The Easter Mass was ended. Heloise, kneeling beside Denise, had listened to her lover’s voice triumphant in the Victimae Paschali,
“Dux vitae mortuus regnat vivus,”
transcending and yet carrying with it the sparrow chirping of the little choir-boys, who stared at him round-eyed, worshipping. That he who was so nearly their lord should take his place surpliced among them seemed to them a more stupendous condescension than any unintelligible Incarnation. Through the east window Heloise saw a budded limetree, holding up its small translucent cups of light: and her heart rose with it. From the moment she had wakened that morning with the west wind breathing on their faces through the open doorway, the doom and terror of the night had seemed only a bad dream: his arm was under her head. “Pour forth upon us, O Lord, the spirit of thy love, that by thy loving kindness thou mayest make to be of one mind those whom thou hast fed with the sacraments of thine Easter.” She was of one mind with him: come what might, she was content to go his way.
She stood by the well in the courtyard, waiting for him. Denise had left her to go into the bakehouse, where ever since daybreak there had been a cheerful clatter of tongues and the crackling of sticks under the great oven, in preparation for the Easter feast. Heloise would have followed her, but Denise refused.
“Child, there’s plenty here to get under my feet without you. Wait for Peter. Let him have his day.”
She saw him now, coming up the causeway, side by side with Hugh the Stranger in companionable silence. Then Hugh turned and went into the stable, and Abelard came towards her.
“Let’s go down to the river,” he said. He looked at her, a little discontented with the white coif that hid her hair. “Heloise, do you know that I have never done what all the lovers do, made you a spring garland? Do you know that until now we have wasted all our spring in a town?”
“If you knew how I have wanted you,” said Heloise, “these April dusks in the fields.” They had gone through the gate, and were going down the uneven track to the ford. “And yet the pain of it seemed the richest thing I have ever had.”
“Amore crucior,
vulnere morior,
quo glorior,”
said Abelard under his breath. “Do you know the garland I am going to make you, Heloise? I was thinking of it this morning, before you wakened. If it were May, I thought it would be wild roses. I do not know why, but it must have a thorn in it. The wild roses were all over when we were riding down to Brittany last July. And then I looked at your dark hair and the small white face sleeping there, and I knew what it would be. First I shall plait you a crown of green rushes, so that I can fasten the twigs in it and not hurt you: and then it will be Flos de spina, flower of the thorn.”
He reached up and pulled a branch from the blackthorn hedge that overhung the track.
“It has always seemed to me the world’s miracle,” he went on, touching the frail white blossom on the long fierce spine. “I wonder what Adam thought his first March day outside Paradise, when the thorns that had cursed him all winter broke into anything so small and white and tender as this.”
“Peter? Are you there?”
The call came muffled from the hill behind them. They stopped, reluctantly. Heloise shook her head at the truant look preparing in Abelard’s eyes.
“It’s Hugh, and he sounds uneasy,” she said. “We had better go back.” They turned, but stood aside to let the slow cows go by on their way from their belated milking to the water-meadow. They blew sweet breaths as they went by, and one timid young heifer at the unaccustomed sight of Abelard hustled into the hedge, throwing her head over another’s flank and looking at him with wild, frightened eyes.
“Chè, Chè,” said Abelard comfortingly. The eyes ceased to roll, though they still looked anxious, and she swerved past him, cantering. The last laggard was coming through the gate as they reached it, and saw Hugh the Stranger standing in the stable door.
“I wish you would look at the mare, Peter, if you are going to ride her to-morrow. She won’t let me near her. Did you notice her lame yesterday?”
“I did not,” said Abelard. “But then I was leading her and walking slow with Heloise the last half-mile. Maybe she picked up a thorn at the gap. Let me see, girl.” The mare rubbed her head against his shoulder, and stood still while he lifted her fore foot.
“That’s what it is, and a wicked one, too. I’ll need to bathe it. Wait for me in the orchard, Heloise.”
