U&I
UTHER AND IGRAINE
BOOK I : THE WAY TO WINCHESTER
1903
BY
WARWICK DEEPING
WITH THE AUTHOR’S HOMAGE
Transcriber’s Notes:
Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings, inconsistent hyphenation, and other inconsistencies.
Chapter I
Beneath the dark cornices of a thicket of wind-stunted pines stood a small company of women looking out into the hastening night. The half light of evening lay over the scene, rolling wood and valley into a misty mass, while the horizon stood curbed by a belt of imminent clouds. In the western vault, a vast rent in the wall of grey gave out a blaze of transient gold that slanted like a spear-shaft to a sullen sea.
A wind cried restlessly amid the trees, gusty at intervals, but tuning its mood to a desolate and constant moan. There was an expression of despair on the face of the west. The woods were full of a vague woe, and of troubled breathing. The trees seemed to sway to one another, to fling strange words with a tossing of hair, and outstretched hands. The furze in the valley—swept and harrowed—undulated like a green lagoon.
The women upon the hill were garbed after the fashion of grey nuns. Their gowns stood out blankly against the ascetic trunks of the pines. They were huddled together in a group, like sheep under a thorn hedge when storms threaten. The dark ovals of their hoods were turned towards the south, where the white patch of a sail showed vaguely through the gathering grey.
Between the hill and the cliffs lay a valley, threaded by a meagre stream, that quavered through pastures. A mist hung there despite the wind. Folded by a circle of oaks rose the grey walls of an ecclesiastical building of no inconsiderable size, while the mournful clangour of a bell came up upon the wind, with a vague sound as of voices chanting. Valley, stream, and abbey were rapidly melting into the indefinite background of the night.
Suddenly a snarling murmur seemed to swell the plaining of the bell. A dark mass that was moving through the meadows beneath like a herd of kine broke into a fringe of hurrying specks that dissolved into the shadows of the circle of oaks. The bell still continued to toll, while the women beneath the pines shivered and drew closer together as though for warmth and comfort. There was not one among them who had not grasped the full significance of the sinister sound that had come to them from the valley. A novice, taller than her sisters, stood forward from the group, as though eager to catch the first evidence of the deed that was to be done on that drear evening. She held up a hand to those behind her, in mute appeal to them to listen. The bell had ceased pulsing. In its stead sounded a faint eerie whimper, an occasional shrill cry that seemed to leap out of silence like a bubble from a pool where death has been.
The women were shaken from their strained vigilance as by a wind. The utter grey of the hour seemed to stifle them. Some were on their knees, praying and weeping; one had fainted, and lay huddled against the trunk of a pine. It was such a tragedy as was often played in those days of disruption and despair, for Rome—the decrepit Saturn of history—had fallen from empire to a tottering dotage. Her colonies—those Titans of the past—still quivered beneath the doom piled upon them by the Teuton. In Britain, the cry of a nation had gone out blindly into the night. Vortigern had perished in the flames of Genorium. Reculbuum, Rhutupiæ, and Durovernum had fallen. The fair fields of Kent were open to the pirate; while Aurelius, stout soldier-king, gathered spear and shield to remedy the need of Britain.
The women upon the hill were but the creatures of destiny. Realism had touched them with cynical finger. The barbarians had come shorewards that day in their ships, and at the first breathing of the news the abbey dependants had fled, leaving nun and novice to the mercies of the moment. It had become a matter of flight or martyrdom. Certain fervent women had chosen to remain beside their abbess in the abbey chapel, to await with vesper chant and bell the coming of sword and saexe. Those more frail of spirit had fled with the novices from the valley, and now knelt numb with a tense terror on the brow of that windswept hill, watching fearfully for the abbey’s doom. They could imagine what was passing in the shadowy chapel where they had so often worshipped. The face of the Madonna would be gazing placidly on death—and on more than death. It was all very swift—very terrible. Thenceforward cloister and garden were theirs no more.
A red gleam started suddenly from the black mass in the valley. The nuns gripped hands and watched, while the gleam became a glare that poured steadily above the dark outline of the oaks. A long flame leapt up like a red finger above the trees. The belfry of the chapel rose blackly from a circlet of fire, and gilded smoke rolled away nebulously into the night. The barbarians had set torch to the place. The abbey of Avangel went up in flame.
The tall novice who had been kneeling in advance of the main company rose to her feet, and turned to those who still watched and prayed under the pines. The girl’s hood had fallen back; the hair that should have been primly coifed rolled down in billowy bronze upon her shoulders. There was infinite pride on the wistful face—a certain scorn for the frailer folk who wept and found sustenance in prayer. The girl’s eyes shone largely even in the meagre light under the trees, and there was a straight courage about her lips. She approached and spoke to the women who knelt and watched the burning abbey in a cataleptic stupor.
“Will you kneel all night?” she said.
The words were scourges in their purpose. Several of the nuns looked up from the flames in the valley.
“Shame on you, worldling!” said one of thin and thankless visage; “down on your knees, brat, and pray for the dead.”
The novice gave a curt, low laugh. The reproofs of a year rankled in her like bitter herbs.
“Let the dead bury their dead,” quoth she. “I am for life and the living.”
“Shame, shame!” came the ready response. “May the Mother of Mercy melt your proud heart, and punish you for your sins. You are bad to the core.”
“Shame or no shame,” said the girl, “my heart can grieve for death as well as thine, Sister Claudia; and now the abbey’s burnt, you may couch here and scold till dawn if you will. You may scold the heathen when they come to butcher you all. I warrant they will give such a beauty short shrift.”
The lean nun ventured no answer. She had been worsted before by this rebellious tongue, and had discovered expediency in silence. Several of the women had risen, and were thronging round the novice Igraine, querulous and fearful. Implicit faith, though pious and admirable in the extreme, neither pointed a path nor provided a lantern. Southwards lay the sea and the barbarians; the purlieus of Andredswold came down to touch the ocean. There was night in the sky; no refuge within miles, and wild folk enough in the world to make travelling sufficiently perilous. Moreover, the day’s deed had harried the women’s emotions into a condition of vibrating panic. The unknown seemed to hem them in, to smother as with a cloak. They were like children who fear to stir in the dark, and shrink from impalpable nothingness as though a strange hand waited to grip them to some spiritual torture. As it was, they were fluttering among the pines like birds who fear the falcon.
“It grows dark,” said one.
“Let Claudia pray for us.”
“Igraine, you are wiser in the world than we!”
“Truth,” said the girl, “you may bide and snivel with Claudia if you will. I am for Anderida through the woods.”
“But the woods,” said a child with wide, dark eyes, “the woods are fearful at night.”
“They are kinder than the heathen,” said Igraine, taking the girl’s hand. “Come with me; I will mother you.”
Even as she spoke the novice saw a point of fire disjoint itself from the dark circle of the oaks below. Another and another followed it, and began to jerk hither and thither in the meadows. The dashes of flame gradually took a northern trend, as though the torch-bearers were for ascending the long slope that idled up to the ragged thicket of pines. She turned without further vigil, and made the most of her tidings in an appeal to the women under the trees.
“Look yonder,” she said, pointing into the valley. “Let Sister Claudia say whether she will wait till those torches come over the hill.”
There was instant hubbub among the nuns. Cooped as they had been within the mothering arms of the Church, peril found them utterly impotent when self-reliance and natural instinct were needed to shepherd them from danger. The night seemed to sweep like a wheel with the burning pyre in the meadows for axle. The torches were moving hither and thither in fantastic fashion, as though the men who bore them were doubling right and left in the dark, like hounds casting about for a scent. The sight was sinister, and stirred the women to renewed panic.
“Igraine, help us,” came the cry.
Even tyranny is welcome in times of peril. Witless, resourceless, they gathered about her in a dumb stupor. Even Claudia lost her greed for martyrdom and became human. They were all eager enough for the forest now, and hungry for a leader. Igraine stood up among them like a tall figure of hope. Her eyes were on the east, where a weird glow above the tree tops told her that the moon was rising.
“See,” she said, "we shall have light upon our way. There is a bridle-path through the wold here that goes north, and touches the road from Durovernum. I am going by that path, follow who will."
“We will follow Igraine,” came the answer.
North, east, and west lay Andredswold, sinister as a sea at night. The hill, tangled with gorse and bracken, and sapped by burrows, dipped to it gradually like an outjutting of the land. To the east they could see a wide tangle of pines latticing the light of the moon. It was dark, and the ground more than dubious to the feet. The women, nine in all, herded close on Igraine, who walked like an Eastern shepherdess with the sheep following in her track. First came Claudia, who had held sway over the linen, with Malt, the stout cellaress, next Elaine and Lily, twin sisters, two nuns, and two novices. There was much stumbling, much clutching at one another in the dark; but, thanks to holy terror, their progress was in measure ungracefully speedy.
The girl Igraine led with a keen gleam in her eyes and a queer cheerfulness upon her face, as she stepped out blithely for the dark mass where the wold began. Her sojourn in the abbey had been brief and stormy, a curt attempt at discipline that had failed most nobly. One might as well have sought to hem in spring with winter as to curb desire that leapt towards greenness and the dawn like joy. She had ever thought more of a net for her hair than of her rosary. The little pool in the pleasaunce had served her as her mirror, casting back a full face set with amber shadowed eyes, and a bosom more attuned to passion than to dreams of quiet sanctity. She had been the wayward child of the abbey flock, flooded with homilies, surrendered to eternal penances, yet holding her own in a fair worldly fashion that left the good women of the place wholly to leeward.
Thrust out into the world again she took to the wild like a fox to the woodland, while her more tractable comrades were like caged doves baffled by unaccustomed freedom. Matins, complines, vespers were no more. Cold stone arched no more to tomb her fancies. Above stretched the free dome of the sky; around, the wilderness free and untainted; in lieu of psalms she heard the gathering cry of the wind, and the great voice of the forest at night.
In due course they came to where a dark mass betokened the rampart thickets of the wold, rising like a wall across the sky. Igraine hoped for the track, and found it running like a white fillet about the brow of a wood. They followed till it thrust into the trees, a thin thread in the shadows. As they went, great oaks overreached them with sinuous limbs. The vault was fretted innumerably with the faint overdome of the sky. Now and again a solitary star glimmered through. To the women that place seemed like an interminable cavern, where grotto on grotto dwindled away into oblivious gloom. But for the track’s narrow comfort, Igraine and her company would have been impotent indeed.
The prospect was sad for these folk who had lived for peace, and had tuned their lives to placid chants and the balm of prayer. In Britain Christ was worshipped and the Cross adored, yet abbeys were burnt, and children martyred, and strong towns given over to sack and fire. Truth seemed to taunt them with the apparent impotence of their creed. The abbess Gratia had often said that Britain, for its sloth and sin, deserved to meet the scourge of war, and here were her words exampled by her own stark death. The nuns talked of the state of the land, as they plodded on through the night. There was no soul among them that had not been grossly stirred by the fate that had overtaken Avangel, Gratia, and her more zealous nuns. It was but natural that a cry for vengeance should have gained voice in the hearts of these outcast women, and that a certain querulous bitterness should have found tongue against those in power.
Igraine, walking in the van, listened to their words, and laughed with some scorn in her heart.
“You are very wise, all of you,” she said presently over her shoulder. “You speak of war and disruption as though the whole kingdom were in the dust. True, Kent is lost, the heathen have burnt defenceless places on the coast, and have stormed a few towns. The abbey of Avangel is not all Britain. Have we not Aurelius and the great Uther? Our folk will gather head anon, and push these whelps into the sea.”
“God grant it,” said Claudia, with a smirk heavenward.
“We need a man,” quoth Igraine.
“Perhaps you will find him, pert one.”
“Peril will,” said the girl; “there is no hero when there is no dragon or giant in need of the sword. Britain will find her knight ere long.”
“Lud,” said Malt, the cellaress, “I wish I could find my supper.”
Thereat they all laughed, Igraine as heartily as any.
“Perhaps Claudia will pray for manna dew,” she said.
“Scoffer!”
“It will be cranberries, and bread and water, till better seasons come. I have heard that there are wild grapes in the wold.”
“Bread!” quoth Malt; “did some kind soul say bread?”
“I have a small loaf here under my habit.”
“Ah, Igraine, girl, I would chant twenty psalms for a morsel of that loaf.”
“Chant away, sister. Begin on the ‘Attendite, popule.’ I believe it is one of the longest.”
“Don’t trifle with a hungry wretch.”
“The psalms, Malt, or not a crust.”
“Keep it yourself, greedy hussy; I can go without.”
“We will share it, all of us, presently,” said the girl, “unless Malt wants to eat the whole.”
They held on under the ban of night, following the track like Theseus did his thread. At times the path struck out into a patch of open ground, covered with scrub and bracken, or bristling thick with furze. Igraine had never seen such timid folk as these nuns from Avangel. If a stick cracked they would start, huddle together, and vow they heard footsteps. They mistook an owl’s hoot for a heathen cry, and a night-jar’s creaking note made them swear they caught the chafe of steel. Once they suffered a most shrewd fright. They drove a herd of red deer from cover, and the rush and tumultuous sound of their galloping created a most holy panic among the women. It was some time before Igraine could get them on the march again.
As the night wore on they began to lag from sheer weariness. Two or three were feeble as sickly children, and the abbey life had done little for the body, though it had done much to deform the mind. Igraine had to turn tyrant in very earnest. She knew the women looked to her for courage and guidance, and that they would be hopeless without her stronger mind to lead them. She put this knowledge to effect, and held it like a lash over their weakly spirits.
Igraine found abundant scope for her ingenuity. When they voted a halt for rest, she vowed she would hold on alone and leave them. The threat made the whole company trail after her like sheep. When they grumbled, she told tales of the savagery and lust of the heathen, and made their fears ache more lustily than did their feet. By such devices she kept them to it for the greater portion of the night, knowing that the shrewdest kindness lay in seeming harshness, and that to humour them was but mistaken pity.
At last—heathen or no heathen—they would go no further. It was some hours before dawn. The trees had thinned, and through more open colonnades they looked out on what appeared to be a grass-grown valley sleeping peacefully under the moon. A great cedar grew near, a pyramid of gloom. Malt, the cellaress, grumbling and groaning, crept under its shadows, and commended Igraine to purgatorial fire. The rest, limp and spiritless, vowed they would rather die than take another step. Huddling together under the branches, they were soon half of them asleep in an ecstasy of weariness. Igraine, seeing further effort useless, surrendered to the inevitable, and lay down herself to sleep under the tree.
Chapter II
Day came with an essential stealth. The great trees stood without a rustling leaf, in a stupor of silence. A vast hush held as though the wold knelt at orisons. Soon ripple on ripple of light surged from the hymning east, and the night was not.
The sleep of the women from Avangel had proved but brief and fitful, couched as they had been under so strange a roof. They were all awake under the cedar. Igraine, standing under its green ledges, listened to their monotonous talk as they rehearsed their plight dismally under the shade. The nun Claudia’s voice was still raised weakly in pious fashion; she had learnt to ape saintliness all her life, and it was a mere habit with her. The cellaress’s red face was in no measure placid; hunger had dissipated her patience like an ague, and she found comfort in grumbling. The younger women were less voluble, as age and custom behoved them to be. Unnaturally bred, they were like images of wax, capable only of receiving the impress of the minds about them. Such a woman as Malt owed her individuality solely to the superlative cravings of the flesh.
About them rose the slopes of a valley, set tier on tier with trees, nebulous, silent in the now hurrying light. Grassland, moist and spangled, lay dew-heavy in the lap of the valley, with the track curling drearily into a further tunnel of green.
Igraine, scanning the trees and the stretch of grassland, found on a sudden something to hold her gaze. On the southern side of the valley the walls of a building showed vaguely through the trees. It was so well screened that a transient glance would have passed over the line of foliage without discovering the white glimmer of stone. She pointed it out to her companions, who were quickly up from under the cedar at the thought of the meal and the material comforts such a forest habitation might provide. They were soon deep in the tall grass, their habits wet to the knee with dew, as they held across the valley for the manor amid the trees.
The place gathered distinctness as they approached. Two horns of woodland jutted out—enclosing and holding it jealously from the track through the valley. There were outhouses packed away under the trees. A garden held it on the north. The building itself was modelled somewhat after the fashion of a Roman villa, with a porch—whitely pillared—leading from a terrace fringed with flowers.
The silence of the place impressed itself upon Igraine and the women as they drew near from the meadowlands. The manor seemed lifeless as the woods that circled it. There were no cattle—no servants to be seen, not even a hound to bay warning on the threshold. Passing over a small stone bridge, they went up an avenue of cypresses that led primly to the garden and the terrace. They halted at the steps leading to the portico. The garden, broken in places, and somewhat unkempt, glistened with colour in the early sun; terrace and portico were void and silent; the whole manor seemed utterly asleep.
The women halted by the stairway, and looked dubiously into one another’s faces. There was something sinister about the place—a prophetic hush that seemed to stand with finger on lip and bid the curious forbear. After their march over the meadows, and considering the hungry plight they were in, it seemed more than unreasonable to turn away without a word. None the less, they all hesitated, beckoning each to her fellow to set foot first in this house of silence. Igraine, seeing their indecision, took the initiative as usual, and began to climb the steps that led to the portico. Claudia and the rest followed her in a body.
