F. Crawford - Via Crucis

The abbot had begun a letter, but the pen lay beside the unfinished writing, his elbow rested on the parchment, and he shaded his eyes from the light. The brilliancy was gone from his face and was succeeded by an almost earthy pallor, while his attitude expressed both lassitude and dejection. He had done what had been required of him, he had fired the passion of the hour, and one hour had shown him how completely it was to be beyond his control. He remembered how Peter the Hermit had led the vast advance-guard of the First Crusade to sudden and miserable destruction before the main force could be organized; he had seen enough on that afternoon to prove to him that the air was laden with such disaster, of which the responsibility would surely be heaped upon himself. He regretted not the thoughts he had preached, but the fact of having yielded to preach at all to such men and at such a time. He had begun to set forth all this and much more in a letter to Pope Eugenius, but before he had written a dozen lines the pen had fallen from his hand, and he had begun to reflect upon the impossibility of stemming the tide since it had turned to flood.

A soft step sounded in the outer hall beyond the curtained doorway, but Bernard, absorbed in his meditations, heard nothing. A jewelled hand pushed aside the thick folds of the hanging, and the most beautiful eyes in the world gazed curiously upon the unheeding abbot.

"Are you alone?" asked the Queen's voice.

Without waiting for an answer she came forward into the room and paused beside the low platform, laying one hand upon the table in a gesture half friendly, half deprecating, as if she still feared that she had disturbed the holy man. His transparent fingers fell from his eyes, and he looked up to her, hardly realizing who she was, and quite unable to guess why she had come. A dark brown mantle completely covered her gown, and only a little of her scarlet sleeve showed as her hand lay on the table. Her russet-golden hair hung in broad waves and lightened in the rays of the oil lamp. Her eyes, that looked at Bernard intently and inquiringly, were the eyes of old Duke William, whom the Abbot of Clairvaux had brought to confession and penance long ago, and who had gone from the altar of his grand-daughter's marriage straight to solitary hermitage and lonely death in the Spanish hills; they were eyes in which all thoughts were fearless and in which tenderness was beautiful, but in which kindness was often out of sight behind the blaze of vitality and the burning love of life that proceeded from her and surrounded her as an atmosphere of her own.

"You do not welcome me," she said, looking into his face. "Are you too deeply occupied to talk with me awhile? It is long since we have met."

Bernard passed his hand over his eyes as if to brush away some material veil.

"I am at your Grace's service," he said gently, and he rose from his seat as he spoke.

"I ask no service for myself," she answered, setting her foot upon the platform and coming to his side. "Yet I ask something which you may do for others."

Bernard hesitated, and then looked down.

"Silver and gold have I none," he said, quoting, "but such as I have I give unto thee."

"I have both gold and silver, and lands, and a crown," answered the Queen, smiling carelessly, and yet in earnest. "I lack faith. And so, though my people have swords and armour, and have taken upon them the Cross to succour their brethren in the Holy Land, yet they have no leader."

"They have the King, your husband," answered Bernard, gravely.

Eleanor laughed, not very cruelly, nor altogether scornfully, but as a man might laugh who was misunderstood, and to whom, asking for his sword, a servant should bring his pen.

"The King!" she cried, still smiling. "The King! Are you so great in mind and so poor in sense as to think that he could lead men and win? The King is no leader. He is your acolyte-I like to see him swinging a censer in time to your prayers and flattening his flat face upon the altar-steps beatified by your footsteps!"

The Queen laughed, for she had moods in which she feared neither God, nor saint, nor man. But Bernard looked grave at first, then hurt, and then there was pity in his eyes. He pointed to the window-seat beside the table, and he himself sat down upon his carved bench. Eleanor, being seated, rested her elbows on the table, clasped her beautiful hands together, and slowly rubbed her cheek against them, meditating what she should say next. She had had no fixed purpose in coming to the abbot's lodging, but she had always liked to talk with him when he was at leisure and to see the look of puzzled and pained surprise that came into his face when she said anything more than usually shocking to his delicate sensibilities. With impulses of tremendous force, there was at the root of her character a youthful and almost childlike indifference to consequences.

"You misjudge your husband," said the abbot, at last, drumming on the table nervously and absently with the tips of his white fingers. "They who do their own will only are quick to condemn those who hope to accomplish the will of Heaven."

"If you regard the King as the instrument of Divine Providence," answered Eleanor, with curling lip, "there is nothing to be said. Providence, for instance, was angered with the people of Vitry. Providence selected the King of France to be the representative of its wrath. The King, obedient as ever, set fire to the church, and burned several priests and two thousand more or less innocent persons at their prayers. Nothing could be better. Providence was appeased-"

"Hush, Madam!" exclaimed Bernard, lifting a thin hand in deprecation. "That was the devil's work."

"You told me that I was condemning one who is accomplishing the will of Heaven."

"In leading the Crusade, yes-"

"Then my husband works for both parties. Today he serves God; to-morrow he serves Mammon." Eleanor raised her finely pencilled eyebrows. "I believe there is a parable that teaches us what is to become of those that serve two masters."

"It applies to those who try to serve them at the same time," answered the abbot, meeting her contemptuous look with the quiet boldness of a man sure of power. "You know as well as I that the King took oath to lead a Crusade out of repentance for what he did at Vitry."

"A bargain, then, of the very kind against which you preached to-day." The Queen still smiled, but less scornfully, for she fancied herself as good as Bernard in an argument.

"It is a very easy thing to fence with words," Bernard said. "It is one thing to argue, it is quite another to convince your hearers."

"I do not desire to convince you of anything," answered Eleanor, with a little laugh. "I would rather be convinced."

She looked at him a moment and then turned away with a weary little sigh of discontent.

"Was it without conviction that you took the Cross from my hands to— day?" asked Bernard, sadly.

"It was in the hope of conviction."

Bernard understood. Before him, within reach of his hand, that great problem was present which, of all others, Paganism most easily and clearly solved, but with which Christianity grapples at a disadvantage, finding its foothold narrow, and its danger constant and great. It is the problem of the conversion of great and vital natures, brave, gifted and sure of self, to the condition of the humble and poor in spirit. It is easy to convince the cripple that peace is among the virtues; the sick man and the weak are soon persuaded that the world is a sensuous illusion of Satan, in which the pure and perfect have no part nor share; it is another, a greater and a harder matter, to prove the strong man a sinner by his strength, and to make woman's passion ridiculous in comparison of heaven. The clear flame of the spirit burns ill under the breath of this dying body, and for the fleeting touch of a loving hand the majesty of God is darkened in a man's heart.