第32章 THE WOOD OF LIFE(1)

The Lady Catherine de Laval, in her own right Countess of Beaumanoir, and mistress of fiefs and manors, rights of chase and warren, mills and hospices, the like of which were not in Picardy, was happy in all things but her family.Her one son had fallen in his youth in an obscure fray in Guienne, leaving two motherless boys who, after her husband's death, were the chief business of life to the Countess Catherine.The elder, Aimery, grew to manhood after the fashion of the men of her own house, a somewhat heavy country gentleman, much set upon rustic sports, slow at learning, and averse alike from camps and cities.The ambition of the grandmother found nothing to feed upon in the young lord of Beaumanoir.He was kind, virtuous and honest, but dull as a pool on a winter's highway.

Catherine would fain have had the one youth a soldier and the other a saint, and of the two ambitions she most cherished the latter.The first made shipwreck on the rustic Aimery, and therefore the second burned more fiercely.She had the promise from the saints that her line had a great destiny, and the form of it she took to be sanctitude.For, all her married days she had ruled her life according to the canons of God, fasting and praying, cherishing the poor, tending the afflicted, giving of her great wealth bountifully to the Church.She had a name for holiness as far as the coasts of Italy.Surely from the blood of Beaumanoir one would arise to be in dark times a defender of the Faith, a champion of Christ whom after death the Church should accept among the beatified.Such a fate she desired for her seed more hungrily than any Emperor's crown.

In the younger, Philip, there was hope.He had been an odd child, slim and pale while Aimery was large and ruddy, shy where his brother was bold and bold where he was shy.He was backward in games and unready in a quarrel, but it was observed that he had no fear of the dark, or of the Green Lady that haunted the river avenue.Father Ambrose, his tutor, reported him of quick and excellent parts, but marred by a dreaminess which might grow into desidia that deadly sin.He had a peculiar grace of body and a silken courtesy of manner which won hearts.His grey eyes, even as a small boy, were serious and wise.But he seemed to dwell aloof, and while his brother's moods were plain for all to read, he had from early days a self-control which presented a mask to his little world.With this stoicism went independence.Philip walked his own way with a gentle obstinacy."Asaint, maybe," Father Ambrose told his grandmother."But the kind of saint that the Church will ban before it blesses."To the old dame of Beaumanoir the child was the apple of her eye; and her affection drew from him a tenderness denied to others.But it brought no confidences.The dreaming boy made his own world, which was not, like his grandmother's, one of a dark road visited rarely by angels, with heaven as a shining city at the end of it; or, like his brother's, a green place of earthy jollity.It was as if the Breton blood of the Lavals and Rohans had brought to the solid stock of Beaumanoir the fairy whimsies of their dim ancestors.While the moors and woodlands were to Aimery only places to fly a hawk or follow a stag, to Philip they were a wizard land where dreams grew.And the mysteries of the Church were also food for his gold fancy, which by reshaping them stripped them of all terrors.He was extraordinarily happy, for he had the power to make again each fresh experience in a select inner world in which he walked as king, since he was its creator.

He was a child of many fancies, but one especially stayed with him.When still very small, he slept in a cot in his grandmother's room, the walls of which were hung with tapestry from the Arras looms.One picture caught his eye, for the morning sun struck it, and when he woke early it glowed invitingly before him.It represented a little river twining about a coppice.There was no figure in the piece, which was bounded on one side by a great armoire, and on the other by the jamb of the chimney; but from extreme corner projected the plume of a helmet and the tip of a lance.

There was someone there; someone riding towards the trees.It grew upon Philip that that little wood was a happy place, most happy and desirable.

He fancied himself the knight, and he longed to be moving up the links of the stream.He followed every step of the way, across the shallow ford, past the sedges of a backwater, between two clumps of willows, and then over smooth green grass to the edge of the wood.But he never tried to picture what lay inside.That was sacred--even from his thoughts.

When he grew older and was allowed to prowl about in the scriptorium of the Abbey of Montmirail which lay by the Canche side, he found his wood again.

It was in a Psaltery on which a hundred years before some Flemish monk had lavished his gold and vermilion.Opposite the verse of Psalm xxiii., "In loco pascuae," was a picture almost the same as that in the bedroom arras.