“You may go your ways, Fulbert. You may go your ways. Not one foot will you get me from my chair this day.”
“But consider——”
Gilles de Vannes twinkled up at the little agitated figure through half-closed eyelids.
“And do not wag your finger at me. What does the man look like? A wasp trying to convert a caterpillar.” He subsided into rumbling chuckles.
“A wasp?” Fulbert stiffened, his face pink. He flushed easily, for he had the exquisite sensitive skin of the aged ecclesiastic.
“There, there, Fulbert. Not a wasp: a bee. Man, it is the consecrated metaphor for the good ecclesiastic. Apis humilis, casta, indefatigabilis—but you must not sting, Fulbert. It does not matter for wasps: it is their function. But bees die of it. Lord, Lord, do you remember poor Evrard’s first letter, begging to be received? From Liége, I think. ‘Having, as an unworthy pup, licked up sufficient crumbs from under the table here, I would fain enter your lordship’s hive as an obedient bee.’”
Fulbert received the pleasantry with an inclination. He had a little relaxed, but formality never left him. “I have never understood,” he said, “the circumstances in which Evrard became one of us. Whatever our faults, we were, I think, a body not without distinction.”
Gilles’ eyes caressed him. It was a joy to see anyone derive so much innocent pleasure from his office. “His guilelessness,” he said briefly. “It was in Fulco’s time, you remember. And Fulco, may God assoil him, needed an animal of some kind in the chapter. Evrard was the only one of us who did what he was told. He has been like a lost dog since Fulco died. Nobody ever tells him anything. And so—— Poor Evrard!”
“I confess,” said Fulbert, “that I have some difficulty in comprehending your position. You gave your vote with the rest of us in chapter, after the reading of the letter from Ivo of Chartres?”
“I did.”
“Yet you refuse to attend the chapter which deprives him.”
“I think,” said Gilles thoughtfully, “that I have always preferred theory to practice.”
“You do not then, in your heart, agree with Ivo of Chartres?”
“With all my heart,” said Gilles fervently. “God forbid that the Cloitre Notre Dame should become a nursery of squalling brats.”
“In that case——”
“I tell you, Fulbert,” said Gilles, roused to brief energy, “I have no liking for executions of justice. Doubtless it is a bad conscience. For I am never the executioner or the spectator, but the wretch that is tied to the pillar.”
“This is no question of the discipline,” said Fulbert stiffly. “Evrard is a canon, and not a choir-boy. And a simple act of ecclesiastical deprivation——”
“I never liked,” said Gilles, “to see a man ashamed. Odd,” he continued, musing, “for I have never in my life been ashamed of myself. Except of course,” he added gravely, “on such occasions as the rubric demands it.”
Fulbert nodded approvingly. He rose.
“I am to make your excuses, then?”
“You are a good fellow, Fulbert,” said Gilles gratefully. “Tell them it is a profound sciatica. It was the truth yesterday. Only yourself will know it is a bad conscience.” He sighed. “Not many of us, Fulbert, are like you, with a conscience as candid as your hair.”
The sensitive face flushed to the silver ring of the tonsure.
“There,” said Gilles tenderly, “I have embarrassed you with my praises.”
“I shall be late,” said Fulbert piteously. He looked about him in distress. “Where did I—— Surely—— Heloise!”
The girl reading at the further window laid down her book and came swiftly down the long room. Gilles sat watching her as she came. She wore green, girdled low; her hair fell on either side the oval of her face, and swung in long plaits to her knee.
One of the dead queens, alive and young, the stone queens for the west portal of Chartres: one of them, the loveliest and saddest, wore her hair so. But here there was no sadness yet: the laughter that sprang in her at sight of these two together rippled in her face as light glances in water. Gilles glanced at Fulbert, and mentally absolved him. This radiant creature could never have been begotten by the spinsterish figure nervously fidgeting with its hood. She was beside him now, touching him with her light fingers, turning back his over-long sleeves, settling his collar: and the creature stood there happy and quiescent, blinking, thought Gilles savagely, like a tomcat on a sunny wall.
“Thank you, my dear, thank you. You always know what I want. You will go straight home, sweetheart?”
“Must she go, Fulbert?” said Gilles abruptly. “Leave her with me while you are in chapter. There is a fair draft of the inscription for the lapidaries to make, and gout in my thumb, and Heloise has the best clerk’s script in Paris.”
“Surely, surely,” Fulbert babbled with pleasure. “You think the girl writes well, Gilles?”
“If Adam does but copy in stone what she writes on vellum, it will be a rare marvel,” said Gilles.
“I will come back for her,” said Fulbert, “when chapter is over. And then I can tell you, Gilles, tell you all about it.”
“That was my hope,” said Gilles gravely. “But I had not liked to ask it of so busy a man. It would be a great kindness. And indeed, Fulbert,” he called, as the Canon fumbled with the latch, “I would come with you to the stoning of Stephen if I had the courage.”
“Not Stephen,” corrected Fulbert kindly, “Evrard.”
“I grow old. I grow old.” Gilles sank back despondent in his chair. His junior by five years beamed upon him, making deprecatory noises, and the door latched behind him. The two pairs of eyes met.
“Heloise,” said Gilles de Vannes suddenly, “you are the only contemporary I have.”