Within the portico the carved doors were wide. The sun streamed down through a latticed roof into a peristylum, where flowers grew, and a pool shone silverly. There were statues at the angles; one had been thrown down, and lay half buried in a mass of flowers. The place looked wholly deserted, though, by the orderly mood of court and garden, it could not have been long since human hands had tended it.
The women gathered together about the little font in the centre of the peristylum, and debated together in low tones. They were still but half at ease with the place, and quite ready to suspect some sudden development. The house had a scent of tragedy about it that was far from comforting.
Said Malt, “I should judge, sisters, that the folk have fled, and that we are to be sustained by the hand of grace. Come and search.”
Claudia demurred a moment.
“Is it lawful,” quoth she, “to possess one’s self of food and raiment in a strange and empty house?”
“Nonsense,” said the cellaress with a sniff.
“But, Malt, I never stole a crust in my life.”
“Better learn the craft, then. King David stole the shewbread.”
“It was given him of the priests.”
“Tut, sister, then are we wiser than David; we can thieve with our own hands. I say this house is God-sent for our need. May I stifle if I err.”
“Malt is right,” said Igraine, laughing; “let us deprive the barbarians of a pie or a crucifix.”
“Aye,” chimed Malt, “want makes thieving honest. Jubilate Deo. I’m for the pantry.”
A colonnade enclosed the peristylum on every quarter. Beneath the shadows cast by the architrave and roof, showed the portals of the various chambers. Igraine led the way. The first room that they essayed appeared to have been a sleeping apartment, for there were beds in it, the bedding lying disordered and fallen upon the floor as though there had been a struggle, or a sudden wild flight. It was a woman’s chamber, judging by its mirror of steel, and the articles that were scattered on floor and table. The next room proved to be a species of parlour or living-room. A meal had been spread upon the table, and left untouched. Platter and drinking cups were there, a dish of cakes, a joint on a great charger, bread, olives, fruit, and wine. Armour hung on the walls, with mirrors of steel, and paintings upon panels of wood.
The women made themselves speedily welcome after the trials of the night. Each was enticed by some special object, and character leaked out queerly in the choosing. Malt ran for a beaker of wine; the cakes were pilfered by the younger folk; Claudia—whispering of Saxon desecration—possessed herself with an obeisance of a little silver cross that hung upon the wall. Igraine took down a bow, a quiver of arrows, and a sheathed hunting knife; she slung the quiver over her shoulder, and strapped the knife to her girdle. The clear kiss of morning had sharpened the hunger of a night, and the meal spread in that woodland manor proved very comforting to the fugitives from Avangel.
Satisfied, they passed out to explore the rooms as yet unvisited. A fine curiosity led them, for they were like children who probe the dark places of a ruin. The eastern chambers gave no greater revealings than did those upon the west. The kitchen quarters were empty and soundless, though there was a joint upon the spit that hung over the ashes of a spent fire. It seemed more than likely that the inmates had fled in fear of the barbarians, leaving the house in the early hours of some previous dawn.
As yet they had not visited a room whose door opened upon the southern quarter of the peristyle. Judging by its portal, it promised to be a greater chamber than any of the preceding, probably the banqueting or guest room. The door stood ajar, giving view of a frescoed wall within.
Malt, who had waxed jovial since her communion with the tankard, pushed the door open, and went frankly into the half light of a great chamber. She came to an abrupt halt on the threshold, with a fat hand quavering the symbol of a cross in the air. The women crowded the doorway, and looked in over the cellaress’s stout shoulders.
In a gilded chair in the centre of the room sat the figure of a man. His hands were clenched upon the lion-headed arms of the siege, and his chin bowed down upon his breast. He was clad in purple; there were rings upon his fingers, and his brow was bound with a band of gold. At his feet crouched a great wolf-hound, motionless, dead.
The women in the doorway stared on the scene in silence. The man in the chair might have been thought asleep save for a certain stark look—a bleak immobility that contradicted the possibility of life. Here they had stumbled on tragedy with a vengeance. The mute face of death lurked in the shadows, and the vast mystery of life seemed about them like a cold vapour. It was a sudden change from sunlight into shade.
Igraine pushed past Malt, and ventured close to the crouching hound. Bending down, she looked into the dead man’s face. It was pinched and grey, but young, none the less, and bearing even in death a certain sensuous haughtiness and dissolute beauty. The man had been dark, with hair turbulent and lustrous. In his bosom glinted the silver pommel of a knife, and there were stains upon cloak and tessellated pavement. Clasped in one hand was a small cross of gold that looked as though it had been plucked from a chain or necklet, and held gripped in the death agony. The wolf-hound had been thrust through the body with a sword.
“Hum,” said Malt, with a sniff,—“Christian work here. And a comely fellow, too—more’s the pity. Look at the rings on his fingers; I wonder whether I might take one for prayer money? It would buy candles.”
Igraine was still looking at the dead man with strange awe in her heart.
“Keep off,” she said, thrusting off Malt; “the man has been stabbed.”
“Well, haven’t I eyes too, hussy?”
Claudia came in, white and quavering, with her crucifix up.
“Poor wretch!” said she; “can’t we bury him?”
“Bury him!” cried Malt.
“Yes, sister.”
“Thanks, no. It would spoil my dinner.”
Claudia gave a sudden scream, and jumped back, holding her skirts up.
“There’s blood on the floor! Holy mother! did the dog move?”
“Move!” quoth Malt, giving the brute a kick; “what a mouse you are, Claudia.”
“Are you sure the man’s dead?”
“Dead, and cold,” said Igraine, touching his cheek, and drawing away with a shiver. “Come away, the place makes my flesh creep. Shut the door, Malt. Let us leave him so.”
The women from Avangel had seen enough of the manor in the forest. Certainly, it held nothing more perilous than a corpse, perched stiffly in a gilded chair; but the dead man seemed to exert a sinister influence upon the spirits of the company, and to stifle any desire for a further sojourn in the place. Folk with murder fresh upon their hands might still be within the purlieus of the valley. The women thought of the glooms of the forest, and of the strong walls of Anderida, and discovered a very lively desire to be free of Andredswold, and the threats of the unknown.
They left the man sitting in his chair, with the hound at his feet, and went to gather food for the day’s journey. Bread they took, and meat, and bound them in a sheet, while Malt filled a flask with wine, and bestowed it at her girdle. Igraine still had her bow, shafts, and hunting knife. Before sallying, they remembered the dead. It was Igraine’s thought. They went and stood before the door of the great chamber, sang a hymn, and said a prayer. Then they left the place, and held on into the forest.
Nothing befell them on their way that morning. It was noon before they struck the road from Durovernum to Anderida, a straight and serious highway that went whitely amid wastes of scrub, thickets, and dark knolls of trees. The women were glad of its honest comfort, and blessed the Romans who had wrought the road of old. Later in the day they neared the sea again. Between masses of trees, and over the slopes, they caught glimpses of the blue plain that touched the sky. From a little hill that gave broader view, they saw the white sails of ships that were ploughing westward with a temperate wind. They took them for the galleys of the Saxons, and the thought hurried them on their way the more.
Presently they came to a mild declivity, with a broken toll-house standing by the roadside, and two horsemen on the watch there, as the distant galleys swept over the sea towards the west. The men belonged to the royal forces in Anderida. They were reticent in measure, and in no optimistic mood. They told how the heathen had swept the coast, how their ships had ventured even to Vectis, to burn, slay, and martyr. The women learnt that Andred’s town was some ten miles distant. There was little likelihood, so the men said, of their getting within the walls that night, for the place was in dread of siege, and was shut up like a rock after dusk.
Igraine and the nuns elected, none the less, to hold upon their way. Despite their weariness, the women preferred to push on and gain ground, rather than to lag and lose courage. For all they knew, the Saxons might be soon ashore, ready to raid and slay in their very path. They left the soldiers at the toll-house, and went downhill into a long valley.
Possibly they had gone a mile or more when they heard the sound of galloping coming in their wake. On the slope of the hill they had left, they could see a distant wave of dust curling down the road like smoke. The two men from Andred’s town were coming on at a gallop. They were very soon within bowshot, but gave no hint of halting. Thundering on, they drew level with the women, shouted as they went by, and held on fast,—dust and spume flying.
“God’s curse upon the cravens,” said Malt, the cellaress.
Cravens they were in sense; yet the men had reason on their side, and the women were left staring at the diminishing fringe of dust. There was much frankness in the phenomenon, a curt hint that carried emphasis, and advised action. “To the woods,” it said; “to the woods, good souls, and that quickly.”
The road ran through the flats at that place, with marsh and meadowland on either hand. Further westward, the wold thrust forth a finger from the north to touch the highway. Southward, scrub and grassland swept away to the sea. It was when looking southwards that the nuns from Avangel discovered the stark truth of the soldier’s warning. Against the skyline could be seen a number of jerking specks, moving fast over the open land, and holding north-west as though to touch the road. They were the figures of men riding.
The outjutting of woodland that rolled down to edge the highway was a quarter of a mile from where the women stood. A bleak line of roadway parted them from the mazy refuge of the wold. They started away at a run; Igraine and another novice dragging the nun Claudia between them. The display was neither Olympic nor graceful; it would have been ridiculous but for the stern need that inspired it. Igraine and her fellows made the best of the highway. In the west, the wold seemed to stretch an arm to them like a mother.
The heathen raiders were coming fast over the marshes. Igraine, dragging the panting Claudia by the hand, looked back and took measure of the chase. There were some score at the gallop three furlongs or more away, with others on foot, holding on to stirrups, running and leaping like madmen. The girl caught their wild, burly look even at that distance. They were hallooing one to another, tossing axe and spear—making a race of it, like huntsmen at full pelt. Possibly there was sport in hounding a company of women, with the chance of spoil and something more brutish to entice.
Igraine and her flock were struggling on for very life. Their feet seemed weighted with the shackles of an impotent fear, while every yard of the white road appeared three to them as they ran. How they anguished and prayed for the shadows of the wood. A frail nun, winded and lagging, began to scream like a hare when the hounds are hard on her haunches. Another minute, and the trees seemed to stride down to them with green-bosomed kindness. A wild scramble through a shallow dyke brought them to bracken and a tangled barrier about the hem of the wood. Then they were amid the sleek, solemn trunks of a beech wood, scurrying up a shadowed aisle with the dull thudding of the nearing gallop in their ears.
It was borne in upon Igraine’s reason as she ran that the trees would barely save them from the purpose of pursuit. The women—limp, witless, dazed by danger—could hardly hold on fast enough to gain the deeper mazes of the place, and the sanctuary the wold could give. Unless the pursuit could be broken for a season, the whole company would fall to the net of the heathen, and only the Virgin knew what might befall them in that solitary place. Sacrifice flashed into the girl’s vision—a sudden ecstasy of courage, like hot flame. These abbey folk had been none too gentle with her. None the less she would essay to save them.
She cast Claudia’s hand aside, and turned away abruptly from the rest. They wavered, looking at her as though for guidance, too flurried for sane measures. Igraine waved them on, with a certain pride in her that seemed to chant the triumph song of death.
“What will you do, girl? Are you mad?”
“Go!” was all she said. “Perhaps you will pray for me as for Gratia the abbess.”
“They will kill you!”
“Better one than all.”
They wavered, unwilling to be wholly selfish despite their fear and the sounding of pursuit. There shone a fine light on the girl’s face as they beheld her—tyrannical even in heroism. Her look awed them and made them ashamed; yet they obeyed her, and like so many winging birds they fled away into the green shadows.
Igraine watched them a moment, saw the grey flicker of their gowns go amid the trees, and then turned to front her fortune. Pursing her lips into a queer smile, she took post behind a tree bole, and waited with an arrow fitted to her string. She heard a sluthering babel as the men reined in, with much shouting, on the forest’s margin. They were very near now. Even as she peered round her tree trunk a figure on foot flashed into the grass ride, and came on at the trot. The bow snapped, the arrow streaked the shadows, and hummed cheerily into the man’s thigh. Igraine had not hunted for nothing. A second fellow edged into view, and took the point in his shoulder. Igraine darted back some forty paces and waited for more.
In this fashion—slipping from tree to tree, and edging north-west—she held them for a furlong or more. The end came soon with an empty quiver. The wood seemed full of armed men; they were too speedy for her, too near to her for flight. She threw the empty quiver at her feet, with the bow athwart it, put a hand in the breast of her habit, and waited. It was not for long. A man ran out from behind a tree and came to a curt halt fronting her.
He was young, burly, with a great tangle of hair, and a yellow beard that bristled like a hound’s collar. A naked sword was in his hand, a buckler strapped between his shoulders. He laughed when he saw the girl—the coarse laugh of a Teuton—and came some paces nearer to her, staring in her face. She was very rich and comely in a way foreign to the fellow’s fancy. There was that in his eyes that said as much. He laughed again, with a guttural oath, and stretched out a hand to grip the girl’s shoulder.
An instant shimmer of steel, and Igraine had smitten him above the golden torque that ringed his throat. Life rushed out in a red fountain. He went back from her with a stagger, clutching at the place, and cursing. As the blood ebbed he dropped to his knees, and thence fell slantwise against a tree. He had found death in that stroke.
A hand closed on the girl’s wrist. The knife that had been turned towards her own heart was smitten away and spurned to a distance. There were men all about her—ogrish folk, moustachioed, jerkined in skins, bare armed, bare legged. Igraine stood like a statue—impotent—frozen into a species of apathy. The bearded faces thronged her, gaped at her with a gross solemnity. She had no glance for them, but thought only of the man twitching in the death trance. The wood seemed full of gruff voices, of grotesque words mouthed through hair.
Then the barbaric circle rippled and parted. A rugged-faced old man with white hair and beard came forward slowly. There was a tense silence over the throng as the old man stood and looked at the figure at his feet. There were shadows on the earl’s face, and his hands shook, for the smitten man was his son.
Out of silence grew clamour. Hands were raised, fingers pointed, a sword was poised tentatively above the girl’s head. The wood seemed full of bearded and grotesque wrath, and the hollow aisles rang with the clash of sword on buckler. But age was not for sudden violence, though the blood of youth ebbed on the grass. The old man pointed to a tree, spoke briefly, quietly, and the rough warriors obeyed him.
They stripped Igraine, cast her clothes at her feet, and bound her to the trunk of the tree with their girdles. Then they took up the body of the dead man, and so departed into the forest.
Chapter III
It was well towards evening when the men disappeared into the wood, leaving the girl bound naked to the tree. The day was calm and tranquil, with the mood of June on the wind, and a benign sky above. Igraine’s hair had fallen from its band, and now hung in bronze masses well-nigh to her knees, covering her as with a cloak. Her habit, shift, and sandals lay close beside her on the grass. The barbarians had robbed her of nothing, according to their old earl’s wishes. She was simply bound there, and left unscathed.
When the men were gone, and she began to realise what had passed, she felt a flush spread from face to ankle, a glow of shame that was keen as fire. Her whole body seemed rosily flaked with blushes. The very trees had eyes, and the wind seemed to whisper mischief. There were none to see, none to wonder, and yet she felt like Eve in Eden when knowledge had smitten the pure flesh with gradual shame. Though the place was solitary as a dry planet, her aspen fancy peopled it with life. She could still see the heavy-jowled barbaric faces staring at her like the malign masks of a dream.
The west was already prophetic of night. There was the golden glow of the decline through the billowy foliage of the trees, and the shadows were very still and reverent, for the day was passing. A beam of gold slanted down upon Igraine’s breast, and slowly died there amid her hair. The west flamed and faded, the east grew blind. Soon the day was not.
Igraine watched the light faint above the trees, wondering in her heart what might befall her before another sun could set. She had tried her bonds, and had found them lacking sympathy in that they were staunch as strength could make them. She was cramped, too, and began to long for the hated habit that had trailed the galleries of Avangel, and had brought such scorn into her discontented heart. There was no hope for it. She was pilloried there, bound body, wrist, and ankle. Philosophy alone remained to her, a poor enough cloak to the soul, still worse for things tangible.
Her plight gave her ample time for meditation. There were many chances open to her, and even in mere possibilities fate had her at a vantage. In the first place, she might starve, or other unsavoury folk find her, and her second state be worse than her first. Then there were wolves in the wold; or country people might find and release her, or even Claudia and the women might return and see how she had fared. There was little comfort in this last thought. She shrewdly guessed that the abbey folk would not stop till they happened on a stone wall, or the heathen took them. Lastly, the road was at no very great distance, and she might hear perchance if any one passed that way.
Presently the moon rose upon Andredswold with a stupendous splendour. The veil of night seemed dusted with silver as it swept from her tiar of stars. Innumerable glimmering eyes starred the foliage of the beeches. Vague lights streamed down and netted the shadows with mysterious magic. Here and there a tree trunk stood like a ghost, splashed with a phosphor tunic.
The wilderness was soundless, the billowy bastions of the trees unruffled by a breath. The hush seemed vast, irrefutable, supreme. Not a leaf sighed, not a wind wandered in its sleep. The great trees stood in a silver stupor, and dreamt of the moon. The solemn aisles were still as Thebes at midnight; the smooth boles of the beeches like ebony beneath canopies of jet.
The scene held Igraine in wonder. There was a mystery about a moonlit forest that never lessened for her. The vasty void of the night, untainted by a sound, seemed like eternity unfolded above her ken. She forgot her plight for the time, and took to dreaming, such dreams as the warm fancy of the young heart loves to remember. Perhaps beneath such a benediction she thought of a pavilion set amid water lilies, and a boy who had looked at her with boyish eyes. Yet these were childish things. They lost substance before the chafing of the cords that bound her to the tree.
