The Red Saint

by Warwick Deeping

Denise carried her pitcher to the spring the morning after they had brought Waleran’s boy to her with an arrow through his heart. She stripped herself at the pool, and washed her body, scooping up the water in her palms, her hair knotted over her neck. Denise’s naked figure might have stood as the symbol of her womanhood, clean, comely, unshadowed by self-consciousness. It was part of the infinite mystery of things, a mystery that dwelt in Denise’s heart, and gave her power over women and over men.

Her brown eyes were sad that morning as she slipped on her white shift and her grey gown, and went back under the beech trees to her cell. With the fragrance of the wild flowers and the dew came the consciousness of the rougher world within that world of hers. She remembered the flames of the night before, Waleran’s dead boy, the savage anguish of the man breaking out into bitterness and laughter. What more might not happen in the deeps of the woods? Denise was no ignorant child, she had lived in another world before Olivia had built her the cell under the Goldspur beeches.

Denise said her prayers, worked awhile in her garden, and then brought out her orfrays of gold, and sat in the doorway under the deep shade of the thatch. But though her fingers were busy with the threads, her mind was full of a spirit of watchfulness and of unrest. She felt as it were the stir and movement of another world beyond the towering domes of the trees. She had a premonition that someone would come through the wood that morning. It would be a man, and yet not Grimbald. Denise’s hands were idle awhile, and her brown eyes looked thoughtfully into the deeps of the wood.

Nor was it very wonderful that Aymery’s thoughts should turn towards Denise as a man struggles through the thick of a crowd when he sees a beloved head in danger. He and Grimbald had been at the burying of Waleran’s boy, but Aymery had left Grimbald and the rest, and ridden back to Goldspur to see Denise.

The trampling of his horse’s hoofs through the dead beech leaves came as no surprise to the woman who sat with the orfrays work of gold in her lap. She had watched her own mind, till, like a crystal, it had been full of the man’s coming. Often in her life Denise had been able to foresee the faces of those dear to her, and to feel friends near while they were still far distant. She had the gift of inward vision, though the power became lost to her later when she had suffered many humiliations.

Aymery rode out into the sunlight of the glade, and Denise could see that he was armed. A surcoat of apple green covered the ringed hauberk, though the hood of mail was turned back between his shoulders. Aymery rode his big black destrier that day, and not the rough nag he used for hawking and cantering over his lands. He looped the bridle over the post at the gate, and came up the path with the air of a man who has more in his heart than his lips might utter.

Denise let her work lie idle in her lap. She had had no fear of Aymery from the first, his face had become so familiar that it seemed part of the life round her, like the trees, or the hills, or the distant sea. Yet from the instant that he opened the wattle gate that morning, a sense of strangeness took hold of both of them. Each felt the change and wondered at it, so simple in its significance, and yet so strange. The shadow of a cloud lay over them for the first time. The more intimate hour had come when the man looked into the woman’s eyes and thought that thought which opens the eyes of the soul—“if any harm should befall her! If that dear head should suffer shame!”

“We have buried the boy,” he said. “That will be the beginning of a long tale.”

There was something satisfying about Aymery, a man who carried his head high, and looked fearlessly at the horizon. He had a quick yet quiet way with him had Aymery of Goldspur. Shirkers and cowards were afraid of those grey eyes of his, for they were not the eyes of a man to be trifled with or fooled.

He spoke to Denise, resting his hands on his sword, and looking at the golden orfrays work in her lap. She was leaning against the door-post, her face in the shadow, thought and feeling as intimately one as the rose and the scent of the rose.