Chapter XIX
The day was far spent when they came to the valley in the heart of the woods where the ruined house of the Dales stood on that white blossoming island in the midst of the water. Mellis had dismounted half a league from the ford, and had refused to go forward until Martin had loaded the baggage again on the horse’s back.
“I am rested,” she had said, “and your strength is precious. Let the beast bear the burden for which he was born.”
Martin Valliant had to hide the vivid memories of yesterday, but as he stood at Mellis’s side on the edge of the beech wood and looked down upon Woodmere, he could but marvel at the strangeness of life. Here was he beside her, her comrade in arms, an outlaw, a man who had thrown the future into the melting-pot of fate. And as he watched a world of tenderness and yearning swim into her eyes, his soul stood stoutly to its outlawry. His muscles were made to serve her, and he thanked God for his strength.
“That was our home.”
She looked long at it, her lips trembling, her bosom rising and falling with emotion.
“Gilbert will never see it again. We used to draw pictures in France, and in his fancy the apple trees were always pink and white, just as they are now.”
Martin could find no words to utter. He wanted to touch her, to make her feel that he understood.
But she broke loose from these sad thoughts, rallied herself to face the fiercer issue.
“The valley looks empty.”
They scanned it keenly.
“Not a soul.”
“They will not leave us in peace for very long, and the hours will be precious. Come.”
Martin shut his eyes for a moment. He could not forget that vision of her with her dark hair clouding about her body. But the vision was sacred.
“You see, the bridge is broken.”
He had to pretend his innocence.
“And there is no boat?”
“It is rotting in the mud.”
They went down to the water’s edge, and Martin tied the horse to one of the willows. He paid homage to her forethought in the bringing of those tools.
“We shall have to build a bridge.”
Already she was pushing her way through the scrub, and Martin followed her. There were two gaps to be dealt with, one where the arch had fallen, and a second where the drawbridge should have served.
“The trunks of a few young trees thrown across.”
“Yes—but the horse.”
“We could leave him on this side for the night.”
She stared at the gate-house.
“Perhaps. But we shall want a bridge that can be drawn in, to keep out chance visitors. The gate, too, is off its hinges, and broken. I know where a beam is hidden, but I doubt whether we can lift it.”
“There is the rope—and I am strong.”
Her eyes looked him over with critical praise.
“Yes, you are bigger than your father. If we could throw a couple of young ash trees across the first gulf. There is a thicket of ashes down yonder.”
Martin needed no second word from her. He had the tools off the horse’s back, and the ax on his shoulder.
“Which way?”
“Over there. I’ll take the billhook and lop off the boughs while you do the felling.”
They started away like a couple of children, full of the adventure, and Martin was soon at work in a thicket of ash trees that had been planted some twenty years before. He chose a tree and had it down with six clean, slanting blows of the ax, so that the cuts clove wedgewise into the trunk.
“Oh, brave man! That was woodman’s skill.”
She fell to clearing the trunk of its top and side branches while Martin threw a second tree. He felled four, and shouldered them one by one up to the bridge end, and here his great strength served. These ash spars were no broomsticks, and he had to spear them forward over the gap, and keep their ends from dropping into the water.
“Brave comrade! Well done!”
She cheered his triumph.
“And now a few willow withies.”
He took the bill, lopped off some willow boughs, and then, straddling his way along the ash trunks, lashed them together with the withies. The thing made a very passable bridge. Martin tested it, and was happy.
“A few more trees, and some earth rammed on the top, and the horse will be safe across.”
“Yes—to-morrow. It is growing late. Now for the beam I told you of.”
It was lying in the sluice ditch under a smother of brambles and young thorns, a great balk of timber all sodden with damp, fifteen feet long, six inches thick, and a foot in breadth. Two men might have shirked carrying it twenty yards; but Martin, in that springtime of his love, dragged it out upon the grass.
“Good saints, but you are strong!”
She tossed him the rope.
“Throw a noose around it. I can help at pulling.”
They got the beam to the bridge, across the platform of ash trees, and so to the place where the drawbridge should have been, and here the business baffled them. The thing was far too ponderous to be thrust across like a plank.
Martin solved the riddle. He had to fell two more small trees, lay them across, and straddle his way over. Then he climbed the stair to the broken gate-house and bade Mellis throw him the rope. The first two casts failed, but the third succeeded. They swung the great beam across between them, Martin keeping his end raised by straining the rope over the wall.
