U&I ♔ UTHER AND IGRAINE :: BOOK II {WARWICK DEEPING}

U&I

UTHER AND IGRAINE

BOOK II : GORLOIS

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

---

Radamanth the goldsmith was held in no little honour and esteem by the townsfolk of Winchester. Even the market women and the tavern loungers stood aside for him in the street as he made his stately march in black robe and chain of gold. He was a man possessed of those outward virtues so well suited to commend a character to the favour of the world. He was venerable, rich, and much given to charity. His coffers were often open to infirmary and church; his house near the market square was as richly furnished as any noble’s, and he gave good dinners. No man in Winchester had a finer aptitude for pleasing all classes. He was smooth and intelligent to the rich, bland and neighbourly to his equals, quite a father to the poor, and moreover he had no wife. Every Sabbath he went at the head of his household to the great basilica church in the chief square, worshipped and did alms as a rich merchant should.

Disinterestedness is a somewhat unique virtue, and it must not be supposed that Radamanth lived with his eye on eternity alone. It must be confessed that self-interest was often the dial of his philanthropy, and expediency to him the touchstone of action. Nothing furthers commerce better than a pious and merciful reputation, and Radamanth knew the inestimable value of a solid and goodly exterior. Wise in his generation, he nailed the Cross to his door, and plied his balances prosperously behind the counter.

Thus when the girl Igraine trudged sad-eyed into Winchester in her gown of grey, and appeared before him  as a homeless child of the Church, he took her in like the good uncle of the fairy tale, and proffered her his house for home. Possibly he pitied her for her plight after the burning of Avangel, for she seemed much cast down in mind and very deserving of a kinsman’s proper comfort. Then she was of noble family, a coincidence that no doubt weighed heavily in Radamanth’s opinion. It was good to have so much breeding in the house, to be able to say with a smirk to his friends and neighbours, “My niece, the daughter of Malgo, Lord of the Redlands, slain and plundered of the heathen in Kent.” Igraine brought quite a lustre into Radamanth’s home. He beamed on her with sleek pride and satisfaction, gave her rich stuffs for dress, a goodly chamber, and a little Silurian maid to wait. Moreover, he gave his one child and daughter Lilith a grave lecture on sisterly companionship, advised her to study Igraine’s gentle manners, and to profit by her aristocratic and educated influence. Luckily Lilith was a quiet girl, not given to jealousy or much self-trust, and Igraine found as warm a welcome as her unhappy heart could wish.

No few days had passed since that dawn on the hill above Winchester when Igraine had started up from under the green boughs to find Pelleas gone. They had been days of keen trouble to the girl. Often and often had she hated herself for her vain delay, her over-tender procrastination, that had brought misery in place of joy. The past was now a wounded dream to her, ripe and beautiful, yet fruited with such mute pain as only a woman’s heart can feel. Igraine had conjured up love like some Eastern house of magic, only to see its domes faint goldly into a gloom of night. She felt as much for Pelleas as for herself, and there was a blight upon her that seemed as though it could never pass. She was not a woman given to tears. Her trouble seemed to live in her eyes with pride, and to stiffen her stately throat into a pillar of rebellious strength.

Not a word, not a sign had come to her of Pelleas. Taken into Radamanth’s house, served, petted, flattered, she  went drearily through its daily round, sat at its board, talked with the guestfolk, while hope waited wide-eyed in her heart and kept her brave. Pelleas had told her that he was for Winchester, and assuredly, she thought, she might find him and confess all. She often kept watch hour by hour at her window overlooking the street. In her walks she had a glance for almost every man who passed on foot or horseback, till she grew almost ashamed of herself, and feared for her modesty. Her eyes always hungered for a red shield and harness, a black horse, a face grieving in dark reserve and silence. At night she was often quite a child in herself. She would take the little gold cross from her bosom and brood over it. She even found herself whispering to the man as she lay in bed, and stretching out her arms to him in the dark as in pain. For all her pride and courage she was often bowed down and broken when no one was near to see.

It was not long before she found a confidant to befriend her in her distress of heart. Lilith, the goldsmith’s daughter, had great brown eyes, soft and very gentle; her face was wistful and white under her straightly combed hair; she was a quiet girl, timid, but very thoughtful for others. The two appealed each other by contrast. Lilith had soon read trouble in Igraine’s eyes, and had nestled to her in soul, ready with many little kindnesses that were like dew in a dry season. Igraine unbent to her, and suffered herself to be enfolded by the other’s sympathy.

One day she told her the whole distressful tale. It was in the garden behind the house, a green and pleasant place opening on the river, and flanked with stone. The two were in an arbour framed of laurels, its floor mosaicked with quaint tiles. Igraine sat on the bench with Lilith on a stool at her feet. They were both sad, for Lilith was a girl whose heart answered strongly to any tale of unhappy mood. Igraine had made mere truth of the matter, neither justifying nor embellishing. Her clear bleak words were the more pathetic for their very simpleness. Lilith had been crying  softly to herself. Her brown eyes were very misty when she turned her white face to Igraine’s with a grievous little sigh.

“What can I say to you?” she said.

“Nothing,” said Igraine, taking her hands and smiling through misery.

“I have never the words I wish for, and when I feel most I can say little.”

“You understand; that is enough for me.”

“Ah,” said Lilith, with a fine blush and a shy look, “I think I can feel for you, Igraine, almost to the full, though I seem such an Agnes. I am woman enough to have learnt something that means all to a girl. I am very sad for your sake.”

“Child.”

“I will try to comfort you.”

Igraine’s eyes burned. She kissed Lilith on the lips and was mute. For a while they sat with their arms about each other, not daring to look into each other’s eyes. Then the girl kissed Igraine’s cheek, and touched her hair with her slim fingers.

“Perhaps I can help you,” she said.

“Help me?”

Lilith flushed, and spoke very quickly.

“Yes—to find Pelleas. I tell you what I will do. I will send a friend of mine to question all the guards at the gates whether they have seen such a one as you have described ride in.”

Igraine hugged the girl.

“And then you say this Pelleas was in the King’s service. I have never heard of a knight so named; but there are so many, and I hear only gossip. I know a girl in the King’s household. I will go and ask her whether she knows of a tall, dark knight whose colour is red, who rides a black horse, and is named Pelleas. You do not know how much I may not learn from her. I feel wise already.”

Igraine plucked up heart and spirit. She felt sorry that she had not spoken of her trouble to Lilith before, for she  had lost many days trusting to her own eyes and her little knowledge of the town. She kissed the girl again, and almost laughed. Then in a flash she remembered a speech of Pelleas’s which she had forgotten till that moment.

“Fool that I am,” she said; “the very chain he wore he had it from your father, and here in my bosom I have the little cross that nigh lost him his life. Surely this may help us in some measure.”

Lilith looked at the cross that Igraine had taken from under her tunic, where it hung by a little chain about her neck.

“We will show it to my father,” said the girl, “and ask him thereof. He may have record of such a chain, and to whom it was sold. Who knows? Come, Igraine, we will show it him after supper if you wish.”

And again Igraine kissed her.

It was Radamanth’s custom, after the business of the day had been capped by an honest supper, to sit in his parlour and drink wine with certain of his friends. He had a particular gossip, an old fellow named Eudol, who had been a merchant in his time, and had retired with some wealth. These two would spend many an evening together over their wine, taking enough to make their tongues wag, but never exceeding the decent warmth of moderation. Eudol was a lean old gentleman with a white beard and a most patriarchal manner. He was much of a woman’s creature, and loved a pretty face and a plump figure, and he would father any wench who came in his way with a benignity that often made him odious. He had a soft voice, and a sleek, silken way with him that made folk think him the most tender-souled creature imaginable.

These two were at their wine together when Lilith and Igraine went in to them that evening. Radamanth since his spouse’s death had grown as much a father as trade and the getting of gold permitted. In his selfish, matter-of-fact way he was fond of this timid, brown-eyed creature he called daughter. His affections boasted more of science than of  sentiment. Lilith, unusually bold, went and sat on the arm of his chair, and patted his face in a half-shy, half-mischievous fashion. Eudol laughed, and shook his head with a critical look at Igraine.

“More begging,” quoth he. “So, cousin Igraine, you look fresh as a yellow rose in the sun.”

Igraine laughed, and sat down to talk to him, while Lilith questioned her father. The goldsmith bore his daughter’s caresses with a sublime and patient resignation. She began to tell him about the chain, keeping Igraine and her tale wholly in the background. When she had said enough for the sake of explanation, she showed her father the cross, and waited his words.

Radamanth fingered it, turned it this way and that, and found his own mark thereon.

“I wrought and sold three such chains as you describe,” he said; “but what is such a chain to you, child, and whence came this cross?”

Lilith flushed, hesitated, and glanced at Igraine.

“The cross is mine,” quoth the latter.

Radamanth eyed her as though he were not a little desirous of questioning her further, but there was a very palpable coldness on his niece’s face that forbade any such curiosity. He had a most hearty respect for the girl’s pride, and never dreamt of any degree of tyranny that might seem vulgarly plebeian to her more noble notions. The remembrance of her parentage and estate had always a most emollient effect upon his mind.

“Well, well,” he said, “I’ll meddle discreetly, and go no further than I am asked.”

Eudol winked at the company at large.

“Never ask a lady an uncomfortable question,” quoth he.

Lilith beamed at him shyly.

“You are very wise,” she said.

Radamanth rose from his chair, and going to a great press took a book from it. He set the book on the table, and after much turning of pages, discovered the record that  he sought. Following the scrawling lines with his finger, he read aloud from the ledger:

“Gold chain of special weight, large links, two gold crosses pendant over either breast. Of such three were wrought and sold.

“The first to Bedivere, knight of the King’s guard.

“Nota bene—unpaid for.”

Eudol set up a sudden brisk cackle.

“The man, the very man, I’ll swear.”

Igraine gave him a look that made his mouth close like a trap and his body stiffen in his chair. Radamanth continued his reading.

“The second chain was sold to John of Glastonbury. The third to the most noble Uther, Prince of Britain.”

Radamanth closed the book, and returned it to the press—orderly even in trifles. Lilith and Igraine had exchanged a mute look that meant everything. Slipping away without a word to either man, they went to Igraine’s bedroom, a great chamber hung with heavy red hangings and richly garnished. A carved bed stood in the centre. The two girls sat on it and stared into each other’s eyes. Igraine was breathing fast, and her face was pale.

“Know you Bedivere?” she said.

Lilith shook her head.

“Or John of Glastonbury?”

“No.”

“Or Uther?”

Lilith’s brown eyes brightened.

“Noble Uther I have often seen,” she said, “riding through Winchester on a black horse. A dark man, and sad-looking. He would be much like your Pelleas.”

Igraine was very white. There seemed a race of thoughts in her as she played the statue with her eyes at gaze, and her lips drawn into a line of red. Her hands hung limply over the edge of the bed, and she seemed stiffened into musings. Lilith sidled close to her, and put her warm arms round her neck, her soft cheek to Igraine’s.

 

“We may learn yet,” she said.

“Uther,” said Igraine as in a dream.

“Can it be?”

Igraine drew a long breath and sighed like one waking.

“I must see him,” was all she said.

Lilith kissed her.

“I will go to the King’s house to-morrow,” she said; “the girl may tell us something of use. I have heard it said that Uther has not been in Winchester for many a week. Ah, Igraine, if it should be he.”

They looked deep in each other’s eyes, and smiled as only women can smile when their hearts are fast in sympathy. Then they went to bed in Igraine’s bed, and slept the night through in each other’s arms.

Early next day they went together to the King’s house that stood by the gardens and the river. At the kitchen quarters Lilith inquired for the girl who served as a maid in the household. Being constrained by a most polite lackey, she went in to see the woman, while Igraine kept her pride and herself in the porch, and watched the people go by in the street. Presently Lilith came out again with a frown on her mild face, and her brown eyes troubled. She took Igraine aside into the gardens that lined the great highway skirting the palace, and led her to where a fountain played in the sun, and stone seats ringed a quiet pool. White pigeons were there, coquetting and sweeping the ground with their spread tails, their low cooing mingling with the musical plashing of the water. An old beggar woman sat hunched in a corner, and three or four children were feeding the fish in the pool. All about them the gardens were thickly shadowed with great trees and glistening lusty laurels.

Igraine looked into Lilith’s face.

“I see no news in your eyes,” she said.

Lilith brooded at the pool and the children, and seemed disquieted, even angry.

“I have learnt little, Igraine,” she said, "and am dis appointed. I will tell you how it was. The old wretch who oversees the women found me talking with the girl Gwenith, read me a sermon on interfering with household work, scolded me for a young gossip, and had me packed off like a beggar."

“What a harridan!”

“I have learnt a little.”

“Quick!—I thirst.”

Lilith hurried on for sympathy.

“The girl has never heard of a knight named Pelleas,” she said, “and there are so many dark men about Court that your description was little guide. As for Uther, no one knows where he is at present. Folk are not disquieted, for he seems to be ever riding away into the woods on adventure. So much gossip could read me.”

Igraine’s face clouded.

“Did you ask of Bedivere?” she said.

“Oh, yes; a silly, vain fellow, with a red beard and sandy hair.”

“And John of Glastonbury?”

“Gwenith could tell me nothing of that man. Dame Martha caught us talking, and it was then she scolded—the ugly, red-faced old hen. She said”—and Lilith blushed—“that I was an idle, silly hussy to gad and gossip after Court gentlemen. Now that wasn’t fair, was it, Igraine?”

“No, dear. I should like to have a talk with Dame Martha.”

Lilith rose to the notion.

“She would never scold you, Igraine. You look far too stately.”

“Simpleton! a scold would spatter Gabriel.”

“Well, if I were Gabriel I know what I should do to Dame Martha.”

“You quiet-faced thing—why, you are quite a vixen after all!”

“Ah, Igraine, was there ever a woman without a temper?”

 

“No, dear, and I wouldn’t give a button for her either.”

Suddenly, as they sat and talked, the beggar woman lifted up her head to listen, and the children turned from feeding the fish in querulous, childish wonder. There was something strange on the wind. Igraine and Lilith heard a gradual sound rising afar off over the city—a noise as of men shouting, a noise that waxed and waned like the roar of surges on a beach. It grew—rushed nearer like a storm through trees,—deep, sonorous, triumphant. The girls sat mute a moment, and looked at each other in conjecture.

“What can it be?”

“God knows!”

“The heathen?”

“Not that shout.”

“Then—Uther.”

Igraine caught a deep breath.

“Listen! it comes nearer. Come away, I must see.”

Passing through the gardens they came again to the highway skirting the palace. Men, women, brats, monks, all Christendom, seemed swarming up from the city, and there was already a great throng in the street. The breeze of shouting came nearer each moment. Igraine climbed the pediment of a statue that rose above the balustrading of the gardens; the ledge gave room to both Lilith and herself. Together they stood and looked down on the crowd that began to swarm at their feet—soldiers, nobles, dirty craftsmen, courtezans, fat housewives, churchmen—their small prides lost in one common curiousness. The street seemed mosaicked with colour. The broken words and cries of the crowd were flung up to Igraine like so much foam.

“Gorlois, say you?”

“Noble Gorlois.”

“A thousand heathen.”

“What—all slain!”

 

“Where?”

“Under the walls of Anderida.”

“Come to my house and I will give you red wine, and play to you on the cithern.”

“Thank the Virgin.”

“Great Gorlois.”

“If it is true I’ll burn twenty candles.”

“Give over trampling me.”

“A thousand heathen.”

“Ho! there—some rogue’s thieved my purse.”

“They are coming.”

“Let’s shout for him.”

“Great Gorlois.”

Up between the stone fronts of the palace and the dwindling houses and the rolling green of the gardens came a blaze of gold and purple, of white, green, blue, and scarlet, a gross glare of steel thundered on with the tramp of men and the cry of many voices. A river of armour seemed to flow with a brazen magnificence between the innumerable heads of the crowd. Clarions were braying, banneroles adance. The sun flashed on helmet and shield, and made a brave blaze on the flanks of the great serpent of war as it swayed through the thundering street, arrogant, triumphant, glorious.

Well in the van rode a knight on a great white horse. His armour was all of gold, his trappings white with gold borders, and stars of gold scattered thereon. His baldric was set with jasper, his sword and scabbard marvellous with beryl and sardonyx. A coronet gemmed with one great ruby circled his casque, and shot red gleams at the archer sun.

Behind him came a veritable grove of spears,—lusty knights, their saddles weighed down with the spoil of battle, with torque, bracelet, sword, and axe. Further yet came pikemen, mass on mass, bearing each on his spear-point a heathen head,—pageant of leers, frowns, scowls of red wrath, wild eyes, blood, and blood-tangled hair.

 

The great knight on the white horse rode with a certain splendid arrogance, and his eyes were full of fire under the arch of his casque. It was easy to see that the noise and pomp were like wine to him, and that his pride blazed like a beacon in a wind.

“Gorlois, great Gorlois!” thundered the crowd.

By the palace there was such a press that the white horse came to a halt, hemmed in by a sea of vociferous faces. Igraine, in a gown of violet, was leaning from her statue, and looking at Gorlois. Her glance seemed to magnetise him, for he turned and stared full at the girl as she stood slightly above him in the glory of her beauty and her pride.

Long looked Gorlois, like a man smitten with a sudden charm. Then he wrenched the coronet from his casque, and spurring his horse through the crowd, rode close to the statue whose knees were clasped by Igraine’s arm. It was the statue of Fame crowned by Love with a wreath of laurels. So, Gorlois, with head bowed, held up the coronet on the cross of his sword, and gave Igraine his glory.

Chapter II

---

Splendid in arms, magnificent in fortune, Gorlois of Cornwall held high place in the war lore and romances of the green isle of Britain. Ask any pikeman or gallowglass whose crest he would have advance in the van in the tough tussle of a charge home, and he would tell you of Gorlois or of Uther. Question any merchant as to the most prolific purse in the kingdom, and he would beam seraphically and talk to you of Gorlois. So much for the man’s reputation.

Physically he was tall, big-chested, lean-limbed, with a square jaw and eyes that shone ever alert, as though watching a knife in an enemy’s hand. You could read the  swift, soaring, masterful spirit of him in the bleak lines of his handsome face, and the soldierly carriage of his head. He was quick as a hawk, supple and springy as a willow, keen and eager in his action as a born fighter should be. When you saw him move, the lean hard fibre of him seemed as tense and tough as the string of a five-foot bow. Though he might seem to the eye all impulse, there was a leopard reason in him that made him the more formidable. He was no mere fighting machine—rather a man of brain and sinew whose cunning went far to back his strength.

