XXXV
So with Colgran and his rebels beating at the inner gate, Flavian of Gambrevault took Yeoland to wife, and was married that same eve by Father Julian in the castle chapel. There was pathetic cynicism in the service, celebrating as it did the temporal blending of two bodies who bade fair by their destinies to return speedily to dust. The chant might have served as a requiem, or a dirge for the fall of the mighty. It was a tragic scene, a solemn ceremony, attended by grim-faced men in plated steel, by frightened women and sickly children. Famine, disease, and death headed the procession, jigged with the torches, danced like skeletons about a bier. Trumpets and cannon gave an epithalamium; bones might have been scattered in lieu of flowers, and wounds espoused in place of favours. For a marriage pageant war pointed to the grinning corpses in the breach and the clotted ruins. It was such a ceremony that might have appealed to a Stoic, or to a Marius brooding amid the ruins of Carthage.
Peril chastens the brave, and death is as wine to the heart of the saint. Even as the sky seems of purer crystal before a storm, so the soul pinions to a more luminous heroism when the mortal tragedy of life nears the “explicit.” As the martyrs exulted in their spiritual triumph, or as Pico of Mirandola beheld transcendent visions on his bed of death, when the Golden Lilies of France waved into luckless Florence, so Flavian and Yeoland his wife took to their hearts a true bridal beauty.
When the door was closed on them that night, a mysterious cavern, a spiritual shrine of gold, came down as from heaven to cover their souls. They had no need of the subtleties of earth, of music and of colour, of flowers, or scent, or song. They were the world, the sky, the sea, the infinite. Imperishable atoms from the alembic of God, they fused soul with soul, became as one fair gem that wakes a thousand lustres in its sapphire unity. To such a festival bring no fauns and dryads, no lewd and supple goddess, no Orphean flute. Rather, let Christ hold forth His wounded hands, and let the wings of angels glimmer like snow over the alchemy of souls.
Flavian knelt beside the bed and prayed. He had the girl’s hand in his, and her dark hair swept in masses over the pillow, framing her spiritual face as a dark cloud holds the moon. Her bed-gown was of the whitest lace and linen, like foam bounding the violet coverlet that swept to her bosom. The light from the single lamp burnt steadily in her great dark eyes.
Flavian lifted up his face from the coverlet and looked long at her.
“Dear heart, have no fear of me,” he said.
She smiled wonderfully, and read all the fine philosophy of his soul.
“God be thanked, you are a good man.”
“Ah, child, you are so wonderful that I dare not touch you; I have such grand awe in my heart that even your breath upon my face makes me bow down as though an angel touched my forehead.”
“All good and great love is of heaven.”
“Pure as the lilies in the courts of God. Every fragment of you is like to me as a pearl from the lips of angels; your flesh is of silver, your bosom as snow from Lebanon, girded with the gold of truth. Oh, second Adam, thanks be to thee for thy philosophy.”
She put out her hands and touched his hair; their eyes were like sea and sky in summer, tranquil, tender, and unshadowed.
“I love you for this purity, ah, more and more than I can tell.”
“True love is ever pure.”
“And for me, such love as yours. Never to see the wolfish stare, the flushed forehead, and the loosened lip; never to feel the burning breath. God indeed be thanked for this.”
“Have no fear of me.”
“Ah, like a white gull into a blue sky, like water into a crystal bowl, I give myself into your arms.”