She went to the corn bin by the door and filled her lap; screwing up her eyes as she came from the pungent darkness into the naked sunlight of the court. Then the pigeons spied her and were on her with a swoop, settling on her shoulders and arms, and she flung them off, throwing the corn into the air like golden spray, and they rose after it, a fountain of white breasts and dazzling wings. One handful she kept for a brooding hen that she had found with some pride in a hollow tree in the orchard: but when she passed through the gate and came stooping under the low apple-boughs that caught her hair and shook their strange cold dew upon her, she saw that someone was before her. Denise was kneeling beside the prisoner, lifting the grain and letting it fall again to tempt her, and making small crooning noises: and at last the hen replied, though querulously, lumbered with caution off her sitting of brown eggs and began to peck, grudgingly at first, then suddenly ravenous. Heloise, hidden among the apple-boughs, stood watching: she was never weary of watching Denise. It was her patience, not holy like the conscious patience of the saints, offering up all vexation as a mortification, but a kind of natural wisdom: like the verse in Isaiah, “and shall gently lead those that are with young.” She could be brisk enough with anything that could run about, on two or four feet, but with Peter Astrolabe, or a blind puppy, or a beast that was near its time, she seemed never to grow weary. She stood up now, deep-breasted but still slender; “crossed beauty,” they called her in that country, for she had brown eyes set far apart under hair that was very fair; then stooping, the hen now safely absorbed, she caught up an egg from the nest and held it to her ear, listening for the first faint tapping within. She looked up, a little guilty, as Heloise came across the dappled grass.
“It wasn’t that I thought you would forget her,” she said. “But I thought I would see if any of the eggs are chipped. They should be, any day now. And I did want you to have your one day with Peter.”
“He is with Hugh in the stable. Hugh wanted him about the mare.”
“Listen,” said Denise. She held the brown shell to the girl’s ear. It was there, the ghost of a voice, talking to itself in the dark. “And they have to work so hard to get out, the creatures.” She looked down at the nest, the same humorous gentleness in her eyes as Heloise had seen, watching the youngsters busy with their bowls and spoons. “Look at them, Heloise,” she said once, “trying so hard to live.”
“Now, old woman,” she pushed a platter of water under the greedy beak, “it’s time you had a drink and got back to your work.”
“Denise,” said Heloise suddenly. “Abelard says he is taking me back with him to-morrow.”
“I thought that would be the way of it,” said Denise, rising to her feet. “I just thought that was what brought him back so soon. They can never let one be.” Then her brow puckered. “But, child, what is he going to do with you? It would be a scandal if he had you to live with himself, and he would never let you go back to your uncle.”
“He says it will all be different,” said Heloise mechanically. It seemed to her that she could do nothing but repeat what Abelard had said last night, and that was bald enough. “He wants to marry me.”
Denise caught her breath. Her arms came about Heloise in one of her rare quick caresses.
“It is what I have prayed for,” said she, “ever since I saw Hugh lifting you down from your horse that first night. Oh, my dear,” her face had flushed and her eyes were bright with tears, “it is like when my father said that I might marry Hugh.”
“But, Denise,” Heloise stopped. She felt she must make Denise realise something of the issues: but do what she would, she could not revive her own conviction of last night. There was no power of thought left in her: nothing but the tranquil acceptance of this shining day.
“What is it, child? What is there to hinder you?”
“It is Abelard,” said Heloise. “He is a clerk. If he marries me, it is the end of any great place for him.”
“I never could see Peter a bishop,” said Denise indifferently. “But if he wanted it, I expect they would make him one. You do not know Peter, child, the way I do. He has always got what he wanted, ever since he was the height of a turf.”
“It is not only that,” said Heloise. “But it would ruin him in Paris, if it were known. They might take the Schools from him.”
“My dear, wherever Peter is, there the Schools will be. He emptied Paris once, and if they turn him out, he’ll empty it again.”
Heloise was silent. In spite of herself, her spirits rose. I suppose, she thought to herself a little ruefully, even one’s lover can never seem quite so omnipotent as one’s eldest brother.
“But, Denise, do you not think it is wrong of him to marry?”
The hen had gone clucking back to her nest. Denise stooped to prop up the dilapidated osier basket that stopped the hole.
“I think,” she said painfully, “it would be wrong of him not to. My dear,” she turned to Heloise, her face crimson, “you know what I did myself when I was a girl, with Hugh. A whole summer through. And I’d have gone after him begging through the ditches, if my father had turned him away. And I wasn’t ashamed of what I had done. At least, I wasn’t in my heart. And yet, once I was married to him—it is like drinking when one is thirsty, and yet you feel more blessed if you stop to say a Benedicat over it. I think, maybe, the difference was that now I could say my prayers before I went to bed with him. I couldn’t before. It seemed like cheating.”
Heloise was fingering the moss on the elm. “You see, Denise,” she said slowly, “I don’t say any prayers, unless for him. So it does not matter.”