Meliograunt ruled in Cornwall in those days, Meliograunt who was to rear young Tristram for the plaguing of Mark, and the love of the fair Isoult. Gorlois was Meliograunt’s nephew, holding many castles, woods, and wild coastlands towards Lyonesse, lording it also over other lands in Britain, houses in London and Winchester, and some mountainous regions in Gore, where Urience held sway. Mordaunt had been his father, a great knight who had done many brave deeds in his day. His grandsire, Gravaine, famed for his wisdom, had fought abroad and died in battle. Gorlois had ancestry enough to breed worship in him, and after Ambrosius and black Uther he held undoubted precedence of all knights in Britain.

Unblemished fortune is not always the nurse best suited to the dandling of a man’s mind. It had been so with Gorlois. He was one of those beings whose life seemed to promise nothing but triumphal processions and perpetual bays of victory. Selfishness is such a glittering garment that it needs a great light to reveal its true texture to the wearer. Flattered, praised, obeyed, bent to, it became as natural for Gorlois to expect the homage of circumstance as to look for the obedience of his cook. There was much that was Greek about him in the worst sense, a certain sensuous brilliancy that aimed at making life a surfeit of rare sensations, with an infinite indifference for the hearts of others. Gorlois liked to see life swinging round him like a dance while he stood pedestalled in the centre, an earthly Jove.

 

The man had given Igraine his coronet on the cross of his great sword. That meant much for Gorlois. He was not a gentleman who had need to trouble his wits about women, for there were many enough ready to ogle their eyes out in his service. Yet in his keen way he had conceived a strong liking for the girl’s face. A species of sudden admiration had leapt out on him, and brought him in some wonder to a realisation of the power of a pair of eyes. Igraine was such a one as would attract the man. In the first place she was very fair to look upon, a point of some importance. She was tall, big of body, and built for grace and strength, things pleasant to Gorlois’s humour. Above all she was proud and implacable, no giggling franion hardly worth the kissing, and Gorlois had grown past the first blush of experiences of heart. He was sage enough to know that a woman lightly won is often soon lost, or not worth the winning. Let a man’s soul sweat in the taming of her, and there is some chance of his making an honest bargain.

Moreover, like many a man of restless, soaring spirit, Gorlois ever hungered for romance, and the mysterious discomforts and satisfactions that hedge the way into a woman’s bosom. Certain men are never happy unless they have the firebrand of love making red stir for them in heart and body. Of some such stuff was Gorlois. He had a soul that doted on nights spent at a window under the moon. All the thousand distractions, the infinite yet atomic cares, the logical sweats of reasoning were particularly pleasant to his fancy. He loved the colour, the exultation, the heroism, the desperate tenderness of it all. Battle, effort, ambition, lost half their sting for Gorlois when there was no woman in the coil.

Igraine’s home was soon known to him, thanks to the apt vigilance of a certain page much in favour with Gorlois for mischief and cunning. The boy had Igraine’s habits to perfection in a week or two. By making love to the girl who served her, he put himself into the way of getting almost any tidings he required. Every morning he would slip out  early, meet Igraine’s girl, Isolde, under the shadow of the garden-wall, and, under cover of a kiss, he would inquire what her mistress might be doing that day, pretending, of course, that his interest on such a subject merely arose from his desire to have Igraine out of the way, and her girl free. The lad quite enjoyed the game, Isolde being a giggling, black-eyed wench, who loved mischief. Of course he ended by falling in love with the reckless earnestness of a boy, but that kept him well to business. Betimes he would run home and tell his master where Igraine would probably be seen that day.

Gorlois’s proud face began to come into the girl’s life at every turn. Igraine would see him often from her window as he rode by on his white horse, looking up, and very eager to greet her. He would pass her in the aisles of the great basilica in the market, walking in gold and scarlet, amid silks and cloths from the East, vases, armour, skins of the tiger and camelopard, flowers, fruit, wine, and all manner of merchandise. On the river which ran by the end of Radamanth’s garden his barge often swept past with the noise of oars and music, and a gleam of gold over the hurrying water. In the orchards without the walls his face would come suddenly upon her through a mist of green, and she would be conscious of his eyes and the nearness of his stride.

One Sunday morning she found him laving his hands in the labrum beside her before entering the long narthex porch of the church, and he was near her all through the service, watching her furtively, noting the graceful curves of her figure as she knelt, the profusion of her hair, a thousand little things that are much to a man. When the sacrament was given, he knelt close beside her, and touched the cup where her lips had been. Apparently Gorlois was content for a while with the rich delight of gazing. His bearing was courteous enough, and he never exposed her to any public rudeness that could warrant her in resenting his persistent, though distant, homage.

 

The great baths of Winchester stood in a little hollow near the southern gate of the city, a white pile of stone set about with quiet gardens. They had fallen into some decay and disrepute, but still in the summer-time girls and men of the richer classes went thither to bathe. On sunny mornings, in the great marble bath of the women, girls would flash their white limbs, and sport like Naiads in the laughing water. Afterwards they would have their hair dressed and perfumed, and then go to sun themselves in the rose-walks like eastern odalisques. The music of flute and cithern might often be heard in the grass-grown peristyles. The library attached to the place had once boasted many scrolls and tomes, but it had long ago been pillaged by the monks of the great abbey.

Lilith had taken Igraine there more than once. One morning Igraine had bathed, tied her hair, and had passed out into the garden alone. The place was of some size, boasting twenty acres or more, full of winding paths, grass glades, and knolls of bushy shrubs, where one might lose one’s self as soon as think. Children often played hide-and-seek there, and idling up some green walk you might catch a giggling girl, with hair flying, bursting out of some thicket with a lad in full chase. Or in some shady lawn you might come upon a company of children dancing as solemnly as little elves to the sound of a pipe.

Nooks and grass walks were almost deserted at this hour, the gardens being most favoured towards evening, when the day was marked by a deepening discretion. Igraine had no purpose in the place. She knew that Lilith was somewhere within its bounds. She also knew that Lilith had no particular need of her that morning, and as the day was hot and slothful, Igraine’s only ambition was to waste her time as pleasantly as possible till noon.

Turning round a holly hedge that hid a statue of Cupid, she came full upon a woman seated on the stone bench that ringed the statue’s pedestal. The woman wore a light blue tunic, and a purple gown that ran all along the  seat in curling masses. She was combing her fair hair as though she had only lately come from the bath. Her white glimmering arms were bare to the elbow, and she was humming a song to the sway of her hair, while many rings laughed on her slim white fingers. She had not heard Igraine’s step upon the grass, but saw suddenly her shadow stealing along in the sun. Lifting her face, she stared, knew on the instant, and went red and grey by turns. Her comb halted, tangled in a strand of hair, and she was very quiet, and big about the eyes. Igraine remembered well enough where she had seen that would-be innocent stare, and that loose little mouth that seemed to bud for lawless kisses.

Morgan, with her face as white as her bosom, drew the comb from her hair, and flourished it uneasily betwixt her fingers. She was frightened as a mouse at the tall girl standing big and imperious so near, and her eyes were furtive for chance of flight. Igraine in her heart was in no less quandary than was dead Madan’s wife. She could prove nothing against the woman, for Pelleas was lost and away, and even the man’s name might be a myth likely to involve further mystery. She had as much to fear too from Morgan’s tongue, as Morgan had from her knowledge of that night in the island manor.

Morgan, too flurried for sudden measures, sat biting her lips, while her blue eyes were fixed on Igraine with a restless caution. Neither woman said a word for fully a minute, but eyed each other like a couple of cats, each waiting for the other to move. The shrubs around were so still that you might imagine they were listening, while Cupid, poised on one foot, drew his bow very much at a venture.

“Good-morning, holy sister.”

Igraine said never a word.

“I am glad to see you so improved in dress, that olive-green gown looks so well on you.”

Still no retort.

 

“By the saints, sister, you are very silent. I hope you were not kept long on that island?”

Igraine arched her eyebrows and gave the girl a stare. She knew what a coward Morgan was, and guessed she was in a holy panic, despite her cool impudence and seeming ease of mind. Woman-like, she conceived a sudden strong desire to have Morgan whimpering and grovelling at her feet, for there is some satisfaction in terrorising an enemy, even if one can do no more.

“I presume, madame,” she said, “you thought me safely packed away in that island, and likely to die of hunger, or be taken by heathen.”

Morgan forced a smile, and began to bind her hair for the sake of having something to do in the full glare of Igraine’s great eyes.

“You did not think I could swim.”

“Madame, I could think anything of you. Nuns are so clever.”

“After all, I am not a nun.”

“Of course not. You could not be bothered with vows in summer-time. I turned nun myself once for a month, it being convenient.”

Igraine began to fret and to lose patience.

“You are over venturesome, madame,” she said, “in coming to Winchester.”

“So!”

“I believe they hang folk here at times; they might even break your slim white neck.”

Morgan’s lips twitched, but she did not blench from the argument.

“You speak of hanging,” she said, “and the inference is rather peculiar. Listen a moment, my good convent saint: your knight on the black horse would most certainly have needed the rope, if my man had not mended vengeance with that poniard.”

“Pelleas and the gallows! You’re a fool!”

Morgan smiled back at her very prettily.

 

“After all, your man did first murder,” she said.

“On a traitor cur in Andredswold!”

“Madame, my husband.”

The woman’s contention was not so illogical when Igraine came to consider it in a less personal light. Morgan may have loved the man Madan for all she knew, and she could feel for her in such a matter. She looked at her with less scorn for the moment, and less injustice of thought.

“Perhaps you have grieved much,” she said.

Morgan gave a blank stare.

“Grieved?”

“You loved your husband?”

“I did, while he lived.”

“And no longer?”

“What is the use of wasting one’s youth on a corpse?”

Igraine retracted her late sympathy, and returned to enmity. Morgan had risen, and was ruffling herself like a swan in her part of the great lady, and gathering her purple gown round her slim figure with infinite affectation.

“I cannot see that we have cause to quarrel further,” she suggested.

“Indeed!”

“Seemingly we are quits, good Sister Morality. I have lost my man, you yours.”

“You are very logical,” said Igraine.

“Why should we women grieve?”

“Why indeed?”

“There are many more men in the world.”

“Madame, I do not understand you.”

Morgan gave a malicious little laugh that ended in a sneer. She touched her hair with her jewelled fingers, blew a kiss to Cupid, and again laughed in her sly mischief-making way. In a moment words were out of her lips that set Igraine’s face ablaze, her heart at a canter, and mulled all further parley. Morgan saw trouble, dodged, and ran round the statue. Igraine was too quick for her, and winding her fingers into the woman’s hair, gave her a  cuff that would have set a helmet ringing. Morgan tripped and fell, dragging Igraine with her, and for a moment there was a struggle, green and purple mixed. Igraine, the heavier and stronger, came aloft on the other soon. Then a knife flashed out. Morgan got two quick strokes in, one on the girl’s shoulder, a second in her left forearm. Igraine lost her grip, and fell aside in a stagger of surprise and pain, while Morgan, taking her chance, squirmed away, slipped up, and ran like a rabbit. She was out of sight and sound before Igraine had got back her reason.

Here was a pretty business. The girl’s sleeve was already red and soaked, and the slit cloth showed a long red streak in the plump white of her flesh. Blood was welling up, and dripping fast to the grass at her feet. Despite the smart of her wounds and her temper, she saw it would be mere folly to chase Morgan. Following instinct, she ran for home, holding her right hand pressed over the gash in her shoulder.

In the main avenue who should she meet but Gorlois, carried in a litter, and looking out lazily from behind half-drawn curtains. His quick eyes caught sight of Igraine as she passed. He saw the blood and the girl’s white face, and he was out of the litter like a stag from cover, and at her side, with spirited concern. Igraine was white and half dazed, her green gown soaked and stained. Her eyes trembled up at Gorlois as she showed him her gashed arm, with a smile and a little whimper that made him storm.

“Who did this?”

He had stripped his cloak off, and was tearing it into strips, while his jaw stiffened.

“An old foe of mine.”

“Describe him.”

“A woman, my lord.”

“The damned vixen. Her dress?”

“Blue tunic, and gown of purple.”

Gorlois turned to certain servants who stood round gaping at the girl in her blood-stained dress, and their  lord tearing his cloak into bandages with characteristic furor.

“Search the gardens—a woman in blue and purple; have her caught. By my sword, I’ll hang her.”

He rent Igraine’s sleeve to the shoulder, and wound the strips of his cloak about her arm with a strength that made her wince.

“Pardon,” he said in his quick, fierce way; “this will serve a season; stern heart, good surgeon.”

Igraine smiled, and made light of it, while he knotted the bandage. Some of his men had scattered among the shrubs and into the dark alleys of the place, for Igraine could hear them trampling and calling to each other. While she listened, and before she could hinder him, Gorlois had lifted her as though she had been but a sheaf of corn, and laid her in the litter. He drew the curtains. The bearers were at the poles, and setting off at a good stride they were soon in the town.

By the time they reached Radamanth’s doorway Igraine, despite her spirit, was faint from loss of blood, and all atremble. Gorlois, tersely imperious, lifted her up as she lay half dazed and stupid, carried her in his arms into the house, and taking guidance from a white-faced maid, bore Igraine above to her chamber, and laid her on her bed. Then he kissed her hand, and leaving her to the women, hurried off to send skilled succour.

Chapter III

---

It was not long before Gildas, the court physician, a dear old scoundrel with a white beard and a portentous face, came down in state to attend on Igraine. He was an old gentleman of most solemn soul. His dignity was so tremendous a thing, that you might have imagined him a solitary Atlas holding the whole world’s health upon his shoulders.

 

He soon dabbled his fingers in Igraine’s wounds that morning, dropped in oil, and balmed them with myrrh and unguents under a dressing of clean cloth. He frowned all the time, as was his custom in the sick chamber, as though wisdom lay heavy on his soul, or at least as though he wished folk to think so. The only time you saw Gildas smile was when you payed him a fee or complimented him upon his knowledge. Tickle his pocket or his vanity, and he beamed on you. That morning he told Radamanth that his niece’s wounds were serious, but that he trusted that they would heal innocently, treated as they had been by credited skill. Gildas always pulled a long face over a patient’s possibilities; such discretion kept him from pitfalls, and enabled him to claim all the credit when matters turned out happily.

The streaks of scarlet in the white waste of skin soon died cleanly into mere bands of pink, and Igraine had little trouble from her wounds, thanks to the great Gildas. In fact, she was in bed but three days, while Lilith played nurse, chatted and sang to her, or leant at the open window to tell her of those who passed in the street. Master Gildas came and went morning and evening with the prodigious regularity of the sun. The girls aped him behind his back, and Igraine, with some ingratitude to science, made Lilith empty the ruby-coloured physic out of the window. It happened to spatter a lean booby of a man as he passed, who, looking up, flattered himself that Lilith must have sprinkled him with scented water by way of showing her affection. So much for Gildas’s rose-water and flowers of dill.

The man of physic marched each day like a god into Gorlois’s house to tell how the Lady Igraine fared at his hands. Such patronage was worth much to Gildas, and knowing how the wind blew, he puffed religiously upon the new-kindled fire. The girl’s glamour had caught up Gorlois in a golden net. He had loved to look upon her and to dream, but now the perfume of her hair, the warm softness of her body, the very odour of her shed and scarlet blood were memories in him that would not fade.

 

One evening a posy of flowers came tumbling in at Igraine’s window.

Lilith looked out, and saw Gorlois.

“For the Lady Igraine,” were his words.

Lilith smiled down, and ventured to tell him that Igraine was much beholden to his courtesy and succour, and would thank him with her own lips when well of her wounds. She took the flowers to Igraine, who was listening in bed in the twilight.

“Shall I throw a flower back?” asked the girl.

“It would be courteous.”

Lilith did so. The bloom struck Gorlois on the mouth like a blown kiss. The man put the thing in his bosom with a great smile, and went home to spend some hours like a star-gazer in his garden, while his musicians tuned their strings behind the bushes. At such a season Gorlois loved sound and colour. The voices, sweetly melancholic, thrilled up into the night—

“Her head is of brighter gold than the broom-flower,

Her breast like foam under her green tunic;

Like a summer sky at night are her glances;

Her fingers are as wood anemones in a daze of dew;

Of her lips,—who shall tell!

The gates of a sunsetWhere love dies.

Her limbs are like May-blossoms

Bedded on a green couch:

The night sighs for her,

And for the touch of her hand.”

Of course Morgan had escaped capture. Gorlois’s men had hunted an hour or more, and had caught nothing, not even a glimpse of the purple gown for which they searched. Radamanth, who had had the affair from Gorlois’s own lips, came and told Igraine, and began to ask her who this woman foe of hers was. Igraine put him off with a fable. She had no thought of letting him have knowledge of her love for  Pelleas, and she was glad in measure that Morgan had escaped capture, and so left her secret in oblivion. The woman might have proved troublesome if brought to bay, for she had as much right to claim the truth as had Igraine. Better let a snake go than take it by the tail.

In a week or so there was nothing left to mark the incident save the red lines in Igraine’s white skin. Flowers and fruit came daily in from Gorlois, and every evening there was music under the window, till she began to consider these perpetual courtesies. She was woman enough to know whither they all tended. As for Radamanth, he was more kind to her than ever, seeing how the wind might blow favours into his ready lap. Gorlois was a great and noble gentleman, and the goldsmith had an intense respect for the nobility.

The very first day that Igraine walked abroad again after her seclusion, she fell in straight with Gorlois. By Gildas’s advice, she had gone, presumably for her health’s sake, to the baths with Lilith; and Gorlois, warned by the leech himself, followed alone, and overtook them near the porch. He was very gracious, very sympathetic, very splendid. He begged a meeting with Igraine after she had bathed, and since the girl had something in her heart that made her wish to speak with him, she consented, and left him in the laconicum, proposing to meet him in the rose-walk an hour later. Truth to tell, she intended questioning him as to Pelleas, whether Gorlois had heard of a knight so named; and also as to Uther, whether he had yet been heard of in any region of Britain. She knew Gorlois would take her consent as favour. Still, she imagined she could venture a little for her heart’s sake without much prick of conscience.

An hour later, true to her word, she went alone into the rose-walk, a grassy pathway banked with yews, and hemmed with a rich tangle of red blooms. Gorlois was there waiting as for a tryst. He was full of smiles and staunch glances as he led her to a seat that was set back in an alcove,  carved from the dense green of the yews, where they might talk at leisure, and out of sight. Igraine’s hair lay loosened over her shoulders to dry in the sun. It had been perfumed, and the scent of it swept over Gorlois like a violet mist. He sat watching her for a while in silence, as she plied her comb with the sun-shaken masses pouring over her face like ruddy smoke.

