Red Eve | Page 5

As he spoke the ropes of the ship were loosened, the wind caught her
crimson sails, and she departed into the night, one blood-red spot
against its blackness.
The multitude watched until they could see her no longer. Then they
flamed up with mingled joy and rage. They laughed madly. They

cursed him who had departed.
"We live, we live, we live!" they cried. "Murgh is gone! Murgh is gone!
Kill his priests! Make sacrifice of his Shadows. Murgh is gone bearing
the curse of the East into the bosom of the West. Look, it follows him!"
and they pointed to a cloud of smoke or vapour, in which terrible
shapes seemed to move dimly, that trailed after the departing,
red-sailed ship.
The black priests and the white priests heard. Without struggle, without
complaint, as though they were but taking part in some set ceremony,
they kneeled down in lines upon the snow. Naked from the waist up,
executioners with great swords appeared. They advanced upon the
kneeling lines without haste, without wrath, and, letting fall the heavy
swords upon the patient, outstretched necks, did their grim office till all
were dead. Then they turned to find her of the flowers who had danced
before, and her of the tattered weeds who had followed after, purposing
to cast them to the funeral flames. But these were gone, though none
had seen them go. Only out of the gathering darkness from some
temple or pagoda-top a voice spoke like a moaning wind.
"Fools," wailed the voice, "still with you is Murgh, the second Thing
created; Murgh, who was made to be man's minister. Murgh the
Messenger shall reappear from beyond the setting sun. Ye cannot kill,
ye cannot spare. Those priests you seemed to slay he had summoned to
be his officers afar. Fools! Ye do but serve as serves Murgh, Gateway
of the Gods. Life and death are not in your hands or in his. They are in
the hands of the Master of Murgh, Helper of man, of that Lord whom
no eye hath seen, but whose behests all who are born obey--yes, even
the mighty Murgh, Looser of burdens, whom in your foolishness ye
fear."

So spoke this voice out of the darkness, and that night the sword of the
great pestilence was lifted from the Eastern land, and there the funeral
fires flared no more.

CHAPTER I
THE TRYSTING-PLACE
On the very day when Murgh the Messenger sailed forth into that
uttermost sea, a young man and a maiden met together at the
Blythburgh marshes, near to Dunwich, on the eastern coast of England.
In this, the month of February of the year 1346, hard and bitter frost
held Suffolk in its grip. The muddy stream of Blyth, it is true, was
frozen only in places, since the tide, flowing up from the Southwold
harbour, where it runs into the sea between that ancient town and the
hamlet of Walberswick, had broken up the ice. But all else was set hard
and fast, and now toward sunset the cold was bitter.
Stark and naked stood the tall, dry reeds. The blackbirds and starlings
perched upon the willows seemed swollen into feathery balls, the fur
started on the backs of hares, and a four-horse wain could travel in
safety over swamps where at any other time a schoolboy dared not set
his foot.
On such an eve, with snow threatening, the great marsh was utterly
desolate, and this was why these two had chosen it for their meeting
place.
To look on they were a goodly pair--the girl, who was clothed in the
red she always wore, tall, dark, well shaped, with large black eyes and a
determined face, one who would make a very stately woman; the man
broad shouldered, with grey eyes that were quick and almost fierce,
long limbed, hard, agile, and healthy, one who had never known
sickness, who looked as though the world were his own to master. He
was young, but three-and-twenty that day, and his simple dress, a tunic
of thick wool fastened round him with a leathern belt, to which hung a
short sword, showed that his degree was modest.
The girl, although she seemed his elder, in fact was only in her
twentieth year. Yet from her who had been reared in the hard school of
that cruel age childhood had long departed, leaving her a ripened
woman before her time.

This pair stood looking at each other.
"Well, Cousin Eve Clavering," said the man, in his clear voice, "why
did your message bid me meet you in this cold place?"
"Because I had a word to say to you, Cousin Hugh de Cressi," she
answered boldly; "and the marsh being so cold and so lonesome I
thought it suited to