Denise held her peace. She knew the spirit in those grey eyes was beyond her. She could not even fear for a creature so fearless for itself.
“And I don’t think,” Heloise went on, “that he is doing it because he thinks it was wrong. It is because he says he broke faith. It—it is the point of honour.”
Denise lifted her hands and dropped them again. “That is like him. They will never make a churchman out of Peter. He is far more of a fighter than Guillaume, even though he would never do his service and be knighted. All these tussles of his, I sometimes think it is only the fun of unhorsing people, only in a different way. There he is. Look at him.”
Abelard had vaulted the orchard gate without waiting to open it. Smiling and mischievous, he came across the grass, then suddenly halted, his arms resting on a branch, his eyes fixed on them. Standing there as they did, side by side, with the budding apple-boughs above their heads, their faces turned to watch him, he felt suddenly remote, walled out from their mysterious ancient understanding. It was no altarpiece that he saw: it was an older thing than Mary the mother of Our Lord, and Anne the mother of Mary. It was Demeter and Persephone, with Pluto come to claim her, the six months ended. Then Heloise came a step to meet him, and the vision broke. He came gravely towards them, put his arm about her with a quick straining of her to his side, and then stood, looking down at his sister.
“Well? Will you give us your blessing, Denise?”
She looked up at him, her eyes soft, and for a while said nothing. Then she put her arms round his neck and kissed him. “I wish it could have been here,” she said, complaining. “I’d have liked to spread your marriage-bed. Could you not leave her till the summer, Peter?”
He shook his head. “I promised to bring her back with me. The old man is breaking his heart for her, and I think he could not be content unless he saw her married with his own eyes. But now that I think of it, I must get her into Paris by stealth. Have you kept the nun’s habit you came in, Heloise?”
“It is in my own chest,” said Denise. “No, child, stay where you are. I’ll bring it here to you. It will maybe need airing.”
They moved into a patch of sunlight where an elm lay, half uprooted. Tiny sprigs of green were growing on the dark and ancient bark. Heloise touched them. It was like this morning, after last night’s despair.
“Have you told Hugh?” she asked, after a while.
Abelard nodded.
“Did he say anything?”
“I said I was taking you with me to Paris, to marry you. And he said,” Abelard’s voice was grave, but his glance at her was side-long, “‘Man, I’m glad to hear it. But at that rate, I’ll need to get her little horse in off the grass.’”
Denise heard them laughing as she came through the trees, her arms full of creased black draperies. They smelt fusty as she shook them out, and Abelard looked at them with distaste against the delicate lilac of her gown.
“Slip them on, Heloise,” she said. “You are taller since you came, and we’ll maybe have to let down the hem.”
The girl stood up obediently, and Denise gathered up the dingy folds to slip them over her head. Suddenly, her face already hidden in them, she screamed aloud, thrusting them up with her hands.
“I can’t, I can’t,” she cried, struggling with the black folds already fallen about her arms, and growing more hopelessly entangled. Even when Denise had pulled her free of them, she stood there shaking and crying, her hands over her eyes, more like a frightened child than Denise had ever seen her.
“There,” she said, putting her warm hands on the girl’s shoulders, and holding her. “There. It’s all right now. Child, you’re like a little pony that has seen a ghost at the side of the road.”
Heloise nodded. She stood, trying to twist the quivering of her mouth into a smile. “I am sorry,” she said shakily. “I think—I think I felt rather like a pony. A pony that has seen its own ghost. I suppose it was what Soeur Godric used to say at Argenteuil, that she knew someone was walking over her grave.”
“They’re ugly things, anyhow,” said Denise comfortably, stirring the tumbled heap with her foot. “And come to think of it, I’d as soon put a young bride into her shroud as into these. I’ll find something else will hide you just as well.”
“Denise,” said Abelard diffidently, “you haven’t a suit of young Berengar’s? Surely she is about his height.”
“To be sure I have,” said Denise. “There’s one he left behind him—you remember, Heloise, at Hallowe’en, when he came home from his uncle’s at Clisson. He had grown too broad in the shoulders for it, though it was new when he went away. You can try it on after dinner. But you’ll do no more till you have some food in you. There’s the children back from catechism.”
She bundled the nun’s habit under her arm and went down the orchard. Abelard stood a moment, looking down at Heloise.
“Will you be Berengar, beloved,” he said softly, “and ride to Paris to the Schools with your uncle Peter?”