Presently she began to sing softly to herself for the cheating of monotony. She was growing cold and hungry, too, despite all the magic of the place, and the hours seemed to drag like a homily. Then with a gradual stealthiness the creeping fear of death and the unknown began to steal in and cramp even her buoyant courage. It was vain for her to put the peril from her, and to trust to day and the succour that she vowed in her heart must come. Dread smote into her more cynically than did the night air. What might be her end? To hang there parched, starved, delirious till life left her; to hang there still, a loathsome, livid thing, rotting like a cloak. To be torn and fed upon by birds. She knew the region was as solitary as death, and that the heathen had emptied it of the living. The picture grew upon her distraught imagination till she feared to look on it lest it should be the lurid truth.
It was about midnight, and she was beginning to quake with cold, when a sound stumbled suddenly out of silence, and set her listening. It dwindled and grew again, came nearer, became rhythmic, and ringing in the keen air. Igraine soon had no doubts as to its nature. It was the steady smite of hoofs on the high-road, the rhythm of a horse walking.
Now was her chance if she dared risk the character of the rider. Doubts flashed before her a moment, hovered, and then merged into decision. Better to risk the unknown, she thought, than tempt starvation tied to the tree. She made her choice and acted.
“Help, there! Help!”
The words went like silver through the woods. Igraine, listening hungrily, strained forward at her bonds to catch the answer that might come to her. The sound of hoofs ceased, and gave place to silence. Possibly the rider was in doubt as to the testimony of his own hearing. Igraine called again, and again waited.
Stillness held. Then there was a stir, and a crackling as of trampled brushwood, followed by the snort of a horse and the thrill of steel. The sounds came nearer, with the deadened tramp of hoofs for an underchant. Igraine, full of hope and fear, of doubt and gratitude, kept calling for his guidance. Presently a cry came back to her in turn.
“By the holy cross, who are you that calls?”
“A woman,” she cried in turn, “bound here by the heathen.”
“Where?”
“Here, in a grass ride, tied to a tree.”
The words that had come to her were very welcome, heralding, as they did, a friend, at least in race, and there was a manly depth in the voice, too, that gave her comfort. She saw a glimmer of steel in the shadows of the wood as man and horse drew into being from the darkness. Moonlight played fitfully upon them, weaving silver gleams amid a smoke of gloom, making a white mist about the man’s great horse. A single ray burnt and blazed like a halo about the rider’s casque, and his spear-point flickered like a star beneath the vaultings of the trees. He had halted, a solitary figure wrapped round with night, and rendered grand and wizard by the misty web of the moon.
The sight was pathetic enough, yet infinitely fair. Light streamed through, and fell full upon the tree where Igraine stood. The girl’s limbs were white and luminous against the dark bosom of the beech, and her rich hair fell about her like mist. As for the strange rider, he could at least claim the inspiration accorded to a Christian. The servant of the Galilean has, like Constantine, a symbol in the sky, prophetic in all need, generous of all guidance. The Cross is a perpetual Delphi oracular on trivial matters as on the destinies of kingdoms. The man dismounted, knelt for a moment with sword held before him, and then rose and strode to the tree with shield held before his face.
Igraine was looking at the figure in armour, kindly, redly, from amid the masses of her hair. The small noblenesses of his bearing towards her had won her trust with a flush of gratitude. The man saw only the white feet like marble amid the moss as he cut the thongs where they circled the tree. The bands fell, he saw the white feet flicker, a trail of hair waving under his shield. Then he turned on his heel without a word, and went to tether his horse.
The interlude was as considerate as courtesy had intended. Igraine darted for her habit with a rapturous sigh. When the man turned leisurely again, a tall girl met him, cloaked in grey, with her hair still hanging about her, and sandals on her feet.
“Mother Virgin, a nun!”
The words seemed sudden as an echo. Igraine bent her head to hide the half-abashed, half-smiling look upon her face. It had been thus at Avangel. Nun and novice had worn like habits, and there had been nothing to distinguish them save the final solemn vow. The man’s notions were plainly celibate, and, with a sudden twinkling inspiration, she fancied they should bide so. It would make matters smoother for them both, she thought.
“My prayers are yours, daily, for this service,” she said.
The man bent his head to her.
“I am thankful, madame,” he answered, “that I should have been so good fortuned as to be able to befriend you. How came you by such evil hazard?”
“I was of Avangel,” she said.
“You speak as of the past,” quoth he, with a keen look.
“Avangel was burnt and sacked but yesterday,” she said. “Many of the nuns were martyred; some few escaped. I was made captive here, and bound to this tree by the heathen.”
Igraine could see the man’s face darken even in the moonlight, as though pain and wrath held mute confederacy there. He crossed himself, and then stood with both hands on the pommel of his sword, stately and statuesque.
“And the Lady Gratia?” he said.
“Dead, I fear.”
A half-heard groan seemed to come from the man’s helmet. He bent his head into the shadows and stood stiff and silent as though smitten into thought. Presently he seemed to remember himself, Igraine, and the occasion.
“And yourself, madame?” he said, with a twinge of tenderness in his voice.
The girl blushed, and nearly stammered.
“I am unscathed,” she hastened to say, “thanks to heaven. I am safe and whole as if I had spent the day in a convent cell. My name is Igraine, if you would know it. I fear I have told you heavy tidings.”
The man turned his face to the sky like one who looks into other worlds.
“It is nothing,” he said, gazing into the night; “nothing but what we must look for in these stark days. Our altars smoke, our blood is spilt, and yet we still pray. Yet may I be cursed, and cursed again, if I do not dye my sword for this.”
There was a sudden bleak fierceness in his voice that betrayed his fibre and the strong thoughts that were stirring in his heart that moment. His face looked almost fanatical in the cold gloom, gaunt, heavy-jawed, lion-like. Igraine watched this thunder-cloud of thought and passion in silence, thinking she would meet the man in the wrack of life rather as friend than as foe. The brief mood seemed to pass, or at least to lose expression. Again, there was that in the kindness of his face that made the girl feel beneath the eye of a brother.
“You will ride with me?” he asked.
Igraine hesitated a moment.
“I was for Anderida,” she said, “and it is only three leagues distant. Now that I am free I can go through the wold alone, for I am no child.”
“An insult to my manhood,” said the stranger.
“But the heathen are everywhere, and I should but cumber you.”
“Madame, you talk like a fool.”
There was a sheer sincerity about the speech that pleased Igraine. His spirit seemed to overtop hers, and to silence argument. Proud heart! yet without thought of debate she gave way in the most placid manner, and was content to be shepherded.
“I might walk at your stirrup,” she said meekly.
The man seemed to ponder. He merely looked at her with dark, solemn eyes, showing a quiet disregard for her humility.
“Listen to me,” he said, “you, a woman, must not attempt Anderida alone. The town will be beleaguered, or I am no prophet. To Anderida I cannot go, for I have folk at Winchester who wait my coming. If you can put trust in me, and will ride with me to Winchester, you will find harbour there.”
She considered a moment.
“Winchester,” she said, “yes, and most certainly I trust you.”
The man stretched out a hand to her with a smile.
“God willing,” he said, “I will bear you safe to the place. As for your frocks and vows, they must follow necessity, and pocket their pride. It will not damn you to ride before a man.”
“I trow not,” she said, with a little laugh that seemed to make the leaves quiver. So they took horse together, and rode out from the beech wood into the moonlight.
Chapter IV
When they were clear of the solemn beeches, and saw the road white as white before them, Igraine began to tell the man of the doom of Avangel, and the great end made by Gratia the abbess. The knight had folded his red cloak and spread it for her comfort. Her tale seemed very welcome to him despite its grievous humour, and he questioned her much concerning Gratia, her goodness and her charity. Now it had been well known in Avangel that Gratia had come of noble and excellent descent, and seeing that this stranger had been familiar with her in the past, Igraine guessed shrewdly that he himself was of some ancient and goodly stock. To tell the truth, she was very curious concerning him, and it was not long before she found a speech ready to her tongue likely to draw some confession from his lips.
“I have promised to pray for you,” she said, “and pray for you I will, seeing that you have done me so great a blessing to-night. When I bow to the Virgin and the Saints, what name may I remember?”
The man did not look at her, for her face was in the shadow of her hood and his clear and white in the light of the moon.
“To some I am known as Sir Pelleas,” he said.
“And to me?”
“As Sir Pelleas, if it please you, madame.”
Igraine understood that she was to be pleased with the name, whether she liked it or not.
“Then for Sir Pelleas I will pray,” she said, “and may my gratitude avail him.”
There was silence for a space, broken by the rhythmic play of hoofs upon the road, and the dull jar of steel. Igraine was meditating further catechism, adapting her questions for the knowledge she wished for.
“You ride errant,” she said presently.
“I ride alone, madame.”
“The wold is a rude region set thick with perils.”
“Very true,” quoth the man.
“Perhaps you are a venturesome spirit.”
“I believe that I am often as careful as death.”
Igraine made her culminating suggestion.
“Some high deed must have been in your heart,” she said, “or probably you would not have risked so much.”
The man Pelleas did not even look at her. She felt the bridle-arm that half held her tighten unconsciously, as though he were steeling himself against her curiosity.
“Madame,” he said very gravely, “every man’s business should be for his own heart, and I do not know that I have any need to share the right or wrong of mine with others. It is a grand thing to be able to keep one’s own counsel. It is enough for you to know my name.”
Igraine none the less was not a bit abashed.
“There is one thing I would hear,” she said, “and that is how you came to know of the abbess Gratia.”
For the moment the man looked black, and his lips were stern—
“You may know if you wish,” he said.
“Well?”
“Madame, the Lady Gratia was my mother.”
Igraine felt a flood of sudden shame burst redly into her heart. Gratia was the man’s mother, and she had been plying him with questions, cruelly curious. She caught a short, shallow breath, and hung her head, shrinking like a prodigal.
“Set me down,” she said. “I am not worthy to ride with you.”
“Pardon me,” quoth the man; “you did not think, not knowing I was in pain.”
“Set me down,” was all she said; “set me down—set me down.”
The man Pelleas changed his tone.
“Madame,” he said, with a sudden gentleness that made her desire to weep, “I have forgiven you. What, then, does it matter?”
Igraine hung her head.
“I am altogether ashamed,” she said.
She drew her hood well over her face, and took her reproof to heart like a veritable penitent. Even religious solemnities make little change in the notorious weaknesses of woman. Igraine was angry, not only for having blundered clumsily against the man’s sorrow, but also because of the somewhat graceless part she seemed to have played after the deliverance he had vouchsafed her. As yet her character seemed to have lost honour fast by mere brief contrast with the man’s.
Pelleas meanwhile rode with eyes watching the wan stretch of road to the west. On either hand the woods rose up like nebulous hills bowelled by tunnelled mysteries of gloom. He had turned his horse to the grass beside the roadway, so that the tramp of hoofs should fall muffled on the air. Igraine, close against his steeled breast, with his bridle-arm about her, looked into his face from the shadows of her hood, and found much to initiate her liking.
If she loved strength, it was there. If she desired the grand reserve of silent vigour, it was there also. The deeply caverned eyes watching through the night seemed dark with a quiet destiny. The large, finely moulded face, gaunt and white in its meditative repose, seemed fit to front the ruins of a stricken land. It was the face of a man who had watched and striven, who had followed truth like a shadow, and had found the light of life in the heavens. There was bitterness there, pain, and the ghost of a sad desire that had pleaded with death. The face would have seemed morose, but for a certain something that made its shadows kind.
Instinctively, as she watched the mask of thought beneath the dark arch of his open casque, she felt that he had memories in his heart at that moment. His thoughts were not for her, however much she pitied him or longed to tell him of her shame and sympathy. Nothing could come into that sad session of remembrances, save the soul of the man and the memories of his mother. That he was grieving deeply Igraine knew well. His was a strong nature that brooded in silence, and felt the more; it must be a terrible thing, she thought, to have the martyrdom of a mother haunting the heart like a fell dream at night.
Slipping from such a reverie, the turmoil and weariness of the past days returned to take their tribute. Despite the strangeness of the night, Igraine began to feel sleepy as a tired child. The magnetic calm of the man beside her seemed to lull to slumber, while the motion of the ride cradled her the more. The noise of hoofs, the dull clink of scabbard against spur or harness, grew faint and faint. The woods seemed to swim into a mist of silver. She saw, as in a dream, the strong face above her staring calmly into the night, the long spear poised heavenwards. Her head was on the man’s shoulder. With scarcely a thought she was asleep.
It was then that Pelleas discovered the girl heavy in his arms, and looked down to find her sleeping, with hood fallen and a white face turned peacefully to his. Strangely enough, the sorrow that had taken him seemed to make his senses vibrate strongly to the more human things of life. The supple warmth of the girl’s slim body crept up the sinews of his arm like a subtle flame. From her half-parted lips the sigh of her breathing came into his bosom. Over his harness clouded her hair, and her two hands had fastened themselves upon his sword-belt with a restful trust.
The man bent his head and watched her in some awe. Her lips were like autumn fruit fed wistfully on moonlight. To Pelleas, woman was still wonderful, a creature to be touched with reverence and soft delight. The drab, the scold, and the harlot had failed to debase the ideals of a staunch spirit, and the fair flesh at his breast was as full of mystery as a woman could be.
He took his fill of gazing, feeling half ashamed of the deed, and half dreading lest Igraine should wake suddenly and look deeply into his eyes. He felt his flesh creep with magic when she stirred or sighed, or when the hands upon his belt twitched in their slumber. Pelleas had seen stark things of late, burnt hamlets, priests slaughtered and churches in flames, children dead in the trampled places of the slain. He had ridden where smoke ebbed heavenwards, and blood clotted the green grass. Now this ride beneath the quiet eyes of night, with the bosomed silence of the woods around, and this lily plucked from death in his arms, seemed like a passage of calm after a page of tempest. Little wonder that he looked long into the girl’s face, and thrilled to the soft sway of her bosom. He thanked God in his heart that he had plucked her blemishless from gradual death. It was even thus, he thought, that a good soldier should ride into Paradise bearing the soul of the woman he loved.
Igraine stirred little in her sleep. “Poor child,” thought Pelleas, “she has suffered much, has feared death, and is weary. Let her sleep the night through if she can.” So he drew the cloak gently about her, said his prayers in his heart, and, holding as much as possible under the shadows of the trees, kept watch patiently on the track before him.
All that night Pelleas rode, thinking of his mother, with the girl sleeping in his arms. He saw the moon go down in the west, while the grey mist of the hour before dawn made the forest gaunt like an abode of the dead. He heard the birds wake in brake and thicket. He saw the red deer scamper, frightened into the glooms, and the rabbits scurrying amid the bracken. When the east mellowed he found himself in fair meadowlands lying locked in the depths of the wold, where flowers were thick as on some rich tapestry, and where the scent of dawn was as the incense of many temples. With a calm sorrow for the dead he rode on, threading the meadowland, till the girl woke and looked up into his face with a little sigh. Then he smiled at her half sadly, and wished her good-morning.
Igraine, wide-eyed, looked round in a daze.
“Day?” she said, “and meadows? It was moonlight when I fell asleep.”
“It has dawned an hour or more.”
“Then I have slept the night through? You must be tired to death, and stiff with holding me.”
“Not so,” said Pelleas.
“I am sorry that I have been selfish,” she said. “I was asleep before I could think. Have you ridden all night?”
“Of course,” quoth he, with a smile, “and not a soul have I seen. I have been watching your face and the moon.”
Igraine coloured slightly, and looked sideways at him from under her long lashes. Her sleep had chastened her, and she felt blithe as a bird, and ready to sing. Putting the man’s scarlet cloak from her, she shook her hair from her shoulders, and sprang lightly from her seat to the grass.
“I will run at your side awhile,” she said, “and so rest you. Perhaps you will halt presently, and sleep an hour or two under a tree. I can watch and keep guard with your sword.”
Pelleas smiled down at her like the sun from behind a cloud.
“Not yet,” he said; “a soldier needs no sleep for a week, and I feel lusty as Christopher. We will go awhile before breakfast, if it please you. There is a stream near where I can water my horse, and we can make a meal from such stuff as I have. When you are tired, tell me, and I will mount you here again.”
She nodded at him gravely. Grass and flowers were well-nigh to her waist. Her gown shook showers of dew from the feathery hay. Foxgloves rose like purple rods amid the snow webs of the wild daisy. Tangled domes of dogrose and honeysuckle lined the white track, and there were countless harebells lying like a deep blue haze under the green shadows of the grass.
Presently they came to where red poppies grew thickly in the golden meads. Igraine ran in among them, and began to make a great posy, while Pelleas watched her as her grey gown went amid the green and red. In due course she came back to him holding her flowers in her bosom.
“Scarlet is your colour,” she said, “and these are the flowers of sleep and of dreams for those that grieve. Hold them in the hollow of your shield for me.”
Pelleas obeyed her mutely. She began to sing a soft slumberous dirge while she walked beside the great black horse and plaited the flowers into its mane. The man watched her with a kind of wondering pain. The song seemed to wake echoes in him, like sea surges wake in the caverns of a cliff. He understood Igraine’s grace to him, and was grateful in his heart.