“Lady Igraine,” he said at length.

The girl’s eyes glimmered at him slantwise from behind her hair.

“I knew your father, Malgo, before his death.”

Igraine merely nodded.

“I am claiming to be the friend of his daughter, seeing that I have learnt the very colour of her several girdles, the number and pattern of her gowns since I rode into Winchester.”

The venture in flattery was perhaps more suggestive than Igraine could have wished.

“You must waste much time, my lord.”

“But little.”

“I am sorry I have so poor a wardrobe, that you have fathomed the whole of it in less than a month. To tell the truth, when I came into Winchester, I had only one gown, and that rather ragged.”

“They did not give you green and gold at Avangel?”

“No, the good women wore grey to typify the colour of their souls.”

Gorlois laughed in his keen quiet fashion. The girl’s eyes were wonderfully bright and subtle, and he had never seen such a splendour of hair. He longed to finger it, to let it run through his fingers like amber wine. Leaning one elbow on the stone back of the seat, and his head on his palm, he watched the silver comb rippling at its work, with a kind of dreamy complacency.

The girl’s voice broke out suddenly upon him.

“My lord?”

Gorlois attended.

 

“You know many of the knights and gentlemen famed for arms in Britain?”

“I may so boast myself.”

“I was once befriended, a piece of passing courtesy, yet I have always been curious to learn the character and estate of the man who did me this service. Have you heard of a knight named Pelleas?”

Gorlois fingered his sharp-peaked black beard, and looked blankly irresponsive.

“I have never known such a knight,” he said.

“Strange.”

“Never so. We men of the woods and moors often ride under false colours, sometimes to try our friends on the sly, sometimes to escape cognisance. The man who befriended you may have been Pelleas in your company.”

Igraine cut in with a laugh.

“And Ambrosius at home,” she said; “even Princes love masquerading in strange arms. Meadow-flower that I am, I have never seen the stately folk of the court—Ambrosius or Uther. I have heard Uther is an ugly man.”

“If strength makes a man ugly, Uther may claim ugliness.”

“Well?”

“Picture a dark man with black hair, eyes packed away under heavy brows, a straight mouth, and a great clean-shaven jaw that looks sullen as death.”

“Not beautiful in words.”

Gorlois stretched his shoulders, and half yawned behind his hand.

“Uther is a man with a conscience like a north wind,” he said; “always lashing him into tremendous effort for the sake of duty. He has the head and neck of a lion, the grip of a bear. You have never known Uther till you have seen him in battle. Then he is like a mountain thundering down against a sea, a black flood plunging through a pine forest. A quaint, gentle, devilish, God-ridden madman; I can paint him no other way.”

 

Igraine laughed softly to herself.

“A man worth seeing,” she said.

“I should judge so.”

“Tell me, is it true that Uther has gone into the wilds, and been seen of no man many days?”

“Uther left Winchester more than two months ago, and no word of him has come to Ambrosius.”

“Curious.”

“Madame, nothing is curious in Uther. If I were to hear some day that he had ridden down to Hades to fight a pitched battle with Satan, I should say, ‘Poor Satan, I warrant he has a sore head.’”

“Indeed!” quoth Igraine.

She shook her hair, tilted her chin, and looked at Gorlois out of the corners of her eyes. She guessed her power, was young, and a woman. It tempted her to read this creature called “man” in his various forms and phases, and hold his heart in the hollow of her hand. Her interest in Gorlois was no discourtesy to her love for Pelleas. She had seen few men in her time; they seemed strange beings, strong yet weak, wise yet very foolish, sometimes heroic, yet utter children.

Gorlois, who had the sun in his eyes, beheld her as in an unusual mist. He was warming to life, for his brain seemed full of the sound of harping, and his blood blithe with summer. Stretching out a hand he touched Igraine’s hair as it poured over her shoulders, for the red gold threads seemed magnetic to his fingers, and the glimmer of her eyes made his tough flesh creep.

“You have wonderful hair,” he said.

“I learnt that long ago,” drawing the strand away.

“The dawn of knowledge.”

“It reaches not so very far from my feet.”

Igraine hung out a flag, as it were, to try the man. She knew the look of Pelleas’s eyes, and she wanted Gorlois for comparison. Standing up, she shook the glistening shroud about her while it seemed to drop perfumes and to spark out  passion. The man’s malady showed plainly enough on his face, but his eyes did not please Igraine. There was too much selfishness, not enough abasement. She knew Pelleas would have looked at her as though she was a saint in a church, and he but a lad from the brown ploughland. Igraine thought that she loved mute devotion far better than the bold impatient hunger on Gorlois’s face.

The man leant back and tilted his beard at her, while his eyes were half shut for the sun.

“I have heard it told that women are ambitious. Is it truth?”

Igraine, all gravity again, with her tentative mischief banished, looked at her knees, and said she could not tell. Gorlois waxed subtle.

“Are you ambitious, Igraine?”

“Ambitious, my lord?”

“Have you never wished to stand out like a bright peak above the world?”

“No.”

“Or to have the glory of your beauty filling the gate of fame like a scarlet sky?”

Igraine forced a titter.

“I suppose you are a poet, sir.”

“Only a fool, madame.”

“Ah!”

“All poets are fools.”

“How do you contrive that?”

“Because they are for ever praising women.”

“And yet you are a poet, my lord!”

“How could I be else, madame, since I am a man?”

Gorlois took a deep breath, and smiled at the dark yews, sombre and mysterious behind their belt of glowing roses. Igraine was watching his face in some uneasiness. It gave the profile of a strong, stark man, whose every feature spelt alert daring and great hardihood of mind. There was a keen, half-cruel look about the tight lips and impatient eyes. She was contrasting him with Pelleas in her heart, and the  dark, brooding face of lion-like mould that so haunted her left little glory for Gorlois’s lighter, leaner countenance.

They were both strong men, but she guessed instinctively which was the stronger.

Gorlois turned suavely again, with his courage strung like a steel bow.

“I am a queer fellow,” he said.

Igraine began to bind her hair.

“If I ever loved a woman—”

“Well, my lord?”

“She could be ambitious to her heart’s content. The more her pride flamed, the better I should like her.”

Igraine frowned.

“She would be intolerable.”

Gorlois arched his eyebrows, and covered his convictions with a laugh.

“Shall I tell how I should win her?”

“It would be a quaint tale.”

“In the beginning, I should half-kill any man who braved it out that she was not the comeliest woman in Britain.”

“Somewhat harsh, my lord, but emphatic.”

“I should make her the envy of every lady, dame, and damoselle in the land.”

“Not wise.”

“Like a golden Helen should she rise in the east; blood should flow about her feet like water; I would tear down kingdoms to pile her up a throne. Such should be my wooing.”

Igraine looked at her lap, and said never a word for a minute or more. All these heroics were rather hollow to her ear, though she did not doubt the man’s sincerity towards himself, and his earnest mind to please her. Then she asked Gorlois a very simple question.

“Imagine, my lord, that the woman loved some other man?”

Gorlois’s answer came swift off his tongue.

 

“I should meet him in open field, sword to sword, and shield to shield, and kill him.”

Igraine started suddenly, grave and grey as any beadswoman. She did not think Pelleas would have taught any such doctrine.

“To you, that is love?” she asked.

“What else!”

Igraine thrust her silver bodkin into her hair with some vigour; there was no mirth or patience in her.

“I name it murder.”

“Madame!”

“Stark, selfish murder.”

Gorlois spread his hands and laughed.

“What is love?” he asked.

“Should I know!”

“Stark selfishness,—nothing more.”

Igraine thought of Pelleas, and the way he had left her for knowledge of her imagined vows. Something in her heart told her that that was love indeed that had clasped thorns in the struggle to embrace truth. Therewith she wished Gorlois a very formal good-morning, refused his escort, and went straight home with the clear conviction that she had learnt something to her credit. Her talk with Gorlois had set a brighter halo about Pelleas’s head.

Gorlois of Cornwall was nothing if not subtle. A selfish man of diplomatic mind may reach the very zenith of unselfishness to work his ends. Gorlois had so studied the expediencies and discretions of his purpose that even his love, headstrong though it may have been, was for the time being harnessed to the chariot of circumspection, whence intellect drove with steady hand. He had discovered for himself that Igraine was of sterner, prouder stuff than the general mob of women, and that he could not count much upon her vanity. She was to be won by honour, stark, unflinching honour, and by such alone, and Gorlois, thanks to the no mean wit that was in him, had judged that to his credit. He set about winning her at first with a consistency that  was admirable, and a wisdom that would have honoured Nestor.

Naturally enough, Radamanth was amazed. Gorlois, one of the first men in Britain, sitting in a goldsmith’s parlour and soliciting his patronage and countenance with a modest manliness! Radamanth stroked his beard, strove to appear at ease under so intense an obligation, struggled to wed servility with a new-found sense of importance. The whole business was most astonishing; not that Gorlois should love the daughter of Malgo of the Redlands, but that he should come frankly to a Winchester merchant and make such a Minos of him. Radamanth beamed, stuttered, excused himself, crept, condescended, in one breath. When Gorlois had gone, the good man sat down to think in a sweat of wonder. Probably he would find himself feasting with the king before long, and certainly it might prove excellent for trade.

After a cup of wine and a biscuit to restore his faculties, he sent for Igraine, who was in the garden, and prepared to parade his news with a most benevolent pleasure. He took a most solemn and serious mood, bowed her to a chair in magnificent fashion, and began in style.

“My dear niece, I have great honour to lay before you.”

Igraine, who had heard nothing of Gorlois’s visit, merely waited for Radamanth to unfold, with a mild and silent curiosity. The old man was big and benignant with the news he had, and when he began to speak he rolled his words with the sonorous satisfaction of a poet reading his verses to patrons in some Roman peristyle.

“Lady Igraine,” he said, “honour is pleasant to an old man, and reverence welcome as savoury pottage. Yet, honour to those he loves is even sweeter to him than honour to himself. In honouring a kinswoman of mine, a certain noble gentleman has poured oil of delicious flattery on my grey head, and treated me to such an exhibition of grace, frankness, and courtesy, that my heart still warms to him. Perhaps, my dear niece, you can guess to whom I refer.”

 

Igraine thrilled to a sudden thought—a thought of Pelleas. “I cannot tell,” she said.

Radamanth could have winked, only in his present exalted frame of mind he remembered that such an expression was neither dignified nor courtly. If he were to become the associate of noble folk, it behoved him to raise up new ideals, and so he contented himself with a most ingenuous smile.

“Hear, then,” he said, “that my noble visitor was the Count Gorlois.”

“Gorlois!”

“Exactly.”

Radamanth believed Igraine wholly overwhelmed. He waxed more and more patriarchal, till his very beard seemed to grow in dignity.

“Believe me, a most honourable man. Gentlemen of his position might well fancy other methods—well, never mind that. Count Gorlois came to me, like a man, to frankly crave my sanction for a betrothal.”

Igraine stared, admired Gorlois’s excellent plan for netting Faith, Hope, and Charity at one swoop, but said nothing. Radamanth prosed on.

“Count Gorlois besought me in most courtly and flattering fashion to countenance him in his claims. He would have everything done in the light, he said, in honourable, manly, and open fashion—no secret loitering after dark, or sly kisses under hedges. Mark the gentleman, dear niece.”

The goldsmith idled over the words as though they were fat morsels of flattery, and Igraine had never seen him look so eminently happy before. She understood quite well that Gorlois’s move had inspired him into complete and glowing partisanship, and that she was to have those sage words of advice that young folk love so much. Radamanth climbed down, meanwhile, to material things, and began to knock off Gorlois’s possessions in practical fashion on his fingers.

“A grand match,” he said. "There are the castles in Cornwall—Terabil and Tintagel; the lands in Gore and  elsewhere; the palace in London; and the great house here by the river. In Logria he has lands, I have heard,—miles of fat pastures, woods, and many manors, lying towards the great oaks of Brederwode. The man is as rich as any in Britain, and if death took Ambrosius or Uther—"

Igraine cut in upon his verbosity.

“What did you tell him, uncle?”

Radamanth stared at her, with his fingers still figuring.

“Tell him, child?”

“Yes.”

“What a thing to ask. Of course I promised to further his cause with you in every way possible. I said we should soon need the priest.”

Igraine groaned in spirit.

“It is all useless,” she said.

“What!”

“I have no scrap of love for this man.”

Now Radamanth had never heard a word of Pelleas, for Igraine had cautioned Lilith never to speak to her father on the matter. Like many old people who have spent their lives in getting and possessing, he had lost that subtle something that men call “soul.” Sentiment to him was a foolish and troublesome thing when it interfered with material advantage or profit, or barred out Mammon, with its rod twined with red roses. Consequently he was taken aback by Igraine’s cool reception of so momentous a blessing. He sat bolt upright in his chair and stared at her.

“My dear niece.”

There was such chagrin in his voice that Igraine, remembering his many kindnesses, hung her head and felt unhappy.

“Do not be angry,” she said; “I do not wish you to speak of this more.”

“But, my dear child, the honour, the fame, the noise of it!”

Igraine almost smiled at his palpable dismay, for she knew that her words must have flustered him not a  little. Radamanth mopped his bald head, for the season was sultry.

“I am astounded,” he said.

“Uncle!”

“Let me reason with you.”

“Love is not reason.”

“No, niece, it is prejudice. Yet I assure you Gorlois is a most noble soul.”

“If he were a seraph, uncle, I could not love him.”

“You women are all fancy. Why, you have hardly seen the colour of him. Come, now!”

“I do not need to see more of Gorlois.”

“Why, bless my soul, my wife never loved me till we had been married a month, and she had learnt my fibre.”

Igraine thought a moment. Then she asked Radamanth a question.

“Do you love Lilith?”

“Why, girl, what a question.”

“Would you marry her to a man she did not love or trust, simply because it brought gold?”

Radamanth saw himself rounded in the argument like a rat in a corner. He sat stroking his beard, and striving to look pleased.

“Think over it, my dear,” he said presently.

“There is no need.”

“Gorlois will woo you like a hero.”

“Let him. He will accomplish nothing.”

“It would be a grand match.”

Igraine jumped up, kissed him to show she bore no ill will, and ran away much troubled to find Lilith in the garden. She flung herself down beside the girl in the bower of laurels, and told her all that passed that morning in Radamanth’s parlour. Lilith listened with her brown eyes deep with thought, and a quiet wonder. When Igraine had finished, Lilith took both her hands in hers, and, kneeling before her, looked up into her face.

“What will you do, Igraine?”

 

“Need you ask, dear?”

“Forgive me.”

“Ah!”

“You love Pelleas.”

Igraine put her arms round Lilith’s neck, and kissed her.

Chapter IV

---

Radamanth’s words to the girl proved very true before many days had gone; his prophetic belief in Gorlois’s mood found abundant justification in the event. Gorlois had the warm imagination of his race, an imagination that found extravagance and rich taste ready ministers to work his purpose. Igraine, met by all manner of devices on all possible occasions, began to realise the cares of those whom a purblind world insists on smothering with limitless favours.

Flowers were poured in upon her, worked into posies, garlands, shields, harps, crosses,—all bearing with them some mute plea for mercy. It might have been perpetual May-day in Radamanth’s house, so flowered and scented was it. Flowers were followed by things more tangible, a pearl-set cithern, a great white hound, a gold girdle, a pair of doves in a cage of silver wire, a necklet of rich stones gotten from some Byzant mart. Gorlois seemed ready to send her all the finery in Winchester despite her messages and her words to him,—“My lord, I can suffer none of these things from you.” Servants and slaves came down to Radamanth’s house as though they had been sent from Sheba, while one of Radamanth’s men went back from Igraine like an echo, bearing back the unaccepted baubles. It was a patient game, and rather foolish.

These were but small flutters in Gorlois’s sweep for the sun. Had not Igraine been stabbed in the public gardens! Gorlois put the incident to use. He formed a bodyguard of certain of the noble youths who were under his patronage,  and warned Igraine with all reverence that he had acted for her sanctity, and that a dozen gentlemen would follow near her when she walked abroad, or went to bath or church. Even her humblest stroll in the street began to partake of the nature of a triumphal progress. Children would gather to her in the gardens and throw flowers and laurel branches at her feet, or she would be followed by music and some sweet love ditty to the harp. A hundred quaint flatterers seemed to dog her from door to door, till she hardly dared to stir out of Radamanth’s garden.

Naturally enough, her name was soon the one name in Winchester. The good folk with their Celtic beauty-loving souls spoke of her with quaint extravagance; her skin was like the apple-bloom in spring, and her lips like rich red May; her feet moved soft and swift as sunlight through swaying branches; her hair was a cloud of gold plucked from the sky at dawn. She was gaped at and pointed at in the street like a prodigy. When she went into church on Sunday half the folk turned to stare at her, and a clear circle was left about her where she sat in the nave. She was for the season the city’s cynosure, its poem, its gossip. Aphrodite might have stepped out of mythology and taken lodging at Radamanth’s, to judge by the curiosity displayed by the people, and doubtless many a comfortable piece of business came to Radamanth thereby.

Many women would have gloried for self’s sake in such a pageant of flattery. It was not so with Igraine. She was a woman who mingled much warmth of heart with strength of will, and fair measure of innate wisdom; her feelings were too staunch and vivid to be swayed or weakened by any fresh circumstance, however strange and magnificent it might appear. Her love, once forged, could bend to no new craft. Her thoughts were all for Pelleas, and any glory her beauty received she kept it in her heart for him. Igraine was so eternally in love that even worldly prides seemed dead in her, and she had not vanity enough to be tempted by Gorlois’s great homage.

 

The whole business troubled her not a little. There was a certain mockery in it that hurt her heart. It was as if she had panted in thirst for water, and some rude hand from heaven had thrown down gold. Gorlois had her in measure at his mercy. He seemed to take all her rebuffs with a sublime stoicism, and she had no one to whom she could appeal. She wished to bide in Winchester, for the city seemed to promise her the best chance of seeing Pelleas or Uther, and of learning if these twain were one.

One night there was music under her window. Flute, harp, and cithern with deep voices were pleading for Gorlois under the stars. Igraine listened, lying quiet, and thinking only of Pelleas.

Take then my heart,

My soul, my shield, my sword,—

sang the voices under the window. Igraine kissed the gold cross that hung at her bosom, and longed till her heart seemed fit to break for yearning. If only the song had come from Pelleas, how fair it would have sounded in the night. As it was, the whole business made her feel desperately weary.