She looked up at him, her eyes alight. They walked together on the daisied grass, where the shadows of the apple-boughs made a stiff mosaic beneath their feet, and Abelard saw the woods through which to-morrow would find them riding, he and she.
“Beloved,” he stopped and set his hands on her shoulders, “do you know what this will mean? If you are Berengar, you need have no woman with you. Guibert is in Paris. And for the first time in our lives, you and I will be alone.”
It was barely sunrise when the two rode over the drawbridge and down the causeway; the morning ghost of the Easter moon lay on its back over the keep. Abelard was determined to start early, that they might be clear of the plain before the midday heat. They would avoid Nantes, he had decided, Nantes, and Angers, and Le Mans, though that was the shorter road. He was too familiar a figure on it. Instead, he would keep south of the Loire, through the woods past Azay and Chinon to Tours, and north from Tours to Chartres, and so to Paris. The slight figure still muffled in its cloak was very quiet, and he had the wisdom to keep silence for a while. Coming back through the solar for the cloak he had forgotten in the keep, he had seen her standing in her boy’s clothes beside Denise’s great bed, empty only for a tiny heave of the bedclothes at the further side. She was not crying, only rigid. He had gone back into the hall to talk to Hugh the Stranger till she came out.
The village was still only half awake: here and there the creak of a well-rope, or the sharp smell of newly-kindled wood. But the mists were rising, and soon the sun was warm enough for Heloise to get rid of her cloak. They halted while he dismounted to fold it and strap it to his own saddle: and suddenly it seemed to him that all the grief of the parting was folded up with the cloak, for she straightened her shoulders and cantered ahead, and by the time he came galloping behind her, it was a boy’s face that provoked him, over her shoulder. The smell of the sweet warm grass steeped their bodies through: and when they rode through a lane of crimson hawthorn, he remembered with a tide of rising exaltation that two days from now would be the first of May. They would keep their Vigil of Venus in the woods. What was there in love that it taught a man all the mysteries of the ancient faiths? He looked at the young creature riding ahead of him, with a kind of awe. Was this the Heloise he knew, or had Psyche become Eros, and was he riding with Love himself?
The weather held. It was seven days instead of three before they reined in their horses and sat, their eyes dazzled at the silver of the Loire at Tours: and if Abelard closed his mind to the memory of Paris and the turbulent crowds of his scholars shouting poor Ralph of Beauvais down, he had good reason for it. The days of riding between Paris and the west he had always counted as singularly his own: he was responsible to no one but himself, he felt, and sometimes he would stop in open country and think exultingly that no one in the world, for Guibert mattered no more than his own shadow, could be certain where he was, or lay any claim upon him: he was absolute master of himself. But now, with the madness of May in his blood, and Heloise transmuted in the pregnant stillness of the woods into some wild changeling of laughter and sudden passion, it seemed to him that he was master of space and time. They would halt at a village to buy food, and now and then the two would stop for a meal at a parsonage, and Heloise would carry herself as meek as a shy lad riding to the Schools at the heels of his distinguished uncle: the two would play the whole comedy of timid submission on one side and indulgent sternness on the other, but they soon wearied of it, and could not ride too quickly till the woods again received them into their sun-charmed world. The April rains had left the valley of the Loire bewitched between wood and water: he would lay her in a forest pool to see how golden she was in the brown water, and carry her from it to worship her whiteness on the grass. Their minds burnt with love as their bodies with the sun, they hardly felt the chill shadow of the walls of the Abbey as they rode past Charlemagne’s tower. But when they turned into the Rue de la Scellerie and on to their hostelry under the shadow of St. Gatien, their hearts misgave them. They would ride east no more. To-morrow they must take the northern road, to Paris.
They slept ill. Their upper room in the hostelry was small, and full of stenches after their forest nights. They would have been better in the guest-house at St. Martin’s, Abelard said, but he had shirked the hospitable commotion that his coming would have roused, and the friendly inquisition his nephew would have to face. Heloise turned and tossed and saw the window darken and grow grey again before she slept: and it seemed to her she had only closed her eyes when Abelard’s hands were touching her to waken her. She opened her eyes and looked up at him: but her broken cry of recognition had a poignancy he did not understand. The face looking down at her was no longer the face of the forest god, but the haggard scholar who had been her lover first: and it seemed to her that her heart clave to him, as it had not to the other.
He sat down beside her on the bed, looking at her remorsefully. He was fully dressed.
“I am a brute to wake you, Heloise. But there is a man I want to hear, lecturing at the Cathedral Schools at six. I’d have let you sleep and gone myself, but I did not like the look of them downstairs last night, and I do not want you sleeping here alone. Will you get up and come with me?”
