The Brothers of Gwynedd (32 page)

  "But more there could well have been," said Hywel. "Or if she ventured alone she must have some shelter she knows of in these hills, for I'm sure she's not ahead of us now. She's let us by somewhere on the road."

  I hesitated long what we ought to do. For with our errand thus completed, however lamely, we were committed to riding north to rejoin Llewelyn at Cwm Hir, and our fastest and safest way, considering the weather, would have been to skirt Brecon with care by north or south, and reach the valley of the Wye, and so press on northwards by Builth. True, there were castles on the way that were held by men no friends to Llewelyn's cause, but I had companions with me who knew those ways well, and in the sheltered valley we should do better than over the wild, bleak uplands of Mynydd Eppynt, exposed to every wind. Every other road open to us was a hill road, even if we circled Eppynt by the west. But I thought it preferable, all the same, to make the blizzard an excuse for turning back to spend the night at Dynevor, and making an early start by Llandovery. To this day I do not know how far it was an honest decision, and how far a means of retracing the way by which we had come, and so keeping a watch as we went for the woman who had duped us. For if she was indeed alone and lost in the woods, with the night coming on, and the snow obliterating paths and landmarks, she was in sorry case.

  So we turned back and rode along the valley with less haste than when we had come, the leaden afternoon closing upon us. Hywel could find his way in these parts by night or day, and in any weather, we had no fear for ourselves however deep the snow. But I think that when we came to the climbing path we slowed still more, and not all in mercy to our tired horses. Also we spread out into the fringes of the trees, for there she must surely have withdrawn silently when we lost her, and let us pass without a word.

  I cannot say that we found her. We had made but a quarter of the climb to the ridge track when she came out of the woods before us, slender and dark against the snow, not avoiding but advancing upon us, with her pale, bright face uplifted. Most strange, she was on foot now, and the furred cloak she had worn was gone from her shoulders. Very small and young and slight she looked, wading through the deep snow with her skirts gathered high in her hands. And as I halted my horse beside her, she said the most unexpected words I could then have heard, the first ever I heard from her:

  "Sir, is there any among you is priest or clerk?"

  I think we all stared and gaped for a moment, yet her face, which was oval and fierce and fair, with great eyes intent, demanded instant answer, and the questions we had for her fell by the way. I told her we had no priest among us, but I had gone some way in my boyhood towards minor orders, and knew the office. I do not know how it was, but from the moment she appeared before us and spoke so, there was no business we had of any urgency but her business. For in her face, though young and glowing with vigour, there was also, even before she spoke again, the close shadow of death.

  "Come with me," she said. "There is a man dying."

  I lighted down and offered to lift her into the saddle, for she was soaked to the knees and pinched with cold she seemed not to feel. But she shook her head, saying: "It is not far," and turned and plunged again into the trees, and we, picking our way and leading our horses, followed her. Snow shook down upon her and us from the trees, and she shrugged it off and paid no heed.

  It was not far. Three hundred paces at the most into the thick and deepening darkness of the trees, invisible from the track, there was a wooden hut, low and leaning, but sound of wall and roof. She led us straight to the doorless opening, and I went in with her.

  "He is here," she said.

  It was so dark within that but for the shining whiteness of the snow that had drifted in through the doorway I should not have been able to see him. It gave a kind of light that came from the ground upwards, not from the sky down. The first thing I was aware of was a wave of surprising warmth that met me out of the dark, and the vast, deep sound of breathing that made a part of the warmth, misty and moist on the air. She had left her dying man the great, vigorous body of her horse to warm him, wanting the means to make a fire. More, she had left him the cloak she had worn, and run out into the blizzard without it when she caught the sound of our movements below on the path. I found him by the gleam of the snow that just touched one lax hand with its feathery fringe. He lay on his back, both arms spread at his sides, his eyes wide open, for their glare had a light of its own. He made no sound, but he was not sleeping or dead, or so far gone from the world as to be indifferent to us who came in. He was stiff with agony. I quivered at the very sight of the lines of his body, straight as timber under the cloak she had spread over him.

  The woman said, in a whisper for my ear only: "He crept here when his strength failed. I do not know how he got so far after Cwm-du. He is thrust clean through the bowels, and has a wound in the armpit besides. Take care how you touch him. He cannot last long."

  "You knew of this place?" I said as softly.

  "I knew of it. He happened on it. I found him here when I came."

  I said over my shoulder to Hywel: "Elis has flint and tinder. Get me a torch alight as fast as you can. Then find dead wood for a fire." And they went, silently. She was quite still there, one step before my left side, her shoulder on a level with my heart, her waist almost between my hands. I said into her ear: "Has he spoken to you?"

  "Not to me! He has said: I have sinned! He is in torment. I would you were a priest," she said.

  Hywel came then at my back, very softly, with a dried branch of pine already sputtering, casting a fitful yellowish light inside that shelter, and peopling it with all its living and dying. He held it before me, stepping over the living body and reaving the torch into the rough boarding of the timber wall. The horse steaming gently into the cold, its neck bowed meekly towards its feet, heaved up its head in mild astonishment, and stared at us with great globes of eyes. And the shape and lineaments of the mortally wounded man sprang into the flickering light, and showed me a face I knew from long since.

  I went on my knees beside him on the hard earth floor littered with pine needles, and searched the visage that glared up at me with open and recognising eyes. It was more than twelve years since I had seen him, or he me, but when those great, chill eyelids rolled back he knew me as I knew him. One step from the threshold of death he was still a comely person, my mother's husband, Meilyr.

