When they had lifted the litter, Waleran jerked himself on to it, and putting the shield aside, sat fingering his boy’s face.
“A puff of wind, and the candle is out,” he said.
The litter swayed under his weight.
“Spill me, you fools, and I shall have something to say to you. Off with you. To-morrow we must put this poor pigeon under the grass.”
The men moved away, and Grimbald would have followed them, but Waleran ordered him back.
“Have I nothing better to do than to cut my own throat!” he said. “Shifts and cassocks are no good for me. The puppy is mine, by God! Let no one meddle between him and me.”
Grimbald followed them no farther, and heard the swish of their feet die away through the dead leaves into the darkness.
In an hour from their first coming the beech wood was silent and empty, and Denise’s cell lay with its dark thatch like an islet in the midst of a quiet mere. Not a ripple of sound played over the surface of the night. Aymery and Grimbald had gone to warn their own people that death was abroad on the White Horse. And Denise, sitting on her bed, wakeful, and filled with a great pity for Waleran and the lad, felt that the stealthy glamour of the moonlight was cold and unreal. If her compassion followed Waleran, a feeling more deep and more mysterious followed Aymery under the boughs of the beeches. Yet this feeling of Denise’s was as miraculous as the moonlight which she thought so cold and mute.
The two men made their way through the wood by a broad green ride, and stood listening where the heathland began for any sound that might steal out of the vast silence of the night. Grimbald’s great head, with its gaunt, eagle face, the colour of smoked oak, had the full moon behind it for a halo. Aymery of Goldspur stood a little below him on the hillside, leaning on his sword. His thoughts were back among the trees about Denise’s glade, those towering trees whose boughs seemed hung with the stars.
Below them stretched wastes of whin and heather, hills black with forests, valleys full of moonlit mist. They could see the sea shining in the distance, a whole land beneath them, ghostly, strange, and still.