In such a fashion began the Barons’ war in many a quiet corner of the land. Lawyers might orate and scribble, but when men quarrelled over a great issue, and the heart of a people was full of bitterness and discontent, the rush was towards the primitive ordeal of the sword. “God—and the King!”—“Earl Simon and the Charter!” These two rallying cries cut off brother from brother, and father from son. There had been years of verbiage, oath breaking, famine, peculation, and cynical corruption in high places. The law was no law, the King’s oath a byword in brothels and in taverns. The great Father—even the Pope—had had both fists in the English money pots. Poitevins, Provençals, and Italians had scrambled together. The country was sick of it. Men who were in grim earnest hastened to get to blows. As Denise, half hermitess, half saint, went back through the beech wood, the fire, like a great red brazier, still shone out on her, latticed by the black boughs, or hidden for a moment behind a tree bole. And though the wood was as still and solemn as a temple, it seemed full of a hushed and listening dread, waiting for the wind that should come roaring through the tops of the trees. Unrest was upon the hills, and in the deeps of the valleys. Denise felt it as she might have felt the nearness of thunder on a sultry night in June. But if no wind stirred in the wood that night, there were other sounds more human and more passionate than the voice of the wind. Denise had said her prayers in her cell when the dead leaves under the beech trees whispered with the moving of many feet. Indistinct figures went in and out among the tree boles, the muttering of voices mingling with the rustle of the leaves. A full moon had risen, and begun to throw long slants of light into the darkness of the wood, outlining the black branches, and splashing the trunks of the trees with silver. In and out, through the still moonlight and the shadows, came the moving figures whose feet filled the whole wood with the shiver of dead leaves. They straggled along by twos and threes, some silent and morose, others talking with the quick muttering intensity of men who have given and taken blows. A darker core moved along the woodland path in the midst of this scattered company. Men were carrying a litter of boughs piled upon the trunks of two young ash trees. The moonlight played intermittently upon the men about the litter, showing so many white faces, intent and silent, and a body that lay upon the bed of boughs with a shield covering its face.