She was already pulling on Berengar’s hose. He sat contentedly, munching an apple, watching her dress.
“Who is he, Peter?”
“Bernard Sylvestris. They don’t talk much of him at Paris yet, but I heard Hildebert speak about him when I rode through Le Mans a week ago. Very young, but as wise as a troll, they say: one of the small dark men that were left over from the first race. Hildebert says he is a poet. And Hildebert should be a judge.”
“Where does he come from?”
“No one knows. Except that he is a Breton. Some say he is from Carnac or Locmariaquer. Anyhow, they say he is like something would come out of a wood, and that that is why he was nicknamed Sylvestris. It is his great word for the primal chaos, antiqua silva, the ancient wood. Ready? There’s the bell.”
She pulled the hood of her cloak about her head, and they went down the steep stair and out through the courtyard into the Place in front of the cathedral. For a moment they walked in the strange argent light that filled the square as though Tours itself lay beneath the silver water of the Loire: then Abelard turned in at the side of the cathedral, as the last vibration of the great bell died. An aged canon, a pace or two before them, was going down the paved walk to the north door, seemingly to early Mass. Abelard halted in his quick stride.
“Don’t overtake him,” he murmured. “I believe it is Roscelin.”
The old man had reached the steps. He turned and looked back, a bitter withered face, unshaven, with reddish eyebrows going white. He had the air of a very ancient fox slinking home to his covert in the early morning. A spark of recognition gleamed in his eyes, and he came back a step or two to meet them.
“If it is not a phantasma of the morning,” he said in the high elaborate voice of the old rhetorician, “I should say it was my one-time pupil, Peter Abelard.”
“You are too good a nominalist to see phantasmata, Master Roscelin,” said Abelard courteously. “You are well?”
“I am old,” said Roscelin. “But I have my eyes. Though indeed I do not think I have set them on you since you were the height of the lad that is lurking behind you.” A glance like a barb shot at Heloise, who had fallen back a step in due respect. “But Tours is honoured: what brings you so far from Paris, Master Peter?”
“My private affairs,” said Abelard, so pleasantly that it was a moment before the rebuff went home. “And I am now on my way to hear your new Master of the Schools. Hildebert tells me he is as good a Platonist as Bernard of Chartres.” He made to turn towards the cloister, down which two belated scholars were hurrying.
As Abelard spoke, the crafty eyes were perpetually sliding towards Heloise, who stood meekly waiting, her face downcast and partly hidden by Berengar’s hood.
“And Ganymede goes with you?” He stooped forward smiling, to look under the hood.
Heloise smiled back, and raised her head, shy and pleased to be taken notice of. “But my name is not Ganymede, Master Roscelin,” she said, in a piping treble. “My name is Berengar, sister’s son to my uncle Peter.”
The eyes slid from one to the other. “Well, have a care of him, Master Peter,” said Roscelin. “It is a tender youth to be let loose in the streets of Paris.”
Abelard bowed. “He is in my charge,” he said quietly. “And now I shall take my leave of you, Master Roscelin, or I shall be showing small courtesy to Sylvestris. Come, boy.” He swung her round, with no gentle hand, and turned down the cloister, his hand still gripping her shoulder. Roscelin stood looking after them. He was smiling a small secret smile.
They were late. The long vaulted room was crowded, but there was a narrow ledge on one side the embrasure of the door. Abelard set Heloise upon it and stood beside her, half hidden in the shadow. From the cathedra at the further end a low oddly resonant voice was speaking, half chanting. No one had turned to stare at their incoming. Abelard made mental note of it. It was an orator who could so hold his men at six o’clock in the morning.
It was some little time before he himself paid much heed. The encounter with Roscelin had shaken him with one of his swift deadly angers. Ganymede: lurking: so the world looked to a fox, and sure enough, he left the fox’s smell behind him. But gradually the strange voice had its way with him, lulling him the more for the half-unfamiliar Breton accent of the Latin, and the singing note, alternating between verse and prose. Broceliande, he was saying, and the woods of the Ardennes, and Italian Silo, that sees from its high pines the white sails of twin seas. What kind of wizard was the little man, that when he spoke you saw what he saw, yet on those white sails neither your eyes nor his had ever rested? It was rivers now, the waters of Shiloh that go softly, the Tiber that bears Rome upon his shoulders, the Po that rolls towards Venice its imperious way. And now it was the stars. This must be the poem of which Hildebert had spoken, the making of the world from chaos and old night: and still the little figure swung there, gazing out under a penthouse of great brows and a thatch of black hair, his short-sighted eyes rapt and unaware, unless of the vision within.
