a red, wintry dawn was in the east when denise stood ready for her flight from the abbey lands, her rabbit-skin cloak about her, and the hood drawn over her head. she had knotted the money that reginald had given her into a corner of her under tunic, and the food that she had saved from yesterday she carried wrapped in a clean cloth. denise had thought of seeking grimbald, but her heart had failed her at the thought of meeting the familiar faces of the people who had looked upon her as something superhumanly pure and wonderful. the passion that obsessed her for the moment was the passion to escape from the inquisitive eyes of those who knew her, and to slip away into the world where she would be nothing more than a mere woman.
a robin twittered on the thorn hedge as she left the cell and, crossing the grass, went out by the wicket gate. the land was white with hoar frost, each twig and blade beautiful to behold, and the arch of the east red with an angry dawn. the hills looked big and blue, and very sombre, and in the north the sky had an opaqueness as of coming snow.
the brittle silence of a frosty morning seemed unbroken as yet, and denise, after looking half fearfully about her, came out from the shadow of the thorn hedge, and walked quickly in the direction of the road. she would be away and over the abbey bounds before anyone knew in the town that she had gone. reaching the road, she climbed down the path into it, for the road ran in a hollow there. a bramble had caught the latchet of her shoe and pulled it loose, and denise bent down to refasten it, putting the cloth with the food on the bank beside her.
now dom silvius’s treachery had betrayed her to the people, and denise, as she fastened her shoe-latchet, was startled by a shrill, gaggling laugh that seemed to rise out of the ground close to her. the banks on either side of the road were covered with furze bushes, and a number of these bushes were suddenly endowed with the miraculous power of movement. they rose up from where they had grown, and came jigging down the steep banks into the road.
moreover these same furze bushes burst into loud laughter, and began to crow with exultation.
“a miracle, a miracle!”
“st. denise has worked a wonder, at last!”
“holy virgin, see how the bushes dance!”
denise stood still at the foot of the bank, and the furze bushes came jigging round her like mummers in a mask. flapping skirts and shuffling feet gave a human undercurrent to the green swirl of the furze. now and again she saw a red, triumphant face, or a pair of brown arms holding a bough, while the frolic went on with giggles and little screams of laughter. then, at a given shout from one of them, these women of the winter dawn flung their furze boughs upon denise, as the sabines threw their shields upon tarpeia.
the thorns were as nothing compared with that circle of coarse and jeering faces that stood revealed. old hags with white hair, skinny arms, and flat bosoms; women in their prime, rough and buxom, with hard features and loud mouths; young girls, whose tongues were pert and insolent. bridget, the smith’s wife, led this wolf pack, like a hungry and red-eyed dam.
denise’s face was bleeding, but she did not flinch now that her pride had been driven against the pricks. she looked round at the women, holding her head high, although they had beaten her across the face. and for the moment the women hung back from her as she pushed the furze boughs aside, and made as though to pass on without answering a word.
bridget, the smith’s wife, stood in her path. she flung up her head and laughed like a great raw-boned mare, and an echo came down from mountjoye hill like the answering neigh of a horse. on the ridge above, where the dawn light shone, were crowded the men who had come out to see their women bait denise.
bridget began the savage game with a word that brought the blood to denise’s face. the women shrieked with delight. taunts struck her on every side as they crowded close on her, gloating, screaming, their mouths full of cursing and derision. they began to shake their fists, and to stretch their claws towards her, and the smell of their bodies was in her nostrils.
bridget swung forward, and spat in her face.
“she would work miracles, this jade, this wanton! where is my boy, you minion? answer me that, i say!”
“where is your man, eh?”
“we know him, we know him! let him show his face here!”
“look at her, the pretty jade!”
“spoil her beauty. strip her naked.”
“out with the harlot. let her freeze.”
warts, sterility, and fifty more were howling about her, drunk with the very noise they made. for a moment denise stood white-faced in the midst of them. then she disappeared in a swirl of coarse and violent movement, like a deer that is dragged down and smothered beneath the brown bodies of the wolves.
the road that morning was a martyr’s way as the redness of the dawn waned and the sky became cold and grey. mouths spat upon her, hands smote her, and clutched at her clothes. buffeted at every step, jostled, and torn, she was brought to the boundary of the abbey leuga, and driven out thence into the world. the women even caught up stones and pelted her when they had let her go, screaming foul words, and laughing in loud derision.