“How long were you mewed in Avangel?” he said, presently.
“Long enough,” quoth she, betwixt her singing, “to learn to love life.”
“So I should judge,” said Pelleas, curtly.
His tone disenchanted her. She threw the rest of the flowers aside, and walked quietly beside him, looking up with a frank seriousness into his face.
“I was placed there by my parents,” she said, by way of explanation, “and against my will, for I had no hope in me to be a nun. But the times were wild, and my father—a solemn soul—thought for the best.”
“But your novitiate. You had your choice.”
“I had my choice,” she answered vaguely. “Did ever a woman choose for the best? Avangel was no place for me.”
Pelleas eyed her somewhat sadly from his higher vantage. “The nun’s is a sorry life,” he said, “when her thoughts fly over the convent walls.”
A level kindness in the words seemed to loose her tongue like magic. Twelve long months had her sympathies been outraged, and her young desires crushed by the heel of a so-called godliness. Never had so kind a chance for the outpouring of her discontent come to her. Women love an honest grumble. In a moment all her bitterness found ready flight into the man’s ears.
“I hated it!” she said, "I hated it! Avangel had no hold on me. What were vigils, penitences, and long prayers to a girl? They made us kneel on stone, and sleep on boards. The chapel bell seemed to ring every minute of the day; we had vile food, and no liberty. It was Saint This, Saint That, from morning till night. We saw no men. We might never dress our hair; and, believe me, there were no mirrors. I had to go to a little pool in the garden to see my face.
“And they were so dull,—so dismal. No one ever laughed; no one ever told romances; all our legends were of pious things in petticoats. And what was the use of it all? Was any one ever a jot the better? I used to get into my cell and stamp. I felt like a corpse in a charnel-house, and the whole world seemed dead.”
Pelleas scanned her half smilingly, half sadly.
“I am sorry for your heart,” he said.
“Sorry! You needs must be when you are a soldier, with life in your ears like a clarion cry.”
“Life is a sorry ballad, Sister Igraine, unless we remember the Cross.”
“Ah, yes, I have all the saints in mind—dear souls; but then, Sir Pelleas, one cannot live on one’s knees. I was made to laugh and twinkle, and if such is sin, then a sorry nun am I.”
“You misunderstand me,” said the man. “I would that a Christian held his course over the world, with a great cross set in the west to lead him. He can laugh and joy as he goes, sleep like the good, and take the fruits of life in his time. Yet ever above him should be the glory of the cross, to chasten, purge, and purify. There is no sin in living merrily if we live well, but to plot for pleasure is to lose it. Look at the sun; there is no need for us to be ever on our knees to him, yet we know well it would be a sorry world without his comfort.”
“Ah,” she said, with a little gesture. “I see you are too devout for me, despite my habit. Take me up again, Sir Pelleas, and I will ride with you, though I may not argue.”
Pelleas halted his horse, and she was soon in the saddle before him, somewhat subdued and pensive in contrast to her former vivacity. The man believed her a nun, and she had a character to play. Well, when she wearied of it, which would probably be soon, she could tell him and so end the matter. It was not long before they came to the ford across the stream Pelleas had spoken of. It was a green spot shut in by thorn trees, and here they made a halt as the knight had purposed.
Before the meal Pelleas knelt by the stream and prayed. Igraine, seeing him so devout, did likewise, though her eyes were more on the man than on heaven. Her thoughts never got above the clouds. When they were at their meal of meat and bread, with a horn of water from the stream, she talked yet further of her life at Avangel, and the meagre blessing it had been to her. It was while she talked thus that she saw something about the man’s person that fired her memory, and set her thinking of the journey of yesterday.
Pelleas was wearing a gold chain that bore a cross hanging above the left breast, but with no cross over the right. Looking more keenly, Igraine saw a broken link still hanging from the right portion of the chain. Instinctively her thoughts fled back to the silent manor in the wood, and the dead man seated stiffly in the great carved chair.
Without duly weighing the possible gravity of her words, she began to tell Pelleas of the incident.
“Yesterday,” she said, “I saw a strange thing as we fled through the wold. We came to a villa, and, seeking food there, found it deserted, save for a dead man seated in a chair, and stricken in the breast. The dead man had a small gold cross clutched in his fingers, and there was a dead hound at his feet.”
The man gave her a keen look from the depths of his dark eyes, and then glanced at the broken chain.
“You see that I have lost a cross,” he said.
Igraine nodded.
“Your reason can read the rest.”
She nodded again.
“There is nothing like the truth.”
Igraine stared at the man in some astonishment. He was cold as a frost, and there was no shadow of discomfort on his strong face. Knowledge had come to her so sharply that she had no answer for him at the moment. Yet there stood a sublime certainty in her heart that this violent deed was deserving of absolute approval, so soon had her faith in him become like steel.
“The man deserved death,” she said presently, with a curt and ingenuous confidence.
Pelleas eyed her curiously.
“How should you know?” he asked.
“I have faith in you,” was all she said.
Pelleas smiled, despite the subject.
“No man deserved death better.”
“And so you slew him.”
He nodded without looking at her, and she could see still the embers of wrath in his eyes.
“I slew him in his own manor, finding him alone, and ready to justify himself with lies. Honour does not love such deeds; but what would you?—Britain is free of a viper.”
“And you have blood on your hand.”
He winced slightly, and glanced at his fingers as though she had not spoken in metaphor.
“All is blood in these days,” he said.
“And what think you of such laws?” she ventured, with a supreme reaching after the requirements of her Order. “What of the Cross?”
“There was blood upon it.”
“But the blood of self-sacrifice.”
Her words moved him more than she had purposed. His dark face flushed, and light kindled in his eyes as though the basal tenets of his life had been called in question. He glowed like a man whose very creed is threatened. Igraine watched the fire rising in him with a secret pleasure,—the love of a woman for the hot courage of a man.
“Listen to me,” he said strongly; "which think you is the worthier life: to dream in a stone cell mewed from the world like a weak weed in a cellar, or to go forth with a red heart and a mellow honour; to strive and smite for the weak and the wounded; to right the wrong; to avenge the fatherless? Choose and declare."
“Choose,” she said, with a shrill laugh and a kindling colour, “truth, and I will. Away with the rosary; give me the sword.”
Like a wild echo to her human choice came the distant cry of a horn borne hollowly over the sleeping meadows. Both heard it and started. The great war-horse, grazing near by, tossed his head, snorted, and stood listening with ears twitching and head to the east. Pelleas rose up and scanned the road from under his hand, with the girl Igraine beside him.
“A Saxon horn,” he said laconically; “the heathen are in the woods.”
Chapter V
As they watched, looking down betwixt two thorn trees, a faint puff of dust rose on the road far to the east, and hung like a diminutive cloud over the meadows. This danger signal counselled the pair. Pelleas caught his horse and sprang to selle; Igraine clambered by his stirrup, and was lifted to her seat before him. Pelleas slung his shield forward, and loosened his sword.
“If it comes to battle,” he said, “I will set you down, and you must hide in the meadows or woods, while I fight. You would but cumber me, and be in great peril here. Rest assured, though, that I shall not desert you while I live.”
With that he turned his horse to the road, and halted, gazing down amid the placid fields to where the little cloud of dust had hinted at life. It was there still, only larger, and sounded on by the distant triple canter of horses at the gallop. Pelleas and Igraine could see three mounted figures coming up the road amid a white haze, moving fast, as though pressed by some as yet unseen enemy. It was soon evident to Pelleas and the girl that one of the fugitives was a woman.
“We will abide them,” said the man, “and learn their peril. We shall be stronger, too, for company, and may succour one another if it comes to smiting. Look! yonder comes the heathen pack.”
A second and larger cloud of dust had appeared, a mile or less beyond the first. Pelleas watched it awhile, and then turned and began riding at a trot towards the west, so that the three fugitives should overtake him. He bade Igraine keep watch over his shoulder while he scanned the meadows before them for sign of peril or of friendly harbour.
“Have no fear, child,” he said; “I could vow, by these fields, that there is a manor near. I trust confidently that we shall find refuge.”
Igraine smiled at him.
“I am no coward,” she said.
“That is well spoken.”
“I would, though, that you would give me your dagger, so that, if things come to an evil pass, I shall know how to quit myself.”
“My dagger!” he said, with a sudden stare. “I left it in the man’s heart in Andredswold.”
“Ah!” said Igraine; “then I must do without.”
The dull thunder of the nearing gallop came up to them—a stirring sound, full of terse life and eager hazard. Pelleas spurred to a canter, while Igraine’s hair blew about his face and helmet as they began to meet the kiss of the wind. She clung fast to him with both hands, and told what was passing on the road in their rear.
“How they ride,” she said; “a tangle of dust and whirling hoofs. There is a lady in blue on a white horse, with an armed man on either flank. They are very near now. I can see the heathen far away over the meadows. They are galloping, too, in a smoke of dust. Our folk will be with us soon.”
In a minute the lady and her men were hurtling close in Pelleas’s wake. He spurred to a gallop in turn, and bade Igraine wave them on to his side. The three were soon with them, stride for stride. The girl on the white horse drew up on Pelleas’s right flank. She was habited in blue and silver—a flaxen-haired damosel, with the round face of a child. Seemingly she was possessed of little hardihood, for her mouth was a red streak in a waste of white, and her blue eyes so full of fear that Igraine pitied her. She cried shrilly to Pelleas, her voice rising above the din like the cry of a frightened bird.
“The heathen!” she cried.
“Many?” shouted the man.
“Two score or more. There is a strong manor near. If we gain it we may live.”
“How far?”
“Not a mile over the meadows.”
“Lead on,” said Pelleas; “we will follow as we may.”
The damosel on the white horse turned from the road, and headed southwards over the meadows, with her men galloping beside her. The long grass swayed, water-like, before them, its summer seed flying like a mist of dew. Wood and pasture slid back on either hand. The ground seemed to rise and fall before them as a sea, while rocks here and there thrust up bluff noses in the grass like great lizards stirred by the hurtling thunder of the gallop.
On they went, with white spume on breast and bridle; leaping, swerving where rough ground showed. To Igraine the ride was life indeed, bringing back many a whistling gallop from the past. She felt her heart in her leaping to the horse’s stride. Now and again she took a sly look at Pelleas’s face, finding it calm and vigilant—the face of a man whose thought ran a silent course unruffled by the breeze of peril. She felt his bridle-arm staunchly about her like a girdle of steel. Although she could see the dust gathering thickly on the distant road, she felt blithe as a new bride in the man’s company, and there was no fear at all in her thought.
The grassland began to slope gradually towards the south. A quavering screech of joy came back to them from the woman riding in the van. Pelleas spoke his first word during the gallop.
“Courage,” he said. “Southwards lies our refuge.”
Igraine looked over his shoulder, and saw how their flight tended down the flank of a gentle hill into the lap of a fair valley. The grass stretch was broken by great trees—oaks, beeches, and huge, corniced cedars. Down in the green hollow below them a mere shone with the soul of the sky steeped in its quiet waters. It was ringed with trailing willows, and an island held its centre, piled with green shadows and the grey shape of a fair manor. The place looked as peaceful as sleep in the eye of the morning.
The woman on the white horse bade one of her men take his bugle-horn and blow a summons thereon to rouse the folk upon the island. Twice the summons sounded down over the water, but there was no answering stir to be marked about the house or garden. The place was smokeless, lifeless, silent. Like many another home, its hearths were cold for fear of the barbarian sword.
As they held downhill, Igraine wove the matter through her thought like swift silk through a shuttle.
“Should there be no boat,” she said, giving voice to her misgivings, “what can you do for us?”
“We must swim for it,” said Pelleas, keenly.
“It is a broad, fair water, and the horse cannot bear us both.”
“He shall, if needs be.”
She felt that the brute would, after Pelleas had spoken so. She patted the arched black neck, and smiled at the sky as they came down to the mere’s edge at a canter. The water was lapping softly at the sedges amid a blaze of marsh marigolds and purple flags, the surface gleaming like glass in the sun. Half a score water-hens went winging from the reeds, and skimming low and fast towards the island. A heron rose from the shallows, and laboured heavenwards with legs trailing.
Riding round the margin, they found to their joy a barge grounded in a little bay, with sweeps ready upon the thwarts, and a horse-board fitted at the prow. A purple cloak hung over one bulwark, trailing in the water; a small crucifix and a few trinkets were scattered on the poop, as though those who had used the ferry last had fled in fear, forgetful of everything save flight.
Then came the embarkation. The barge would but hold three horses at one voyage, so Pelleas ordered Igraine and the rest into the boat, and bade the men row over and return. Igraine demurred a moment.
“Leave your horse,” she said; “they may come before the boat can take you.”
Pelleas refused her with a smile, running his fingers through the brute’s black mane.
“I have a truer heart than that,” he said.
The men launched away, and pulled at the sweeps with a will, Igraine helping, and doing her devoir for the man Pelleas’s sake. The barge slid away, with ripples playing from the prow, and a gush of foam leaping from each smile of the blades. It was a hundred yards or more to the island, and the craft was ponderous enough to make the crossing slow.
Pelleas sat still and watched the meadows. Suddenly—bleakly—a figure on horseback topped the low hill on the north, and held motionless on the summit, scanning the valley. A second joined the first. Pelleas caught a shout, muffled by the wind, as the two plunged down at full gallop for the mere, sleeping in its bed of green. Here were two gentlemen who had outstripped their fellows, and were as keen as could be to catch Pelleas before the barge could recross, and set the mere betwixt them. Pelleas saw his hazard in a moment. Even if the barge came before the heathen, there would be some peril of its capture in the shallows.
He would have to fight for it, unless he cared to swim the mere. Provided he could deal with these two outriders before the main company came up, well and good, the raiders would find clear water between the quarry and their swords. He thought of Avangel, and grew iron of heart. Then there was the nun, Igraine, with the wonderful eyes, and hair warm as the dun woods in autumn. He was her sworn knight as far as Winchester. God helping him, he thought, he would yet see her face again. So he rode out grimly to get fair field for horsecraft, and waited for the two who swept the meadows.
Igraine, standing on the wooden stage at the water’s edge, saw Pelleas taking ground and preparing for a tussle. The barge had put off again and had already half spanned the water. She was alone with the woman of the white horse, who stood beside her still quaking like a reed, and almost voiceless from the fulsome terror of an unshrived death. Igraine had no heed for her at the moment. Her whole thought lurked with the red shield and the black horse in the meadows. Worldly heart! her desire burnt redly in her own bosom, and found no flutter for the powers above.
She saw Pelleas gathering for the course, while the heathen slackened so as not to override their mark. A crescent of steel flashed as the foremost man launched his axe at the knight’s head. The red shield caught and turned it. In a trice Pelleas’s spear had picked the rogue from the saddle, despite his crouching low and seeking to shun it. The second fellow came in like a whirlwind. His horse caught the black destrier cross counter and rolled him down like a rammed wall. Pelleas avoided, and was up with bleak sword. Smiting low, he caught the man’s thigh, and broke the bone like a lath. The Saxon lost his seat, and came down with a snarling yell. The rest was easy as beating down a maimed wolf.
The main company had just topped the hill. Pelleas, with the skirmish ended to his credit, shook his sword at them, and led his horse into the shallows. The barge swept in, took its burden from the bank, and held back for the island, where Igraine stood watching on the stage, ready with her welcome. She was glad of Pelleas in her heart, as though the comradeship of half a day had given her the right to share his honour, and to chime her joy with his. The woman in her swamped the assumed sanctity of the nun. As the water stretch lessened between them, Pelleas, silent and dark-browed as was his wont, found himself beneath the beck of eyes that gazed like the half-born wonder of the sky at dawn. It was neither joy nor great light in them, but a kind of quiet musing, as though there were strange new music in her soul.
“Are you hurt?” she asked, as he sprang from the barge and stood beside her, with head thrown back and his great shoulders squared.
“Not a graze.”
“Two to one, and a fair field,” quoth she, with a quaver of triumph; “my heart sang when those men went down. That was a great spear thrust.”
“Less and less of the rosary!”
She caught his deep smile, and laughed.
“I am a greater heathen than either,” she said. “God rest their souls.”
Meanwhile the lady in the blue tunic had somewhat recovered her squandered wits and courage. She came forward with a simpering dignity, walking daintily, with her gown gathered in her right hand, and her left laid over her heart. Her eyes were very big and blue, their brightness giving her an eager, sanguine look that was upheld the more by an assumed simpleness of manner. Her childish bearing, winsomely studied, exercised its subtleties with a lavish embellishment of smiles and blushes. Looked at more closely, and in repose, her face belied in measure the perspicuous personality she had adopted. A sensual bold ness lurked in mouth and nostrils, and there was more carnal wisdom there than a pretended child should possess.
“Courtesy fails me, sir,” she said, letting her shoulders fall into a graceful stoop, and turning her large eyes to Pelleas’s face; “courtesy fails me when I would most praise you for your knightly deed in yonder meadows. I am so frightened that I cannot speak as I would. My heart is quite tired with its fear and flutter. Think you—you can save us from these wolves?”
Pelleas had neither the desire nor the leisure to stand juggling courtesies with the woman.
“Madame,” he said, “we shall fight. Leave the rest to Providence. I can give you no better comfort.”
“No,” she said, “no”—as in a daze.
Pelleas, reading her misery, repented somewhat of his abrupt truthfulness.
