And the monk mounted his horse, and rode away like one who has received a pallium, dreaming miraculous dreams, and beholding innumerable pilgrims, peasant and prince, knight and lady, riding and journeying towards Senlac over hill and dale.
As for Denise she stood at the door of her cell long after Silvius had left her, as though she lacked even the power to move. What help was there, what other means should she devise? This cell of stone had become a den of evil dreams for her; the tenderness and mystery had fled. She had no heart to live there any longer, no heart to meet those who had knelt to her before this thing had happened.
CHAPTER XIV
Since the fight at Goldspur Father Grimbald had lain hidden in a saw-pit on one of the forest manors, the swineherd who had hidden him being also woodman and sawyer when his hogs were rooting amid the beech mast and the acorns. Saw-dust with heather spread over it made none so miserable a bed, and the swineherd had fortified Grimbald against wind, rain, and the inquisitiveness of enemies by covering the mouth of the pit with faggots. For a month Grimbald had lain there, his shirt and cassock clotted to great wounds that no man dared to touch. At first a fever had taken him, and he had roared and stormed at night like some sturdy saint at grips with Apollyon in a corner of hell. The swineherd had banked up the faggots to deaden the sound, praying God to abate Father Grimbald’s fever, for a dozen of Gaillard’s men were camped that very night not two furlongs from the saw-pit. Yet Grimbald’s shouts had come rumbling out of the earth, “Strike, strike, St. George!” “Shine, brown bills, and beat the Frenchmen into the sea!” And so strenuous and bellicose had the fever grown in him, that the swineherd, staking purgatory or peace on a pail of water, had lifted the faggots and doused Grimbald to cool him. Nor had any harm come of it, but rather good, for Grimbald had grown less fiery, and fallen into a deep sleep.
About the time that Dom Silvius made his second pilgrimage to the beech wood above Goldspur, Grimbald was so well recovered of his wounds that he could sit up on his bed, and take his food with great relish. Being also an industrious soul he made the swineherd throw him down billets of seasoned oak, a knife, and a hatchet, and set himself to carve heads of the saints for decorating the corbels of his little church. But either St. Paul and St. Simon were in an ill humour, or Grimbald knew little of his craft, for the saints emerged pulling most villainous faces, sour, evil, and grotesque, with flat noses, and slits for eyes. So Grimbald gave up his struggle with them, and heaved them up out of the pit to be burnt, and took to pointing and feathering arrows, for your woodlander was often his own fletcher.
The flesh prospering so well with him, and the end of his sojourn in the saw-pit seeming near, Grimbald sent the swineherd for some of the Goldspur folk. The very same evening the swineherd brought in the two men Oswald and Peter, both of them full to the brim with gossip, and ready to empty themselves at their spiritual father’s feet. Grimbald sat on his bed in the pit, whittling a yew bough with his knife; Oswald and Peter squatted side by side on a faggot like a couple of solemn brown owls on a bough.
“Father,” quoth Oswald, “we have seen the devil in St. Denise’s wood.”
Peter chimed in to add to the impression.
“A black devil with a black horse that breathed fire and smoke.”
“And he came and went like the wind, Father!”