denise was as dazed and as exhausted as though she had been wrecked, and washed ashore half dead by some lucky wave. her face was bruised and bleeding, her clothes in tatters, her tunic torn open so that her bosom showed. she drew her ragged clothes about her, and went unsteadily down the road, with the cries of the women still following her as she went. denise’s pride made a last brave spreading of its wings. it carried her beyond the sound of those voices, though her feet dragged, and her knees gave under her, and a kind of blindness filled her brain.
perhaps she struggled on for a mile or more before she turned aside, and lay down under some hazels beside the road. and as she lay there, dull-eyed, grey-faced, and still half dazed, the power to think came back like the sense of reviving pain. horror of herself and of the world took hold of her by the throat. it was as though those women had spat upon her soul, and made her revolt from herself as from something unclean. those mocking faces symbolised the mercies of her sister women. all those who knew the truth would scoff, and draw away their skirts. she was an outcast, a thing whose name might broider a lewd tale.
denise was no ignorant child, but a grown woman, yet she was weak and in pain, and her very weakness made her anguish the more poignant. she lay there a long while under the hazels, not noticing the cold, nor the sodden soil, for her heart seemed colder than the frost. life held its helpless, upturned palms to the unknown. what use was there in living? god had deserted her, and had suffered her innocence to be put to shame. she was too weary, too miserable even for bitterness or for rebellion. inert despair had her, body and soul.
presently a boy came along the road towards battle, driving an ass laden with paniers full of bread. close to the spot where denise lay under the hazels, the ass was taken with the sulks, and stood obstinately still. the boy tugged at the bridle, shouted, thwacked the beast with his stick, but make her budge he could not. denise sat up and watched him, this piece of byplay thrusting a wedge between her and the apathy of despair.
the boy was a sturdy youngster, with brown face, brown smock, and brown legs splashed with mud. he rubbed his nose with a brown hand, and catching sight of denise, took her to be a beggar, and perhaps a bit of a witch.
“hi, there,” he shouted, “give over frightening the beast.”
“it is none of my doing,” she said, surprised somehow at the sound of her own voice.
“she stopped here, none of your tricks, old lady,” said the boy.
denise put back her hood, and the youngster stared.
“lord,” said he, “you have been fighting, and you are not old, neither!”
his curiosity was curtailed by the curiosity of the ass, who took to kicking, sending sundry loaves rolling on the road.
“hi, there, come and help.”
denise rose up, and went towards the struggling pair. she took the bridle from the boy, and began to pull the donkey’s ears, to rub her poll, and talk to her as though she were a refractory child. the beast grew suddenly docile, and the bread was saved.
denise helped the boy to pick up the loaves. he looked hard at her when they had refilled the paniers, and then offered one of the loaves to denise.
“take it,” he said almost roughly, yet with the brusqueness of a boy’s good-will.
“it will be missed.”
the boy gave a determined shake of the head.
“father’s bread. the jade served him the same trick last week, kicked the loaves on to a dung heap. he can’t blame me.”
he thrust the loaf into denise’s hand, gave her a friendly grin, and cut the ass viciously across the hind-quarters with his stick. the response on the beast’s part was a wild and hypocritical amble.
this simple adventure on the road heartened denise in very wonderful fashion, even as the voice of a child may interpose between a man and murder. it was like a mouthful of wine in the mouth of one ready to faint upon a journey. denise watched the boy disappear, hardly thinking that she had been saved from despair by the obstinacy of an ass. she had the loaf in her hand and the boy’s smile in remembrance, and the mocking voices of the morning seemed less shamefully persistent.
denise broke and ate some of the bread, and finding a ditch near with a film of ice covering it, she broke the ice with her shoe, and soaking one corner of her tunic in the water, she washed the blood from her mouth and face. it was then that she found the money that abbot reginald had given her still knotted up in her clothes. and these two things, the bread and the money, comforted her with the thought that she was not utterly forgotten of god. both blessings had come to her by chance, but when a soul is in the deeps it catches the straws that float to it, and believes them heaven-sent.
despite her wounds and her bruisings denise walked five miles before noon. the passion to escape from familiar faces and to sink into the outer world, had revived in her. she skirted robertsbridge and its abbey, crossing the rother stream by a footbridge that she found. on the hill beyond she met a pedlar travelling with his pack, and taking out a piece of money bought a rough brown smock from him, a needle and some thread. about noon she found some dry litter under the shelter of a bank of furze. she put on her brown smock, and mended her cloak, and then despite the january cold, such an utter weariness came upon her that she fell asleep.
