The Brothers of Gwynedd (178 page)

"Who would have believed it? That any man could be so crass and thick of wit!"

  I was at a loss, for my mind had been full of David. "Ah, no, not my brother!" he said, and smiled and took comfort for a moment. "No, my brother you shall find for me presently. He did not tell me what he meant to do, or I might have contrived to dissuade him, at least for this time. But who knows? He might not have thanked me for it if I had. It is for him to answer as he chooses, and I have no right to ask of him either that he shall go with me or abandon me. I can only ensure that he stays or goes with my blessing. No, all is well between David and me."

  And again he was silent, and shook his head over the all but incredible, and wrung vainly at a stranger grief.

  "And I have respected these men!" he said. "I had an advocate I could almost have loved, for all his faults, to which, God knows, I never was blind. And here he sends me with pride and confidence this contemptible and affronting offer! I thought he had some understanding of me, and he has none. I thought the warmth he had in him could at least feel the reality of another man's warmth, but he is as blockish as a dead tree. And he will be angry and wounded, even amazed, when his service is cast back in his face! Has he no place on earth that means anything to him, that he should truly believe he does me a kindness by uprooting me from Wales, and bidding me strike root in an English shire? He should have known, if he was one-tenth part of the man I thought him, that I would not give Edward one boulder of all the rocks of Snowdon, or one man who was bred among them, for his thousand pounds a year and his earldom. Or is there still hope for Peckham? Did this come solely from Edward, and has Peckham only sent and urged it upon me with shame and reluctance, in despair of better? It does not show in his wording, but then, he might steel himself to banish it, if this was all he could offer. I would I knew! I should have liked to go on thinking well of him!"

  I said never a word, for there was no man could ever again give him back the pleasure he had taken in liking and trusting the archbishop. Always he had been too easily given to affection, by nature seeing the best in men, and taking for granted that they would do as much for him. Yet I did remember and recall to him the genuine courage and perseverance with which Peckham had laboured for Amaury's release.

  "A Christian obligation," said Llewelyn, "and his duty to his church, yes…But was there more heart and wisdom in that than in this blind, arrogant benevolence he now holds out to me? Did he ever feel anything for Amaury, the man and the prisoner? Or only for the papal chaplain over whose detention the pope so bitterly complained? Truly I wonder! Oh, Samson, bear with me," he said, "for this is the first pain I have felt since my love died in my arms! For besides this man I took to be my friend, I have lost the one I knew to be my enemy. I respected and esteemed him still! If he had been as large as his body I could well have loved him. And all that liking and emulation I have wasted on the dwarf lurking within the giant. Do you remember, it was she said that of him? He could have crushed me fairly in drawn-out war, and I should not have lost him thus, or felt myself so demeaned by having respected him. He could have stood stark now and refused me any quarter, and that I could have borne ungrudging. But that he should believe of me, or of any decent man, that I would surrender Wales into his hands, and take myself off to some soft English pasture as his broken hound! Sell him my home and my people for a safe earldom! Has he known so little of me, that he could suiter this savage insult to be offered me? Has he no love for his English earth, that he acquits me of love for my Wales?"

  "He loves it," I said, roused and certain of my ground, "as belonging to him and conferring lustre upon him. He has never loved wife or child in any other way. As for his roots, they are almost all in southern France, where all his forebears on his mother's side come from, and half those on his father's. His roots are everywhere and his heart nowhere. No, he has no understanding of what you feel for this barren, lovely land."

  "Yet he has had pretensions to it from a child," said Llewelyn, fretting at what was beyond his understanding. "And he has learned nothing! He understands nothing! He feels nothing! Land is only an enlargement of his own magnificence. And if I can keep Wales from him with my blood and my body and my curse, he shall never have it. And if he wins it, those who come after him shall again lose it, for what he has is still not a right, only a pretension, a greed, a lust. I am delivered from the shadow and the weight of Edward. He is lighter than ash. There is nothing to be done with him but despise him. I never thought to see the day!"

  "A good day," I said, furious that he should so suffer over so unworthy a creature, however gifted of God as he was also maimed of God. "A good day, when you are freed of the last illusion, and can do your worst against him, and be at peace. You have no obligations to him any longer, none. Even though he may destroy, he cannot match you. He is beneath your feet!"

  "More to my purpose," said Llewelyn grimly, "that Wales should not end beneath his feet. As for me, I have a life I may throw away as I please, to the best advantage of Wales, and never grieve. Of what other value is it to me? I am a rampart, frail enough, between Edward and Wales. It matters not a whit if I am trampled into the earth, provided Wales outlives me." He leaned his head into his hands a moment, and drew a great sigh, as though he were indeed lightened of all trivial and unworthy burdens, whether of love or hate. But he was never a hater. He could resent and burn up in flame, but he could not nurse grudges, and when he uncovered falsity and meanness he had no recourse but to heave them from him and draw clear, as swimmers heave off weed and slime to breathe clean air and get back safe to land.

  "Well, we go forward," he said, and shook his shoulders free of Peckham's crass incomprehension and Edward's cold, malignant littleness. "They'll not deny us the right to a few days of continued truce, and until we have all cooled from our first rage, and considered well what we are doing, I will not let any answer be made."

  "One has already been made," I said, "and I do not think it will be changed."

