F. Crawford - Via Crucis

"And therefore you would rob me of all I have, to make your happiness, when you have so much that I have not! Is that your justice?"

"No," answered Eleanor, almost sadly, "it is not justice. It is my excuse to God and man, before whom you say I am condemned."

The girl roused herself again, and though it was sharp pain to move, she raised her weight upon her elbow and looked straight into the Queen's eyes.

"You argue and you make excuses," she said boldly. "I ask for none. I ask only that you should not take the one happiness I have out of my life. You say that we are speaking as woman to woman. What right have you to the man I love? No, do not answer me with another dissertation on the soul. Woman to woman, tell me what right you have?"

"If he loves me, is that no right?"

"If he loves you? Oh, no! He does not love you yet!"

"He saved me yesterday-not you," answered the Queen, cruelly, and she remembered his eyes. "Does a man risk his life desperately, as he did, for the woman he loves, or for another, when both are in like danger?"

"It was not you, it was the Queen he saved. It is right that a loyal man should save his sovereign first. I do not blame him. I should not have blamed him had I been more hurt than I am."

"I am not his sovereign, and he is no vassal of mine." Eleanor smiled coldly. "He is an Englishman."

"You play with words," answered Beatrix, as she would have spoken to an equal.

"Take care!"

They faced each other, and on the instant the fierce pride of royalty sprang up, as at an insult. But Beatrix was brave-a sick girl against the Queen of France.

"If you are not his sovereign, you are not mine," she said. "And were you ten times my Queen, there can be no fence of royalty between you and me from this hour, or if there is, you are doubly playing with the meaning of what your lips say. Are you to be a woman to me, a woman, at one moment, and a sovereign to me, a subject, at the next? Which is it to be?"

"A woman, then, if nothing more. And as a woman, I tell you that I will have Gilbert Warde for myself, body and soul."

The girl's eyes lightened suddenly. Men said that in her mother's veins there had run some of the Conqueror's blood, and his great oath sprang to her lips as she answered:-

"And by the splendour of God, I tell you that you shall not!"

"Then it is a duel between us," the Queen said, and she turned to go.

"To death," answered the girl, as her head sank back upon the pillows, pitifully weak and tired in her aching body, but dauntless in spirit.

Eleanor crossed the carpeted floor of the tent slowly toward the door. She had not made four steps when she stood still, looking before her. A great shame of herself came upon her for what she had said-the loyal, generous shame of the strong who in anger has been overbearing with the weak. She stood still, and she felt as an honest man does who has struck a fallen enemy in unreasoning rage. It was the second time that she had fallen so low in her own eyes, and her own scorn of herself was more than she could bear.

Quickly she came back to Beatrix's side. The girl lay quite still, with parted lips and closed eyes that had great black shadows under them. Her small white hands twitched now and then spasmodically, but she seemed hardly to breathe. Eleanor knelt beside her and propped her up higher, thrusting one arm under the pillow while she fanned her with the other hand.

"Beatrix!" she called softly.

She thought that the girl's eyelids quivered, and she called her again; but there was no answer, nor any movement of the hand this time, and the face was so white and deathly that any one might have believed life gone, but for the faintly perceptible breath that stirred the feathers of the Greek fan when the Queen held it close to the lips. She grew anxious and thought of calling the Norman serving-woman and of sending for her own physician. But, in the first place, she thought that Beatrix might have only fainted, to revive at any moment, in which case she had things to say which were not for other ears; and as for her physician, it suddenly occurred to her that, although he had been in her train five years, she had never under any circumstances had occasion to consult him, and that he was probably what he looked, a solemn fool and an ignorant drencher, whereas there were younger men with wise heads who had followed the army and made a fat living by concocting draughts for those who overcloyed themselves with Greek sweetmeats, physicians who could make salves for bruises, who knew the cunning Italian trick of opening a vein in the instep instead of in the arm, and who, on occasion, could cast a judicial figure of the heavens and interpret the horoscope of the day and hour.

But while she hesitated, Eleanor brought water from a bright brass ewer and dashed drops upon the girl's face; she found also a cup with Greek wine in it, that smelt of fine resin, and she set it to the pale lips and held it there. Presently Beatrix opened her eyes a little, and suddenly she shuddered when she saw Eleanor and heard her voice in the deep stillness.

"As one woman to another-I ask your forgiveness."

Gilbert sat in the door of his tent at noon, the sun shining down upon him and warming him pleasantly, for the day was chilly, and he was still aching. As he idly watched the soldiers going and coming, and cooking their midday meal at the camp-fires, while Dunstan and Alric were preparing his own, he was thinking that this was the third day since he had saved the Queen's life, and that although many courtiers had asked of his condition, and had talked with him as if he had done a great deed, yet he had received not so much as a message of thanks from Eleanor nor from the King, and it seemed as if he had been forgotten altogether. But of Beatrix, Dunstan told him that she was in a fever and wandering, and the Norman woman had said that she talked of her home. Gilbert hated himself because he could do nothing for her, but most bitterly because he had yielded to the Queen's eyes and to her voice in the instant of balanced life and death.

The great nobles passed on their way to their tents from the King's quarters, where the council met daily to trace the march. And still Gilbert's shield hung blank and white on his lance, and he sat alone, without so much as a new mantle upon him, nor a sword-belt, nor any gift to show that the royal favour had descended upon him as had been expected. So some of the nobles only saluted him with a grave gesture in which there was neither friendship nor familiarity, and some took no notice of him, turning their faces away, for they thought that they had made a mistake, and that the Englishman had given some grave offence for which even his brave action was not a sufficient atonement. But he cared little, for his nature was not a courtier's, and even then the English Normans were colder and graver men than those of France, and more overbearing in arms, but less self-seeking, one against another, in court.

Dunstan came from behind the tent, where the fire was, bringing food in two polished brass bowls, and Gilbert went in to eat his dinner. Coarse fare enough it was, a soup of vegetables and bread, with pieces of meat in it, and little crumbs of cheese, scraped off with a sharp knife, and floating on the thick liquid; and then, in the other bowl, small gobbets of roasted beef run by sixes on wooden skewers that were blackened at the ends by the fire. And it all tasted of smoke, for the wood was yet green on the hillsides. But Gilbert ate and said nothing, neither praising nor blaming, for very often on the long march he had eaten the dried bread of the German peasants and the unleavened wheat— cakes of the wild Hungarians, with a draught of water, and had been glad even of that. Also on Fridays and Saturdays, and on the vigils of feast days, and on most days in Lent, he had eaten only bread and boiled vegetables, such as could be found, and the fasting reminded him of the old days in Sheering Abbey.