He saw Mellis run lightly across, and scrambling back along the wall and down the stone stairway built in the angle of the gate-house, he joined her in the courtyard. The sun hung low over the tops of the trees, and its level rays threw the blackened beams of the burned roof of the hall into grim relief. The whole place had been gutted, with the exception of the little octagonal tower to the south of the hall, and one or two outhouses lying beyond the garden. The gate-house was just a stone shell, the charred gate lying rotting in a bed of nettles.
The evening light played in Mellis’s eyes, and Martin Valliant held his peace for the moment. Her lips moved as though she were repeating some promise she had made. It crossed his mind that she might wish to be alone, so he went back across the bridge and carried the two sacks and the tools over.
She called to him.
“Martin—Martin!”
She had opened a door that led from the courtyard into the garden, and stood waiting for him.
“Let us look everywhere. I want to be sure that no one has been here before us.”
She wandered out into the garden, a sweet and tangled place, sloping toward the sunset. The walks had gone back to grass, and the rose bushes were smothered with brambles. The four clipped yews by the sundial had grown into shaggy trees, and the herbs in the borders lived the life of the woods. Wild flowers had taken possession, buttercups, ragged robin, purple vetches, and great white daisies. There was a nut walk that had grown into a green tunnel; and a stone seat on the terrace under the wall of the house was almost hidden by bushes that had sprung up between the stones.
“This was a garden, and that was my mother’s seat. Men are very cruel.”
“And yet the place is very beautiful,” he said.
“With the beauty of sadness and of pain.”
In one of the borders she found an old rose bush that was budding into bloom, and one red flower had opened its petals. Her eyes glimmered.
“Why—this is a miracle!”
She plucked the rose, kissed it, smelled its perfume.
“Red is our color.”
And then a thought struck her.
“Comrade in arms, you are for Lancaster; here is your badge.”
She gave him the rose, and Martin touched it with his lips as she passed on down the garden.
They had explored the whole island before the sun dropped below the trees. The only habitable place was the tower; it had escaped the fire, probably because the wind had been blowing from the south when Roger Bland’s men had thrown their torches into the hall. A newel staircase led to an upper room, and though there was nothing but the boarded floor, the place was dry and habitable.
Martin did not enter the room, but stood on the threshold, as though some finer instinct held him back.
“There is plenty of old bracken in the beech wood,” he said; “it would serve—for a night.”
She was leaning her hands on the window ledge and looking down on the sea of white apple blossom below. Martin left her there, and, crossing himself, went out to the woods to gather bracken.
When he returned he found her watering the horse at the edge of the mere.
“We can let him lodge in one of the thickets for the night,” she said, smiling at the great bundle of brown bracken on Martin’s back.
A blackbird was singing in the orchard, and bats were beginning to flit against the yellow sky. Martin carried the bracken to the tower, and threw the bundle down on the floor of her room. The door still hung on its hinges, and he nodded his head approvingly when he saw that it could be bolted on the inside. It was fitting and right that she should feel secure in her chamber, since she was the queen of the place and more sacred to him than any lady in the land.
Martin went for more bracken, and when he returned with it he left the bundle on the flagstones at the foot of the stairs. Mellis had found a sheltered woodland stall for the horse, and had tethered him there with several lapfuls of grass for his supper. Dusk was falling over the Forest, and a great stillness prevailed. The surface of the mere was black and smooth as a magician’s mirror.
Martin heard Mellis calling.
“Bread and wine—and then to bed.”
She had found a rickety, worm-eaten oak bench, and carried it out to the terrace above the garden. They sat one at each end of the bench, using the space between them as a table.
“To-morrow there will be much work for you, Martin Valliant,” she said, smiling.
“Work is the sap of life.”
“Oh, sententious man! You will build me an oven, and I will bake bread. There are plenty of fish in the mere, and some venison would help to stock our larder. You will be a slave to-morrow, Martin Valliant; we have to victual our stronghold and stop the gaps in its defenses. Every day may be precious.”
He could see that she was weary, and ready to yawn behind her hand.
“Go and sleep,” he said, when they had ended the meal; “I shall lie on guard, ready for an alarm.”
“Martin Valliant, man-at-arms!”
So Martin made his bed at the foot of the stairs, and slept across them, so that no one could pass save over his body.