“Come,” he said, with a kind strength and a hand on her shoulder; “go to the house and rest there with Sister Igraine. I see you are too much shaken. Go in and pray if you can, while we hold the island.”
The girl looked at him unreservedly for a moment. Then she gave a little laugh that was half a sob, and, bending to him, kissed his hand before he could prevent her. Giving him yet another glance from her tumbled hair, she stepped aside to Igraine, and they turned together towards the manor, and the trees and gardens that ringed it. The girl had set her hand in Igraine’s with a little gesture that was intended to be indicative of confidence in the supposed nun’s greater intelligence.
“Let us go and sit under that yew tree,” she suggested. “I cannot stifle within walls now. You are named Igraine. I am called Morgan—Morgan la Blanche,—and I am a lord’s daughter. I almost envy you your frock now, for death cannot frighten you as it frightens me. Of course you are very good, and the Saints guard and watch over you. As for me, I have always been very thoughtless.”
“Not more than I,” said Igraine, with a smile. “I have often hummed romances when I should have praised Paul or Peter.”
“But doesn’t the fear of death blight you like a frost?”
“I never think of death.”
“It seems so near us now that I can hardly breathe. Do you think we are tortured in the other world, if there be one?”
“How should I know, simple one?”
“I wish the mere were a league broad. I should feel further from the pit.”
“Is your conscience so unkind?”
“Conscience, sister? It is self-love, not conscience. I only want to live. Look!—the heathen are coming down to the mere. How their axes shine. Holy Mother!—I wish I could pray.”
Igraine, catching the girl’s pinched face, with lips drawn and twitching, pitied her from her very heart.
“Come then, I will pray with you,” she said.
“No, no, my prayers would blacken heaven. I cannot, I cannot.”
The wild company had swept down between the great trees in disorderly array. Their weapons shone in the sunlight, their round bucklers blickered. They were soon at the place where Pelleas had slain his men in fair and open field. Dismounting, they gathered about their dead fellows, and sent up, after their custom, a vicious, dismal ululation, a sound like the howling of wolves, drear enough to make the flesh tingle under the stoutest steel. Lining the bank among the willows, they shook buckler and axe, gesticulating, threatening, their long hair blowing wild, their skin-clad bodies giving them a wolfin look not pleasant to behold. Round the margin they paddled—searching—casting about for a boat. They seemed like beasts behind the gates of some Roman amphitheatre—caged from the slaughter. The girl Morgan looked at them, screamed, and hid her face in her tunic. Igraine found the girl’s quaking hand, and held it fast in hers.
“Courage, courage,” she said; “there is no boat, and, even if they swim, Sir Pelleas is a great knight.”
“What can he do against fifty?” whined the girl, with her face still covered.
“Fifty? There are but a score. I have numbered them myself.”
“I would give all the jewels in the world to be in Winchester.”
“Ah! girl, I have no jewels to give; but this, I promise you, is better than a convent.”
The barbarians had gathered in a group beneath a great willow. Plainly they were in debate as to what should be done. Some, by their gestures, their tossing weapons, and their bombast, were for swimming the mere. Their councils were palpably divided. Possibly the sager folk among them did not think the venture worth the loss to them it might entail, seeing that one of those cooped upon the island had already given proof of no mean prowess. They could see the three armed men waiting grimly by the water’s edge, ready to strike down the swimmer who should crawl half-naked from the water weeds and mire. Gradually, but surely, the elder tongues held the argument, and the balance went down solemnly for those upon the island.
Pelleas and the two men, watching keenly for any movement, saw the circle of figures break and melt towards the horses. They saw them pick up the bodies of their two dead fellows, and lay them across the saddle. In a minute the whole troop turned, and held away southwards at a trot, flinging back a last wild cry over the water. The meadows rolled away behind them; the gradual trees hid them from moment to moment. Pelleas and the two servants stood and watched till the black line had gone southwards into the thickening woods.
Under the yew tree Morgan la Blanche had uncased her white face, and was smiling feebly.
“I am glad I did not pray,” she said; “it would have been so weak. Look! I have torn my tunic, and my belt’s awry. Bind my hair for me, sister, quickly,—before Sir Pelleas comes.”
Chapter VI
With the heathen lost in the distant woods, Pelleas and the women essayed the house, leaving the two servants to sentinel the island.
The great gates of the porch were ajar. Pushing in, they crossed into the atrium, and found it sleepy as solitude. The water in the impluvium gleamed with the gold flanks of the fish that moved through its shadows. Lilies were there, white and wonderful, swooning to their own images in the pool. The tiled floor was rich with colour. Venturing further, they found the triclinium untouched, rich couches and flaming curtains everywhere, gilded chairs, and deep-lustred mirrors, urns, and flowers. In the chapel candles were guttered on the altar; dim lights came down upon a wealth of solemn beauty—saints, censers, crosses, frescoed walls all green and azure, gold and scarlet. The viridarium, set betwixt chapel and tablinum, held them dazed with a glowing paradise of flowers. Here were dreamy palms, orange trees like mounts of gold, roses that slept in a deep delight of green. Over all was silence, untainted even by the silken purr of a bird’s wing.
Gynœcium and bower were void of them in turn. Everywhere they found the relics of a swift desertion. The manor folk had gone, as if to the ferry of death, taking no worldly store or sumptuous baggage with them. Not a living thing did they discover, save the fish darting in the water. The cubicula were empty, their couches tumbled; the culina fireless, and its hearth cold.
Pelleas and the women marvelled much at the beauty of the place; its solitude seemed but a ghostly charm to them. As for the girl Morgan, she had taken Pelleas into her immediate and especial favour, holding at his side everywhere, a-bubble with delight. The luxury of the place pleased her at every glance; her vanity ran riot like a bee among flowers. She eyed herself furtively in mirrors, and put a rose daintily in her hair while Pelleas was not looking. She had already rifled a cabinet, strung a chain of amethysts about her neck, and poked her fingers into numberless rings. Then she would try the couches, queen it for a moment in some stately chair, or smother her face sensuously in the flowers growing from the urns. All these pretty vapourings were carried through with a most mischievous grace. Igraine, who had seen the girl white and whimpering an hour before and in deadly horror of the pit, wondered at her, and hated her liberally in her heart.
Nor was Pelleas glad of the change her presence had wrought; for her childish subtleties had no hold on him, and even her thieving seemed insipid. With solemn and shadowy thoughts in his heart, her frivolous worldliness came like some tinkling discord. Igraine seemed to have dimmed her eyes from him beneath the shadow of her hood. Her face was set like the face of a statue, and there was no play of thought upon it. She walked proudly behind the pair—not with them—like one elbowed out of companionship by a vapouring rival.
In the women’s bower Morgan found a lute, and pounced upon it.
“One’s whole desire seems here,” she chattered. “This bower suits my fancy like a dream, and I could lodge here a month for love of it. What think you, Knight Pelleas? I never set foot in a fairer manor. I warrant you there are meat and wine in the cellars. We will feast and have music anon.”
Pelleas’s face looked more suited to a burial. Igraine pitied him, for his eyes looked tired and sad. Morgan ran on like a jay. In the chapel she found Igraine a share.
“Here is your portion, holy Sister,” she said; “mine the bower, yours the altar. So you see we are all well suited. Come, though, is it not very horrible having to look solemn all day, and to wear a grey gown? I should fade in a week inside such a hood; besides, it makes you look such a colour.”
Igraine could certainly boast a colour at that moment that might have warned the woman of her rising fume. Pelleas broke in and took up the argument.
“Men do not consider dress,” he said; “everything is fair to the comely. I look into a woman’s face and into her eyes, and take the measure of her heart. Such is my catechism.”
“But you like to see rich silks and a smile, and to hear a laugh at times. What is a girl if she is not gay? No discourtesy to you, sister; but you seem so far set from Sir Pelleas and myself.”
Igraine, lacking patience, flared up like a torch. “Ha! mark you,” she said, “my habit makes me no coward, nor do I thieve. No discourtesy to you, my dear lady.”
Morgan set up a thrill of laughter.
“How true a woman is a nun,” quoth she; “but you are too severe, too careful. Thieving, too; why, I may as well have a trinket or so before the place is rifled, even if I take a single ring. And what is more, I have been turned from my own house with hardly a bracelet or a bodkin. Come, Sir Pelleas, let us be going; the Sister would be at her prayers. I see we but hinder her.”
Pelleas had lost both pity and patience in the last minute. Partisanship is inevitable even in the most trivial differences, and Pelleas’s frown was strongly for Morgan la Blanche.
“Perhaps it would be well, madame,” said he, “if we all went on our knees for the day’s deliverance. I cannot see that there is any shame in gratitude.”
“Gratitude!” chirped the girl. “Gratitude to whom?”
“To the Lord Saviour, madame, and the Mother Virgin.”
She half laughed in his face, but his eyes sobered her. For a moment she fronted him with an incredulous smirk, then her glance wavered, and lowered to his breast. It held there with a tense stare, while her whole face hardened. Pelleas saw her pupils darken, her cheeks flush and pale in a moment. He thought nothing of it, or ascribed her distraught and strange look to some sudden shame or shock of penitence. In a trice the smile was back again, and she seemed pert and pleased as ever.
“I see you are too devout for me,” she said with a glib laugh, “and that I am too wicked a thing for the moment. I will leave you to Sister Igraine till you both have prayed your fill.” Here she laughed again, a laugh that made Igraine’s cheeks burn. “Remember me to St. Anthony if you may. If I recollect rightly he was a nice old gentleman, who cured ‘the fire’ for a miracle, and nearly fell in love with a devil. Till you have done, I will go and gather flowers.”
Pelleas and Igraine looked at one another.
“A devout child,” said the man.
“And not bred in a nunnery.”
“The world’s convent, I should say.”
For the moment Igraine was almost for telling him of her own hypocrisy, but the thought found her more troubled on that score than she could have guessed. She had acted a lie to the man, and feared his true eyes despite her courage. “Another day I will tell him,” she thought; “it is not so great a sin after all.” So they turned and knelt at their devotions.
Morgan la Blanche went away like the wind. She ran through atrium and porch with hate free in her eyes, and her child’s face twisted into a scowl of temper. In the garden she idled up and down awhile in a restless fume, like one whose thoughts bubble bodingly. Sometimes she would smite a lily peevishly with her open hand, or pluck a flower and trample it under her feet as though it had wronged her. Then she would take something from her bosom and stare at it while her lips worked, or while she bit her fingers as though galled by some inward barb. Presently she found her way by a laurel walk to the orchard, and thence by a wicket-gate to the island’s rim, where one of her men kept watch on the further meadows.
She stood under an apple tree, called to him, and beckoned. He came to her—a short, burly fellow with the look of a bull, and brute writ large on his visage. Morgan drew him under the swooping dome of the tree, plucked something that shone from her bosom, and dangled it before his eyes.
“The cross,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Galerius, the cross.”
The man stared at her stupidly. Morgan lifted a finger, ran this way and that peering into the green glooms and listening. Then she came back to the man, soft-footed, glib as a cat, with the cross of gold gripped in her fingers. She smiled at him, a smile that was almost a leer.
“Galerius,” she said, “the knight in the house yonder wears a chain with one cross missing, and the fellow cross matches this. Moreover, his poniard sheath is empty. I marked all this as I stood by him a moment ago. This is the man who slew my lord.”
The servant’s heavy face showed that he understood her well enough now.
“To-night,” she said, almost skipping under the trees with the intensity of her malice, “it shall be with his own poniard. I have it here. Galerius, you have always been a good fellow.”
The man grinned.
“Keep silence and leave all to me. I shall need your hand and no more.”
“Nor shall he,” said Galerius curtly.
Morgan grew suddenly bleak and quiet, with the thought of murder harboured in her heart.
“Look for yourself, Galerius,” she said; "see that my eyes have not deceived me. The man must have come upon Lord Madan when he was alone, after our hirelings had deserted the house. He slew him in the winter room—this whelp sent by Aurelius the king. You and I, Galerius, found the cross in my lord’s dead hand, and the poniard in his bosom. I warrant you we will level this deed before we hold again for Winchester."
“Trust my hand, Madame Morgan,” quoth the man; “if you can have the fellow sleeping, so much the better, one need not strike in a hurry.”
“Leave it to me,” she said; “I will give you your knife and your chance to-night.”
With that she sent the fellow back to his watching, and threaded the orchard to the manor garden. Pelleas and Igraine had long ended their prayers in the chapel. Morgan found them in the atrium, watching the fish in the water and their own reflections in the pool. The girl had quite smothered the bleak look that had held her features in the orchard. She was the same ingenuous, self-pleased little woman whose blue eyes seemed as clear and honest as a sleeping sea in summer. Before, she had flown in Pelleas’s face for vanity’s sake; now she seemed no less his woman—ready with smiles and childish flattery, and all the pleasantness she could gather. She was at his side again—quick with her eyes and tongue. Probably she guessed that the man despised her, but then that was of no moment now, seeing that it made the secret in her heart more bitter.
At noon they dined in the triclinium, with man Galerius to serve. He had ransacked kitchen and pantry, and from the ample store discovered, had spread a sufficient meal. His eyes were ever on Pelleas as he waited. There was no doubt about cross or poniard sheath; and Galerius found pleasure in scanning the knight’s armour and looking for the place where he might strike.
The afternoon proved sultry, and Pelleas took his turn in keeping watch by the bank. Cool and placid lay the water in the sun, while vapoury heat hung over the meadows and the distant woods. There was still fear lest the heathen might return, thinking to catch the islanders napping. The very abruptness of their retreat had been in itself suspicious; and Pelleas was all for caution. Igraine’s face seemed to make him more careful of peril. He thought much of her as he paced the green bank for three hours or more, before leaving the duty to Galerius and his fellow.
Returning to the manor he found Igraine cushioned on the tiled floor beside the impluvium, fingering the lute that Morgan la Blanche had found. The latter lady was still in the tablinum, so Igraine said, pilfering and admiring at her leisure, with fruit and a cup of spiced wine ready at her hand. Pelleas took post on the opposite side of the pool to Igraine, unarmed himself at his leisure, and began to clean his harness. No task could have pleased Igraine better. She put the lute away, took his helmet on her lap, and burnished it with the corner of her gown. Pelleas had sword, breast-plate, greaves and shoulder pieces beside him. Their eyes often met over the pool as they sat with the scent of lilies in the air, and talked little—but thought the more.
Igraine felt queerly happy. There seemed a warm fire in her bosom, a stealthy, happy heat that crept through every atom of her frame like the sap into the fibres of some rich rose. Her heart seemed to unfold itself like a flower in the sun. She looked often at Pelleas, and her eyes were very soft and bright.
“A fair place, this,” she said presently, as the man furbished his sword.
“Fair indeed,” said he; “a rich manor.”
“It is strange to me after Avangel.”
“Perhaps more beautiful.”
“Ah,” she said, with a sudden kindling; "I think my whole soul was made for beauty, my whole desire born for fair and lovely things. You will smile at me for a dreamer, but often my thoughts seem to fly through forests—marvellous green glooms all drowned in moonlight. I love to hear the wind, to watch the great oaks battling, to see the sea one laugh of gold. Every sunset harrows me into a moan of woe. I can sing to the stars at night—songs such as the woods weave from the voice of a gentle wind, dew-ladened, green and lovely. Sometimes I feel faint for sheer love of this fair earth."
Pelleas’s eyes were on her with a strange deep look. His dark face was aglow with a new wonder, as though his soul had flashed to hers. The great sword lay naked and idle in his hands.
“Often have I felt thus,” he said, “but my lips could never say it. Thoughts are given to some without words.”
“But the joy is there,” she answered, with a quiet smile.
“Joy in beauty?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, girl, a beautiful face, or a blaze of gold and scarlet over the western hills, are like strange wine to my heart.”
“Yes, yes, it is grand to live,” said Igraine.
Pelleas’s head went down over his sword as though in thought.
“It would seem,” he said presently, “that beauty is a closed book, save to the few. It is good to find a heart that understands.”
“Ah, that know I well,” she chimed; “in Avangel they had souls like clay; they saw nothing, understood nothing. I think I would rather die than be soul blind.”
“So many folk,” said the man, “seem to live as though they were ever scanning the bottom of a pot. They never get beyond reflections on appetite.”
As they talked, Morgan la Blanche came in from behind the looped curtains, with silks, samites, siclatons, and sarcanets in her arms. She had found some rich chest in the bower accomplice to her fingers, and had revelled gloriously. She sat herself down near Pelleas, and began to laugh and chatter like a pleased child. The dainty stuffs were tossed this way and that, gathered into scarves or frills, spread over her lap and eyed critically as to colour, before being bound in a bale for her journey. Vain and vapid as her behaviour seemed, there was more in this little woman’s heart than either Pelleas or Igraine could have guessed. Her whole mood was false. Foolish as she seemed on the surface, she was more keen, more subtle by far than Igraine, whose whole soul spelt fire and courage.
As the day drew towards evening, Morgan became more stiff and silent. Her eyes were bright as the jewels round her neck; they would flash and waver, or fall at times into long, sidelong stares. More than once Igraine caught the girl’s face in hard thought, the pert lips straight and cruel, the eyes hungry and very shallow. It reminded her of Morgan’s look in the morning, when she was in such stark fear of the heathen and of death. Yet while she watched her, smiles and glib vivacity would sweep back again as though there had been but a transient cloud of thought over the girl’s face.
