The Red Saint

by Warwick Deeping

Denise broke and ate some of the bread, and finding a ditch near with a film of ice covering it, she broke the ice with her shoe, and soaking one corner of her tunic in the water, she washed the blood from her mouth and face. It was then that she found the money that Abbot Reginald had given her still knotted up in her clothes. And these two things, the bread and the money, comforted her with the thought that she was not utterly forgotten of God. Both blessings had come to her by chance, but when a soul is in the deeps it catches the straws that float to it, and believes them Heaven-sent.

Despite her wounds and her bruisings Denise walked five miles before noon. The passion to escape from familiar faces and to sink into the outer world, had revived in her. She skirted Robertsbridge and its Abbey, crossing the Rother stream by a footbridge that she found. On the hill beyond she met a pedlar travelling with his pack, and taking out a piece of money bought a rough brown smock from him, a needle and some thread. About noon she found some dry litter under the shelter of a bank of furze. She put on her brown smock, and mended her cloak, and then despite the January cold, such an utter weariness came upon her that she fell asleep.

When Denise awoke it was with a rush of misery into the mind, a misery so utter that she wished herself asleep again, even sleeping the sleep of death. She was so stiff with the cold and her rough handling that it hurt her to move, and the infinite forlornness of her waking made her shudder. Something soft touched her face, like the drifting petal of apple blossom out of the blue. A wind had risen and was whistling through the furze bushes, and buffeting them to and fro. The sky had grown very sullen. Snow was beginning to fall.

Denise dragged herself up and drew her cloak closer about her. She must find shelter for the night somewhere, unless she wished to tempt death in the snow. Yet she had gone but a short way along the road when a sudden spasm of pain seized her, pain such as she had never felt before.

Denise stood still, clenching her hands, her eyes full of a questioning dread. The spasm passed, and she went on again slowly, the flakes of snow drifting about her, the sky and the landscape a mournful blur. She had walked no more than a furlong when the same pain seized her, making her catch her breath and stand quivering till the spasm had passed. Nor was it the pain alone that filled her with a sense of infinite helplessness and dread. The birth of a new and terrible consciousness seemed to grip and paralyse her heart. She knew by instinct that which was upon her, a state that called up a new world of shame and tenderness and fear.

Denise went on again, a woman laden with the simple and primitive destiny of a woman. It so happened that she came to a wood beside the road, and at the edge of the wood under the bare branches of the trees she saw a lodge built of faggots, and roofed with furze and heather. The place seemed God-sent in her necessity, and her anguish of soul and body. Denise found it empty, save for a mass of dry bracken piled behind some faggots in one corner of the lodge. The place had a rough door built of boughs. Denise closed it, and hid herself in the far corner of the lodge, sinking deep into the bed of bracken. The pangs were upon her, and all the dolour and the foreboding that take hold of a woman’s heart.

It was bitter cold that night, and the snow came driving from the north, a ghost mist that wrapped the world in a garment of mystery. The wind roared in the trees whose bare boughs clapped together, creaking and chafing amid the roaring of the storm. It was a night when sheep would die of the cold, or be smothered in the snow drifts banked against the hedges.

The sky began to clear about dawn, patches of blue showing between ragged masses of grey cloud. The sun shone out fitfully at first, flashing upon a white world, upon a world of brilliant snow schemes and glittering arabesques, with the wood’s sweeps of black shadow across a waste of white.

The wind had dropped, and there was the silence of snow everywhere, not a voice, not a sound, save the occasional creaking of a rotten bough and the swish of its falling snow. The sun climbed higher, and the whiteness of the world became a pale and blinding glare.

Now, the silence of the wilderness was broken that morning by a slow and steady sound that grew on the still air. It was the muffled beat of hoofs upon the snow of the road that ran southwards along the ridge of the hill. Presently the snorting of the horse, jingle of metal and the creaking of leather were added to the plodding of the hoofs. A man’s voice rang out suddenly into a burst of song. The white world was glorious in the sunshine, marble and lapis lazuli, with flashes here and there of gold.