He had halted. The rhythm changed into prose, yet if anything more resonant, thought Abelard, than his verse.
“Perfect from the perfect, beautiful from the beautiful, eternal from the eternal: from the intellectual world the sensible world was born: full was that which bore it, and its plenitude fashioned it full.” Since John Scotus Erigena, said Abelard to himself, there has been no philosopher who was a poet also: and he began remembering the close of Erigena’s De Divisione Naturae, his prayer for the coming of the Light that will bring to darkness the false light of the philosophers, and will lighten the darkness of those that know. The memory had carried him into a soundless place, and how long he had been deaf he did not know, till beside him he heard Heloise catch her breath.
“A land there is, a little lap of earth,
Near neighbour to the dawn and the south wind,
The first to feel the sweet new-risen sun,
Nor hurt at all by his primæval fire.
It knoweth but the clemency of heaven,
And in one lap holds the delights of earth.
Amid those happy woods a river flows
That winds and turns again upon itself,
Chiding the roots and warring with the pebbles,
Till with a murmuring of fleeting water
It falls into the levels of the lake.
Here to these water-meadows, flowering fair,
Came man, a while their guest; too brief a guest.”
He heard Heloise give a long sigh: it had its echo in his own heart. If Bernard dreamed of man’s lost Paradise, they two were grieving for their own.
The voice from the shadows halted, troubled. Bernard Sylvestris was hanging over his desk, frowning, aware of some vague trouble in the room, a trouble that had wakened his own eternal questioning.
“Too brief a guest,” he repeated. His head sank on his breast. And again after a long silence, “Too brief a guest.
“But shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, ‘What makest thou?’ Shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, ‘He had no understanding’?
“Yea. The soul cries out upon the body: and I have heard the body cry out upon the soul, to the Creator of them both. ‘Daily the soul complains of me,’ it cried, ‘because I conform to my own nature, and dishonour her daily. But Thou didst fashion me of earth: how can I but smell of it? Had I been cleanly fashioned of things clean, then might she blame me for my filthiness. But now, rather might she cry out on that which made me of such stuff, and yoked us in one yoke.’ Aye, and I have seen the souls of the unborn, huddled by the house of Cancer the Crab, and pure in their simple essence, they shudder at the dull and blind habitations which they see prepared.”
He was shuddering now. The short-sighted eyes wandered over the blur of young bewildered faces turned up to his, as though he sought some understanding. Suddenly he strung himself, as if he had met the challenge of the eyes burning in the shadow of the door.
“‘Dull and blind.’ So dull? So blind? I tell you, let the spirit complain of the flesh no more. It is the prison which makes men free. I tell you, this flesh is the condition of their immortality. For in mastering it does the mortal become immortal, and humanity pass to the proud gods. Let you but look at a man’s eyes! The beasts run downcast, locking at the earth, but the very face of man is witness to his majesty: alone on earth he rears his sacred head to the stars. The Gods themselves, and the sky, and the stars, hold speech with him: he is one with the council of the Fates, aye, and by that same base act of generation, he throws the gauntlet down to Atropos. He shall bring to light the dark causes of things, lost in the mirk: he shall see the windy fields of the air, he shall see the dark silence of the dead. His is the height of heaven, and the breadth of the earth, and the depth of the sea, and he shall know the changing face of things and why they change. He shall subdue the earth and rule upon it, the first of things created, their king and their high priest.”
Again he stopped, his eyes holding those other unseen eyes, his spirit grappling with one mightier and more tormented than his. He was crouching forward now, his hands gripping the outer edge of the desk.
“But the stains: but love, tyrannus amor, the tyrant of our flesh: but the whole ineradicable evil of the ancient wood? So be it. Earth to earth: but be thou heaven’s familiar, and let your eyes depart not from those high places. For when this house of thine falls in ruin about thee, they shall abide thy coming, familiar roofs of home. No unknown stranger shalt thou climb there, where waits thee the place and the banner of thy star.”
He swayed a moment, then dropped on his seat, his arms along the desk in front of him, his eyes closed. Heloise felt Abelard’s hand upon her shoulder: she rose and followed him into the sudden light. In silence they went back to the inn: and still in silence, they took the north road to Paris.