“We met on the road, lording, where we wastrels drift. She was not one of us. No. She told me her whole story. That was last night outside Guildford Town.”
Aymery’s eyes were on the priory beneath them amid its meadows. He kept silence awhile, and when he spoke he did not look at Marpasse.
“Part of the tale I know,” he said, “and God forgive me, I had an innocent share in it.”
His eyes were on Denise’s face again, and he smiled as a man smiles with bitter tenderness at death.
“Tell me what you know.”
Marpasse plodded along, staring at the grass. And presently she had told Aymery all that Denise had told her, and told it with the blunt pathos of a rough woman telling the truth.
They were nearing the convent now with its grey walls and trees, its barns and outhouses with their dark hoods of thatch. Aymery’s face was grim and thoughtful. He touched Denise’s hair with his lips, and Marpasse saw the kiss and, being a woman, she understood.
“The devil snatched at her lording,” she said, “but God knows that she was not the devil’s, either in heart or in body.”
Aymery rode on with bowed head. He was thinking of Gaillard, and how he would follow that man to the end of the world, and kill him for the death he had brought upon Denise.
They came to the convent, and Marpasse sat down on a rough bench outside the gate. The portress was waiting there, a very old woman with a dry, wrinkled face, a harsh voice, and grey hairs on her chin. She screwed up her eyes at the knight, and at the burden that he carried in his arms. Aymery was blunt and speedy with her, a man not to be gainsaid.