Flora's last arrow was shivered: if she had had another in her quiver, she would have had no courage to try it after hearing those terrible words. She caught his hand, however, before he could guess her intention, and pressed her lips upon it till they left their print behind, and then she was gone. Her light foot hardly sounded as it sprang down the stairs, but its faint echo was the last living sound connected with Flora Bellasys that ever reached the ear of Guy Livingstone.
When I heard more of the interview, I thought, and think still, that he erred on the side of harshness. He was so fixed and steady in his purpose that he could have afforded to have compromised a little in expressing it. But he did things in his own way, and fought with his own weapons—effective, but hardly to be wielded by most men, like the axe of the King-maker or the bow of Odysseus. In carrying out his will, he was apt to consider the softer feelings of others as little as he did his own. It was just so with him when riding to hounds: he went as straight as a line, and if he did not spare his horses, he certainly did not himself.
To each man alive, one particular precept of the Christian code is harder to realize and practice than all the rest put together. It was this, perhaps, which drove the anchorites on from one degree of penance to another, and made them so savage in self-tormenting. When the macerated flesh had almost lost sensation, the thorn that had galled it sometimes in their hot youth rankled incessantly, more venomous than ever. That one injunction—"Forgive, as you would hope to be forgiven"—was ever a stumbling-block to Guy.
Besides all this, he knew, better than any one, what sort of an adversary he was contending against; one with whom each step in negotiation or temporizing was a step toward discomfiture. It was like the Spaniard with his navaja against the sabre: your only chance is keeping him steadily at the sword's-point, without breaking ground; if he once gets under your guard, not all the saints in the calendar can save you.
Perhaps, then, he was right, after all. Certainly Ralph Mohun thought so, as he listened to a sketch of the proceedings with a grim satisfaction edifying to witness.
As for me, before I went to bed that night, I read through those chapters in the "Mort d'Arthur" that tell how the long, guilty loves of Launcelot and Guenever ended. In the present case, there was certainly wonderfully little penitence on the lady's side, but yet there were points of resemblance which struck me. [I always think the queen must have been the image of Flora.] It is worth while wading through many chapters of exaggeration and obscurity to come out into the noble light of the epilogue at last.
Good King Arthur is gone. It bit deep, that blow which Mordred, the strong traitor, struck when the spear stood out a fathom behind his back; and Morgan la Fay came too late to heal the grievous wound that had taken cold. The frank, kind, generous heart, that would not mistrust till certainty left no space for suspicion, can never be wrung or betrayed again. The bitter parting between the lovers is over too; and Launcelot is gone to his own place, without the farewell caress he prayed for when he besought the queen "to kiss him once and never more." After a very few short months, the beautiful wild bird has beaten herself to death against her cage, and the vision comes by night, bidding Launcelot arise and fetch the corpse of Guenever home. She wandered often and far in life, but where should her home be now but by the side of her husband? Hardly and painfully in two days, he and the faithful seven accomplish the thirty miles that lay between; so utterly is that unearthly strength, before which lance-shafts were as reeds, and iron bars as silken threads (remember the May night in Meliagraunce's castle), enfeebled and broken down. He stands in the nunnery-church at Almesbury; he hears from the queen's maidens of the prayer that was ever on her lips through those two days when she lay a dying, how "she besought God that she might never have power to see Sir Launcelot with her worldly eyes." Then, says the chronicler, "he saw her visage; yet he wept not greatly, but sighed. And so he did all the observance of the service himself, both the dirge at night and the mass on the morrow." Not till every rite was performed, not till the earth had closed over the marble coffin, did Launcelot swoon.
I know nothing in fiction so piteous as the words that tell of his dreary, mortal sorrow. "Then, Sir Launcelot never after ate but little meat, nor drank, but continually mourned until he was dead; and then he sickened more and more, and dried and dwined away; for the bishop nor none of his fellows might make him to eat, and little he drank; so that he waxed shorter by a cubit than he was, and the people could not know him; for evermore day and night he prayed; but needfully as nature required, sometimes he slumbered a broken sleep; and always he was lying groveling on King Arthur's and Queen Guenever's tomb. And there was no comfort that his fellows could make him; it availed nothing."
We know it can not last long; we know that the morning is fast approaching, when they will find him "stark dead, and lying as he had smiled;" when they will bear him forth, according to his vow, to his resting-place in Joyous Guard; when there will be pronounced over him that famous funeral oration—the truest, the simplest, the noblest, I think, that ever was spoken over the body of a sinful man.