Gorlois had begun by holding somewhat aloof. It was part of his purpose to work behind a glowing and fantastic screen, serving Igraine more at a distance, in a spirit of melancholy that should web him round with a mystery that was more splendid than truth. He bore Igraine’s passive antagonism for a while with a spirit of enforced fortitude, going cheerfully by the old and somewhat foolish saying that a woman’s looks lie against her heart, and that persistence wins entry in the end. To do credit to Gorlois’s self-favour, he never considered the ultimate shipwreck of his enterprise as possible. He had fame, gold, bodily favour on his side, and what woman, he thought, could gainsay such a chorus. There are some men who never fail in anticipating success, and Gorlois possessed that quality of mind.

As the days went by, and the girl was still stone to him, he began to chafe and to look for stauncher measures. The  gay gentlemen who served him suggested various expedients; one, a more passionate appeal; another, sly bribery of servants; a third, who was young in years, hinted at humble despair that might evoke pity. Gorlois laughed at them all, and swore he would win the girl, hook or by crook, in a month or less, or lose all the honour his sword had won. He was tired of mere courtesies that ran contrary to his more stormy spirit. He had a liking for insolent daring, for a snatch at love as at an enemy’s banner in the full swing of a gallop on some bloody field. Mere mild homage was all very well for a season. Gorlois loved mastery, and believed there was no wine like success.

About this time a horde of heathen ships came from the east, sailed past Vectis, and began to pour their wild men into the country ’twixt Winchester and the sea. Hamlets and manors were burnt, peasant folk driven to the woods, the crops fired, the cattle slain. The noise of it came into Winchester with a rabble of frightened fugitives who had fled to the city for refuge. Ambrosius the king was in Caerleon, and Uther errant, so that the chance fell to Gorlois of driving the heathen into the sea.

No man could have been more heartily glad of this innovation. Igraine should see him swoop like a hawk in his strength; she should hear how he led men, and how his sword drank blood. In making war on the heathen he would boast himself before her eyes, and show her the merit of manhood, and the glory of a strong arm. Winchester bustled like a camp. Troops poured in from Sarum, and the sound of war went merrily through the streets. Folk boasted how Gorlois would harry the heathen. He rode out one night with picked men at his back, and held straight for the coast, while Eldol of Gloucester, a veteran knight, marched southward before dawn with five thousand footmen. It was Gorlois’s plan to cut the heathen off from their ships, and crush them between his knights and the spearmen led by Eldol.

It was such a venture as Gorlois loved,—keen, shrill, and  full of hazards. Riding straight over hill and dale they saw the glimmer of waves as the sun rose, and knew they had touched the sea. Gorlois’s scouts had located the main mass of the Jutes camped in a valley about a nunnery they had taken, and the British knights coming up through the woods saw smoke in the valley and men moving like ants about the reeking ruin of the holy house. Looking north they saw a beacon burning on a hill,—Eldol’s signal that he had closed the woods, north, east, and west, with his footmen, and that he waited only for Gorlois to sweep up and drive the heathen on to the hidden spears.

Never was there a finer light in Gorlois’s eyes than at such a season. He loved the dance and noise of steel, the plunging hustle of horses at the gallop, the grand rage of the shout that curled like the foam on an ocean billow. His courage sang with the wind as his knights rode down over the green slopes in a great half-moon of steel, a moving barrier that rolled the savage folk northwards, and rent them like a harrow of iron. By the blackened walls of the nunnery Gorlois caught sight of a line of mutilated bodies tied to posts,—dead nuns, stripped, and still bleeding. The sight roused the wolf in him. “Kill! kill!” were his words as they rode in upon the skin-clad horde. It was savage work, bloody and merciless. Eldol’s men closed in on every quarter, and the heathen were cut down like corn in summer.

Very few went back to their ships that day. Scores lay dead with their fair hair drabbled in the blood about the ruins, and on the quiet slopes of the dale. As they had measured out violence to the peasant folk and women, so it was meted to them in turn,—vengeance, piled up, great measure, running over with blood. Some sixty maimed men were taken alive, but mere death was too mild for Gorlois when he remembered the slain nuns. He had certain of the captured burnt alive, others hacked limb from limb, the rest crucified near the river for the birds to feed upon. Then he buried the nuns, and made a great entry  into Winchester, taking care to ride past Igraine’s window with his white horse bloody to the saddle, and his armour splashed as he had come from the field. She should see his manhood, if she would not have his presents.

This single slaughter, however, did not end matters on the southern shores. Bands of Saxons were forraying from Kent, where they had established themselves, and Gorlois rode out again and again to crush and kill. There would be battles in the woods, bloody tussles in the deep shadows of Andredswold, wild flights over moor and waste, triumph cries at sunset. Three times Gorlois rode out at the head of his knights from Winchester; three times he came back victorious, hacked and war-stained, thundered in by the people, past Radamanth’s house to the church in the market-square. Igraine sat at her window and watched him go by, lowering his spear to her with all his proud love ablaze on his face. Had he not driven the barbarians into the very heel of Kent, and left many a tall man from over the seas rotting in sun and rain?

It was customary year by year in Winchester to hold a water pageant on the river, depicting legendary and historic things that had passed within the shores of Britain. August was the pageant month, and in this particular year the display was made more elaborate in order to celebrate the rout of the heathen by Gorlois, and to please the common folk who had made him their idol. The pageant was of no little splendour. Great galleys, fittingly decorated, were rowed down the narrow stream amid a horde of smaller craft, each great barge bearing figures famed in British legend lore. The first barge portrayed Brute the Trojan voyaging for Britain; others, Locrine’s death by the river Severn, Rudhudibras, mythical founder of Winchester, the reunion of Leyr and Cordelia, Porrex the fratricide done to death by damsels. One barge, draped in white and purple, moralised the reconciliation of Brennius and Belenus at the intercession of their mother. A great galley in red and white bore Joseph of Aramathy and the Holy Grail, and a choir of  angels who sang of Christ’s blood. Last of all came Alban the protomartyr, pictured as he knelt to meet his death by the sword.

The day was blue and quiet, with hardly the shimmer of a cloud over the intense gaze of the sky, while banners of rich cloth were hung over the balustrades of the river terraces, and the gardens themselves were full of gay folk who kept carnival, and watched the boats go by. The great pageant galleys had hardly passed, and the small craft that had kept the bank were swarming out into mid-stream, where a great barge with gilded bulwarks and a carved prow came sweeping down like a swan before the wind. It was driven by the broad backs of twenty rowers clad in scarlet and gold. In the stern sat Gorlois, holding the tiller, with a smile on his keen lips as a quavering clamour went up from the gardens and the boats that lined the shallows.

By Radamanth’s house Gorlois held up a hand, and the blades foamed as the men backed water. The great barge lost weigh and lay motionless on the dappled silver of the stream. Slowly it was poled in to the steps that ran from the water’s edge to the terrace of Radamanth’s garden. A light gangway was thrown ashore, and a purple carpet spread upon the steps, while the men lined the stairway with their oars held spearwise as Gorlois went up to greet Igraine.

Clad in white and gold, with a rose over her ear, she was sitting between Radamanth and Lilith on a bench at the head of the stairway. There was an implacable irresponsive look on her face as Gorlois came up the steps and stood in front of her like a courtier before a queen’s chair. Radamanth and the merchant folk present were on their feet, and uncovered; only Igraine kept her seat in the man’s presence, and looked him over as though he had been a beggar.

They were left alone together on the terrace, Radamanth shepherding his merchant friends aside for the moment with  the discreet desire to please the count. Gorlois stood by the stairhead and told Igraine the reason of his coming, as though she had not guessed it from the moment his barge had foamed up beside the steps. He told her frankly that he wished to speak to her alone, and that his barge gave her an opportunity of hearing him without his having the advantage of her in solitude, while the noise of oars would drown their words. Igraine listened to him with a solemn face. She began to feel that she must face her destiny and give the man the truth for good. Procrastination would avail nothing against such a man as Gorlois. Being so minded, she gave Gorlois her hand and hardened herself to satisfy him that day.

Away went the great barge before the strong sweep of the long oars. Igraine watched the water slide by—foaming like a mill race as the blades cut white furrows in the tide. The river gleamed with colour as innumerable galleys, skiffs, and coracles drifted in the shallows or darted aside to give passage to Gorlois’s barge. Fair stone houses, gardened round with green, slid back on either side. They passed the spectacular galleys one by one, and the wooden wharfs packed with the mean folk of the city, and foaming on under the great water-gate, drew southward into the open country and the fields.

Igraine looked at Gorlois, and found his face impenetrable with thought. A fillet of gold bound his hair, and he was wearing his great sword, and an enamelled belt over his rich tunic. The cushions of the barge had been sprinkled with perfumes, and the floor covered ankle deep with flowers. Igraine groaned in spirit, and read the old extravagance that had persecuted her so long, and made a mockery of her love for Pelleas.

Gentle meads lapped greenly to the willows, giving place anon to woods that seemed to stride down and snatch the river for a silver girdle. The festival folk and their skiffs were out of sight and hearing, yet Gorlois’s barge ran on, to plunge into emerald shadows, tunnels whose floors  seemed of the blackest crystal webbed with nets of green and blue, whose vaultings were the dense groinings of the trees. Not a wind stirred. The great curving galleries in the woods were dark and mysterious, the water like glistening basalt, the trees dreaming over their own images in an ecstasy of silence. The foam from the oars was very white, and the moist swish of the blades made the silence more solemn by contrast, while the water seemed to catch a golden flicker from the flanks of the barge.

Igraine knew well enough what was in the man’s heart as he sat handling the tiller, and watching her with his restless eyes. She was quite cold and undisturbed in spite of her being at his mercy, and the consciousness that in her heart she did not trust him vastly. Gorlois had spoken only of the town, and they were running on under dense foliage into the forest solitudes that edged the river. Yet Igraine had faith in her own wit, and believed herself a match for Gorlois, or any man, for that matter, save Pelleas. Gorlois passed the time by telling her of his battles in Andredswold, how he had driven the heathen into Thanet, and freed Andred’s town from leaguer. Igraine began to wonder how long it would be before he would turn to matters nearer to his heart. She had marshalled up her courage for the argument, and this waiting under arms for the bugle-call did not please her.

The day had already slipped into evening, for the water pageant was ordered late, so that it might merge into a lantern frolic on the river after dusk. Igraine, seeing how the light lapsed, told Gorlois to have the barge turned for Winchester. She had hardly spoken when the boat ran out from the trees into open water. In the west the sky was already aflame, ridged tier above tier with burning clouds, while the blaze fainted zenithwards into gold and azure. A queer cry as from a man weary of torture came down from the west. On a low hill near the river, bleak against the sky, stood a black concourse of beams set upright in the ground, looking like the charred pillars of a  burnt house. They were crosses, and the bodies of men crucified.

Gorlois pointed to them with the evening glow on his face, and taking a horn that hung at his belt, blew a loud call thereon. At the sound a vulture rose from a crossbeam, and went flapping heavenwards—a black blot against the scarlet frieze of the west. Others followed, like evil things driven from their food. Again the cry, the wail from one who had hung torn and wracked in the parching sun, came down from the darkening hill.

Igraine shuddered and felt cold at the sound, and watched the figures against the sky with a kind of awe.

“Who are these?” she said.

“Dogs from over the sea.”

“Some are still alive.”

“These pirates are hard; they die slowly, despite beak and claw. Such be the death of all who burn holy houses and homes, and put women and children to the sword.”

“Take them down, or let them be killed outright.”

“Never.”

“At my prayer.”

“What I have done, I have done.”

“Cruelly.”

“Cruelly, madame! You should have seen twenty dead nuns tied to stakes as I have seen, and you would gloat and be glad as I am. By God, little mercy had this offal at my hands in the glades of Andredswold. I burnt, and crucified, and tore with horses. Mere steel is too good for such as these.”

“My lord!”

“What is hate unless it is hate? I can never brook an enemy to Britain.”

Igraine had sudden insight into the core of Gorlois’s nature. She understood, in a vague, swift way, what primæval instincts were hid in him ready at the beck of baser feelings such as jealousy or smitten pride. Woman-like, she recoiled from a man whose strength was so inflexible that it owned no pity or leavening kindness where malice or anger was  concerned. She loved strength, and the natural wrath of a man, but she had no touch of the Semiramis about her, and her heart could not echo Gorlois’s wolf-like cry.

The rowers had turned the barge, and they were soon back again under the shadows of the trees. It was dim and ghostly with the onrush of night, while a faint fire flickered through the trees from the west and touched the sullen water with a reddish flame. Gorlois’s face was in the shadow. He was leaning over the tiller towards Igraine, and his eyes seemed to burn out upon her face and to make her heart beat faster. She sat as much away from him as the gunwale suffered, and looked ahead over the misty river, or up into the dense, black bosoms of the trees.

The foamy rush of the oars and the grind of the looms in the rowlocks half drowned Gorlois’s words as he spoke to her.

“Igraine.”

“My lord.”

“You have read me to the heart.”

Igraine turned and looked him full in the face. Now that the brunt had come, she was strong and ready to tell the man the truth, though it might be bleak and bitter to his pride. Gorlois was very near her, and she could see his white teeth between his lips, and the glint of his eyes as he leant towards her in the shadows.

“Are you ambitious, Igraine?”

“No, my lord.”

“Not even a little?”

“My lord, I have no more ambition in me than one of those dead men hanging athwart the sunset.”

“You are a queer woman.”

“Pardon, I have a conscience.”

Gorlois bit his lip, stared in her face, and set a hand upon her wrist.

“You can never shirk me,” he said.

“I never shirk the truth.”

“Come now, give me the word.”

 

“My lord, may I save you pain in the telling of it! You can never come near my heart.”

“Woman, never be so sure.”

Gorlois drew back, and said never another word. Igraine watched him furtively as his keen profile hung near her in the dusk clear as marble. Now and again his eyes gleamed out upon her and made her fear the moment, while the oars swung out over the smiling stream, and the black woods started by like night.

Soon the lights of Winchester showed up against the northern sky, and far ahead over a straight stretch of water they could see the lanterns and torches of the folk who kept festival. A golden mist and the noise of music came down to them, as they surged under the great water-gate and ran on through the city amid a glimmering web of lights and laughter. Soon the barge found the shallows under white walls, and Igraine was standing on the steps leading to Radamanth’s garden, with a starry sky sweeping like a wheel above the world.

Gorlois went slowly from her down the steps, with a face that was dark and brooding. Torchlight glimmered on the fillet of gold about his hair, on the splendid setting of his baldric, and the scabbard of his sword. At the water’s edge he lifted up his face to her out of the night.

“It shall be life or death,” he said.

Then he was swept away with a red flare of torches over the river, and Igraine went solemn-eyed to bed.

Chapter V

---

Not a word of Uther yet, no sound of his name in Winchester, though Igraine lived on in Radamanth’s house, and hoped for light in the dark.

Gorlois had had the truth, and she wondered what would come of it. Lulled by an ingenuous reasoning into the  belief that she would be free of the man, she began to breathe again and to take liberty in her hand. She did not think Gorlois could plague her longer after the blunt answer she had given him. His pride would drag him aside, make further homage impossible, and there the matter would end.

If Igraine believed this, then she was in very gross error. Many men never show their true fibre till they are given the blunt lie, and Gorlois was never more himself than when baffled. There was much of the hawk about him, and Igraine had underrated his pride if she expected it to take league with her against its kinsman passion. Her measure only uncovered the darker side of the man’s nature, and sounded the doom of a lighter, gayer chivalry. Gorlois’s pride and self-love never dragged in the wind, but held him taut to the storm, as though determined to weather all the perversities of which a woman’s heart is capable. In truth, Igraine had done the very thing least likely to free her from the man’s thought; she had taunted his passion and thrown down a challenge to his pride.

Gorlois kept his own counsel, and frowned down the mischievous curiousness of his friends when they laughed at him and asked how the girl framed for a wife. He struck Brastias his squire to the ground for daring to jest sympathetically on the subject. Those who went about his house and hunted and diced with him soon found that he was in no temper for light raillery or the sly privileges of an intimate tongue. The fabric of a mere nice romance had stiffened into sterner, darker proportions. There was the look of a dry desire in the man’s eyes, a lean hungry silence about him that made his men whisper. Some of them had seen Gorlois when he hunted down the heathen. They knew his temper, and the cast of his features when there was some lust of enterprise in his heart.

About that time a knight came from Wales thrusting a woman’s beauty upon every man with the point of his spear. As had been his custom elsewhere, he set up a green pavilion outside the walls, and daily rode out armed to the sound of  a trumpet to declare a certain Amoret of Caerleon the fairest gentlewoman in Christendom. He was a big man, red and burly, and had overthrown every like fanatic for love’s sake on this particular adventure. Gorlois heard of the fellow with no little satisfaction. Every finger of him itched to spill blood, and he took the deed on him, vowing it should be the last peace-offering to Igraine.

Arming one morning, he rode down and fought the Green Knight in his meadow outside the walls. It took them an hour to settle the matter. At the end thereof the errant from Wales was lying impotent and bloody in his tent, and the name of Amoret aped the ineffectual moon. Afterwards Gorlois rode into the town, war-stained as he was, found Igraine at her window, and presented her the Green Knight’s token on the point of his spear.

It was a woman’s sleeve in green silk, and edged with pearls. Igraine saw a crowd of upturned faces about the man on the white horse. His bright arms seemed to burn in upon her, and to light a sudden impatience in her heart. She took the green sleeve from the spear, and looking Gorlois full in the face, in reckless mood she threw the thing down under his horse’s hoofs.

There was a great hush all through the street at the deed, and Gorlois started red as a man struck across the face with a whip. His eyes seemed to grow large, like the eyes of an angry dog. Never had folk seen him look so black. He stared up a moment at Igraine, shook his spear, and trampling the green sleeve under the hoofs of his horse, rode away without a word through the glum and gaping crowd.

Igraine had thrown down the glove with a vengeance. It was a mad enough method of beating off the pride of a man such as Gorlois, whose temper grew with the blows given, and who knew no moderation in love or in hate. Gorlois had ridden home through the town that day to have his wounds dressed, and to spend half the night in a fury of cursing. Yet for all his bitterness he had the power of level thought, and of taking ground for the future. He  would read this woman a lesson; that much he swore on the cross of his sword; and the early morning saw him again at Radamanth’s, strenuous to speak his mind.

The goldsmith happened to know that Igraine was alone in the garden. Without noise or ceremony he sent Gorlois in to her, locked the door on them both, and went to watch from a narrow window on the stairs. He swore that Gorlois should have his own way, and not go balked for a woman’s whim.