Heloise nodded. She drew a stool beside his feet, and sat looking into the fire.
“I know,” she said after a pause. “And yet I feel it with a difference. It is as though you had all time behind you as well. So that I can ask you things.”
“What things?”
“I am always asking you things. But to-day——” She hesitated, her eyes on the white wood-ash.
Gilles waited, content to look at her.
“Gilles,” she spoke suddenly, “what will become of Evrard?”
“I think,” he said slowly, “he will do very well. It so happens that there is a school of sorts at Sarzeau, and the priest has little of letters, and I have some influence there. It will not be much of a living, but better than going to feed hogs for the woman’s people. They are farmers. He had thought of that, God help him.”
“He came to see you, then?”
“I went to see him,” said Gilles reluctantly.
Heloise turned her eyes on the motionless bulk in the great chair, a caress of tenderness so profound that now, thought Gilles, it is I who blink like a cat. Then her face hardened.
“Gilles, was he wrong to marry?”
“Canonically, yes.”
“Then is marriage a sin?”
“Not a sin. Only a mistake.” She was looking at him, and the delighted irony in her eyes met the irony in his. “That,” he continued, “is why the canonists regard it so gravely. For one can repent and be absolved of a sin, but there is no canonical repentance for a mistake. Unless indeed in the sense wherein St. Paul said: ‘Such shall have trouble in the flesh: but I spare you.’”
The light danced in her face, and suddenly went out. “But Evrard—it was such a good face, and she—I saw her this morning at her door, all sodden with crying and frightened. And the Archdeacon—my uncle says it was he who first denounced him in chapter—the Archdeacon——” She stopped.
“Has strange bedfellows,” agreed Gilles smoothly.
Heloise had risen, her hands clenched in sudden fury. “Then why? And yet you, you, voted against Evrard.”
“And should vote again to-morrow.” The indulgence had gone from Gilles’ voice and left it cold.
It had its effect. The girl sat down again, as if suddenly spent, gazing into the changing heart of the fire as if she followed there the tortuous working of men’s minds. Gilles reached out his hand and turned the hour-glass.
“Say it, Heloise. Say what you are thinking me.”
She shook her head. “I do not want to say it, because I know it is not true.”
“What is not true?”
“That you are a hypocrite.”
“I am,” said Gilles. “Officially, I am a canon of Notre Dame, and I have the morals, and, what is worse, the appearance, of Silenus.”
Heloise shook her head. “It is not that. You make no pretence at goodness. Not like the Archdeacon. But—you condemned Evrard.”
“Canon law condemned him. So also would it condemn the Archdeacon, if the charges against him were first brought, and then proved. And it is easier to prove marriage than . . . other forms of depravity.”
“And the Church says marriage is a sacrament.”
“And I believe,” said Gilles steadily, “in the Holy Catholic Church.”
Heloise drew a long breath of bewilderment. “Gilles,” she said suddenly, shaking the canonical riddle from her shoulders, “tell me. What do you, yourself, think of marriage?”
Gilles turned from fingering the hour-glass and gazed steadily into the eyes confronting him. His heavy jaw set.
“Marriage, to me, is a compromise with the flesh. The Church in its great wisdom has given its blessing to that compromise, considering it, moreover, as an indulgence that brings its own chastening, and speaking also, as did Ivo of Chartres, of a certain spiritual union, of which I have seen little, and have, I confess, desired less. But the very root of marriage, to me, is the satisfying of a lust of the flesh: and the Church itself declares that the ascetic has chosen the more excellent way. I am no ascetic, but my satisfactions have never had the blessing of the Church upon them. Which is perhaps illogical,” his voice was lightening, “since I have never eaten without a Benedicat.”
“Then is love lust?”
“Its root is lust.”
For a while neither spoke.
“You find that horrible?”
“I do.” Her voice was almost inaudible.
“But the rose is lovelier than its root, Heloise. And by your leave, madam, a rose grows better in a dunghill than in a quarry of white Carrara marble. And dies . . .”—he hesitated, and the words came grating—“and dies less soon.”
Heloise turned upon him, her mouth quivering.
“Dies?”
Gilles shook his head. “This also will pass. And marriage—marriage seems to me the effort to make that permanent which is in its nature transient. Nequidquam, nequidquam, in vain, in vain.”
His face had sunk into its heaviest lines of disillusionment.
“Hunger and thirst appeased, there’s profit in’t.
The body’s richer for it: but from this,
All human beauty and the face of men,
Naught but the ghosts of unfulfilled desire
Drifting on every wind.”
The husky voice grating through the heavy Lucretian hexameters had strengthened, till the whole plangent resonance of desire rang in it like a violin. Heloise sat motionless, her eyes unfathomable with pain, fixed on the dreamer’s face. Another listener, unseen in the doorway, the arras clutched in his hand, stood halted, holding his breath.
“Never yet
Hath he possessed her wholly, never yet
Have twain been one.”
Nequidquam, nequidquam. The voice stumbled on the sullen consonants and ceased. Gilles sat forward, his head sunk on his breast, his hands hanging from his knees. With a long sigh Heloise stirred and woke, to meet the eyes of Abelard, still rigid in the shadow of the door.