Martin Valliant had fallen into great darkness of soul.
The Forest lay about him, vast, silent, and mysterious; the sky was overclouded, and the moon obscured; and life seemed like the Forest, all black and without a purpose, a wilderness1 where wild beasts wandered and outcast men hid themselves from the law.
For a while he wandered about among the beech2 trees like a blind man who had lost his way, for in very truth he was blind of soul, so smitten3 through with anguish4 that he could neither think nor pray. A stupor5 gripped him, a stupor of misery6 and helplessness. It was as though a great hand had swept down and put out the white light that had burned within him; blackness, nothingness, remained.
As he went to and fro under the great trees, Martin Valliant struggled to break through this human anguish and all this coil and tumult7 of loving and being loved. He tried to stand as his old self, calm, patient, gentle, a watcher of other men’s lives. Things had been so quietly ordered in the old days; nothing had been able to master him, to send him like a blown leaf whirling with the wind.
But now—what had happened? Was God mocking him, or had he been cheated by the devil? Who was God, and who was the devil? What was this thing that men called sin? Was life only a huge fable8, a piece of tapestry9, behind which lay the burning, passionate10 reality, the being and becoming, the great glowing flux11 of fire?
He fell on his knees and clasped his head between his hands.
Who was calling him, and why did his heart answer?
“Mellis! Mellis! Mellis!”
She was in the darkness, she was among the stars, in the leaves of the trees, in the stillness of the night. She was light and shadow, sound and silence, colors and perfumes; she held the round world in her hands, and heaven was behind her eyes. He loved her, and her love was his. Where was the sin? Where was the shame?
Martin made a cloister12 of the beech wood all that night, pacing up and down between the black boles, sometimes lying prone13 in the dead leaves or the bracken. He saw nothing but Mellis—Mellis white and speechless, stretching out her hands to him, looking at him with eyes of anguish. She was a white flame burning in the darkness, and he could see nothing, think of nothing but her.
So Dame14 Nature, Mother of all the gods, led Martin to the deep waters and showed him in their blackness the image of a woman. And into these waters a man must cast himself naked, madman and rebel, leaving his manifold hypocrisies15 behind him, stripped of the shreds16 and the patchwork17 and the cap of the moral fool. Before dawn came Martin Valliant had taken that great plunge18. He was a rebel, naked and unashamed, most bitterly refusing to surrender the great thing that was his, and ready to fight for it with savage19 fierceness against saints and devils, priests and men.
With the first grayness of the dawn Martin turned his face toward Woodmere, and stealing from tree to tree, worked his way slowly through the beech wood. There were no more than three or four great trees left between him and the open sky, and he could see the mere20 lying in the valley and the tower where Mellis had slept; the birds were singing; the camp still seemed asleep.
Something whirred past him and struck the trunk of a tree away on his left, and Martin threw himself flat, for he knew that a cross-bow bolt had been loosed at him. Though he raised his head cautiously, and peered about him, he could see nothing but the bracken below, the green gloom of the branches above, the great gray trunks standing21 like the pillars of a church. But the man who had fired the shot could still see Martin. A second bolt whizzed over his head and buried itself in the ground.
“Run, you dog! Off with you, or the next shot shall be in your body.”
The voice came from the fork of a tree, and Martin was shrewd enough to believe in the man’s sincerity22. He sprang up, and dashed back into the deeps of the wood, furious at the thought that Falconer had set men to watch for him. He tried another part of the wood, but with no better luck. This time an arrow from a long bow drove into the ground within a yard of his feet, warning him that he was shadowed and that the Forest’s eyes were wide awake.
Martin took the lesson to heart, and turned back sullenly23 into the deeps of the wood. His wits were at work, offering him all manner of wild hazards, and............