With the shadows lengthening, they turned, all three of them, into the garden, and found ease on a grass bank beneath the black boughs of a great cedar. The arch of the dark foliage cut the sky into a semicircle of azure. All about them the grass seemed dusted with dim flowers—blue, white, and violet. A rich company of tiger lilies bowed to the west. Dense banks of laurels and cypresses stood like screens of blackest marble, for the sun was sinking. As they lay under the tree, they could look down upon the water, sheeny and glorious in the evening peace. Further still, the willows slept like a mist of green, with the fields Elysian and full of sweet stupors, the woods beyond standing solemn and still at the beck of night.
Morgan, who had brought the lute with her, began to touch the strings, and to sing softly in a thin, elfin voice—
My heart is open at the hour of night
When lilies swoon
And roses kiss in bed.
When all the dreams of sad-lipped passion rise
From sleep’s blue bowers
To die in lover’s eyes.
Come flame, Come fire,
A woman’s bosom
Is but life’s desire.
So, all my treasures are but held for loveIn scarlet silks
And tapestries of snow.
I long, white-bosomed like the stars that sigh
A bed in heaven
For love’s ecstasy.
Come flame, Come fire,
A woman’s bosom
Is all man’s desire.
The birds were nestling and gossiping in the laurel bushes, taking lodging for the night. From the topmost pinnacle of the cedar, a thrush, a feathered muezzin, had called the world to prayer. From the mere came the cries of water-fowl; the eerie wail of the lapwing rose in the meadows. Presently, all was still and breathless; a vast hush seemed to hold the world. The west was fast dying.
Under the cedar the light lurked dim and magic. Morgan’s fingers were still hovering on the strings, and she was singing to herself in a whisper, as though she had care for nothing, save for that which was in her heart. Pelleas and Igraine were quite near each other in the shadow. They had looked into each other’s eyes—one long, deep look. Each had turned away troubled, yet with a sudden glory of quick anguish in their hearts. The night seemed very subtle to them, and the whole world sweet.
Chapter VII
Igraine’s thoughts were to music when she went to bed that night. Pelleas’s eyes stayed with her, darkly, sadly; his tragic face seemed to look out of the night, like the face of one dead. And he more than liked her. She felt sure of that, even if she did not dream of kinder things sprung from long looks and quiet sighings. She sat on her bed, and smiled the whole strange day over to herself again. She had the man before her in all his looks and poses; how he sat his horse, the habit he had of looking deeply into nothingness, his strength and quiet knightliness, and above all his devout soul. He seemed to please her at every point in a way that set her thrilling within herself with a delicious wonder. Last, she thought of the weird twilight under the grand old tree—rare climax to a day of deeds and memories. She felt her heart leap as she remembered the great wistful look that had shone out on her from Pelleas’s eyes.
The manor house seemed still as the night itself. Morgan la Blanche had taken herself to a couch in the triclinium, choosing it rather than one of the cubicles leading from the atrium. Galerius was on guard, pacing the mere’s bank, while his comrade slept in the kitchen. Pelleas, armed, with sword and shield beside him, had quartered himself on cushions in the great porch, with the doors open.
It was about ten o’clock. Igraine, full of sweet broodings, crept into bed, and settled herself for sleep. The night was wonderfully peaceful. The window of the room was overgrown with a tangle of roses, the flowers seeming to mellow the air as it came softly in, and there was a faint shimmer into the shadows that hinted at moonlight. Igraine lay long awake, with her eyes on the few stars that peeped through between the jambs. There was too much in her heart to let sleep in for the while, and her thoughts were a’dance within her brain like wild, fleet-footed things. As she lay in a happy fever of thought, her face grew hot upon the pillow, and her tumbled hair was like a lustrous lava flow over the bed. In course, despite her tossing, she fell into a shallow, fitful sleep that verged between wakefulness and dreams.
It was well past midnight when she started, wide awake, with the half-dreamt memory of some eerie sound in her ears. She sat up in bed, and listened, shivering. There were footfalls, swift and light, on the pavement of the atrium. From somewhere came a gruff voice, speaking tersely and in bated tones. Next, there was something that sounded like a groan, and then silence.
Igraine crept out of bed, hurried on her habit, opened the door gently, and looked out. Moonlight streamed in through the square aperture in the roof of the hall, but all else lay in darkness. The porch gates were ajar, with a band of light slanting through upon the tiles. Eager, tremulous, she fancied as she stood that she heard the beat of oars. Then the low, groaning cough that she had heard before thrilled her into action like a trumpet cry.
She was across the court in a second, and into the darkened porch. The doors swung back to her hands, and the night streamed in. Clear before her, lit with a silver emphasis, lay the water, and on it she saw the dark outline of the barge, moving with foaming oars towards the further bank. For the moment her heart seemed to halt within her.
“Pelleas!” she cried. “Pelleas!”
A stifled sound answered her from a dark corner of the porch. With a sudden frost in her bosom she saw a black rill trickling over the tiles in the moonlight, even touching her feet. Great fear came upon her, but left her power to think. In the triclinium she had seen a lamp, with tinder, steel, and flint in a tray beside it, and in her fear she ran thither, tore her fingers in her haste with stone and steel, but had the lamp lit with such speed as she had never learnt at Avangel. Then she went back trembling into the porch.
The knight Pelleas lay in the corner, half propped against the wall. His head was bowed down upon his chest, and he had both hands clasped upon the neck-band of his tunic. Blood was trickling from his mouth, and he seemed to be hardly breathing, while under the left arm-pit shone the silver hilt of the knife that had been thrust there by Galerius’s hand. To the thought of the girl it seemed as if the man were in his death agony.
The utter realism of the moment drove all fear from her. She set the lamp on the tiles, and kneeling by Pelleas, pulled the knife slowly from his side. A gush of blood followed. She strove to staunch it with a corner of her gown. The man was quite unconscious, and never heeded her, though he was still breathing jerkily and feebly, with a rattling stridor in his throat. She lifted his head and rested it upon her shoulder, while she knelt and pressed her hand over the wound, dreading to see him die each moment.
For an hour she knelt, cold and almost bare-kneed, on the stone floor, holding the man to her, watching his breathing with a tense fear, pressing upon the wound as though ethereal life would ebb and mock her fingers. Little by little she felt the warm flow cease, felt her fingers stiffened at their task, while the minutes dragged like æons, and the lamp flickered low in the night. At last she knew that the issue was stayed, and that Pelleas bled no more. Gradually, fearfully, lest life should fall away like a poised wand, she laid the man down, and again watched with her hand over the stricken side. He was breathing more noticeably now, with less of the look of death about him. Encouraged thus, she dared to meditate leaving him to find wine, and sheets to cover him there. When she essayed to move she found her habit clotted to the wound where she had held it. It took her minutes to cut the cloth through with the knife that had stabbed Pelleas, for she was palsied lest the wound should break again and lose her her love’s labour.
Free at last, she fled into her room, tore the clothes in which she had lain from the bed, and carried them trailing into the porch. Then, lamp in hand, she spoiled the triclinium of rugs and cushions, and found there the chalice of wine that Morgan had sipped from. Ladened, she struggled back across the hall, fearing all the while to find the man parted. No such foul fortune, however. He was breathing better and better.
Then she set to to make a bed. She spread cushions and rugs; and then, so slowly, so gently, that she seemed hardly to move, she had the man laid upon the couch, with two cushions under his head. Next she covered him with the clothes taken from her own bed. Thus much completed without mishap, she washed his lips and face with water taken from the pool, trickled some wine down his throat, and set the doors wide to watch for dawn.
So pressed had she been by the man’s peril, that even the right of thought had been denied her. Now, seated by the lamp, she began to sift matters as well as her meagre knowledge would suffer, keeping constant watch on wounded Pelleas the while. She knew that Morgan and her men were gone in the barge, but as to who gave Pelleas his wound, she could come to no clear understanding in her heart. There must have been some deep feud for such a stroke, though she could find no reason for the deed. Still, she could believe anything of that chit Morgan la Blanche, and there the riddle rested for a season.
Before long she saw the summer dawn stealing silently and mysteriously into the east. The face of the sky grew grey with waking light, and the hold of the moon and night relaxed on wood and meadow. Then the birds began in the garden, till she thought their shrill piping must wake Pelleas from his swoon, so blithe and lusty were they. The east was forging day fast in its furnace of gold. The glare touched the clouds and rolled them into wreaths of amber fire.
A sigh from the couch brought her to her feet like magic. She went and knelt by the bed in quite a tumult of expectation. Pelleas’s hands were groping feebly over the coverlet like weak, blind things. Igraine caught them in hers, thrilled as they closed upon her fingers, and, bending low, she waited with her lips almost on the man’s, her hair on his forehead, her eyes fixed on his closed lids. All her soul seemed to droop above him like a lily over a grave. Presently he sighed again, stirred and opened his eyes full on Igraine’s, as she knelt and mingled her breath with his.
“Pelleas,” she whispered. “Pelleas.”
He looked at her for a moment with a dazed stare that dawned into a smile that made her long to sing.
“It is Igraine,” she said.
Pelleas caught a deep breath, and groaned as his stricken side twinged to the quick.
Igraine put two fingers on his lips.
“Lie still,” she said, “lie still if you love earth. You must not speak, no, not one little word. I must have you quiet as a child, Pelleas. You have been so near death.”
She felt the man’s hand answer hers. He did not speak or move, but lay and looked at her as a little child in a cradle looks at its mother, or as a dog eyes his master. Igraine put his hands gently down upon the coverlet, and smiled at him.
“Lie so, Pelleas,” she said; “be very quiet, for I am to leave you, for a minute and no more. You must not move a finger, or I shall scold.”
She beamed at him, started up and ran straight to the chapel, her heart a-whimper with a joy that was not mute. She went full length on the altar steps with her face turned to the cross above—the cross whose golden arms were aglow with the sun through the eastern window. In her mood, the white Christ’s face seemed to smile on her with equal joy. She learnt more in that moment than Avangel had taught her in a year.
Hardly five minutes had passed before she was with Pelleas again, bearing fruit and olives, bread and oil. She made a sweet dish of bread and berries, with some wine in it for his heart’s sake, and then knelt at his side to feed him. She would not let him lift a finger, but served him herself with silver spoon and platter, smiling to give him courage as he obeyed her like a babe. It seemed very pitiful to her that so much strength and manliness should have been smitten so low in one brief night. None the less, the man’s feebleness brought her more joy than ever his courage had done, and his peril had discovered clear wells of ruth in her that might have been months hidden but for the hand of Galerius. When Pelleas had finished the bread and fruit, she gave him more wine, and then set to to bathe his hands and face with scented water taken from the tablinum. Pelleas’s eyes, with deep shadows under them now, watched her all the while with a kind of wondering calm. The sunlight flooded in, and lit her hair like red gold, and made her neck to shine like alabaster. Meeting his look, she reddened, and turned to hide her face for a moment, that he might not see all that was writ there in letters of flame.
“Now you must sleep, Pelleas,” she said, crossing his hands upon the quilt.
He shook his head feebly.
“I am going to leave you,” she persisted, “so you must not flout me, Pelleas. I shall be here, ready, when you wake.”
She smiled at him, and closed his lids gently with her finger tips.
“Sleep,” she said, brushing her hand softly over his forehead, “for sleep will give you strength again. You may need it.”
She left him there, and taking bread and olives with her, she closed the porch gates to shade him, and went herself into the garden. After a meal under the old cedar, she went down to the water’s edge and washed her feet from the stains of Pelleas’s blood, and bathed her hands and face. She saw the barge amid the reeds and rushes on the further bank. There was no sign of life in the meadows, and the woods were deep with peace.
Then she remembered Pelleas’s horse. Going to the stable behind the manor, she found the beast stalled there, though Morgan’s horses had been taken by the men in the barge. Igraine took hay from the rack, gave him a measure of oats in his manger, and watered him with water from the mere. Then she stood and combed his mane with her fingers as he fed. Some of the poppies she had plaited there were dead and drooping in the black hair. She thought as she unbound the withered things how nearly Pelleas’s life had withered with theirs. She was very happy in her heart, and she sang softly the low tender songs women love when their thoughts are maying.
Igraine passed the whole morning in the garden, going every now and again to the porch to open the doors gently, and peep in upon the sleeper. She gathered a basket of fruit and a lapful of flowers. About noon she went in, and bringing jars from the triclinium, she filled them with water and garnished them with flowers. These jars she set in array about Pelleas’s bed, one of tiger lilies and one of white lilies; a bowl of roses at his head, a jar of hollyhocks and one of thyme, and fragrant herbs at the foot. Moreover, she strewed the coverlet with pansies, and scattered rose leaves on his pillow. Then she went to the chapel to pray awhile, before sitting down to watch beside his bed.
Pelleas woke about an hour after noon had turned. At his first stirring, Igraine was hanging over him like a mother, with her hands on his. Pelleas looked up at her, saw the flowers about his bed, and, risking her menaces, spoke his first word.
“Igraine,” he said.
She put her face down to his.
“I am much stronger,” he said; “I can talk now.”
“Perhaps a very little,” she answered, with her eyes on his.
“Igraine!”
“Yes, Pelleas.”
“You are very wonderful.”
“Pelleas!” she said redly.
“I should have died without you, for I was witless, and coughing blood.”
“I thought you would die,” she said very softly, with her eyes downcast. “I held you in my arms and, God helping me, staunched the flow from your wound. But tell me, Pelleas, who was it stabbed you?”
The man smiled at her.
“There, I am as ignorant as you,” he said. “I woke with a fiery twinge in my side, and saw a man running out of the porch in the dark. I struggled to rise. Blood came into my mouth, and betwixt coughing and hard breathing I must have fainted. What of the others?”
Igraine knelt up from stooping over him, and thought.
“Morgan and her men,” she said presently, “fled across the mere in the barge just after you had been stabbed. I saw them go in the moonlight. It was your cry that woke me in bed. I came and found you senseless in the corner, and the woman and her rascals making off in the boat. One of the men must have smitten you while you slept.”
Pelleas kept silence for a while, as though he were thinking hard.
“Show me the knife,” he said anon.
Igraine had washed away the stains, and laid it aside in a corner. She held it up now before Pelleas’s eyes as he lay in bed. He took it from her with trembling hands, and handled it, his face darkening.
“This is my own poniard,” he said, “the poniard I left in the heart of the man in Andredswold. Look, girl, look! Search and see, mayhap you may find a cross.”
Igraine did his bidding, and searched the pavement, but found nothing. Then she came back to the bed, and began to turn the cushions up here and there, and to scan the tiled floor. Sure enough, under the foot of the bed, she found a small gold cross lying, smeared lightly with dried blood. She took it up and gave it to Pelleas. He caught and held it with a terse cry.
Chapter VIII
Pelleas lay the afternoon through in a half dream of shifting thought. But for the tangible things about him there might have been elfin mischief in the air, for the last few days had passed with such flash of new feeling and desire that the man’s mind was still in a daze.
He lay in bed, with jars of lilies round him, and a woman tending him with the grace of a Diana. It was all very strange, very pleasant, despite the ague in his ribs and his inordinate weakness. He was not so sure after all that he bore Morgan la Blanche any so fervent a piece of malice; fortune seemed to beckon him towards generosity, seeing that his condition was so truly picturesque. Uncouth feelings were swallowed up for the time being by a benignant stupor of contentment.
But the balance of human happiness is often very nice and subtle. Leaden reason tumbled into the scale of melancholy may even outscale the bowl of dreams. Love and law often dangle on either beam of a man’s mind, or philosophy anchored to a rock may sky poor fancy into the clouds. So it was with Pelleas that day, wisdom being often enough a miserable nurse. When he thought of Igraine, reason as he would with himself, his soul began to shimmer like moon-rippled water. When she looked at him the very pillars of his manhood seemed to quake. When she passed, light-footed, from garden to porch, she seemed to come in like the sun, bringing streams of warmth into his wounded flesh. Of necessity, he soon met other cogitations less pleasant, and no less imperative. From legal quarters came that inevitable pedagogue blear-eyed Verity, paunched up with dogma and breathing ethical platitudes like garlic. “The woman’s a nun,” quoth Dom Verity, with a sneer. “Keep your fancy in leash, my good Pelleas, and forswear romance. Bar your thoughts from a child of the church or you will rue it. No man may serve a nun. The world has said.”
What with his wound and his fractious meditations, Pelleas soon fell into a most dismal temper. Like most sick folk he had lost for the time that level sense of proportion that is the sure outcome of health. His thoughts began to gape at him, and to pull most melancholy grimaces. Even the dead man squatting in the great chair in the manor in Andredswold began to haunt him like an ogrish conscience. Hot and racked, he could stand his own company at last no longer. Calling Igraine to him, he began to unburden himself to her with regard to the man he had done to death in the forest.
The girl listened, mild as moonlight, and ready to swear away her soul to soothe him.
“I am troubled for the deed,” he was saying, “though the man deserved death, twenty deaths, and though I served justice to the echo. His blood hangs on my hands, and makes me restless at heart.”
“Tell me his sin, Pelleas.”
“They were many, and too gross for ears such as thine.”
“Then palpably he was too gross to live.”
“No doubt, child.”
“Then why trouble for his death, Pelleas; you would not shrink from treading out an adder’s brains?”