  He gave me a long look, and said: "Neither do I. He reads me too well, he knows my mind without any word spoken—as Edward should have known it, and should for shame have refrained from so debasing himself and so insulting me. But until John of Wales sets out for Rhuddlan with written answers from us, what has been said can be given back as freely as it was offered. David may save himself if he chooses, with my forbearance and goodwill. I shall never hold it against him. Find him, Samson, and tell him so."

I did find him, and I did tell him so. He had walked out of camp to the crest of a hill to westward, and was leaning in the shelter of the rocks that cropped out there in the lee of a copse, his shoulders braced in a cleft, and his head tilted back against the slate-blue stone. He was looking across the hills to the west, where level black clouds streaked a sinking sun, though there was yet an hour or two of daylight left. His face was still and calm and awed, as though he had accomplished something that both terrified and assuaged him, and gave him, if not joy, a strenuous satisfaction. When he heard me come, he did not look round.

  "And very apt, too," he said, "to send me my confessor, when I have just nailed together my own coffin. And deliberately, mark you! I must be out of my wits."

  "There was no need," I said, sitting down on a ledge of the rocks beside him, "to be in such haste about it." And at that he laughed loud and sweet and still a little short of desperation.

  "Oh, yes, there was! For me there was dire need. If I had not done it then I might never have done it at all. You need not tell me, there were some there waiting for me to turn my coat again and buy my life at any cost. Now I am committed. However many times I must repeat it, I can do it, for I dare not for shame go back on it."

  "There's one," I said, "won't stand in your way or blame you for it if you do. I think he might even welcome it."

  "I do believe it," said David, when I had told him what Llewelyn had said. "But not even for him will I take back what I have sworn. I have pledged it once for all, and I am glad. Not that I look my death in the eyes with any great joy," he said wryly, "being flesh, and very self-indulgent flesh at that, and knowing Edward as I know him. Bear with me, Samson, if I preen myself a little on being the first to hurl the glove in Edward's face, who should be the last if I were in my right mind. I, the most hated, the furthest banished from any possibility of forgiveness! The orphan and exile he whines and prays about having taken in and succoured, when he knows, as I know, that what he did was to welcome a useful and unscrupulous traitor, worth an army to him in his war against Llewelyn. I used him openly, and he used me, but in his self-deceiving way, convinced he had bought me and made me his for all time. No, if ever I fall into Edward's hands now it will be my death, and such a death as might well make me turn tail, even now, and rush to embrace his contemptible crusade. But does not!" he said, himself marvelling, and curled a lip in a brief smile, and shook his head helplessly over his own maniac audacity. "I begin to think well of myself, I am braver than I thought."

  "You go to meet fate too soon," I said. "Even if this attempt at mediation fails—"

  "It has already failed," said David. "You saw Llewelyn's face, you know as well as I he feels nothing but scorn and disgust. I came late to the understanding of his love of Wales, and if I feel it now, I feel it only through him. I could live as merrily in London as here in the mountains, and I daresay I could make pretty good shift at making myself comfortable even in the Holy Land. But not he! We have a few days of truce left out of this great labour, until the replies go back to Peckham. And that is all we have."

  "Yet even so," I said, "the war is neither won nor lost, and nobody knows on which side the lot will fall in the end. Wales has fought off all the power of England in the past, and may again. It would be shame to us if we lost the battle before it was even fought."

  "In the past," said David, "we had not Edward to deal with, never until the last bout, and then he was but cutting his teeth on us, now he has all his fangs full-grown, and knows how to bite, and for all I will do my utmost, body and soul, against him, I cannot choose but see the scale inclining to his side, and I cannot lie about it to myself, and will not to you. A miracle or two would alter the balance, and prick up my heart very nicely. Do you suppose God is listening?"

  He shook himself suddenly out of his mood, and came and flung an arm about my shoulders. "Come, you've done your errand, and need not fret for me: If ever a man pulled the sky down upon himself, I am that man. And pulled it down upon Llewelyn, too, God forgive me, though I think in the end it would have toppled even without me. There's no way to go but forward! I've committed my life to Llewelyn's cause and the cause of Wales, and there's an end of it. And now, for God's sake, if you can spare an hour before the light goes, come and ride with me, I'm no fit company yet for less tolerant men."

  So I went with him, glad to hear the resolution and gaiety come back into his voice, even if both bore still the edged tone of desperation. We took horses, and rode together over the hill-track to the north-west, and rode further afield than we had intended, for pleasure of leaving thought behind and feeling nothing but the sting of the air and the buffeting of the wind. Earlier in the day great gales had swept the mountains from the north-east, but by that hour in the evening they were no more than boisterous winds, that whipped the blood into David's face and streamed cold and rough through his erected hair.

  We had reined in on a crest, and were thinking it time to turn back when we sighted a rider coming towards us at a gallop from the direction of Bangor, and waited for his coming in some curiosity. No one whose business was not urgent would have been riding a hill-track at that speed and in that deepening twilight. He saw us from the distance and spurred to meet us with a shout, and recognising David as he drew nearer, raised a hand in salute, and cried to us that he brought news from Bangor for the prince.

  "God make it good," said David to me, "for we need it."

  The man heard that as he pulled up glowing beside us, his horse blown and lathered. "Good enough, my lord! To say all in a breath—a battle and a victory!"

  "A breath of life!" said David heartily. "Draw deep again and tell us more!"