"Samson?" he said. His voice was thick and harsh from the pain he contained with so much bitter force, but it was clear enough, like the mind that drove it. "Is it you indeed? Has she sent me her half-priest to make certain I die unshriven and unforgiven?"

  Once again, as of old, I saw that for him there was but one she, in this world or another, and his whole being was still cleaving to the memory of her at the edge of death.

  "Not so," I said. "What was there for her to forgive you but years of love never repaid? Lie still now, and let me see if there is anything man can do for you alive, for of what God in his goodness can do for you after death you need not doubt."

  He said no more for a while, only watched me at every move with those smouldering eyes of grief and rage that I remembered now far better than I could call to mind any of the blows he ever dealt me. I lifted the cloak that covered him, as gently as I might, but the clotted wreckage of his body was past any aid of mine, and the only hope was to let him lie motionless, that the riven flesh, weakening, might slacken its grip of this ceaseless pain. So I covered him again as closely as I dared, and we made a low fire between him and the doorway, so laid that it should not blow smoke over him, but give him its warmth. I took his hand in mine, and it was stiff and cold without response, and yet I knew there was still some force in the hard fingers if he chose to use it. We had wine in a flask, and gave him a little to moisten his mouth, but because of his broken belly I dared not let him drink deep. And when I looked round for the girl, who had said no word and made no sound since we came in, I saw that she was on her knees, and had taken his feet into her lap and wrapped them in the folds of her skirt, and was softly kneading and chafing them at ankle and instep. Her face was quite still and calm, and her eyes were on me. She neither offered nor asked anything, but like the angel of the archives she watched and listened, recording everything for the judgment.

  Meilyr lay and suffered this handling, but nothing of him moved except his eyes that followed all we did, and the thin-drawn lips that smiled terribly at our vain endeavours. And once he said: "You trouble needless. I am a dead man." And again: "Elen!" he said, as though to himself. "She died. The only word I ever had of her, that she was dead. When I heard the girl had married into Dynevor I came to serve here, thinking I might get word…thinking she might even come. Why try to mend me now? To what purpose? I have been a long time dead, ever since the fever took all that beauty out of the world, and my hope with it. If I ever hoped!"

  But when we had done what little could be done to ease him at least of the worst of the cold and darkness, there was nothing left for us to do but stay beside him, that be might not die alone. Though if ever man lived alone, from the day that first he set eyes upon Elen's beauty the man was Meilyr. And I had thought that he wronged me, not understanding how direly he was wronged! So I sat beside him, having covered him up from the cold, and held his right hand between my palms. And as Elen had used him, so he now used me, for he neither accepted nor rejected, but was utterly indifferent.

  Then remembering what the girl had said of him, that he was in torment and had cried out under the burden of his sins, I asked him if he willed to make an act of contrition and confession, for though I was no priest and could not absolve, yet the voluntary expression of his penitence was the true motion of grace.

  Terribly he smiled, his eyes devouring me, and he said: "I have sinned. Against you. When you were weak and at my mercy, I had no mercy in me. But as I did, so has it been done to me, and more also. She avenged you a thousand times over. Where is the debt now?"

  "There is none," I said. "It is past and over, and I have forgotten it. So, too, should you."

  "Forgotten," he said, "but not forgiven."

  "There was no need, once I understood what trouble divided us. But if you set store upon the word, then yes, forgiven also, long ago."

  "By you," he said, "but not by her. When the girl came here to her bridal, she could have sent me her pardon, if she had indeed pardoned me. But never, never a word. Never any, until the word of her death."

  "You do mistake her," I said, for I was possessed by the awareness of his anguish, and wanted nothing in that hour but to take away the great bitterness of it, if I could not take away the pain. And I began to remember all those things I could tell him truly, of how she had changed after his going, of how, with love or without it, he had become for her the single he in this world who needed no name, as she had always been for him the only woman. So I held fast his hand, and leaned over him that he might see my face by the firelight, and know I was not afraid to have it searched for truth or falsehood. And I began to tell him. Of how she froze in dread for him whenever she heard horsemen riding in, until it was certain that he had got safe away into Wales, or elsewhere, and she need fear no more. Of how she had changed, growing warmer and more like human flesh. Of how, when he was gone from her, she spoke of him constantly, and always with solicitude, troubled and anxious if the weather was stormy, grieving to know if he had a roof and a bed when the nights were cold. Of how he had only become real and close to her when he was lost to her and very far away, and only after they were parted for ever was he constantly at her side. And I said that she was strange, and it was not her fault if she could not love after the fashion of other women, but only in some secret and distant way of her own. Most women's love cries out for presence, and cannot survive without the food of glances and caresses and words. Hers awoke only in absence, and lived and grew without sustenance. I told him, last, how she had cried out like a saint at a vision: "He loved me!" and lamented like a penitent at confession: "I was not good to him!"

  All this he heard unmoved, except to a dreadful grin of scorn, his lips drawn back from his teeth in agony. He said: "You lie! In all her life she felt nothing for me, neither love nor hate. What you offer me is out of pity. I need no pity, and no lies. I am too far gone for lies to help me."

  Then I swore to him that all I had said was true, and I would take whatever oath he laid upon me, but still he would not believe, and at my insistence he did but turn his head away, and draw his hand suddenly from between mine, so that the movement troubled his shattered body, and he loosed a great moan. But when he was quiet again he said with certainty: "If this were true she would have sent me a token. No, I go out of this world damned because of her. What is the mercy of heaven to me if she has none?"