CHAPTER XLVIII
A night and a day had passed, and Tristan lived on, though the blood still flowed from his wounded side. Blanche and Rosamunde had dressed the wound with oil and wine and diverse herbs, but the barb would suffer no healing there, and the red stream still ebbed slowly forth. They saw that Tristan weakened hour by hour, his great hands growing white as a young girl’s, his eyes shining like crystal in a mask of wax.
Rosamunde watched at his side, counting the hours by the dial of her heart, neither sleeping nor leaving him long alone. As she saw him weakening with his wound, the fiercer mood returned to her heart as though to defy the power of death. It was not against Tristan that it arose, this passionate anger that strove with Fate. To the man she was mild and tender as moonlight, gentle towards him as the hours sped by. Against God it was that her heart cried out, against the God who would not hear her prayers.
When the second evening came, with the night’s fatalism deepening in the east, she passed out from the room like one whose heart could bear up no longer against despair. It was not to weep that she sped away and climbed to the topmost wall of Holy Guard. Nor was it for prayer in the gentler sense, but rather to fling her burning wrongs full in the countenance of the heavens.
The sun was setting over the sea like some great slave of the Creator, doomed to tread an eternal track amid the planets of the sky. The clouds, like demons, scourged him on, breathing forth fire and purple smoke. Beneath on the rocks the sea complained, that mighty rhapsodist whose words declared the troubled destinies of all mankind. For as the wind is often hushed, luring the ocean into sleep, so doubt and anguish cease at times, only to mock mankind the more.
So it was with Rosamunde that summer night as she stood alone on the wind-swept walls and watched the sun go down in flame. All hope had ebbed from her, and her pure faith had, like an angel, spread its wings, and vanished into the distant gloom. The sky seemed but an iron dome, riveted above the helpless world. All eloquence had passed away with the unfathomable truths of life that sometimes vivify and sometimes kill.
What had life given her? Insult and pain, death, terror, and unanswered prayers! Had not her beauty been a curse? What single blessing had she won but the strong love of a strong man’s heart, one fierce melody in the strifes of sound! And now this one good gift seemed gone, snatched like a jewel from her breast by the lean hand of a mocking fate.
In great bitterness she thrust up her arms and cried aloud under the sky:
“God, if there be a God, hear my voice. Give me some sign that I may know that we are not brute beasts who live to beget life, then—to die. Give me some sign of immortality. Show me that wisdom rules the heavens, that we of earth are not dust and air.”
And still the sun approached the sea, and still the hoarse waves laughed below as though there were no hope in heaven.
“Great God,” she cried again, her hands outstretched towards the west, “give me but one word in my heart, that I may know there is a God, and that some kindness rules the world.”
Yet there was no still small voice as that which spoke to the prophet in the cave when all the discords of the earth moved him to doubt in God’s design. The sea and sky were full of life, the wild woods clamoured and the west wind blew. And yet there shone no light in heaven to comfort her whose faith was dim.
Slowly, with her head adroop, Rosamunde passed back to the Abbess’s room, and stole in silently, to find Tristan asleep. A small lamp burnt on a sconce in the wall, shedding a vague light on the sleeping man’s face. Rosamunde, with the look of one very weary, drew a great wooden chair that had been the Abbess’s towards the bed, lay back therein, and rested her chin upon her hand.
The night had fallen about Holy Guard, filling its broken galleries with gloom. The stars were shining, and from below came the voices of those who sat at meat in the abbey refectory with Blanche the Duchess. It was Rosamunde’s vigil, and no one disturbed her, for she had wine and bread with her in the room.
Once more the heat of her despair died down like a fire that lacks for fuel. Her very soul seemed weary to death, and very lonely in that silent room. A hundred dark thoughts coursed through her brain: the sure knowledge that Tristan would die, that God had deserted her, if there were a God. Apathy possessed her hour by hour; afar she heard the sound of the sea, and the wind in the windows overhead.
As the hours passed her eyes grew hot and heavy with sleep; the long night began to weigh her down, as Tristan slept on and took no heed. Soon her head sank upon her shoulder, the very gloom seemed to grow more dim, and the noise of the wind ebbed from her ears. She drooped down in the great chair, her hands lying open in her lap, her hair clouding over her face. Sleep wiped the tired lines away from her mouth, and her large eyes strained towards the lamp no more.
That night Rosamunde dreamed a dream, a mystic vision, as though the God who watches over the ways of men had sent some seraph to His child. It seemed to her that she stood alone within the ruined chapel upon the rock. The chapel was full of golden vapour, a magic mist that seemed to move in luminous whorls towards the roof. The high altar was hid in gloom, as though a cloud enveloped it, like purple smoke over the moon. Even as she stood gazing in silent awe, a white arm was thrust from out the cloud, pointing its finger towards the floor that lay below the altar steps. A golden ray seemed to fall from the hand upon a stone a full cubit square. Letters of fire were traced on the flag. The purple vapour was rent aside, and in that dream shrine Rosamunde saw the White Christ bending from the Cross.
“Believe,” the Christ’s eyes seemed to say.
Then, with a sudden stream of light and a great sound as of a thunder-clap, the whole chapel rocked and sank into an abyss that had no ending.
With a cry Rosamunde awoke and stared around her in the room. Trembling, she sat up in the chair, awe and fear upon her face, as she remembered the vision she had seen. Tristan was still sleeping on the bed, and the great abbey was silent as death, save that she heard the sound of the sea.
Trembling and amazed, Rosamunde rose up like one whose soul groped in the dark towards the truth. She passed her hand over her heavy eyes, looked at Tristan as he slept close by the window where the night streamed in. Stung by sudden hope, she crossed the room, took the lamp from the sconce in the wall, passed out, and climbed towards the chapel. Up the great stair she made her way, the lamplight flashing on the walls and into her white palm as she shaded the flame. The wind played round her from above, moving her hair about her face. Her eyes were filled with hope and fear, like pools where darkness and moonlight mingle.
So through the gloomy galleries she came into the chapel of Holy Guard. Standing by the door with the lamp held high, she looked round under the ruined roof, as though half thinking to see her dream repeat its mysteries before her eyes. The lamplight quivered on the broken stones, the fallen rafters of the roof, and the snapped pillars that lay around. Above the altar the Cross still stood, but there was no purple mist about its limbs, no golden vapour filling the place.
Holding her lamp above her head, Rosamunde pressed forward over the ruinous floor towards the altar shrouded deep in gloom. Bending low, she gazed at the flagstones one by one as she passed up the aisle, lifting the broken rafters aside and thrusting away the fallen tiles. Before the very altar steps she came to a stone covered with words which she could not read. Kneeling and setting the lamp on the floor, she drew a poniard out of her girdle and worked at the joints with the point thereof.
Soon the stone lurched up, showing a streak of darkness beneath, for there was a goodly cavity under the flag. Bending low, and turning the stone back on its face, she groped in the darkness till her fingers touched the smooth lid of a metal box. Very slowly she lifted it out, laid it in her lap as she half knelt on the floor, and turned the clasp that fastened the lid. Lying within was a glass phial filled with a fluid red as blood, also some yellow silken stuff that looked to her like an eastern veil.
Rosamunde set the phial on the floor and held up the veil before the lamp. Even as the light came streaming through, a golden halo glowed round a face calm and grand as the face of a god. Great awe came down on Rosamunde’s soul, for she seemed to gaze on the face of the Christ.