when denise awoke it was with a rush of misery into the mind, a misery so utter that she wished herself asleep again, even sleeping the sleep of death. she was so stiff with the cold and her rough handling that it hurt her to move, and the infinite forlornness of her waking made her shudder. something soft touched her face, like the drifting petal of apple blossom out of the blue. a wind had risen and was whistling through the furze bushes, and buffeting them to and fro. the sky had grown very sullen. snow was beginning to fall.
denise dragged herself up and drew her cloak closer about her. she must find shelter for the night somewhere, unless she wished to tempt death in the snow. yet she had gone but a short way along the road when a sudden spasm of pain seized her, pain such as she had never felt before.
denise stood still, clenching her hands, her eyes full of a questioning dread. the spasm passed, and she went on again slowly, the flakes of snow drifting about her, the sky and the landscape a mournful blur. she had walked no more than a furlong when the same pain seized her, making her catch her breath and stand quivering till the spasm had passed. nor was it the pain alone that filled her with a sense of infinite helplessness and dread. the birth of a new and terrible consciousness seemed to grip and paralyse her heart. she knew by instinct that which was upon her, a state that called up a new world of shame and tenderness and fear.
denise went on again, a woman laden with the simple and primitive destiny of a woman. it so happened that she came to a wood beside the road, and at the edge of the wood under the bare branches of the trees she saw a lodge built of faggots, and roofed with furze and heather. the place seemed god-sent in her necessity, and her anguish of soul and body. denise found it empty, save for a mass of dry bracken piled behind some faggots in one corner of the lodge. the place had a rough door built of boughs. denise closed it, and hid herself in the far corner of the lodge, sinking deep into the bed of bracken. the pangs were upon her, and all the dolour and the foreboding that take hold of a woman’s heart.
it was bitter cold that night, and the snow came driving from the north, a ghost mist that wrapped the world in a garment of mystery. the wind roared in the trees whose bare boughs clapped together, creaking and chafing amid the roaring of the storm. it was a night when sheep would die of the cold, or be smothered in the snow drifts banked against the hedges.
the sky began to clear about dawn, patches of blue showing between ragged masses of grey cloud. the sun shone out fitfully at first, flashing upon a white world, upon a world of brilliant snow schemes and glittering arabesques, with the wood’s sweeps of black shadow across a waste of white.
the wind had dropped, and there was the silence of snow everywhere, not a voice, not a sound, save the occasional creaking of a rotten bough and the swish of its falling snow. the sun climbed higher, and the whiteness of the world became a pale and blinding glare.
now, the silence of the wilderness was broken that morning by a slow and steady sound that grew on the still air. it was the muffled beat of hoofs upon the snow of the road that ran southwards along the ridge of the hill. presently the snorting of the horse, jingle of metal and the creaking of leather were added to the plodding of the hoofs. a man’s voice rang out suddenly into a burst of song. the white world was glorious in the sunshine, marble and lapis lazuli, with flashes here and there of gold.
the muffled beat of hoofs ceased by the wood where stood the lodge built of faggots. the snow was virgin about it, and the man turned his horse towards the wood, swung out of the saddle, and began kicking the snow aside as though to give the beast a chance of cropping the grass. taking wine and meat from a saddlebag, he brushed the snow from a log that lay outside the lodge, and sat down to make a meal.
and as he sat there in the sun he talked to his horse, and gave the beast some of the bread from his own breakfast. the horse nosed against him like a dog, its breath steaming up into the frosty air, its eyes the colour of sapphires seen against the snow. and there were no sounds save the man’s voice, the breathing of his horse, and the dripping from the boughs as the snow thawed in the sun.
in due course the man remounted, and rode off down the road with the morning sunlight upon his face. cowering on the bracken in the lodge denise lay dazed, and weary, hands and feet numb with the cold. she had prayed to god that the man might not enter the place, and find her there on her bed of bracken. he had been so near to her that she had been able to hear the sound of his breathing, and even the breaking of the crust of the bread.
beside her on the bracken lay a white thing that neither moved nor uttered a cry. denise lay and stared at it, half with dread and mute wonder, half with a passion of primeval tenderness that was too deep for tears. and as aymery rode away from her into the morning, she kept her vigil beside that innocent thing that did not whimper and did not move. the snow and the secret silence thereof seemed part of her life that morning, and the eyes of the world were full of a questioning mist of tears.
