of
Canterbury who had crowned Stephen king, after swearing allegiance to
Maud. This Arnold, who had followed his great cousin in supporting King
Stephen's cause, had received for his service broad lands, both farm
and forest, in Hertfordshire, bordering upon the hereditary estates of
the Wardes; and in the turmoil and chaos of the long civil war, his
word, at first without Raymond's knowledge, had more than once saved
the latter's little castle from siege and probable destruction. Warde,
in his loyalty to the rightful sovereign, had, indeed, rather drawn
back from the newcomer's friendship than made advances to win it; but
Raymond had yielded in the end to his wife's sarcasms and to his own
sense of obligation, as he began to find out how, again and again, in
the turning tides of civil strife, his neighbour, though of opposite
conviction, served him by protecting his bondsmen, his neat cattle, and
his growing crops from pillage and destruction. Raymond did not trace
such acts of neighbourly kindness to the day when, hawking with his
lady and little Gilbert, then hardly big enough to sit upon a horse,
they had been overtaken by a winter storm not far from Arnold's lands,
and when Arnold himself, returning from a journey, had bidden them take
shelter in a small outlying manor house, where he was to spend the
night, and whither his servants had brought his little daughter Beatrix
to meet her father. Raymond had accepted the offer for his wife's sake,
and the two families had made acquaintance on that evening, by the
blazing fire in the little hall.

Before supper, the men had talked together with that sort of cheery
confidence which exists almost before the first meeting between men who
are neighbours and of the same rank, and the Lady Goda had put in a
word now and then, as she sat in the high-backed chair, drying the
bright blue cloth skirt of her gown before the crackling logs; and
meanwhile, too, young Gilbert, who had his mother's hair and his
father's deep-set eyes, walked round and round the solemn little dark-
faced girl, who sat upon a settle by herself, clad in a green cloth
dress which was cut in the fashion for grown-up women, and having two
short stiff plaits of black hair hanging down behind the small
coverchief that was tied under her fat chin. And as the boy in his
scarlet doublet and green cloth hose walked backward and forward,
stopping, moving away, then standing still to show off his small
hunting-knife, drawing it half out of its sheath, and driving it home
again with a smart push of the palm of his hand, the little girl's
round black eyes followed all his movements with silent and grave
curiosity. She was brotherless, he had no sisters, and both had been
brought up without companions, so that each was an absolute novelty to
the other; and when Gilbert threw his round cap, spinning on itself, up
to the brown rafters of the dim fire-lit chamber and caught it upon one
finger as it came down again, the little Beatrix laughed aloud. This
seemed to him nothing less than an invitation, and he immediately sat
down beside her on the settle, holding his cap in his hand, and began
to ask her how she was called, and whether she lived in that place all
the year round; and before long they were good friends, and were
talking of plovers' eggs and kingfishers' nests, and of the time when
they should each have a hawk of their own, and a horse, and each a
hound and a footman.

When supper was over and a serving-woman had taken the little Beatrix
away to sleep in the women's upper chamber, and when the steward of the
manor farm, and his wife and the retainers and servants, who had eaten
and drunk their fill at the lower end of the hall, were all gone to
their quarters in the outbuildings,--and when a bed had been made for
Gilbert, in a corner near the great chimney-piece, by filling with
fresh straw a large linen sack which was laid upon the chest in which
the bag was kept during the daytime, and was then covered with a fine
Holland sheet and two thick woollen blankets, under which the boy was
asleep in five minutes,--then the two knights and the lady were left
to themselves in their great carved chairs before the fire. But the
Lord of Stoke, who was a strong man and heavy, and had eaten well and
had drunk both ale and Gascony wine at supper, stretched out his feet
to the fire-dogs, and rested his elbows upon the arms of his chair, and
matched his hands together by the thumbs and by the forefingers, and by
the other fingers, one by one; and little by little the musical, false
voice of his lady, and the singularly gentle and unctuous tones of his
host, Arnold de Curboil, blended together and lost themselves, just as
the gates of dreamland softly closed behind him.