Igraine was sitting sewing in the arbour of laurels with the little gold cross hanging down over the bosom of her dress. A grass walk led to the arbour between beds of flowers. As she sat stitching she heard the sound of feet in the grass, and saw a shadow slanting across the entry. She expected Lilith, but looking up, found Gorlois.

He was white from his wounds of yesterday and the blood he had lost by the Green Knight’s sword. His left arm lay in a sling of red silk. Igraine noted in her sudden half-fear how his eyes were very bright, and that his beard looked coal-black below his bloodless cheeks. There was something in his face too that made Igraine cautious.

She rose and folded her embroidery in the most unperturbed and quiet fashion, though she was thinking hard all the same. Gorlois watched her, and held back for her to speak, with a hollow fire creeping into his eyes, for the girl’s passionless mood chafed him. He had no gentleness towards her for the moment; such love as he knew had been blown into a red beacon by starved and covetous desire.

“A word with you,” he said.

The speech was rough and pertinent, showing the trend of the man’s purpose. He had abandoned superficialities. Igraine, gathering up her silks, turned and faced him with the frankness of a full moon. Gorlois saw her lips tighten, and there was a temper swimming in her eyes that promised abundant spirit and no shirking. If he had launched out to rouse her from passive antagonism, he could not have chosen a better method.

 

Igraine made a step towards the house, but two strides put Gorlois in her path.

“Make way—”

“Not a foot till you have the truth out of me.”

“Have a care,—I will be stormed at by no man.”

“Woman, look at me.”

Igraine was looking at him with all the temper she could summon. If Gorlois thought to ride straight over her courage, he was enormously mistaken. She would match him for all his hectoring.

“If you are not a fool,” she said, “you will end this nonsense, and go.”

“Am I a scullion?”

“You should know, my lord.”

“I have not bled for nothing.”

“As you will.”

“What have you to say to me?”

Igraine lost all patience, tossed her embroidery aside, and simply flashed out at him with all her soul.

“Say!” she said; “I have somewhat to say, and that bitter; listen if you will. You, Gorlois of Cornwall, who bade you make my name a byword in Winchester? Listen to me,—hear the truth, and profit—you who pestered me with mad tricks till I hated it all and held it insolence. Who asked you to make me gossip for a city, did I? Who took your presents? Who told you the truth? Who threw your token under the hoofs of your horse to shame you? I have mocked you enough, now leave me in peace, or rue it.”

“By God, madame—”

“Don’t echo me. Go, get out of my sight; I hate you!”

Gorlois flushed to the temples in this wind of passion. The girl looked splendid to him in her great anger, her head thrown back and her eyes steady on him as stars. The scorn of her beauty leapt over him like crimson light, and he was more a sensation than a man. He had a great  thirst in him to grip her with his hands, to bend her straight body as he would bend a bow, to strangle up the scorn in her throat with his own breath. He went near her, stooping and staring in her face.

“A SUDDEN MADNESS WHIRLED GORLOIS AWAY”

“Igraine.”

“Mark my words.”

“You golden shrew, you temptation of tempers—”

“Hold off—”

“By God! I’ll tame you, don’t doubt me.”

Igraine, very watchful, slipped past him suddenly like light, and walked for the house with a sweeping air that bade him keep his distance. Coming to the door of the house, she tried it but found the lock shot. The red badge of a new anger showed upon either cheek. She turned on Gorlois; her eyes blazed out at him.

“A pretty trick!”

“What now, madame?”

“You had this door locked.”

“Never.”

“You lie in your throat.”

“Radamanth—”

“Open it.”

“I have no key.”

Igraine’s figure seemed to dilate and grow taller, and her eyes shone well-nigh as bright in colour as her hair.

“Obey me.”

“Not if I had the key.”

“Obey me.”

“I will be master before the sun is at noon.”

“You dog!”

A sudden madness whirled Gorlois away. He went red from the neck, clutched at Igraine’s wrist and held it. For a moment they stood rigid. The girl could not shake him off although he had but one hand to hold her. His breath was hot upon her face as he pressed her back against the wall, and held her there till his lips touched her neck. Igraine, breathing fast and straining from him with all her strength,  set a hand on his face and thrust him away. She twisted her wrist free, and slipped from between him and the wall. Then the door opened, and Radamanth stood by them.

Igraine slipped away with a white face, and running above to her chamber threw herself down on the bed, and cried for Pelleas. She heard Gorlois stride through the house, heard the gate crash as he went out into the street. Shame and loneliness were on her like despair, and she was weak and shaken after her anger, and very hungry for love and comfort. The world seemed a dull blank about her, cold, irresponsive, and grey as a November evening. Every hand seemed against her. Even Radamanth, the man of serious years, had turned the key upon her, more kind to Gorlois than herself. Her thoughts were very bitter as she lay and brooded over it all.

Presently she heard some one coming up the stairs. Darting to the door, she bolted it, and went back to the bed, while a hand rapped out a somewhat diffident summons, and Radamanth’s voice came in to her.

“My dear niece,” it said.

Igraine made no answer.

“My dear niece, let me have a word with you.”

Still no answer. Radamanth tried the door and found it fastened.

“Gorlois is gone,” he said.

Igraine remained obdurate, with face drawn and sullen-eyed. She heard him shuffle down the stairs again, go into his parlour, and shut the door very gently, like a man who is ashamed. Then all was quiet save for casual footsteps in the street, and the garrulous chatter of a starling on the tiles.

Noon had come and gone a long while, and still Igraine lay in her room and moped. She felt sore and grieved to the heart, all her sanguine courage was at low ebb. Winchester seemed a prison-house where she was shut up with Gorlois. The man’s greed and power of soul seemed to stare upon her till white honour folded its hands over its  breast and turned to flee. Oh for Pelleas and the brave look of those honest eyes, the staunch touch of those great hands. He seemed to stand up above the world, above the selfishness, the lust, the violence, like a pine on some lonely hill. She could trust, she could believe. To find him would give her peace.

As she lay there that noontide a new purpose came to her, and lighted up hope. It was frail and flickering enough, but still, it burned. She would leave Radamanth’s house and go afoot into the world to find a shadow. Anything was better than lying cooped in the place for dread of Gorlois. She had long contemplated such a measure, and that morning in Radamanth’s garden gave her decision and made her strong.

She rose up from the bed and hunted out her old Avangel habit from a cupboard in the wall. Then she set to to doff the rich stuffs Radamanth had given her, the embroidered tunic, the coloured leather shoes, the goodly enamelled girdle. In their stead she stood again in the old grey gown, hood, and sandals, with a little thrill of delicious recollection. It was like stepping back into the dream of an enchanted past.

She had hardly ended the transformation when there came a shy tap at her door, and a mild voice calling to her from the landing. It was the girl Lilith. Igraine felt a sudden warmth at her heart as she let her in and barred the door again. Lilith stood and stared at her, her great brown eyes wide with astonishment.

“Why this old dress, Igraine?”

“I will tell you, dear.”

“And you have been crying, for your eyes are red.”

Igraine took the soft-voiced little woman to the window-seat and told her sadly enough all the doings of the morning. Even Lilith looked ashamed and showed her anger openly. Radamanth had confessed nothing of what had passed in the garden.

“I never loved my father less before,” she said. "I  should never have thought this mean trick of him. I am ashamed, Igraine."

“Never trouble, dear, you are my joy in Winchester.”

“And why this old nun’s habit?”

“I am going to leave you, child.”

Lilith clutched at her with both hands, her face suddenly white and almost piteous.

“Oh, no, no, Igraine!”

“I must, dear.”

“Forgive—”

“It is not that alone. I cannot rest here longer. Gorlois and the city have crushed the heart out of me.”

Lilith lifted up her child’s face to her, and then began to sob unrestrained on Igraine’s bosom.

“It seems cruel,” she whimpered.

“No, no, it is best for me after all.”

“But where will you go, Igraine?”

“Heaven knows, dear. I cannot rest here longer after this morning. I feel as if I should stifle.”

“Don’t go, Igraine.”

“Hush, dear, don’t weaken me. I am hard put as it is.”

They were both weeping now. Lilith’s slim body shook as she lifted up her face to Igraine’s, and looked at her through her tears. She had learnt to love Igraine, and jealousy of her tall and splendid kinswoman had had no place in her heart. Lilith possessed to perfection the power of sympathy, and being a simple little soul who lived wholly for the present, she perhaps felt the more for that very reason. She could not say evil enough of Gorlois, nor put too much kindness into her kisses as she sat with her head on Igraine’s shoulder.

“You cannot go out alone in the world,” she said presently.

Igraine was silent.

“I know father would never forgive himself.”

“There are convents, child. They would guard and give me harbour for a time.”

 

“A convent—but you hate the life.”

“If I could only hear of Uther, I would—”

“Yes, yes, I know. But will you go, Igraine?”

“My mind is made up; nothing can change it.”

“Then let me come with you.”

Igraine kissed her, but shook her head at the suggestion.

“I love you for the wish, dear, but I could never drag you into my own troubles, and it would be very wrong to Radamanth.”

That afternoon they had many words together in Igraine’s room, and dusk caught them still talking. Igraine had made Lilith promise that Radamanth should know nothing of her flight till the following morning. Lilith proved a little obstinate at first, but yielded in the end for fear of grieving Igraine. With the dusk she crept downstairs and brought up food. Igraine made a meal, while Lilith, with her tears still falling, put up food and a few trifles into a bundle, slipping in all the little store of money she had. Then she ran softly downstairs to see if the way were clear. Radamanth had gone to supper with a merchant friend, and the house seemed quiet and very lonely. In the passage-way the two girls took leave of each other, Lilith clinging to Igraine for a moment with all her heart. With sad eyes Igraine left her, and went out into the night.

Chapter VI

---

Igraine found lodging that night in the great abbey of St. Helena that Pelleas had spoken of on their ride from the island manor. Posing to the portress as one who had wandered long after her escape from Avangel, she was taken to the refectory, where supper was being spread by the juniors. The women of the place gathered round her, and Igraine inquired with some qualms for any chance news of Malt, Claudia, and the rest, but getting nothing she felt  more confident. She told them her name was Melibœa, and she recounted at length the burning of Avangel and her subsequent wanderings, carefully purging the tale of all that might seem strange to their virgin ears, or set their tongues a-clacking. The women were very kind to her, partly for her own sake, and partly for the interesting gossip she had brought them.

At supper she sat next a young and merry nun who shared her misericords with her. The good women of the place were suffered to talk between vespers and complines, and Igraine, sly at heart, edged the talk to a tone for which she thirsted, and began to speak to her neighbours of Gratia, Abbess of Avangel.

“Did any of you know her?” she asked.

“Only by fame,” said a fat nun opposite Igraine.

“I have heard she was near of kin to the King,” said another, who drooped her lids in very modest fashion.

Igraine started in thought.

“Aurelius?” she said.

The nun nodded.

“How were they related?”

“I have heard Gratia was his aunt.”

“And aunt to Uther also?”

“Of course, seeing they are brothers.”

Igraine looked at her wooden platter, and pressed the little gold cross to her bosom with her hand. And now a strange thing happened. The old nun opposite Igraine, who was the Mistress of the Novices, brought out news that she had heard in the Abbess’s parlour that very morning.

“Uther has been seen again,” she said.

“Uther?”

The word snapped out like a bolt from a bow, and brought the nuns’ eyes on Igraine across the table.

“The man comes and goes like a shadow. He is ever riding alone to do some great deed against the beasts, or against the heathen. A great soul is Uther.”

 

Here were tidings dropped like dew out of heaven at the very hour she stood in need of them. Igraine felt the mist lighten appreciably in her brain. She popped an olive into her mouth and spoke almost carelessly.

“Where is Uther?”

“At Sarum town. He rode, they say, to the great camp there looking like a ghost, or as though he had been playing Simeon on a pillar.”

Igraine merely nodded.

“Uther always looks a serious soul. Have you ever seen him, sister?”

“Never. A dark man?”

“With a face like a sun and a thunder-cloud rolled into one.”

“A good man!”

“So they say; he has a clean look.”

A little bell began to sound to call them away to complines. Igraine went with the rest into the solemn chapel, and let the chant sweep into her soul, and the prayers take her heart to heaven. Incense floated down, colours shone and glimmered on the walls, the dim lamps shivered like stars under the roof. Igraine felt her hollow heart warm as a rose in the full blaze of a golden noon. She said her prayers very fervently that night, for love was awake in her and glad of her new-blossomed hope. She would go to the great camp at Sarum and see this Uther for herself.

She had little comradeship with sleep in the great dormitory that night. When the matins bell rang she was up and ready for her flight like a young lark in the day. After chapel she begged a pittance from the cellaress and stowed it with her bundle in the little wallet Lilith had given her, excusing her early going on the plea that she had far to walk that day. She set out briskly from the grey shadows of the abbey. The place lay quite close by the western gate, so that she was soon beyond the walls and in the fields and orchards where all was goldly quiet at that early hour.

Winchester stood like a prison-house, void and fooled, in  the east. Igraine turned and looked down at it awhile huddled in its great girdle of stone, a medley of towers, roofs, and mist-wrapped trees. She shook her fist at it with a noiseless little laugh when she thought of Gorlois. Further yet to the east she could see the blue pine-smirched ridge where Pelleas had built her that little bower on the night he had left her sleeping. Her eyes grew deep with desire as she thought of it all, even as she had thought of it a thousand times since then. Pelleas’s dark face was garlanded with green in her memory, and trouble, as it ever does, had made love take deeper root in her bosom.

Cheeriness comes with action. Igraine, fettered no longer, footed it along the road with snatches of song on her lips, and her eyes full of summer. A quiet wind came up from the west, and the clear morning air suited her courage. All the wide world seemed singing; the trees had an epithalamium on their whispering tongues, and the sky seemed strewn with white garlands. The tall corn in its occasional cohorts bowed down to her with murmuring acclaim as though it guessed her secret.

When she had gone a league or so she sat down under a tree and made a meal from the stuff in her wallet. Country folk went by on the road, for it was market-day in Winchester. One apple-cheeked lad seeing a nun sitting there came devoutly with his palms full of fruit taken from his ass’s pannier, and made his offering with a shy smile and a bend of the knee. Igraine, touched, blessed him most piously, and gave him a kiss to cap it. The lad blushed and went away thinking he had never seen such a pretty nun before, and wondering if there were many like her in the great abbey. Igraine watched him towards Winchester, and wished some country girl joy of a good husband.

Presently she held on again in great spirits, nor had she gone very far when a tinkling of bells came up behind her with a merry clatter of hoofs. Turning aside to give passage, she looked back and saw an old gentleman riding comfortably on a white mule with two servants jogging along behind  him on cobs. The old man’s bridle was fringed with little silver bells that made a thin jingle as he rode; he was solidly gowned in plum-coloured cloth turned over with sable, and seemed of comfortable degree, judging by his trappings. Igraine looked up in his face as he passed by, while the old gentleman stared down to see what sort of womanhood lurked under a nun’s hood. The man on the mule was Eudol, Radamanth’s bosom gossip.

“Hey now, on my soul,” said the little merchant, reining in with a will; “what have we here, my dear, gadding about nunwise on a high-road? My faith, I must hold a catechism.”

Igraine, knowing the old man’s vulnerability, answered with a smile.

“Ah, Master Eudol, you are a very lady’s man, a gem of discretion.”

“So, and truth,” said the merchant, with a chuckle.

Igraine went close to him and patted the white mule’s neck, while the serving men held at a wise distance.

“I am running away from Winchester,” she said.

“Strange sport, my dear.”

“Now you must not tell a soul, on your honour.”

“Not a living soul, on my honour.”

Igraine let her eyes flit a laughing look up at him.

“Why then, Master Eudol,” she said, “if you will order one of your men to walk, I will get up and ride along with you for a league or two. There is trust for you.”

Eudol appeared entranced with the suggestion. He ordered one of his fellows to dismount, to spread a cloak over the saddle, to shorten a stirrup leather and give Igraine his knee. The girl was soon mounted, seated side fashion with one sandalled foot in the stirrup and one hand on the pommel to steady her. She flanked Eudol’s white mule, and they rode on side by side at a level tramp, with the henchmen some twenty paces in the rear.

Eudol soon waxed fatherly, as was his custom. He twitted Igraine on the temerity of her venture with the  senile and pedantic jocosity of an old man. He said things that would have been impertinent on the tongue of a youngster, and exerted to the full that eccentric fad of age, the supposition that youth needs pleasant patronage and nothing more. Old men, holding young folk to be fools, reserve to their rusty brains the privilege of seeming wise. They are content to straddle the crawling, leather-jointed circumspection that they call knowledge. The bird flutters to his mate, sings, soars, and is taken before night by the fowler. The snail creeps his rheumy round covered with the slime and slobber of prudence, to rot in the end under a tree-stump, unless some good throstle cracks him prematurely on a stone. Eudol had something of the snail about him, but he assayed none the less to ape the soaring of youth with a very ragged pair of wings. That morning he flew with a senile eagerness for Igraine’s favour, and thought himself a match for any young man in the matter of light chivalry.

“Come now, my dear,” he said, “let us have a good look at you.”

“Well, sir?”

“My word, you make a gorgeous nun. Who ever saw such eyes under a hood before! My dear, you are quite foolhardy to go pilgrimaging alone; men are such rogues, and you have such a pretty face.”

There was a cringing tone about the old sinner that made Igraine thoroughly despise him. He seemed to combine elderly bravado with smooth servility, qualities peculiarly obnoxious to the girl’s spirit. She had never liked or trusted Eudol overmuch in the past, but she was at pains to be civil to him now, seeing that he might serve her in sundry ways. She took his speeches with outward graciousness, and laughed at him hugely in her heart.

He began to lecture her in rather egotistical fashion.

“You must remember, my dear,” he said, "that I am a man of the world, and one whose experience may be relied upon. I may tell you that my judgment is much valued by your good uncle Radamanth, a man of much sagacity, but  yet one who lacks just that subtle insight into events that I may say has always been my special characteristic. I am so experienced that I may deserve the infinite honour of advising you if you care to tell me where you are going. I have had so much to do with the world, that I can tell you the best tavern in any town this side of the Thames where clean and honest lodging may be had. I can inform you as to tolls, prices, customs, bye-laws. Are you soon returning to Winchester?"

Igraine shook her head at him.

“Who have you been quarrelling with, my dear?”

“Myself most.”

“To think of it, syrup quarrelling with honey! What will your Lord Gorlois do?”

Igraine stifled the question on the instant.

