The rest of the day had dragged slowly for her in the great beech wood, and she had found her thoughts wandering like children into a forbidden place. And Denise’s pride would start up after these same thoughts, seize on them in that little pleasaunce of dreams, drag them forth, and bar the door. But there was a restless refrain in the mood of the day. The future seemed to fly open before her eyes like the magic gate of an enchanted garden, and she had a glimpse of paradise bathed in a mist of gold. Her thoughts were lured thither, though her pride arose and drove them back.
With the dusk the spirit of unrest in her had deepened, and she had seemed to hear voices calling through the twilight of the woods. A thrush had perched on the topmost bough of a beech tree, and had uttered his desire, till the plaint had rung and rung into Denise’s heart. She had tossed her cloak at the bird, but none of the wild things feared her. And though the dusk fell, the song of the thrush seemed to thrill through the brown gloom.
Then night had come, and her cell had seemed small and stifling, a vault for a live soul. She had thrown her grey cloak over her shoulders, and gone out into the beech wood, following the path that led towards Goldspur manor. Her brown eyes had more than human vision in the darkness, and she knew the wood ways even at night. It was as though she went out to watch over the place, and to dispel the shadow of dread that had settled over her own heart.
Denise had come to the end of the wood where the grassland swept down into the valley, when she stopped to listen, putting her hood back so that she might hear more clearly. Her face was towards Goldspur, and she merged her body into shadow of the trunk of a great tree. Abruptly out of the night came the sudden sound of men shouting, a vague clamour that rose and fell like the noise of a wind through trees. Dots of light shone out in the darkness, jerking to and fro like sparks blown hither and thither by the wind.
Denise stood there watching these dots of fire, afraid yet not afraid, striving to understand what was happening down there in the darkness. The shouting died down suddenly, to change into the scattered cries of men running to and fro. The torches tossed this way and that as though Gaillard’s fellows were hunting for fugitives, calling to one another as they doubled upon their tracks. One of the torches came some little distance up the hill towards the beech wood and then halted, and remained motionless, flaming like the eye of a cyclops.
Denise had drawn back behind the tree, when she heard the sound of something moving in the darkness. A black shape passed momentarily between her and the torch burning below upon the hillside. Footsteps came near to her, the stumbling, irregular, running steps of a man hard put for breath, and perhaps—for blood. He passed close to her in the darkness, labouring for breath, and staggering from side to side. She could still see the moving shadow in the gloom, when it plunged like a man falling forward over a cliff, and she heard the sound of a body striking the crisp, dead leaves. Fear was beneath Denise’s feet for the moment. The man had fallen over the straggling root of a tree, and he was struggling to rise as Denise came up with him.
He had gained his feet, and stood rocking like a drunken man, trying to steady himself, and to win forward into the wood. But his legs would not carry him, and he went swaying as though struck on the chest, to stagger against Denise before she could avoid him. She felt the hard rings of his hauberk against her bosom, and to save herself she held the man, throwing an arm about his body.
Caught thus from behind, he turned his head and looked at her, not questioning the strangeness of it, being dazed and almost dead with what had passed. His face was so close to hers that Denise could not but know him, even in the darkness.
“Aymery!”
Her voice set his dull brain thrilling.