The Lady Goda, who had been far too tired to think of riding home that
night, was not in the least sleepy, and, moreover, she was profoundly
interested in what Sir Arnold had to say, while he was much too witty
to say anything which should not interest her. He talked of the court,
and of the fashions, and of great people whom he knew intimately and
whom the Lady Goda longed to know; and from time to time he managed to
convey to her the idea that the beauties of King Stephen's court would
stand in a poor comparison with her, if her husband could be induced to
give up his old-fashioned prejudices and his allegiance to the Empress
Maud. Lady Goda had once been presented to the Empress, who had paid
very little attention to her, compared with the interest she showed in
Sir Raymond himself. At the feast which had followed the formal
audience, she had been placed between a stout German widow lady and an
Italian abbot from Normandy, who had talked to each other across her,
in dog-Latin, in a way which had seemed to her very unmannerly; and the
German lady had eaten pieces of game-pie with her knife, instead of
using her fingers, as a lady should, before forks were invented. On the
following morning the Lady Goda had been taken away again by her
husband, and her experiences of court life had been brought to an
abrupt close. If the great Earl Robert of Gloucester had deigned to
bestow a word upon her, instead of looking through her with his
beautiful calm blue eyes at an imaginary landscape beyond, her
impressions of life at the Empress's court might have been very
different, and she might ever afterwards have approved her husband's
loyalty. But although she had bestowed unusual pains upon the
arrangement of her splendid golden hair, and had boxed the ears of a
clumsy tirewoman with so much vivacity that her own hand ached
perceptibly three hours afterwards, yet the great earl paid no more
attention to her than if she had been a Saxon dairy-maid. These things,
combined with the fact that she unexpectedly found the ladies of the
Empress's court wearing pocket sleeves, shaped like overgrown
mandolins, and almost dragging on the rushes as they walked, whereas
her own were of the old-fashioned open cut, had filled her soul with
bitterness against the legitimate heir to King Henry's throne and had
made the one-sided barrier between herself and her husband--which she
could see so plainly, but which was quite invisible to him--finally and
utterly impassable. He not only bored her himself, but he had given her
over to be bored by others, and from that day no such thing as even the
mildest affection for him was to be thought of on her side.

It was no wonder that she listened with breathless interest to all Sir
Arnold told her, and watched with delight the changing expression of
his smooth face, contrasted at every point with the bold, grave
features of the Lord of Stoke, solemnly asleep beside her. And Curboil,
on his side, was not only flattered, as every man is when a beautiful
woman listens to him long and intently, but he saw also that her beauty
was of an unusual and very striking kind. Too straight, too cold, too
much like marble, yet with hair almost too golden and a mouth like a
small red wound; too much of every quality to be natural, and yet
without fault or flaw, and too vivid not to delight the tired taste of
the man of pleasure of that day, who had seen the world from London to
Rome and from Rome to the imperial court of Henry the Fifth.