“Master Eudol, leave that name alone if you want more of my company.”

“Pardon, my dear, pardon. I did not know it was so unpleasant a topic.”

“I hate the very name of him.”

“My dear, such a splendid fellow.”

“Detestable boaster.”

“Tut, tut,—a very popular nobleman; just the very man for you, and vastly rich. Now when I heard that he—that gentleman—”

“For God’s sake, Master Eudol, leave your chatter.”

The old merchant for the moment looked a little taken aback. Then he smiled, pulled his goat’s beard, and grew epigrammatic.

“She who wears a gilded shoe,” he said, “will find it pinch in the wearing. Stick to your sandals, my dear, and let your pretty white feet go brown in the sun. Better breathe in the open than freeze in a marble house. Just play the savage and let ambition go hang.”

Igraine thanked him as though she held his counsel to be of the most inestimable value to herself. She was wise enough to know that to please an old man you must take  his words in desperate earnest, and appear much caught by his supreme sagacity. Eudol smacked his lips and was comfortably warm within himself. He went on to tell the girl that he was riding to a little country manor that he owned some few leagues from Winchester. He informed her sentimentally that he was a very Virgil over his farm and garden. Igraine thought “Virgil” might well be Greek for “fool,” but she hid her ignorance under her hood. Eudol ran on to dilate on the subtleties of husbandry, making a fine parade of expert phraseology in the doing of it.

“I see you do not follow me,” he said presently. “Young folk are not fond of turning over the sods; they love grass for a scamper, not clay and dull loam. Shall we talk of petticoats or sarcenet that runs down a pretty figure like water? Eh, my dear? You set the tune, I’ll follow.”

Igraine contented herself with keeping him to his hobby.

“My father loved his violet beds,” she said.

“Wise man—wise man. A garden makes thoughts sprout as though they would keep time to the leaves. You shall see my garden. Let me see, what road are you for following?”

“The road to fortune, Master Eudol.”

“Truth, then, it must run near my doorway. The good woman who keeps house for me will make you most welcome. You must rest on your journey.”

“You are very good.”

“Not a bit of it, my dear. I shall call you St. Igraine—hee, hee!—and you will ripen all the apples in my orchard by looking at ’em. Faith, am I not a wag?”

“You ought to be at court, sir.”

“Hee, hee!”

“You would make all the young squires red with envy.”

“My dear, my dear!”

“Truth.”

“To flatter an old man so—”

“But you are really such a courtier.”

Eudol squirmed and chuckled in the grotesquest fashion.

 

“Assuredly we make very good friends,” he said.

Eudol’s manor nearly halved the mileage between Sarum and the royal town of Winchester, and Igraine found his suggestion quite a happy help to her plans. If needs be, she could bide the night there and make Sarum next day with but trivial trouble. She was glad in a way that she had fallen in with Eudol, for the ride had proved quite a charity to her, and his antique vanities had passed the time better than more modest characteristics could have done. Her only fear was lest he should cheat her, and send word to Radamanth. Accordingly she spoke to him again about her flight, and made him promise on the Cross that he would not betray her whereabouts. Eudol, silly soul, was ready enough by now to promise her almost anything.

About noon they halted and made a meal, with a flat stone lying under the shade of a tree for table. Eudol drank quite enough wine to quicken his failings, and to lull what common sense he had to sleep. He became so maudlin, so supremely sentimental, that Igraine had much ado to throttle her laughter. She quite feared for him when they had to get to horse again. His men had to hoist him into the saddle between them. Once there he seemed quite arrogantly confident of his seat, and being a hardy old gentleman at the pot he soon steadied down into comparative docility, managing his mule as though there had been no such luxury as dinner. He was more garrulous and fatherly than ever; now and again he had to quench a hiccough; otherwise he was only an exaggerated portrait of himself.

An hour’s ride brought them to Eudol’s own pastures. He pointed out his sheep to Igraine amid the clanking of their diverse bells, and told her the profits of the last shearing. Soon the house edged into view, a homely place set back an arrow’s flight from the road, and ringed round with a score or so old trees. It was a green and quiet spot, mellow with the warm comfort of pastureland and wood. A pool twinkled in the meadows, through which ran a small stream.

There was no bridge over the brook; the track crossed  it by a shallow ford where the water gurgled over pebbles. The banks were loose and crumbling, and the trackway littered with stones. Eudol’s mule went over sure-footed as a goat, but Igraine’s horse, slipping on the slope, set a fore-hoof on a shifting stone, and rolled down with a crash. The girl did not avoid in time, and the brute’s body pinned her ankle. She felt the sinews crack, and the stones bruise her flesh. For a moment she was in danger of the animal’s plunges to rise, but one of the men came up and seized the bridle, while his fellow drew Igraine clear.

Eudol climbed down, splashed through the water, and came up puffing sympathy. Igraine tried to walk, but gave up with a wry face. The men helped her to the grass bank, where she sat down, with Eudol fussing round her like an old woman. He sent the men on to the manor to bring a bed; and seeing that Igraine had grown white from the wrench, he ran for the wine-flask at his saddle-bow and urged her to drink. The girl had more fear of a spoilt journey than a cracked bone, and feeling faint for the moment, she suffered Eudol, and took the wine. The old man was on his knees by her stroking her hand, his thin beard wagging, and his glazed eyes vinously sympathetic. When the men came back with the bed they laid Igraine thereon, and bore her through the meadows to the house, Eudol following like a spaniel at their heels.

Chapter VII

---

While Igraine slept in the abbey dormitory and dreamt of Pelleas, the man Gorlois burnt on the grid of his own passions, and found no peace for his soul.

The night sky was not a whit more black than his spirit, and his sinister cogitations were chequered ever with palpitating points of fire. The restless fever of an unfed leopard seemed his, and he was in and out of his tumbled, sleepless bed ten times before dawn. Only a boar-hound kept him  company, a savage red-eyed brute whose temper suited that of his master; the dog followed Gorlois as he wandered from bed-chamber to atrium, out from the peristyles to the garden, down walks of yew and cypress, between the beds of helicryse and asphodel, over the smooth lawns clear in the eye of the moon. There was an evil thing in Gorlois’s thought, a thing fit for beggarly disrelish, yet very white and lovely to look upon. He stalked like a ghost in the night, biting his lips, looking into the dark with red and eager eyes. How often he reached out in naked thought and clasped only the air. He cursed himself and the woman, honoured and abused her in one breath, grew hot and cold like a live coal played upon by a fickle wind.

As soon as dawn came he had a plunge and a swim in a pool in the garden, and having suffered the ceremony of a state toilet, went out unattended into the town. It was the very hour when Igraine was shaking her fist at Winchester for thought of him, but Gorlois was spared the prick of self-knowledge and the frank truth of the girl’s distaste. He thought her nothing more than a shrew, and the possessor of a splendid temper. His long legs and the heat at his heart soon took him down through the quiet streets and the market square to Radamanth’s house.

Early as was the hour, the goldsmith had escaped sloth and was busy at his ledgers in his little counting-house behind the parlour. Gorlois came in in great state, with the serving wench who announced him feasting her curiosity on his face with a sheepish giggle. Radamanth, fetched from his figures, bowed very low, and made the gentleman a most obsequious welcome. He was wondering what Gorlois’s humour might be after the repulse of yesterday. To tell the truth, Radamanth felt somewhat ashamed of the trick he had served Igraine, and he was none too eager to meet his niece, seeing that she still seemed determined to hide her anger in her room. His doubts as to Gorlois’s mood were set at rest by that gentleman’s somewhat saturnine opening.

 

“Radamanth!”

“Your honour’s servant.”

“I have come to make peace.”

“Your lordship’s magnanimity is phenomenal.”

“Was I over hasty, goldsmith?”

“A young man’s way, my lord; no fault at all. Many’s the time I had my face smacked as a youngster, and was none the worse in favour. Take no serious view, sir, but press her the harder. She’ll give in—my faith, yes, being young and full of bone. You are troubled, my lord, with too much conscience.”

“Have you seen the woman since?”

Radamanth raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

“Well, no,” he said. “I am afraid my niece has rather a hot spirit—breeding, my lord—proud blood in her.”

“I know that part of her nobleness well enough.”

Radamanth refrained a moment from a sense of discretion.

“My lord would see her?”

“I’ll not budge till I have done so.”

“You understand women?”

Gorlois smiled a peculiar smile.

“I have wit enough,” he said. “I have my plan.”

“If it please you, sir, to go into the garden, I will endeavour to send her to you.”

“No more locking of doors, goldsmith.”

“Sir, I contemn my late indiscretion in your service.”

Gorlois passed out by a long passage into the gardens, with its green leaves shelving to the river, while Radamanth, half a coward at heart, went towards the stair that led to Igraine’s chamber. Halfway up he met the girl Lilith coming down, very white and frightened looking, as though she dreaded her father’s face. Radamanth kissed her, and asked for Igraine. Then her distraught look dawned on him in the twilight of the stairway, and made him suddenly suspicious.

“Is Igraine awake?”

Lilith hid her face in his sleeve.

 

“Speak, girl, what’s amiss?”

“The room is empty.”

“What!”

“Igraine has left us,” said the girl with a stifled whimper.

Radamanth, sage and solemn soul, lapsed into the sin of blasphemy.

“When did you learn this, girl?”

“Father—”

“Quick now, don’t lie.”

He shook her by the shoulder.

“Father, be gentle with me.”

“Quick, hussy.”

“I can’t, I can’t.”

Radamanth took her firmly by the wrist and brought her with no very considerate care into the parlour.

“Now,” he said, thrusting her into a chair, “you atom of ingratitude, tell me what you know.”

Lilith began to sob. She hid her face behind her fingers and dared not look at Radamanth. The goldsmith chafed and paced the room, hectoring her.

“Don’t think to fool me,” he said; “you know more yet; you would have answered before if there had been any truth in you.”

Radamanth’s harshness seemed certainly to calm the girl, and to conjure up some passing antagonism in her heart.

“The blame is yours, father.”

“Impertinent child.”

“Igraine was angry with you.”

“Well, have I not treated her like a daughter?”

“She fled away last night.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do.”

“I don’t, father; ’tis truth.”

The girl’s brown eyes appealed to him tearfully; she was honest enough, and Radamanth knew it. He took her sincerity for granted and proceeded to question her further.

 

“How was she clothed, child?”

Lilith looked at the floor and plucked at her gown with her fingers.

“Do you hear me?”

“Yes, father.”

“Then answer at once.”

“I can’t.”

“Upon my soul—”

“Igraine made me promise.”

Radamanth lost his temper again and began to bluster like a March wind. Lilith’s cheeks were wet with her tears; they ran down and dropped into her lap like little crystals. She shook and sobbed in her chair, but answered not a word, a martyr to her promises. Then Radamanth, man of money-bags and craft, found something wherewith to loose her tongue.

“Listen,” he said; “a certain lad never enters this house again, and you never again have speech with him, unless you answer me this at once.”

The mean measure triumphed. Lilith’s tears never ceased, but she gave way at last, and hating herself, told Radamanth what he wanted. Then he left her there to whimper by herself, and went into the garden to speak with Gorlois.

The Count of Cornwall guessed from the merchant’s face that matters had fallen out ill for him somewhere. He forestalled Radamanth’s confession with an impatient gust of words.

“She is still in a deuce of a temper?”

“My lord, it is otherwise.”

“Then why so glum—man, have I not uncovered ingots of gold for you if I wed?”

Radamanth held his hands up like a priest giving a blessing. Any one might have thought him grieved to death by the ingratitude of his niece’s desertion. The goldsmith dealt in coarser sentiment.

“My lord, the girl has forsaken my house and fled.”

 

Gorlois had half expected some such news. He said nothing, but merely stared at Radamanth with dark masterful eyes, while his fingers played with the tassels of his belt. His heart was already away over moor and dale chasing the gleam of a golden head of hair.

“When did you miss her, goldsmith?”

“She crept away at dusk yesterday.”

“Whither?”

“Heaven knows, my lord.”

“How dressed?”

“As a grey nun.”

“Has she gone back to the Church?”

“She did not love such a life, my lord.”

“By God, no.”

Gorlois frowned a moment in thought. The scent of the girl’s dress was still in his nostrils, and her eyes haunted him. Then he turned past Radamanth to go, hitching up his sword belt, a significant habit he had learnt long ago.

“I shall find her,” he said.

“Good, my lord.”

“I have your countenance.”

“Be kind to the girl, sir.”

“I could go to hell for her.”

“My lord, why not try heaven?”

“A good jest.”

“Men always go to hell for things,” said the goldsmith.

There was life and stir enough in Gorlois’s great house when its master came back that morning. Gorlois’s orders were like a torch to tinder. Men went to every wind, some to the gates, some to the market, others to the religious houses and the inns, all bent on striking the trail of a nun’s grey gown. The men knew their master’s mood, and the measure of his pulse on such occasions. Gorlois bided quiet in his garden, more like a leopard than a lover. He had made up his mind to catch Igraine, and to win mastery of her, hook or by crook, since she chose to play the shrew and mar his wooing. It was not likely that  one of the first men in Britain should be baffled by the temper of a goldsmith’s niece.

About noon a certain slave who had gone out to net news came back with much elation and claimed his lord’s ear. Brought in before Gorlois, he told how he had talked with a boy selling fruit in the market-place, and how the boy, when questioned, had told him of a nun he had seen sitting under a tree by the road to Sarum that very morning. The lad had described her as a very beautiful lady with large eyes, and a cloud of red-brown hair, and that she wore a grey nun’s habit somewhat torn and travel-stained. Gorlois thought he recognised Igraine, and gave the slave fifty acres and his freedom on the instant. Waiting for further news, word was brought him that a grey nun had been marked by the guard going out of the western gate not very long after dawn. Later still Gorlois heard of such a nun, calling herself Melibœa, having lodged the night at the great abbey of St. Helena.

Gorlois held himself in leash no longer. He buckled on his richly gilt armour, and his great white horse was saddled and brought into the court. Not a knight would he have at his back, neither groom nor page. Getting to horse in the full welt of the afternoon sun, he rode out of Winchester alone by the western gate, watched of many people. Once clear of the town he pricked incontinently for Sarum, lusting much to catch Igraine upon the way.

About that very same hour Eudol was exerting himself in Igraine’s service in the manor farm in the meadows.

The men had carried her up from the ford and set her at her own seeking in a shady place in the garden where she might lie at peace. It was a pleasant nook enough where they had set her bed, a patch of bright green grass with a bank of flowers on one hand and dense laurel hedge hiding it from the track to the house on the other. A vine trained upon poles raised a pleasant pavilion there. Autumn would soon be whispering in the woods, and already some few leaves were ribbed with gold and maroon.

 

Eudol played the physician and made a very critical examination of her ankle. He prided himself, among his other vanities, on having studied Galen, and since the healing craft is often a matter of phenomenal words and wise nothings, Eudol might have outphysicked Gildas at his own game. The art of medicine is the art of hypocrisy, and the sage apothecary is often a broken reed trembling in the wind of ignorance. Eudol, having no reputation at stake, pronounced Igraine’s hurt to be a mere strain of the ankle-joint, and, as it happened, he was right. He swathed her foot in wet linen and set it on a pillow, while the woman who kept house for him, a red-cheeked piece of buxomness, brought wine and food-stuff on a tray. Seeing a nun’s habit the good woman was comforted, and indulged Igraine with many smiles and much motherly care.

Eudol came and sat beside her with a great book on his knee, Virgil’s Bucolics, as he told her, and writ most learnedly for the edification of the wise. Eudol read very little of the book that afternoon. The volume abode with him for effect, but he preferred rather to dwell upon the more Ovidian interest of the girl beside him, and to talk to her in his familiar and fatherly fashion. He made many sly attempts to get the purpose of her pilgrimage from her, but Igraine had enough wit to keep him discreetly mystified on the subject. She was wondering all the while how long her strained ankle would keep her to her bed.

Eudol smothered her with offers of hospitality.

“On my word you shall not be dull,” he said, “though there is only an old man to entertain you. One day you shall ride out in a litter to my vineyards, another you shall be carried out a-hunting. I have a little wench here who can harp and sing like a mermaid. By the poets, I can make you quite a merry time.”

Igraine made the best smile she could, and thanked him.

“You must not put yourself out for me.”

“Nonsense.”

“You are very good.”

 

Eudol shook his finger with most earnest expression.

“My dear lady, it is duty, duty,” he said.

They had not been so very long in the garden when Igraine’s quick ear caught the sharp and rhythmic smite of hoofs on the stony track across the meadows. The sound disquieted her, for she was in the mood for dreads and suspicions. Listening to make sure that the sound approached, she appealed to Eudol and asked him to look and see who rode for the manor. There was a little wicket-gate some way down the laurel hedge carefully screened by shrubs. Eudol went to it, and scanned the meadows under his hand. He came back somewhat flustered to Igraine, and told her that a knight in gilded armour mounted on a white horse was riding up the track to the house.

Igraine started up on her bed with her eyes very big and suspicious.

“It is Gorlois,” she said.

“Heavens, my dear!”

“You have not been lying to me?”

“On my soul—no.”

Igraine touched her forehead with her hand, and looked askance at the sun.

“Master Eudol, if you would serve me, go and fool the man—send him away.”

“My dear child—”

“He must not see the servants or have speech with them.”

“But—”

“I command you, go and speak to him; he is very near.”

Eudol looked at her with his lower lip a-droop. His grey-green eyes met Igraine’s, gleamed, and faltered. He bent over the bed.

“I will do my best. Give me a kiss, my dear. By Augustus, I will get rid of Gorlois if I can.”

He went out quickly by the wicket-gate, and closing it after him, waited for the knight to approach. There were  no slaves about, and Eudol remembered with confidence that his men were in the corn fields, well away to the north. Gorlois came up with the splendid arrogance that so suited him, his rich armour glowing above the white flanks of his horse, his spear balanced on his thigh. Eudol went forward some paces to meet him, as though to learn his business. Igraine, listening behind the laurel hedge, heard their words as plainly as though the two men were but three paces away.

“Greeting, sir,” said Eudol’s thin voice.

Then she heard Gorlois’s clear sharp tenor questioning him. She heard him ask whether a grey nun had called for food, or whether Eudol had seen or heard of such a person. She heard the old man’s meandering negative, and Gorlois’s retort that a grey nun had been seen riding beside a merchant on a white mule. Igraine’s heart seemed to race and thunder. Eudol, rising to the event, suggested that the merchant might be a certain fabulous person from Aquæ Sulis; a man of means, he said, who often came by Sarum to Winchester in the fur trade. He hinted that the knight might overtake them on the road, or discover them at Sarum that evening. Gorlois fell to the suggestion. Igraine heard him inquire further of Eudol, speak to his horse, and ride away with a ringing clatter. She sat on her couch behind her laurel rampart and laughed.

