“Do you not see the crosses?”
“I could not for the crowd,” said Garin. “I can now. They are going to the land over sea?”
“Three ships with their companies sail from the nearest port. All the churches are singing mass and sewing crosses on those who will take them.”
“But there is no great and general going preached to-day,” said Garin. “There has not been since Saint Bernard’s time.”
“They say it will soon be preached again,” answered his informant. “Holy church must find a way to set off heresy that is creeping in!—These are ships sailing with help for King Baldwin of Jerusalem. The Pope has granted a great Indulgence, and many from these parts are going that they may wipe out their sins.”
The informant moved toward the doors. Garin thought of entering and hearing mass and seeing the crosses sewed on. But then he thought that it would be wiser to keep his road. He waited until most of the people had gone into the church, then found his way to the westward-giving town gate and passed out into the country. In Foulque’s purse he had still enough to purchase—not another Paladin, as he recognized with a sigh, but yet some horse not wholly unworthy. But this town, he had been told, had no good horse-market. Such and such a place, some miles away, was better. So he walked in his russet and blue and suited so the russet, sunshiny country and the profound blue arch of the sky.
Upon a lonely stretch of the road he came to a wayside cross, with a gaunt figure carved upon it. A gaunt figure, too, sat beside the cross, but rose as he approached and tinkled a small bell that it carried. As he lifted his mantle and went by with averted face so that he might not breathe the air that flowed between, it croaked out a demand for alms. It came so foully across Garin’s dream that he shook his head and hurried by. But when an eighth of a mile was between him and the leper he stood still, his eyes upon the ground. At last, drawing out Foulque’s purse, he took from it a coin and going back dropped it into the leper’s cup. “In Love’s name!” he said.
The leper widened his lips. “What is Love’s name?” he asked. “If I had its name, I might make it do something!”
Garin left him by the wayside cross, a terrible, unhelped person. He darkened his mood for him, or the stress and strain and elevation of the past week, flagging, left him suddenly in some dead backwater or black pool of being. He walked on, putting the miles behind him, but with no springing step and with a blank gaze. Light and colour seemed to withdraw from the day and the landscape. The cross-taking in the town behind him and the leper by the roadside conjoined with many another fact, attitude, and tendency of his world. It could show itself a gusty world of passion and energy, and also a world of asceticisms, humilities and glooms, of winter days struggling with spring days, of an inward fall toward lessening and annihilation. Here was an hour impetuous and crescive, and here was its successor passive, resigned and fading, and one man or woman might experience both. Garin had been aloft; now he walked in a vale indeed, and could have laid himself upon its ashy soil and wept.
Out of that mood he passed into one less drear. But he was still sad, and the whole huge world came into correspondence. Lepers and outcast persons, prisoners, and slaves, the poor and hopeless, the lovers parted, the condemned for sin—Garin plodded on, his eyes upon the earth.