“Ah, but there is the man’s soul. I feel for him after my own down-bringing. What chance had he of penitence?”
“True,” she said gravely, “but your mother, the Abbess Gratia, used to tell us that bad men repented only in legends and in the Bible; never in grim life. Besides, you prevented the man committing worse offences in the future, and getting deeper into the pit. Why, Pelleas, hundreds of good knights have lost life for a mere matter of love; why trouble for the life of a wretch who perhaps never knew what truth meant. You would not grieve for men slain in battle.”
“In battle the blood is hot and the brain afire. This was a rank and reasonable stroke.”
"And therefore the more deserved. Why trouble about it, Pelleas? In faith, since your plight makes me tyrant, I forbid such brooding. It is but the evil fancy of a distraught mind, an incubus I must chase away. See, your hands are hot, and your forehead too. Will you sleep again, or shall I sing to you?"
“Presently,” he said. “I have more to speak of yet.”
Igraine knelt by him on her cushion, serene and tender.
“Say on, Pelleas,” she said; “a woman loves a man’s confidence. If I can give you comfort I will gladly listen here till midnight. You are not yourself, weak from loss of blood, and a gnat’s sting is like a lance thrust to you. Tell me your other troubles.”
Pelleas groaned, hesitated, looked up into her eyes, and recanted inwardly. He furbished up a minor woe to serve the occasion.
“It is my sword and shield,” he said; “they were given me blessed and consecrated by my mother. It is in my thought that I had smirched them by this deed. What think you, girl?”
“I cannot think so,” she said stoutly.
Then since his face was so wistful and troubled, she racked her fancy for some plan she thought might soothe him. A sudden purpose came to her like prophecy.
“Listen,” she said. “I can do this for you. Give me your shield and sword, and let me lay them on the high altar under the cross with candles burning, and let me pray for them there. Will that comfort you, Pelleas?”
“Yes,” he said, with a sudden sad smile; “pray for me, go and pray for me, Igraine.”
It was the impulse of a moment. She bent down with a great thrill of wonder, and kissed the man’s lips. It was soon done, soon sped. She saw Pelleas’s blood stream to his face, saw something in his eyes that made her heart canter. Then she darted away, took up the great sword and the shield with its red face, and went to the chapel singing like a seraph. Her prayers were a strange jumble of worship and recollection. “Lord Jesu, cleanse his spirit,” said her heart one moment; “truth, how he coloured and looked at me,” it sang with more human refrain the next. “May he be a knight above knights,” quoth devotion; “and may I be ever fair in his eyes,” chimed love. Altogether, it was a most quaint prayer.
Now, a certain mundane matter had been troubling Igraine’s thought that day. The barge, seized and put to use by Morgan and her men, lay amid the reeds on the nether shore, ready to give passage to any chance wayfarer, welcome or otherwise, who should choose to cross the mere. The boat, so fixed, floated as a constant peril to Pelleas and herself. She felt that peace would flout them so long as the barge lay ready to play ferry-boat to any casual intruder. Pelleas’s wound might keep them cooped many days in the place. She vowed to herself that the boat should be regained, and blushed when the oath accused her.
At dusk, when the birds were piping, and there was a green hush over the world, she went back to Pelleas, a beautiful shameface, accompliced by the twilight.
“I have prayed,” she said simply.
Pelleas touched her fingers.
“I feel happier,” he said.
“That is well.”
“Stay near me, Igraine. It grows dark fast.”
“I shall be with you till you sleep,” she said.
Igraine fed him with her own hands, talking little the while, but feeling very enamoured of her lot. She was thinking of her new surprise with some mischieful pleasure as she tended Pelleas. The man was silent, yet very placid and facile to her willing. When she had bathed his face and neck, and seen him well couched, she took the lute Morgan had handled, and began to sing to him softly—wistfully, as though the song was the song of a quiet wind through willows. It was a chant for the dusk, for the quiet gazing of the first fires of heaven. Pelleas heard it like the distant touching of strings over charmed water, and with the breath of lilies over him he fell asleep.
Igraine held by him still as a mouse in the dark, till she knew by his breathing that he was deep in slumber. Then she set the lute aside, put the lamp by the porch door, so that it should be ready to hand, and stole out into the garden.
The moon was just coming up above the distant trees. Igraine waited under the black-vaulted cedar till the great ring rode bleak above the fringe of the tops before she went down between laurels to the water’s edge. There was a deep cedarn scent on the warm air, and everything seemed deathly still. Going to the landing stage, she stood there awhile looking at the water, dark and mysterious, with pale webs of light upon its agate surface. Then she began to bind her hair closely on her head, smiling to herself, and staring down at her vague image in the water.
Her hair in shackles, she turned to her task in earnest. Soon habit, shift, and sandals were lying in a heap, and she was standing clean, rare, gleamingly straight as a statue, with her arms folded upon her breast. For a moment she stood, making the night to swoon, before taking to the mere. Pearly white with an aureole of foam, she swam flankwise with an overhand stroke, one arm thrusting out like a silver sickle. Here and there, fretted by the willows, long moonbeams glinted on her round whiteness, as the maddened foam bubbled, and the water sighed and yearned amid the sedges. A fine glow had leapt through her body like wine, and the mere seemed to sway and sing as she swam for the main bank, where the willows stood blackly in a mist of phosphor glory. Soon she reached the shallows at a pleasant place where stretch of grassland tongued down into the mere. She climbed out, and stood like a water nymph, her body agleam and asparkle with its dew, her skin like rare silk, smooth as a star’s glance. Down fell her hair like smoke. She stretched her arms to the moon, and laughed, aglow with the warmth gotten of her swim. Then she went to where the barge lay amid the reeds, and boarding it poled out into the deeps.
Standing on the poop she used an oar as a paddle, and so brought the cumbrous barge slowly under way. It stole out from the fretted shadows of the trees, and glided like a great ark over the mere in black silence, save for the dip of the blade and the drip of water. The voyage took Igraine longer than her swim. At last, with the boat moored at the stage, she dried her limbs and body with her hair, and took again to shift and habit. Then she stole back to the manor, listened a moment to Pelleas’s breathing, and having lit her lamp she went to bed.
Next morning Igraine, with her deed locked up in her heart, was preparing Pelleas a meal. He had just stirred and roused himself from sleep with a little cry, and he was watching the girl with the mute reflective look of one just freed from the visions of the night.
“Igraine,” he said.
She turned to him with a soft smile.
“I have been dreaming,” he confessed gravely.
“Dreaming, Pelleas?”
“I thought,” said he, “that I saw a great dragon of gold come over the meadows with a naked sword in his mouth, and a collar of rubies round his throat. And he came to the mere’s edge, ramping and breathing fire. And lo! he entered into the barge there, and the barge went forth bearing him, while all the mere’s water boiled and shone about the boat like flame. So he came to the island, and all greenness seemed to wither before him, and with the fear of him I awoke.”
Igraine shook her head at the man.
“Your dreams are distraught,” she said; “it is your wound, Pelleas. In faith we should need the great Merlin for such a vision.”
“Ah,” said he, “I can read you the riddle, Igraine. Our barge lies by the land bank ready for any foe. That is where the dream touches us.”
Igraine brought him a bowl of crushed bread and fruit, and made as though to feed him.
“Never worry,” she said; “the barge is moored safe at the stage.”
Pelleas put the bowl aside with one hand, and stared at her from his pillows.
“Did the barge swim the mere of herself,” quoth he, “and anchor for us so fairly?”
“No.”
“Then—”
Igraine went red of a sudden, and looked at her knees.
“Sooth, Pelleas,” she said, “I must have been the dragon of your dream; God pardon me.”
“Igraine!”
“I never knew I seemed so fearful a creature.”
“Honour and praise—”
He half rose on his pillows in his enthusiasm. Igraine put him gently back, and took up the bowl of bread and fruit.
“That will do, my dear Pelleas,” she said; “now just lie still and have your breakfast.”
What boots it to chronicle at length their sojourn in the island manor. Twelve days Igraine nursed the man there, giving all her heart for service, tending him from sunrise to the fall of night. She seemed to have no other joy than to sit and talk to him, to make music with voice and hand, to keep his couch posied round with flowers. On waking Pelleas would find her by him, fresh as the dawn and full of a golden tenderness; at night his eyes closed upon her gracious figure as she sat in the gloaming and sang. She was near to hear his voice, quick to see his needs and to remedy them with soft hands and softer looks. The very atmosphere about the man seemed touched and mellowed by her, and the hours seemed to trip to the measure of a golden rhyme.
Pelleas mended very rapidly under her care. His wound, sweet and innocent, gave him no trouble save some slight feverishness on the third day. The sixth morning found him so stalwart of temper that Igraine consented to his leaving bed for a morning provided he obeyed her to the letter. His first steps were taken in the atrium with Igraine’s arm about his waist, and his upon her shoulders. So well did he bear himself that the girl led him to the chapel, and there side by side on the altar steps they winged up their devotion to heaven. Igraine’s prayers, be it known, were all for love; Pelleas’s for the threatening shadows over his own soul.
Daily after this innovation Igraine would make him a couch under the great cedar tree in the garden, where he could rest shaded from the sun, and there, morn, noon, and eve, they had much comradeship and speech together. They would talk of God, the saints, and the souls of men, of love and honour, and the needs of Britain. Pelleas would tell her of his own service with Aurelius, of all the fair pomp of Lesser Britain, where Conan had begun a goodly kingdom years ago, and where many British folk had taken refuge. He had been to Rome as a boy, and he described that vast city to her, or told her of the bloody fields he had seen when the steel of Christendom met the heathen. Fresh streams from either soul welled out, and mingled much during those summer days. Pelleas and Igraine looked deep each into the heart of the other, finding fine store of nobleness, of truth, and of things beautiful, till the heart of each had treasured everything for love and for love’s desire. They were fair hours and very sweet to the two. The day seemed a casket of gold, and the night a bowl of ebony ablaze with stars.
About this time the man Pelleas began to go down into deep waters. Many days had passed with a flare of torches in the west; their sojourn was drawing to a close, and the night seemed near. The haler Pelleas grew in body, the more halt and hopeless waxed his soul. The whole world seemed to grow wounded to his eyes; the west was wistful at evening, and the starry sky a sob of pain. When Igraine harped and sang, each note flew like winged death into his heart. He had no joy that was not smitten through with anguish, no thought that was not crowned with thorns. It was a very simple matter indeed, but perverse to utter bitterness. Pelleas saw no hope for himself in the end. He would rock and toss, and think at night till the darkness seemed to crush him into a mere mass of misery. Above all there seemed to rise a great hand holding a cross of gold, and a voice that said, “Beware thy soul and death.”
Not so was it with Igraine. To her life had no shroud, and love prophesied of love alone. She knew what she knew, and her heart was full of summer and the song of birds. Pelleas loved her; she would have staked her soul on it, though she did not realise the desperate turmoil passing in the man’s clean heart. Knowing what she did, she was all for sun and moods of radiant thought and happiness. Each day she imagined that she would tell Pelleas of her secret; each day she gave the golden moment to the morrow. She knew how the man’s face would flame up with the fulness of great wonder, and like a woman she hoarded anticipation in her heart and waited.
The day soon came when Pelleas declared himself hale enough to bear armour, though the admission was made with no great amount of satisfaction. To test his strength he armed himself with Igraine’s help, harnessed his black horse, and rode round the island, first at a level pace with Igraine running beside him. Then he tried a gallop, handling spear and shield the while. Lastly, he took Igraine up to him, and rode with her as he had ridden through the wold. Suffering nothing from these ventures, and seeming sure in selle as ever, he declared with heavy heart that they should sally for Winchester on the morrow.
Pelleas and Igraine passed their last evening in the island under the great cedar in the garden. The place had deep memories for them, and very loth were they to leave it, so fair and kind a refuge had it proved to them in peril. Neither said much that evening, for their thoughts were busy. As for Pelleas, he was glum and heavy-browed as thunder, with a look in his deep eyes that spelt misery. It was as though he were leaving his very soul in the place to ride out like a corpse on a pilgrimage with despair. How much she might have eased him, perhaps Igraine never knew.
The west was already red and rosy, and there was a green hush over the meadows, and a canopy of pale porphyry in the east. All the soul of the world seemed to lift white hands to the night in a stupor of mutest woe. Yet the girl’s mood tended towards mere sensitive regret, for the future was not dark to her imaginings.
“You are sad, Pelleas,” she said.
“I am only thinking, Igraine.”
“I am sorry to leave this place.”
Pelleas sighed for answer. With a contradictory spirit, born of pain, he longed for night and the peace it would not bring. Something swore to him that he was more to the girl than man had ever been, and yet she seemed happy when he compared her humour with his own. The possibility that she could dream of broken vows was never in his thought. He could only believe that her heart was less deep than his, and the thought only added bitterness to his mead of sorrow.
“Igraine,” he said anon.
She turned to him.
“You love life?”
“Truth, Pelleas, I do.”
“Then love it not, girl.”
“Ah!”
“’Tis a broken bowl.”
“How so?” she said, thrilling.
Pelleas turned his face from her to hide the strife thereon. He felt as though death was in his heart, yet he spoke as quietly as though he were telling some mundane tale, and not words conjured up by a desperate wisdom.
“Igraine,” he said, "I have lived and learnt something in my time, and my words are honest. On earth what do we find—a lie on truth’s lips, and anguish on the face of joy. The roses bloom and die, white hands shrivel, and harness rusts under the green grass. As for fame, it breeds hate and jealousy, and the curse of the proud. Music is broken by the laugh of the fool, nor can youth forget the crabbed noisomeness of age. Women sing and pass. A man marries one night and is tombed the next. And love, what of love? I tell you love lives only in the eyes of woe. It is all mockery, cold damned mockery. I have said."
Chapter IX
Pelleas and Igraine were stirring soon after dawn on the morning of their sally for Winchester. It was a summer dawn, still and stealthy; the meadows were full of a shimmering mist, the mere spirit-wrapped, and dappled here and there with gold.
Silent and distraught they made their last meal in the quiet manor. Everything seemed sad and solemn, as though the stones could grieve; the lilies by the impluvium seemed adroop, and the flowers about Pelleas’s bed were withered. After the meal Pelleas armed himself, and went to harness his horse, while Igraine put up bread and foodstuff into a linen cloth for their journey. Before sallying they went all round the manor, into the chapel, where they prayed before the altar, into bower, parlour, and viridarium. The porch with its empty bed and withered flowers they took leave of last. There was such wistfulness there that even the dumb things seemed to cry out in pain.
Pelleas closed the gates with bowed head, and made the sign of the cross upon them with the pommel of his dagger. His throat seemed full of one great muffled sob. Together they wandered for the last time through the garden, while Igraine plucked some flowers for a keepsake. Pelleas felt that he loved every leaf in the place like his own soul. Then they went down to the water’s edge, and, getting the horse on board, they loosed the barge from the bank, and came slowly to the nether shore. It might have been the fury of death, so stark and solemn was Pelleas’s face.
Before turning their backs and riding away, they stood and looked long at the place girdled with its quiet waters. The great cedar slept there with a hood of mist over his green poll. Like a dream island it seemed, plucked by magic from some southern sea, fair with all fairness. Anon, despite their grieving, the last strand cracked, and the wrench was done. They were holding over vapoury meadows with their faces to the west.
Pelleas was very stoical that morning. As a matter of fact he had been awake all night, couched with misery and with thoughts that wounded him. All night through the lagging hours he had tossed and turned, cursing his destiny in his heart—too bitter for any prayer. What mockery that he who had passed so long unscathed should fall into hopeless homage to a nun. Desperate, he left his bed in the dark, and made the garden a dim cloister until dawn. Yet in the rack of struggle a clear voice had come to touch and dominate his being, and day had found him steadfast. He would hold to the truth, he vowed, do his duty, and let God judge of the measure of his gratitude. He could obey, but not with humility; he could suffer, but not with resignation.
It was after such a night in the furnace of struggle that he forged his temper for the days to come. He had thought to meet love with a stark hardihood, to talk lightly, to go with unruffled brow while his heart hungered. Nothing should move him to any emotion. He would meet destiny like a rock, let surges beat and melt back to the sea. It was better thus, he thought, than to go moaning for the moon.
Such was the determination that met Igraine’s lighter humour that morning. She could make nothing of the man as she rode before him. He was bleak, dismal, yet striving to seem contented with their lot, now conjuring up a withered smile, now lapsing into interminable silence. His eyes were stern in measure, but there was the old light in them when she looked deeply, and the staunch flame was there still. After all, Pelleas’s quiet humour did not trouble her very vastly. She had her own reading of the riddle, and a word in her heart that could unlock his trouble. Moreover, she was more than inclined to put him to such a test as should bring his manhood to a splendid trial. Perhaps there was some imp of vanity deep down in her woman’s heart. At all events, she suited herself to the occasion, and passed much of the time in thought.
A ride of some seventy miles lay before them before they should come to the gates of Winchester. Much of that region was wild forestland and moor, bleak wastes of scrub let into woods and gloom. Occasional meadows, and rare acres of glebe ringing some rude hamlet, broke the shadowy desolation of the land. Great oaks, gnarled, vast, and terrible, held giant sway amid the huddled masses of the lesser folk. Here the boar lurked, and the wolf hunted. But, for the most, it was dark and calamitous—a ghostly wilderness almost forsaken by man, and given over to the savagery of beasts.