Eudol came back to her, pleased as possible.

“How was that done,—sweeting?”

“Nobly,” laughed Igraine.

“The Virgin pardon me; what perjury for a pair of lips.”

Chapter VIII

---

Nothing is more chafing to the patience than to lie abed crippled, knowing the while that coveted hours are slipping through one’s fingers like grains of gold. To Igraine, her  maimed ankle was a very thorn in the flesh. Her thoughts were tugging to be at Sarum, and she was in continual fear lest Radamanth or Gorlois should track her to her temporary refuge, and attempt to mar her freedom. She was not a woman who could take hindrance with perfect philosophy, comforting herself with the reflection that care never yet salved unrest. She chafed at delay, and even blamed Eudol with great unreason because he had obliged her with a horse not proof against stumbling.

The knowledge that Gorlois rode in search of her did not tend to the easing of her mind. She began to understand Gorlois to the full. He had betrayed so much of himself in Radamanth’s garden that her dread grew nearly as great as her disrelish.

Eudol had made her comfortable enough in his manor, she had no need to find fault with his hospitality. She had her own room, a little girl to wait and sing to her, fruit and food of the best. She spent the greater part of each day in the garden, her bed being set under the vine leaves; two of Eudol’s slaves would carry her down in the morning and bear her back again at night, so that she should not be too venturesome in trying her ankle. The old merchant kept his folk close on the farm and suffered none to go to Winchester or Salisbury, for fear lest the knowledge of Igraine’s whereabouts should leak into interested channels.

The more the girl saw of Eudol the less she relished him in her heart. The lean look of him, his little green eyes, his thin goat-like beard, reminded her much of the picture of some old Satyr she had seen in the frescoes on the walls of the triclinium at Winchester. He grew more fatherly and kind to her, would smile like some old saint as he sat and read moralities to her from the lives of some of the Fathers. He was very fond of holding her hand and stroking it while he purred sentiment, and made her colour to hear his nonsense. He was quite wickedly delighted when he had fetched a blush to her face. He would sit and chuckle and hug himself, while his little eyes glistened and his beard  shook. Igraine, though her cheeks often tingled, did her best to suffer him, knowing well enough that she was greatly dependent for her peace of mind upon his good-will. She would laugh, turn his senile flatteries into jest, and assume his humour as the most vapoury and fanciful piece of fun possible. She often hinted that Eudol must be neglecting his farm for her sake, though her suggestions were absolutely to no purpose, seeing that Eudol had forgotten all about such mundane matters as harvesting or the pressing of cider.

One afternoon they had a shrewd fright, and the incident led in its final development to Igraine’s leaving the manor in the meadows. She was in the garden with Eudol when two horsemen wearing Gorlois’s livery rode up to the gate and demanded entertainment with much froth and bombast. They were sturdy hot-tongued rogues, quick at liquor, quicker still at blasphemy. Eudol, much flustered, had them brought into the house and set loose upon a wine flask while he smuggled Igraine out of the garden. There was a barn standing on the other side of a little meadow near the house, and the building was screened by a fringe of pines and a thorn hedge. Eudol hurried Igraine to the barn, saw her couched on a pile of hay, closed the door on her, and scampered back to take great care of Gorlois’s gentlemen.

Eudol proved a most obsequious and attentive host. He kept the men primed with wine, watched them like a lynx, forbade his slaves and servants the room so that there should be no chance of gossip. The fellows thought themselves well harboured. Eudol, hardy old tipster, kept them going with a will, till they swore he was the best old gentleman at his cups they had met this side of the Thames. He out-drank, out-yarned, out-jested the pair of them. Grown very mellow towards evening, they vowed by all the calendar that they loved him so much they would make a night of it, and not go to bed till they were carried. Eudol could have denied himself their great esteem, but there was nothing for it but to humour them.

 

He got rid of the fellows next morning, when they went away sadly, very glazed about the eyes, swearing they would pay him another visit at their very earliest opportunity. Eudol, when they were out of sight, went out to the barn and found Igraine comfortably couched there on a mass of hay. The little maid who served her had brought her supper on the sly the night before, and she had fared well enough in her new quarters.

As a matter of fact Eudol had had a parting cup with the men that morning, and had hardly outbreathed as yet the maudlin heritage gotten the previous night. He kissed Igraine’s hand, mumbled his usual courtesies, excused his long absence with a warmth that nearly brought him to tears. He was somewhat flushed over the cheek bones; his eyes were bright, and his breath pregnant with the heavy scent of wine. Igraine wiped the hand he had kissed on her gown, looked at him with little love or gratitude, and told him that she had been trying to walk, and that her ankle bore her passably.

Eudol, edging near, proceeded to narrate at preposterous length how he had kept Gorlois’s men employed, made them drunk as cobblers, and packed them off innocently to Winchester that morning. He was hugely sly over it all. He came and climbed up beside Igraine on the hay, and pinched her arm with his lean fingers as he talked. There was a gaunt, red, eager look about his face. It was quite twilight in the great barn, and a mingled smell of hay and pitch-pine filled the air, while dusty beams of light filtered through in steady streams.

Eudol’s vinous and fatherly solicitude developed abruptly into an absurd revelation of his inner self. He had hold of Igraine’s arm with one hand. Leaving go suddenly, he reached for her waist, poked his grey beard into her face, and made a clumsy dab at her cheek. In a moment the girl’s arm had swept him backwards like an impotent bag of bones. She saw him overbalance and roll off the haycock on to the edge of a scythe. Without waiting for more, and  with a glimpse of the old fool’s slippers still in the air, she slipped down from the hay and out of the barn, and shutting the door, pegged the catch with a piece of wood. Then she went laughing half resentfully towards the house, and told Dame Phœbe that her master had gone to the fields to oversee his slaves.

The woman had taken a remarkable dislike to Igraine, being sulky-eyed and dumb-saucy in her presence as far as she dared. The grey nun told her that she was ending her sojourn at the farm that morning, and was going on foot for the west. The woman’s face changed as suddenly as a spring sky. She was suave and smiling instanter, ready with queries as to Igraine’s ankle, very eager to pack her wallet with stuff from Eudol’s larder. Igraine, with an inward flush, saw how the wind blew. She was keen to be gone before Eudol should be loosed from the barn; even the woman’s changed mood seemed a tacit insult in itself.

She was soon treading the meadows where the backs of Eudol’s sheep stood out like white boulders on the solitary stretch of green. The country began to be as flat as a table, though there were still masses of woodland piled on either side the great white road. Igraine kept in among the trees with just a glimpse of the highway to keep her to her mark. Her grey gown passed almost unperceptibly among the mould-grown trunks as she went in the chequered light like a grey mouse through green corn. Her ankle bore her better than she had prophesied, and she made fair travelling at a modest pace. Later in the afternoon the strain began to tell in measure, and her ankle ached and felt hot, as though she had done enough. Sitting down on a fallen tree she watched the road, and waited for some one to pass.

A charcoal burner went by with a couple of asses panniered up with a comfortable load. Then came two soldiers and a couple of light wenches who haunted camp and castle and lived to the minute. Next, a great wain half ladened up with faggots came lumbering along, drawn  by a pair of sleepy horses, and driven by a peasant in a green smock and leather breeches. Igraine took her choice, and going down from the trees, stood by the roadside, and begged of the man a lift.

Seeing a nun looking up at him the man reined in, climbed down cap in hand, and louted low to her. There was some clean straw spread over the boards at the bottom of the cart. The man helped her up on to the tail-board and raked the straw into a heap to make her a seat. Then they lumbered on again towards Sarum.

In due course she began to talk to the man as he sat on a couple of faggots and held the ropes. He was an honest, ignorant fellow, with a much whiskered face that wore a perpetual look of kindly stupidity. Igraine sought to know whether he was going as far as Sarum. The man shook his bushy head like an amiable ogre, and told her that he was for his lord’s manor some two leagues distant, where he served as woodman and ranger, or soldier when there was need of steel. He commended his lord’s house to her for lodging, with a solid faith in the generosity of its board. Questioned as to other habitations, he told her of a hermit’s cell set in a little dale in the woods, a cell where wandering folk often found harbour for the night. Igraine made up her mind to choose the ascetic’s bread and water, having had enough of the world’s welcome. Possibly in some dim and distant way she began to realise the intense and engrained selfishness of the human heart.

The man of faggots, believing her a holy woman, soon began to relate his domestic troubles to her with a most touching reverence. He told her how his wife had been abed two months from her last childbirth, and how sad and dirty his little cabin was for lack of her hands. He asked Igraine to put the woman in her bede-role, a simple favour that she granted readily enough. Then the fellow with some stolid pathos went on to describe how his eldest lad, a boy of eight, had caught a fever through sleeping in the woods after rain, and how he had fallen sick.

 

“I went to a good monk,” said the man, “and bought holy water and a pinch of dust from a saint’s coffin. Pardy! but it cost me a year’s savings. The good father bade me pour the water on the boy’s head and shake the dust over his body. Glad I was, holy sister; I ran five miles home to cure the lad.”

“And he is well?”

The man gave a doleful whistle.

“The boy died,” said he with pathetic candour, and a short catch in his voice. “I didn’t sleep two whole nights. Then I kissed my woman, mopped her eyes, and went and told the priest.”

Igraine merely nodded.

“Ah, the dear father, he told me ’twas God’s will, and that the blessed dust had drifted the lad straight to heaven, where he would be singing next King David like any lord. So he came and buried the boy, and there was an end on’t.”

Igraine for the moment felt heavy about the eyes.

“I should like to see him there in his little white stole,” she said. “Do you know, goodman, why so many children die?”

“Faith, madame, I have no learning,” said the fellow with a dumb stare.

“Because the great God loves to have children laughing for love of him in heaven.”

“Is’t so?”

“That is why he took your boy.”

The man’s face brightened with a new dignity.

“Little Rual was ever a gentle child,” he said. “I must tell my woman; it will just make her happy.”

“I will pray for her health.”

“God bless you, holy lady, you have a wise, kind heart.”

Igraine blushed, but said nothing.

Presently the man stopped his horses, and pointed her to a little path that led, he said, to the hermitage. He helped Igraine out of the cart, and knelt on the road for her to give  him a blessing. Igraine had a Latin phrase or two from Avangel, and the benediction was earnest enough in spirit, though it lacked genuine authority. Then she took the path through trees, and left the man standing cap in hand by his waggon. Her brief ride with him had done her heart good.

A mile’s walk through unkempt pastures and straggling thickets brought her to an open dale set beneath the shoulder of a wooded hill. On the grass slope over against her she saw the hermitage—a grey cell of unfaced stone standing in a garden in a grove of ancient thorns. By the rivulet that ran half hid by undergrowth a figure in a brown cassock was drawing water. Passing down over the water, Igraine overtook the recluse halfway up the slope to the hermitage garden. She remarked his bald head fringed with a mournful halo of hair, his stooping shoulders, his ungainly weak-kneed gait. Hearing her tread behind him he turned a tanned face to her, a face that brought forth a smile of brotherly greeting at sight of a nun. Igraine, by way of creating good feeling, took his water pot and carried it for him, pleading youth in extenuation of the service.

There was a keen yet kindly sapience about the old man’s big-nosed face that caught her fancy. He was a bit of a cynic on the surface, but warm as good earth at heart. Igraine confessed her need of a lodging for the night, and the man retorted bluntly with the remark that the hermitage was not his house,—but only a refuge to bury strangers in. Pointing to a great slab of stone that stood near the little cell, he told her that the stone had been his bed, summer and winter, these fifteen years, and that dew, rain, frost, and snow had worked their will upon his body and found it leather. The confession, pithily—almost humorously—put, without a trace of rodomontade, set the girl smiling. She looked at the man’s brown buckram skin and congratulated him, embodying her flattery in a little jest that seemed to catch the ascetic fancy. He commended it with a patriarchal  twinkle, and throwing open the door of his cell surrendered her its shelter.

Igraine soon fathomed the shallow compass of the hermitage. It held two pallet beds, some rude furniture and crockery, and such things as were necessary to the old man’s craft, namely a scourge, a calthrop set on the end of an iron chain, a coat made of furze, a garland of thorn twigs, and a pair of spiked sandals. Gardening tools were piled in a corner. Over the doorway hung a rusty suit of harness and a red crusted sword. Here in this narrow place the war tools of world and church were mingled.

Igraine turned back into the hermitage garden. It was a quiet spot, webbed with the faery tracery of flowers and flowering shrubs, golden with helichryse, full of the mist of unshorn grass, bright with the water of its little fish-pool, where the ferns grew thick. A low wattle fence, climbed about by late-seasoned roses of red, shut the whole within its rustic pale. Some of the herb beds were cut into symbols of holy things, and a bay tree had been laboriously pruned into the rude image of a cross. A number of doves peopled the place, flocking about the hermit as he worked, often lighting on his hands or shoulders, while an old hound dozed in the sun, or followed at his heels. Peace seemed over the little refuge like a tranquil sky.

The hermit handed Igraine a hoe, as a matter of custom, and set her to work on the weeds in a neglected corner, while he busied his hands with pruning some of his rose trees, and removing the clay and linen from his grafts. He was by no means the solemn, dismal soul or the kindly simpleton Igraine might have expected. He had a keen, world-wise air about him that made him seem a sort of Christian Diogenes, and it was plain that he had lived much among men. The mingled austerity and happiness of his habits, when set beside his inwardly sympathetic yet somewhat cynic humour, gave a strong interest to his personality that quite commanded Igraine’s liking. Despite the vast responsibilities of man, as he himself put it, he was not  above having a jest at life in general. “For,” said he, as he pruned his rose bushes, “he who knows and obeys the truth can of all men afford to be merry.”

Igraine, smiling through the boughs, agreed with him from her heart.

“There are no sour faces in heaven,” she said.

“Assuredly not,” said the hermit almost fiercely.

“Then why such mortifications of the flesh, father?”

Looking up from his pruning, he beamed over the world.

“I am a very human rogue.”

“Human!”

“Well, you see, sister, mea culpa, I loved the world when I was in it like my own life, and even now if I did not gnash upon myself I should grow frivolous at times. When I have spent a night in the rain, or plied my scourge, it is marvellous how swiftly vain the fabrics of a vaunting pride become. ‘I am dust, I am dust,’ I cry, and am sound at heart again. I look upon bread and olives and a draught of river water as true godsends. Having endured exceeding discomfort of the flesh, I am as happy in the sun here among my flowers as a mortal could be.”

Igraine rested on her hoe, and put her head back, while the evening light gave her hair a rare metallic lustre.

“You believe in a life of contrasts, father?”

The old man became suddenly more serious.

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I have found that by making myself fanatically uncomfortable so many hours a day, I can attain for the rest of it that simple, contented, and heaven-soaring mood that belongs to the honest Christian. Man’s great peril is apathy, and my customs save me from sleepy ease. There is such a thing as living to pander to the flesh; it is the creed of the majority. In order to enjoy a truly spiritual end, I annihilate the appetites of the body, and ecce homo,—merry, conscience whole, clean.”

Igraine resumed her harrowing of reprobate green-stuff.

 

“I suppose your doctrine is right for yourself,” she said.

An answer came back to her leisurely over the rose bush.

“To the backbone, sister. Yet I am not one who would thrust my habits down other men’s throats simply because the said habits happen to suit my soul. All religious methods are a matter of individual experiment. One man may feel more Christian if he drinks wine instead of water; if so—by all the prophets—let him have his wine. I hold doctrinal tyranny to be the greatest curse in Christendom.”

Igraine agreed with him like a sister.

Soon the sun went down with a flood of gold over the trees, the little pool put off sheeny samite for black velvet, and the doves flew up to roost. The hermit in a genial mood went to his vesper meditations. Igraine saw him kneel down before the great stone with his scourge and crucifix beside him. She was still carnal enough to prefer the thin comfort of a pallet bed in the hermitage to stone or mother earth. When it had grown dark and very still she heard the swish of the steel scourge, and the man’s mutterings mingled with the occasional baying of his dog. This phase of mind was, at her age, quite incomprehensible to her. She remembered to pray that night for the peasant’s wife who had been sick in bed so long, and for the little lad who lay under the green grass. Then she went to sleep thinking of Pelleas.

Chapter IX

---

Radamanth the goldsmith had not wasted the hours since his niece had fled Winchester and his house in the dark. He was a man who did not let an enterprise slip into the limbo of the past till he had attempted honestly, and dishonestly, for that matter, to bring it to a successful issue. He had set his heart on getting Igraine married to one of the first lords in the island, and he also had skew ideas as to brimming up his own coffers. Taking it for granted that  Lilith and the girl had not been close friends for weeks together without sharing secrets, and being also strongly of the opinion that Igraine’s perversity arose out of some previous affair, he laid methodical siege to his daughter’s confidences, and cast a parental dyke about her that should compel her to open every gate and alley to his scrutiny.

Lilith, amiable, but weak as milk, was soon worn into surrender by her father’s methods. He had an unfailing lash wherewith to quicken her apprehension, in that young Mark, the armourer’s son, should be barred the house unless she bent to the parental edicts. Lilith soon brought herself to believe that after all there could not be so much disloyalty in telling certain of Igraine’s adventures to her father. Radamanth, bit by bit, had the whole tale of the way from Avangel to Winchester. Seeing how often Igraine—woman-wise—had pictured her man to Lilith, the goldsmith won a clear perception of the strange knight’s person, how he rode a black horse, wore red armour, bore a red dragon on a green shield, and was called Pelleas. Radamanth made a careful note of all these things, and laid the knowledge of them before Gorlois. Various subtleties resulted from these facts—subtleties carefully considered to catch Igraine.

To turn to Eudol. That lean old satyr had fallen gravely into error in the conviction that he had fooled Gorlois’s men so cleverly over the wine-pot. The deceit had been deeper on the other side, and more effectual, seeing that there had been a kirtled traitor in the manor camp. If Eudol had been stirring just after daybreak on the morning after the carouse, he might have caught one of Gorlois’s men coming down a little winding stair that led to a certain portion of the house. A little earlier still he would have found the fellow with his arm round Dame Phœbe’s waist in a dark entry on the stairs. The woman did not love Igraine, nor did she want her in the house; moreover, Gorlois’s man was young, and had fine eyes, and a most wicked tongue. Eudol, like most diplomats, was far from  being infallible when there was a woman in the coil, and Dame Phœbe was very much a woman.