And she, on her side, saw in him the type to which she would naturally
have been attracted had she been perfectly free to make her choice of a
husband. Contrasted with the man of action, of few words, of few
feelings and strong ones, she saw the many-sided man of the world,
whose mere versatility was a charm, and the thought of whose manifold
experiences had in it a sort of mysterious fascination. Arnold de
Curboil was above all a man of tact and light touch, accustomed to the
society of women and skilled in the art of appealing to that
unsatisfied vanity which is the basis of most imperfect feminine
characters. There was nothing weak about him, and he was at least as
brave as most men, besides being more skilful than the majority in the
use of weapons. His small, well-shaped, olive-tinted hand could drive a
sword with a quicker thrust than Raymond Warde's, and with as sure an
aim, though there might not be the same massive strength behind it. In
the saddle he had not the terrible grip of the knee which could make a
strong horse shrink and quiver and groan aloud; but few riders of his
day were more profoundly skilled in the art of showing a poor mount to
good advantage, and of teaching a good one to use his own powers to the
utmost. When Warde had ridden a horse six months, the beast was
generally gone in the fore quarters, and broken-winded, if not dead
outright; but in the same time Curboil would have ridden the same horse
twice as far, and would have doubled his value. And so in many other
ways, with equal chances, the one seemed to squander where the other
turned everything to his own advantage. Standing Sir Arnold was
scarcely of medium height, but seated, he was not noticeably small;
and, like many men of short stature, he bestowed a constant and
thoughtful care upon his person and appearance, which resulted in a
sort of permanent compensation. His dark beard was cut to a point, and
so carefully trimmed as to remind one of those smoothly clipped trees
representing peacocks and dragons, which have been the delight of the
Italian gardener ever since the days of Pliny. He wore his hair neither
long nor short, but the silky locks were carefully parted in the middle
and smoothed back in rich dark waves. There was something almost
irritating in their unnatural smoothness, in the perfect transparency
of the man's healthy olive complexion, in the mouselike sleekness of
his long arching eyebrows, and in the perfect self-satisfaction and
confidence of his rather insolent reddish-brown eyes. His straight
round throat, well proportioned, well set upon his shoulders, and
transparently smooth as his own forehead, was thrown into relief by the
exquisite gold embroidery that edged the shirt of finest Flemish linen.
He wore a close-fitting tunic of fine scarlet cloth, with tight sleeves
slightly turned back to display his shapely wrists; it was gathered to
his waist by a splendid sword-belt, made of linked and enamelled plates
of silver, the work of a skilled Byzantine artist, each plate
representing in rich colours a little scene from the life and passion
of Christ. The straight cross-hilted sword stood leaning against the
wall near the great chimney-piece, but the dagger was still at the
belt, a marvel of workmanship, a wonder of temper, a triumph of Eastern
art, when almost all art was Eastern. The hilt of solid gold, eight-
sided and notched, was cross-chiselled in a delicate but deep design,
picked out with rough gems, set with cunning irregularity; the guard, a
hollowed disk of steel, graven and inlaid in gold with Kufic
characters; the blade, as long as a man's arm from the elbow to the
wrist-joint, forged of steel and silver by a smith of Damascus, well
balanced, slender, with deep blood-channels scored on each side to
within four fingers of the thrice-hardened point, that could prick as
delicately as a needle or pierce fine mail like a spike driven by a
sledge-hammer. The tunic fell in folds to the knee, and the close-
fitted cloth hose were of a rich dark brown. Sir Arnold wore short
riding-boots of dark purple leather, having the tops worked round with
a fine scarlet lacing; but the spur-leathers were of the same colour as
the boot and the spurs themselves of steel, small, sharp, unornamented,
and workmanlike.

Six years had passed since that evening, and still, when the Lady Goda
closed her eyes and thought of Sir Arnold, she saw him as she had seen
him then, with every line of his expression, every detail of his dress,
sitting beside her in the warm firelight, leaning forward a little in
his chair, and talking to her in a tone of voice that was meant to be
monotonous to the sleeper's ear, but not by any means to her own.
Between Warde and Curboil the acquaintance had matured--had been in a
measure forced in its growth by circumstances and mutual obligations;
but it had never ripened into the confidence of friendship on Warde's
side, while on Sir Arnold's it had been but a well-played comedy to
hide his rising hatred for the Lady Goda's husband. And she, on her
side, played her part as well. An alliance in which ambition had held
the place of heart could not remain an alliance at all when ambition
had been altogether disappointed. She hated her husband for having
disappointed her; she despised him for having made nothing of his many
gifts and chances, for clinging to an old cause, for being old-
fashioned, for having seen much and taken nothing--which makes 'rich
eyes and poor hands'--for being slow, good-natured, kind-hearted, and a
prey to all who wished to get anything from him. She reflected with
bitterness that for a matter of seven or eight years of waiting, and a
turn of chance which would have meant happiness instead of misery, she
might have had the widowed Sir Arnold for a husband and have been the
Archbishop of Canterbury's cousin, high in favour with the winning side
in the civil war and united to a man who would have known how to
flatter her cold nature into a fiction of feeling, instead of wasting
on her the almost exaggerated respect with which a noble passion
envelops its object, but which, to most women, becomes in the end
unspeakably wearisome.

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