“Loose!”
“Listen to their cries. They will slay old Nicholas. Quick, we must keep them out.”
They clapped to the door, locked and bolted it, dragged up the beds and benches, piled them against it. As they laboured, panting with fear, a great bird flapped in by the open window, beat blindly about from wall to wall. Rosamunde ran and closed the casement frame, casting a rapid glance at the burning forest. Smoke and a myriad ruddy stars were flying athwart the heavens. The flames had rolled to the rim of the meadowland, and the valley seemed edged with a wall of fire.
In the court below a grim fight had begun. The madmen who had broken loose from their vaults had fallen upon old Nicholas and the two soldiers, penned them in a corner by the gate. The three were overpowered by the furious many, beaten down, trampled, torn limb from limb. Then, in the unreasoning madness of their triumph, the mob had broken down the great gate, and opened the house to the beasts of the forest.
In a moment the wolves, scenting blood, came padding in, leaping on each other in the narrow entry. A hundred red-eyed things surged into the court, foam dropping from their white-fanged snouts. The place became as a pagan amphitheatre, full of death and immeasurable horror. While the fire devoured the trees of the forest, the madman and the wolf rent and slew each other.
CHAPTER XXXVI
Through the black and ruined land came Tristan and his men, marching where the rivers ran, that they might not tread ankle deep in ashes, nor be choked and blinded by the dust and smoke. Ruin was everywhere, black, saturnine, and solemn. A strange silence hung upon the world, where the charred trees still stood with their hands outstretched to the rainless sky. Many lay fallen like the dead upon a battlefield. The wind had passed, the storm blasts moaned no more.
As Tristan rode through the desolate woods, he bowed down his head, and was heavy of heart. He had loved these children of the forest, these scorched martyrs stricken in the rising of the sap. No more would their banners blow with the march of spring. And yet the dead trees were but outlined against the deeper gold of memory, a melancholy afterglow, weird yet tender. The savage in him was inert awhile. Childhood and youth came back, his mother’s face and Rosamunde’s sad eyes, the golden glimmer of his sister’s hair. Rosamunde, Rosamunde! What of the red rose plucked from the snowy towers of Joyous Vale? For the moment he forgot the grim, grinding present, the ten thousand iron men who drove clouds of dust from the ashes under their horses’ feet.
Towards evening they saw a river gleaming below them in a valley, shining like silver set in ebony, as it coursed through the blackened country. Tristan, drawing rein with the Duchess upon the brow of a hill, hardly knew the valley, so great was the change the flames had worked. The river parted about an island, foaming over the rocks that thrust their black snouts above the surface. The island itself was green and untouched, girded by the water from the dead wild around.
Tristan pointed Blanche and his captains to it with his sword. There was a strange light upon his face, even as the light upon the face of a crusader who beheld the Holy City shining under the blue arch of heaven.