Pelleas and Igraine came upon the occasional trail of the heathen as they went. A smoking villa, a burnt village with a dun mist hanging over it like a shroud, and once a naked man, bruised and bloody, bound to a tree, and shot through with arrows—such were the few sights that remembered to them their own need of caution. The wild country had been raided, and its sparse civilisation scattered to the woods. The crosses at the cross-roads had been thrown down and broken. A hermitage they came on in the woods had been sacked, and in it, to their pity, they found the body of a dead girl. They halted there to pray for her, and to give her burial. Pelleas dug a shallow grave under an oak, and they left her there, and went on their way with greater caution.
Not a soul did they meet, yet Pelleas kept under cover as much as possible for prudence’ sake. He scanned well every valley or piece of open land before crossing it, and kept under the wooelshawe whenever the track ran near trees. Fear of the unknown, and the dear burden that he bore, kept him alert as a goshawk for possible peril. By noon, despite sundry halts and reconnoitrings, they had covered nearly twenty miles, and by the evening of the same day they had added another score, for Pelleas’s horse was a powerful beast, and Igraine’s weight cumbered him little.
Towards evening it began to rain, a heavy, summer, windless shower, that made moist rattle in the leaves, and flooded fragrant freshness into the air. Pelleas gave Igraine his cloak, and made her wear it, despite her excuses. As luck would have it, they came upon a little inn built in the grey shelter of a forsaken quarry. The inn folk were still there—an old woman, and a brat of a boy, her grandson. Seeing so great a knight, the beldam was ready enough to give them lodgings, and what welcome she could muster. She spread a supper of goat’s milk, brown bread, and venison—not a bad table for such a hovel. The meal over, she pointed Pelleas with a leer to a little inner room that boasted a rough bed, a water-pot, and ewer.
“We will not disturb ye,” she said; “my lad has foddered the horse. You would be stirring early?”
Pelleas gave the woman her orders, and sent Igraine into the inner room. He made himself a bed of dried bracken before her door, and laid himself there so that none could enter save over his body. The woman and the boy slept on straw in a corner. In this wise they passed the night.
On the morrow, after more goat’s milk and brown bread, with some wild strawberries to smooth it, they sallied early, and held on their way to Winchester. The shower of the night had given place to fair weather, and a fresh breeze blowing from the west. Soon the sun was up in such strength that the green woods lost their dankness, and the leaves their dew. It was the very morning for a ride.
If possible, Pelleas was even more gloomy than on the day before. There was such a level air of dejection over his whole being that Igraine began to have grave qualms of conscience, and to suffer the reproaches of a pity that grew more clamorous hour by hour. None the less, maugre the man’s sorry humour, there was a certain stealthy joy in it all, for Pelleas, by his very moodiness, flattered her tenderness for him not a little. She began to see, in very truth, how staunch the man was; how he meant to honour to the letter her imagined vows, though his love grieved like a winged merlion. His great strength became more and more apparent. A lighter spirit would have gone with the wind, or made great moan over the whole business. Pelleas, she saw, was striving to buckle his sorrow deep in his bosom, to save her the pain of knowing his distress. There was nothing little about the man. Palpably he had not succeeded eminently in his attempt to spur a wounded spirit into light courtliness and easy hypocrisy. Still, that was not his fault; it only said the more for his love.
It was not till noon had passed that Pelleas, with a heavy courage, constrained himself to speak calmly of their parting. Even then he was so eager to shape his speech into mere courtesies, that he overdid the thing, more than betraying himself to the girl’s quick wit.
He had questioned her as to her friends in Winchester, and her purposes for the future. His rambling took somewhat of a didactic turn as he laboured at his mentorship.
“There is a fair abbey within the walls,” he said; "I have heard it nobly spoken of both as to devoutness and comfort. Their rules are not of such iron caste as at some other holy houses; the library is good, and there is a well-planted garden. The abbess is a gracious and kindly woman, and of high family. I have often had speech with her myself, and can vouch for her courtliness and benevolence. Assuredly you may find very safe and peaceful harbour there."
Igraine smiled to herself at the callous benignity of his counsel. He might have been her grandfather by his manner.
“You see,” she said naively, “I do not like being caged; it spoils one’s temper so. I have an uncle in the place—an uncle by marriage—a man not loved vastly by the proud folk of my own family. He is a goldsmith by trade, and is named Radamanth.”
Pelleas’s quick answer was not prophetic of great favour.
“Radamanth,” he said—“a gentleman who weighs his religion by the pound, and is seen much at church. Pardon my frankness, I had this gold chain of him. He is rich as Rome, and has high rank among the merchants.”
“So I had heard,” she answered.
Pelleas looked into space with a most judicial air.
“You do not think of going to a secular house,” he said.
Igraine smiled to herself, and halted a moment in her answer.
“Why not?” she said.
“You—a nun?”
“Pelleas, I do not see why it is necessary for holiness to be bricked up like a frog in a wall in order to escape corruption. Why, you are eating your own words.”
“But you have vows,” he said.
“I have; and doubts also.”
“Doubts?” quoth the man, with a quick look, thrilling inwardly.
“Doubts, Pelleas, doubts.”
She caught his eyes with hers, and gave him one long, deep stare that made him quake as though all that had been flame within him—that which he had sought to tread to ashes—had but spread redly into her bosom. There was no parrying such a message. It smote him blind in a moment. The spiritual bastions of his soul seemed to reel and rock as though some chaos had broken on their stones. There was great outcry in his heart, as of a leaguer when guards and stormers are at grapple on the walls. “Cross! Holy Cross!” cried Conscience, in the moil. “Yield ye, yield ye, Pelleas,” sang a voice more subtle, “yield ye, and let Love in!” He sat stiff in the saddle, and shut his eyes to the day, while the fight boiled on within him. Now Love had him heart and hand; now Honour, blind and bleeding, struggled in and stemmed the rout. He was won and lost, lost and won, a dozen times in a minute.
Recovered somewhat, he made bold to question Igraine yet further.
“Tell me your doubts, girl,” he said.
“They are deep, Pelleas, deep as the sea.”
“Whence came they, then?”
“Some great power put them in my heart, and they are steadfast as death.”
Again the wild flush of liberty swept Pelleas like wind.
“Tell me, Igraine,” he said, in a gasp.
She put her fingers gently on his lips. “Patience—patience,” she said, “and perhaps I will tell them to you, Pelleas, ere long.”
Thus much she suffered him to go, and no further. Her quick instinct had read him nearly to the “Explicit,” and there she halted, content for an hour or a day. Her love was singing like a lark in the blue. She beamed on the man in spirit streams of pride and tumultuous tenderness. How she would comfort him in the end! He should carry her into Winchester on his horse, and she would lodge there, but not at the great inn that harboured souls for heaven. She would have the bow and the torch for her signs, and possibly the Church might serve her in other fashion. Like a lotus eater, she dallied with all these dreams in her heart.
With the sun low in the west, Pelleas and Igraine were still three leagues or so from Winchester. The day was passing gloriously, with the radiant acolytes of evening swinging their jasper censers in the sky. The two were riding on a pine-crowned ridge, and the stretch of wilderness beyond seemed wrapped in one mysterious blaze of smoking gold. Hills and woods were glittering shadows, like spirit things in a spirit atmosphere. The west was a great curtain of transcendent gold. Pelleas and Igraine could not look at it without great wonder.
Presently they came to a little glade, green and quiet, with a clear pool in it ringed round with rushes. A lush cushion of grass and moss swept from the water to the bases of the trees. It was as quaint and sweet a nook as they had passed that day. The place, with its solitude and stillness, pleased Igraine very greatly.
“What say you, Pelleas,” she said, “let us off-saddle, and harbour here the night. This little refuge will serve us more kindly than a ride in the dark to Winchester.”
Pelleas looked round about him, knelt for once without struggle to his own inmost wishes, and agreed with Igraine.
“Very good,” he said. “I can build you a bower to sleep in. There are hazels yonder—just the stuff for a booth. The water in the pool there looks sweet enough to drink, and we have ample in the cloth for a supper.”
Igraine gave him no more leisure to moralise on such trifles. She sprang down to the cushiony turf, and took his horse by the bridle.
“I will be master again for once, Pelleas,” she said, “since, well of your wound, you have played the tyrant. At least you shall obey me to-night.”
Pelleas, half in a stupor, gave up fighting his own heart for a while, and fell in with Igraine’s humour. She was strangely full of smiles and quiet glances; her eyes would meet his, flash, thrill him, and then evade his soul with sudden mischief. She tethered his horse for him, and then, making him sit down under a tree, she began to unarm him, kneeling confidently by his side. Her fingers lingered over-long on the buckles. When she lifted off his helmet, her hands touched his face and forehead, and set him blushing like a boy. The very nearness of her—her breath, her dress, her lips and eyes so near to his—made him like so much wax—passive, obedient, yet red as fire.
When she had ended her task, she gave him his naked sword and her orders.
“Now you may cut me hazels for a bower, Pelleas,” she said. “I will have it here under this tree where the moss is soft and dry. This summer night one could sleep under the stars and never feel the dew.”
Pelleas rose up and did her bidding. The green boughs were ready to his great sword, as it gleamed and glimmered in the wizard light. He cut two forked stakes, and set them upright in the ground, with a pole between them. Then he built up branches about this centrepiece till the whole was roofed and walled with shelving green; he spread his red cloak therein for a carpet. Igraine sat and watched his labour. Life seemed to have rushed nearly to its zenith, and her thoughts were soaring in regions of gold.
The black moth night had come into the sky with his golden-spotted wings all spread. It was time for idyllic love, pure looks, and the touch of hands. The billowy bosoms of the trees rolled sombrously above, and the little pool was like a wizard’s glass, black and deep with sheeny mysteries.
Igraine beckoned Pelleas to a seat on the grass bank at her feet when he had finished. There was a light on her face that the man had not seen before, a kind of quiet rapture, a veil of exultation, as though her maidenhood were flowering gold under a net of pinkest satin. She had loosened her hair in straight streams upon her shoulders, and her habit lay open to the very base of her shapely throat. She sat there and looked at him, with hands clasped in her lap, and her grey gown rising and falling markedly as she breathed. It seemed to Pelleas that there was nothing in the whole universe save twilight, two eyes, a stirring bosom, and two wistful lips.
They had been speaking of their ride, and of the many strange things that had befallen them during their adven tures together. Igraine had waxed strangely tender in her talk, and had spoken subtle bodeful words that meant much at such a season. She was flinging bonds about Pelleas that made him exult and suffer. His heart seemed great within him and ready to break, for the blood that bubbled and yearned in it in glorious anguish.
“To-morrow,” said the girl, “we enter Winchester, and I have known you, Pelleas, two weeks and some few hours more. You seem to have been in my life many years.”
Words flooded into Pelleas’s heart, and stifled all struggle for a moment. He was breathing like a hunted thing.
“Igraine,” he said.
“Pelleas.”
“I never lived till our lives were joined.”
Igraine gave a little gasp, and bent over him suddenly, her eyes aglow, her hair falling down into his face.
“Kiss me, Pelleas,” she said; “in the name of God, kiss me.”
Pelleas gave a great groan.
“Girl, I dare not.”
“You dare.”
“Igraine?”
She bent herself till her lips were over his, and both their heads were clouded in her hair. Her eyes glimmered, her breath beat on his, he saw the whiteness of her teeth between her half-closed lips.
“Igraine,” he said again, half in a groan.
She did not answer him, but simply took his face between her hands and looked into his eyes.
“Coward, Pelleas.”
Power seemed to go from the man in a moment. He put his hands upon her shoulders and looked at her as in a splendid dream. Her face was beautifully peevish, and there lurked an infinite hunger on her lips. Then with a great woe in his heart he drew her face down to his and kissed her. There was such sweet pain in the grand despair of it all that he felt faint for strength of loving. Before he had gathered breath, Igraine had slipped away from him and was in the bower.
“Till dawn, Pelleas, till dawn,” she said.
“Ah, Igraine!”
“Go and sleep, Pelleas; I will talk to you on the morrow.”
Chapter X
With the girl’s face lost behind the green eaves of the bower, Pelleas fell of a sudden into great darkness of soul. It was as though the moon had passed behind a cloud, and left him agrope in the woods without light and without guide. Igraine had bidden him to go and sleep. She might as well have told the sea to be still in the lap of the wind.
Going aside towards the mouth of the glade so that he might not disturb the girl, he began to tread the grass between brake and brake, while he held parley with his turbulent and seething thoughts. What was Igraine to be to him on the morrow? She had broken the back of his determination, and beaten down his strength in those grand moments of sudden passion. The rich June of her beauty was still on his sight. Her grace, her infinite tenderness, the purity of her, were all set about his soul like angels round a dreamer’s bed. She was light and darkness, sound and silence; she had the round world in her red heart, and the stars seemed to go about her in companies of gold. Never had Pelleas thought idolatry so smooth and swift a sin. He had never believed that love in so brief a space could make such wrack of madness in a hale and healthy body.
As he walked under the giant limbs of the great trees he tried to grapple the thing with reason, to untangle this knot by natural logic. These were the bleak facts, and they stood up like white headstones in the night. He loved Igraine, and Igraine he knew loved him in turn; but Igraine was a nun despite her womanliness, and there lay the core of the whole matter. If he obeyed love he must disgrace the girl with broken vows, for like a staunchly taught Christian of somewhat stern and primitive mould he stood in honest awe of things spiritual and ecclesiastic. His very love for the girl made him fearful of in any way dishonouring her. If he held to the trite observations of a prompted conscience, then he must forswear love, and leave Igraine to the miserable celibacy of the Church, that chrysalid state that never burgeons into the fuller, fairer life of perfect womanhood. These were the two forces that held him shaken in the balance.
Long while he went east and west under the trees with the old gloom flooding back like thunder. His whole thought seemed warped into bitterness; the blatant mockery of it all grinned and screamed like a harpy. Again with clarion cry and rosy flush of banners love stormed in and held law at death’s door for a season. Again came the inevitable repulse, the moaning lapse of desire, while the black banner of the Church flapped once more over him in dismal sanctity. Pelleas found no shred of peace wheresoever he looked. Who has not learnt that when anarchy is in the heart, the whole world seems out of gear?
As the night passed, love seemed to faint and wax pale before an ever-darkening visage that declared despair. A sense of inevitable gloom seemed to weigh down desire, and to drown hope in misery. Pelleas grew calmer at heart, though his thoughts were no less woeful. Love’s voice, stifled and wistful, came like an elfin voice through woods, while the cry of conscience was like the thundering surge of the wind through trees. He grew less restless, more apathetic. Coming to a halt he leant against an oak’s bossy trunk, and stood motionless as in a stupor for an hour or more. The blight of soul-sickness was on him, and he was like one dazed by a great fever.
Presently he went back slowly to Igraine’s shelter of boughs, and stood near it—thinking. Then he dropped on his hands and knees, crept up close, and parting the leaves looked in on her as she slept, wrapped in his red cloak. He could see her face indistinctly white in a wealth of shadows; he could hear her breathing. Then he crept away again like a wounded thing, and lay for a time with his face in his arms, grieving without a sound.
Again, a second time, he crept to the bower, and listened there on his knees. Turning his face to the night he tried to pray, vainly indeed, for his heart seemed dumb. A corner of Igraine’s gown lay near his hands at the entry; he went down on hands and knees and kissed it. Then he took the little gold cross from his bosom, the cross Morgan had held, and laid it on the grass at Igraine’s feet. He also put a purse with a few gold coins in it beside the cross. When he had done this he crept away mutely, and began to arm in silence.
Once, as he was buckling on his casque, he thought he heard Igraine stirring. He kept very still, with a sudden, wild wish in his heart that she would wake and save him, but the sound proved nothing. He finished buckling on his harness, girded his sword, and hung his shield about his neck. Then he went to the little pool, and, kneeling down, dashed water in his face, and drank from his palms. He felt faint and bruised after the night’s battle.
Once more he went and stood by the hazel shelter as though for a last leave-taking before the strong wrench came. The little pavilion of leaves seemed to hold all hope and human joy in its narrow compass. Pelleas stood and took long leave of the girl in his heart. He wished her all the fair fortune he could think of, prayed for her as well as he could in a broken, wounded way, and then with a great sob he turned and left her sleeping. His black horse was tethered not far away. As he went he staggered, and seemed blind for a moment. He soon had the girths tightened, and was in the saddle, riding away dry-eyed and broken-souled into the night.
Presently the dawn came, redly, gloriously, like a marriage pageant. Igraine, reft from dreams, woke with a little shiver of joy in her pavilion of green boughs. She lay still awhile, and let her thoughts dance like the motes in the shimmer of sunlight that stole in between the branches. The day seemed warm and glorious, for that morning was she not to tell Pelleas of the secret she had kept from him so many days, the words she had hoarded in her heart like love? It would be a fitting end, she thought, to the rare novitiate each had passed in the heart of the other.
Hearing no stir about her shelter, she thought Pelleas asleep, and peeped out presently between the boughs to bid him wake. Glade and pool lay peacefully in green and silver, but she saw no knight sleeping, no war-horse standing under the trees. Starting up, the gold cross glinting on the grass, with the purse beside it, appealed her with mute tragedy. She caught them up, trembling, and with sudden fear in her heart she went out into the glade and searched from brake to brake. It was barren as her joy. Pelleas had gone.
