Via Crucis | Page 3

herself safe in his absence,
though she knew well enough that only a small part of that devotion
was for herself.
There are people who seem able to go through life, with profit to
themselves, if not to others, by a sort of vicarious grace arising out of
the devotion wasted on them by their nearest and dearest, and
dependent upon the success, the honour, and the reputation of those
who cherish them. The Lady Goda set down to her own full credit the
faithful attachment which her husband's Saxon swains not only felt for
him, but owed him in return for his unchanging kindness and impartial
justice; and she took the desert to herself, as such people will, with a
whole-souled determination to believe that it was all her due though
she knew that she deserved none of it.
She had married Raymond Warde without loving him, being ambitious
of his name and honours, when his future had seemed brilliant in the
days of good King Henry. She had borne him an only son, who
worshipped her with a chivalric devotion that was almost childlike in
its blindness; but the most that she could feel, in return, was a sort of
motherly vanity in his outward being; and this he accepted as love,
though it was as far from that as devotion to self is from devotion to
another-- as greed is far from generosity. She had not been more than
sixteen years of age when she had married, being the youngest of many
sisters, left almost dowerless when their father had departed on a
pilgrimage to the Holy Land, from which he had never returned.
Raymond Warde had loved her for her beauty, which was real, and for

her character, which was entirely the creation of his own imagination;
and with the calm, unconscious fatuity which so often underlies the
characters of honest and simple men, he had continued throughout his
married life to believe that his wife's affection, if neither very deep nor
very high, was centred upon himself and upon Gilbert. Any man a whit
less true and straightforward would have found out the utter emptiness
of such belief within a year. Goda had been bitterly disappointed by the
result of her marriage, so far as her real tastes and ambitions were
concerned. She had dreamt of a court; she was condemned to the
country. She loved gayety; she was relegated to dulness. Moreover the
Lord of Stoke was strong rather than attractive, imposing rather than
seductive, and he had never dreamed of that small coin of flattery
which greedy and dissatisfied natures require at all costs when their real
longings are unfed. It is their nature to give little; it is their nature and
their delight to ask much, and to take all that is within their reach. So it
came to pass that Goda took her husband's loving generosity and her
son's devotion as matters foregone and of course, which were her due,
and which might stay hunger, though they could not satisfy her vanity's
large appetite; and she took, besides, such other things, both good and
bad, as she found in her path, especially and notably the heart of Arnold
de Curboil, a widowed knight, cousin to that Archbishop of Canterbury
who had crowned Stephen king, after swearing allegiance to Maud.
This Arnold, who had followed his great cousin in supporting King
Stephen's cause, had received for his service broad lands, both farm and
forest, in Hertfordshire, bordering upon the hereditary estates of the
Wardes; and in the turmoil and chaos of the long civil war, his word, at
first without Raymond's knowledge, had more than once saved the
latter's little castle from siege and probable destruction. Warde, in his
loyalty to the rightful sovereign, had, indeed, rather drawn back from
the newcomer's friendship than made advances to win it; but Raymond
had yielded in the end to his wife's sarcasms and to his own sense of
obligation, as he began to find out how, again and again, in the turning
tides of civil strife, his neighbour, though of opposite conviction,
served him by protecting his bondsmen, his neat cattle, and his growing
crops from pillage and destruction. Raymond did not trace such acts of
neighbourly kindness to the day when, hawking with his lady and little
Gilbert, then hardly big enough to sit upon a horse, they had been

overtaken by a winter storm not far from Arnold's lands, and when
Arnold himself, returning from a journey, had bidden them take shelter
in a small outlying manor house, where he was to spend the night, and
whither his servants had brought his little daughter Beatrix to meet her
father. Raymond had accepted the offer for his wife's sake, and the two
families had made