Gorlois’s fellows had no sooner cleared the meadows that morning than they were away for Winchester at a dusty rattle. It was fast going over the clean, straight road, and the grey walls were not long in coming into view. The pair swung through the western gate, and went straight through the streets in a way that set the city folk staring and dodging for the pathway. At the gate of Gorlois’s house the porter had a vexatious damping for the spirits of these fiery gentlemen. Gorlois had ridden out. The men swore, off-saddled, and made the best of the matter over a game of dice in the kitchen.

There was great bustle when Gorlois had heard the men’s tale. They excused their not having taken Igraine on the plea that Gorlois had forbidden any to approach her save himself. The man was in a smiting mood, and he swore Eudol should rue giving him the lie and sending him a wild chase miles into the west. Getting to horse at once, and taking the two men with some ten more spears, he rode out and held for Sarum.

There was a swirl of dust before Eudol’s gate, and a sharp scattering of shingle as Gorlois and his troop rode up. A slave, who had seen them from the garden, and had taken them for robbers, was prevented from closing the gate by a brisk youth wedging it with his foot. There was a short scuffle at the tottering door. Then Gorlois and his men burst it in, and cut down those slaves on the threshold who had tried to close the door. The women folk were herded screeching into the kitchen, and penned there like sheep. Out of a cupboard in an upper room they dragged the woman Phœbe, limp with fright, and hurried the truth out of her that Igraine had gone that very morning, and that Eudol was still in the fields. Gorlois, believing her a liar, had the house searched, beds overturned, cupboards torn open, every nook and cranny probed. Then they tried the garden and the stables, with like fortune. One of the  fellows catching sight of the barn across the meadows, half-hidden by pines, they made a circle round it, closed in, and forced the door. A blinking, red-eyed face came up out of the shadows, its beard and thin thatch of hair whisped with hay.

Eudol, collared with little kindness, began to wonder after his drunken sleep who these rough folk could be. A word as to Igraine brought him to his senses. He saw Gorlois, a dark-bearded, black-eyed man, with a frown that he did not like the look of. He began to shake in his slippers, to excuse himself, and to deny all knowledge of the girl since the morning. Matters were against Eudol. Gorlois thought that he had plucked the old man from hiding, and that he was a liar to the bone; his shrift was short, measured out by the man’s hard malice. They struck him down at the door of his own barn, covering his grey head with his hands, and screaming for mercy. His blood soaked the hay, and shot black streaks into the dusty floor. Then they cast back to the manor, and half-throttled the woman Phœbe, till Gorlois was satisfied that he had got all the truth from her he could. In half an hour they were at gallop again for Sarum.

Gorlois reined in cruelly more than once to fling hot questions at the folk they passed upon the road. His horse was all sweat and foam, and its mouth bloody with the heavy hand that played on the bridle. Wayfarer after wayfarer looked up half in awe at the iron-faced man towering above them in the stirrups. Their blank, irresponsive faces chafed Gorlois’s patience to the bone. Not a word did he win of Igraine and her grey gown. Waxing sullen as granite, and very silent, he looked neither to right nor left, but plodded on like a baffled sleuth-hound with the rest of the pack trailing at his tail. The girl’s hair seemed tossing over the edge of the world, like a golden hue from the west, and there was a passionate wind through the man’s moody thought.

It was towards evening when Gorlois with his men—a bunch of spears—came upon the peasant in the green smock driving his wain-load of faggots slowly towards the setting sun. Gorlois drew up and hailed him, and began his cate chism anew. The fellow pulled in his team, and eyeing the horseman with some caution, acknowledged curtly that he had carried in his cart a league or more such a woman as Gorlois had pictured. To further quick queries he proved stubborn and boorish. Gorlois had lost his temper long ago. “Speak up, you devil’s dog!”

The man looked sullen. Gorlois’s sword flashed out. He spurred close up, and held three feet of menacing steel over the peasant’s head.

“Well, you be damned!” he said.

“What want you with the woman, lording?”

“Am I to argue with a clod of clay? The woman is marked for great honour, and must be taken. Will you spoil her fortune?”

The man fingered the reins, looking hard at Gorlois with his stupidly honest face. He guessed he was some great lord, by his harness and his following. It was not for him to gainsay such a gentleman, especially when he flourished a naked sword.

“I would do my best for the good nun, lording,” he said.

“Then speak out.”

“She promised to pray for my woman.”

Gorlois gave a laugh, and scoffed at the notion.

“Let prayers be,” he said; “tell me where she went.”

The man told Gorlois of the hermitage in the dale where Igraine had gone for a night’s lodging. He described how the path could be found, a mile or more nearer Winchester. Gorlois threw a gold piece into the cart, and let the man drive on. Then he sat still on his black horse with his sword over his shoulder, and looked into the wood with dark, glooming eyes. For a minute he sat like a statue, staring on nothing in keen thought. His men watched him, looking for some swift swoop from such a pinnacle of pondering; they knew his temper. His sword shot back into its scabbard, and he was keen as a wolf.

“Galleas of Camelford.”

 

A man with a hooked nose and high cheek bones heeled his horse forward, and saluted.

“Ride hard, find the hermitage, be wary, watch at a distance for sight of the Lady Igraine. If she is at the hermitage, gallop back to Sarum before nightfall. I shall be in Sir Accolon’s house. Attend me there.”

The man saluted again, turned his horse instanter, and rode hard into the east. Gorlois, with a half smile on his lips, rode on with his troop for Sarum.

In Sarum town there was a queer house of stone, very dark and very saturnine. It was hid away behind high walls, and hedged so blackly with yews and hollies that it seemed to stand in the gloom of a perpetual twilight. After dark a sullen glow often hung above the trees; casements would blaze blood-red light into boughs creaking and clutching in the wind; or there would be a moony glimmer on the glass, and belated folk passing near might hear voices or elvish music about them as though dropped from the stars. It was the house of Merlin,—the man of dreams,—wrapped in the gloom of immemorial yews.

That night Gorlois sat in a room hung with black velvet, where a brazier held a dying fire, and a bowl thereon steamed up perfumes in a heavy vapour. A man with a face of marble and eyes like an eternal night was chaired before him, with his long, lean, restless fingers continually touching the cloud of hair that fell blackly over his ears. His fingers were packed with rings gemmed with all manner of stones—jasper, sardonyx, chrysolite, emerald, ruby, and the like. His gown was of black velvet, twined all about with serpent scrolls of white cloth. On his breast was brooched a great diamond that blazed and wavered back the glow from the fire.

Gorlois sat in his carved chair stiff as any image. His strenuous soul seemed mewed up by the psychic influence of the man before him. He spoke seldom, and then only at the other’s motion—at a curious gesture of one of those long, lean hands. The room was as silent as the burial hall  of a pyramid, and it had the air of being massed above by stupendous depths of stone.

Presently the man in the black robe began to speak with deliberate intent, holding his voice deep in his throat so that it sounded much like the voice of an oracle declaring itself in the noise of a wind.

“The woman is beautiful beyond other women.”

“Like a golden May.”

“And true.”

“As a sapphire.”

“Yet will not have you.”

“Not a shred of me.”

The man with the rings smiled out of his impenetrable eyes, and fingered the brooch on his breast.

“The woman has great destiny before her.”

“Ah!”

“I have seen her star in the night. You dare take her fate on you?”

“Like ivy holds a tree.”

“As a wife?”

Gorlois laughed.

“How else?”

“As a wife—by the church.”

“Ah!”

“Or no help of my hand.”

Again there was silence. A coal fell in the brazier, and seemed like a rock down a precipice. The black eyes that stared down Gorlois were full of light, and strangely scintillant. Gorlois listened, with his limbs asleep and his brain in thrall, while the man spoke like a very Michael out of a cloud. The clear glittering plot given out of Merlin’s lips came like a dream vivid to the thought of the dreamer. If Gorlois obeyed he should have his desire, and catch Igraine to a white marriage-bed by law and her own willing. The fire died down in the brazier, and the bowl ceased to smoke perfumes. Gorlois saw the man gather his black robe with his glittering fingers, and move like a wraith round the  room, to stand beckoning by the door. In another minute Gorlois was under the stars, with the house and its yews a black mound against the sky. Like a sleeper half wakened he took full breath of the night air, and stretched his arms up above his head. But it was not to sleep that he passed back through the void streets to the house of the knight Accolon.

To return to Igraine housed for the night in the little hermitage. At the first creep of dawn, when daffodils were thrown up against the eastern sky, she left her pallet bed in the cell and went out into the hermit’s garden. The recluse was down at the brook drawing water, whither the dog and the doves had followed him. Igraine passed through the garden—spun over as it was with webs of dew. To her comfort she found her ankle scarcely troubling her, for she had feared pain or stiffness after the walk of yesterday. Going down the dale, she patted the old dog’s head, and picked up the pitcher as the recluse gave her good-morning.

“You are an early soul, sister. My dog and I come down to the brook each morning as the sun peeps over the hill.”

“You are not lonely,” said Igraine.

The old man tightened his girdle, looked over the solemn piers of the woods, sniffed the air, and hailed an autumn savour.

“Not I,” he said. “I have my dog and my doves, and folk often lodge here, and I have word of the world and how the Saxons vex us. The good people near bring me alms and pittances, or come to ask prayers for their souls, and”—with a twinkle—“for their bodies, too.”

Igraine remembered the peasant’s little son.

“Was it you,” she said, “who gave a peasant fellow near here a saint’s dust to scatter over a sick child?”

The old man shook his head and smiled enigmatically.

“I have no dealings in such marvels,” he said.

“The boy died.”

“Of course.”

 

“They will sell your dust some day.”

A keen look, cynical with beaming scorn, spread over the man’s gaunt face.

“Much good may it do them,” he said; “death is monstrous flatterer of mere clay. I may feed a rose bush with my bones; a better fate than the cheating of superstitious women.”

He made a sign with his hand, and the birds went wheeling in circles above him. The dog crept up and thrust his snout into the old man’s palm. The garden lay above them, ripe with an autumn mellowness; yet there was no regret though winter would soon be piping, and the man’s hair was grey.

“What think you of life?” said Igraine.

“You should know, sister, as well as I.”

“But you see, father, I am not a nun,—only a novice.”

He stared at her a moment with a slight smile.

“Remain a novice,” he said.

“You advise me so!”

“Why subordinate your soul to chains forged of men.”

“These seem strange words.”

He patted his dog’s head, and, half stooping, looked at her with keen grey eyes.

“Have you ever loved a man?”

“Yes,” she said, with a clear laugh and a slight colour.

“Is he worthy?”

“I believe him a noble soul.”

“Naturally.”

“He ran away and left me because he thought I was a nun.”

The hermit applauded.

“That sounds like honour,” he said critically.

“I am seeking him to tell him the truth.”

“And I will pray that you may soon meet,” said the old man, "for there is nothing like the love of a good man for a clean maid. If I had married a true woman, I should  never have taken to the scourge or the stone bed. Marry wisely and you are halfway to Heaven."

They broke fast that morning in the garden, it being the man’s custom to make his meals on the granite slab that served him as a bed. The little dale looked very green and gracious in the tranquil light, with its curling brook and dark barriers of trees. Igraine, as she sat on the great stone and ate the hermit’s bread, followed the brook with her thoughts, wondering whether it became the stream that ran through Eudol’s meadows. She was for Sarum that day, where she would throw off her grey habit and take some dress more likely to baffle Gorlois. She had enough money in her purse. Worldling again, she could give herself to winning sight of this Uther, and to learning whether he was the Pelleas she sought or no.

As she sat and fingered her bread, something she saw down the dale made her rigid and still as a priestess smitten with the vision of a god in some heathen oratory. Her eyes were very wide, her lips open and very white, her whole air as of one watching in a sudden stupor of awe. Another moment and she had broken from the mood like a torrent from a cavern. With eyes suddenly amber bright, she touched the hermit’s hand and pointed down the dale, gave him a word or so, then left him and ran down the hill.

A man on a black horse had ridden out from the trees, and was pushing his horse over the brook at a shallow spot not far away. His red armour glowed in the sun with a metallic lustre. Even at that distance Igraine had seen the red dragon rampant on a shield of green. As she ran down the grass slope she called the man by name, thinking to see him turn and come to her. Pushing on sullenly as though he had not heard the cry that went after him like winged love, he drew up the further slope without wavering, and sank like a red streak into the dense green of the trees.

Chapter X

---

Igraine forded the brook and followed the man by the winding path that curled away into the wood.

She was ever a sanguine soul, and the mere sinister influences that might have discouraged her in her purpose that morning were impotent before the level convictions of her heart. She had seen Pelleas ride in amid the trees; she was sure as death as to his cognizance and his armour. Now Pelleas, she could vow, had not heard her call to him, and if he had heard he had not understood; if he had seen he had not recognised. Doubts could have no place in the argument before such a justification by faith.

It was not long before she caught sight of the red glint of armour going through the trees. It came and went, grew and disappeared, as the path folded it in its curves or thrust out a heavy screen of green to hide it like a heavy curtain. The man was going as he pleased, now a walk, now a casual jog, now a short burst of a canter over an open patch. One moment Igraine would see him clearly, then not at all. Sometimes she gained, sometimes lost ground, yet the knight of the red harness never seemed to come within lure of her voice.

In due course she reached the place where the path ended bluntly on the Winchester high-road, and where the way ran straight as a spear-shaft, so that she could see Pelleas riding for Winchester with a lead of a quarter of a mile. The distant ringing tramp of hoofs came up to her like a mocking chuckle. Putting her hands to her mouth, she hallooed with all the breath left her by her run through the wood; yet, as far as she might see, the man never so much as turned in the saddle, while the smite of hoofs died down and down into a well of silence.

Another halloo and no echo.

“He’s asleep, or deaf in his helmet.”

She forgot the distance and the din of hoofs that might  well have drowned the thin cry that could have reached the rider. Maugre her heat and her flushed face Igraine had no more thought of giving in than she had of marrying Gorlois. With Pelleas so near she had made her vow to follow him, and follow him she would like a comet’s tail. If needs be she would wear her sandals to the flesh, but catch the man she must in the end.

A mile more on the high-road, with her feet and the hem of her gown dust-drenched, and she was still little nearer the man in the red harness for all her hurrying. She could have vowed more than once that he turned in his saddle and looked back at her as though to see how near she had come to him on the road. A mile from the hermitage path he turned his horse southwards from the track into a grass valley headed by a ruined tower and hedged densely on either hand by pine woods. Igraine, seeing from a slight rise in the road this change of course, cut away crosswise with the notion of getting near the man or of intercepting him before he should win clear law again. After all, the effort added only more vexation. She saw the black horse pressed to a canter and cross the point where she might have cut him off, while a great stretch of furze that rolled away to the black palisading of the pines came down and threw a promontory in her path. Pelleas was a mile to the good when she had skirted the furze and the bend of the wood, and taken a straight course southwards down the valley between the pines.

All that morning the sport of hunter and hunted went on between the novice in grey and the man on the black horse. For all her trouble Igraine won little upon him, lost little as the hours went by; while the rider in turn seemed in no wise desirous of being rid of her for good. They passed the pine woods with their midnight aisles, forded a stream, climbed up a heath, went over it amid the heather. From the last ridge of the heath Igraine saw the country sloping away into undulating grasslands, piled here and there with domes of thicketed trees. Far to the  south a dense black mass rose like a rounded hill against the sky. The man in red was still about a mile in front of her, riding slowly, a red speck in a waste of green. Igraine, having him in view from her vantage point, lay down full length to rest and take some food. She was tired enough, but dogged at heart as ever. She vowed that if the man was playing with her she would tell him her mind, love or no love, when she came up with him in the end.

As the sun swam into the noontide arc she went on again downhill, and found in turn that the man had halted, for he had been hidden by trees, and getting view of him suddenly she saw him sitting on a stone with his horse tethered near. As soon as Igraine was within measurable distance she took advantage of a hollow, dropped on her hands and knees, and began to crawl like a cat after a bird. Edging round a thicket she came quite near the man, but could not see his face. His spear stood in the ground by his horse, and he had his shield slung about his neck, and a bare poniard in his hand. It was clear that he was watching for Igraine, for despite her craft he caught sight of her face peering white under the hem of a bush, and climbed quickly into the saddle. Igraine started up, made a dash across the open, calling to him as she ran. Perverse as hate his horse broke into a canter and left her far in the rear. The girl shook her fist at him with a sudden burst of temper. She was standing near the stone where the man had been sitting. Looking at its flat face she saw the reason of the naked poniard in his hand, for he had been carving out thin straggling letters in the stone.

“Sancta Igraine,” she read—

“Ora pro nobis.”

The screed dispelled the doubts in Igraine’s mind on the instant. Palpably the man knew well enough who was following him, and was avoiding her of set purpose; but for what reason Igraine racked her wit to discover. She ran through many things in her heart, the possible testing of  her devotion, a vacillating weakness on Pelleas’s part that would not let him leave her altogether, a freakish wish to give her penance. Then, she knew that he was superstitious, and the thought flashed to her that he might think her a wraith, or some evil spirit that had taken her shape to have him in temptation. Maugre her vexation and her pride she held again on the trail, eating as she went some dried plums that she had in her wallet. The man had slackened down again and was less than half a mile away, now limned against the sky, now folded into a hollow or shut out by trees. Like a marsh-fire he tantalised her with a mystery of distance, holding steadily south at a level tramp, while Igraine plodded after him, her hair down and blowing out to the casual wind, her eyes at gaze on the red lure in the van.

So the mellower half of the day passed, and towards evening they neared the mount of trees Igraine had seen from the last ridge of the heath at noon. The black horse was heading straight for the cloudy mass in a way that set Igraine thinking and casting about for Pelleas’s motive. Perhaps he had some quest in the solitary place that needed his single hand. Would he take to the wood and let her follow as before, or had he any purpose in leading her thither? Drowned in conjecture she gave up prophecy with a vicious sense of mystification, and accepted inevitable ignorance for the time being as to the man’s moods and motives. She was no less obstinate to follow him to the death. If she only had a horse she would come near the man, pride or no pride, and tell him the truth.

Pressing on, with her strained ankle beginning to limp, she topped the round back of a grass rise and came full in view of the wood she had long seen in the distance. It looked very solemn in the declining light. The great trunks of giant beeches were packed pillar upon pillar into an impenetrable gloom. The foliage above, densely green, billowy, touched with red and gold, rolled upwards cloud on cloud as the ground ascended to the south and east.  A great bronze carpet of dead leaves swept away into the night of the trees. There was an eternal hush, a gross silence, over the glooming aisles that seemed to beckon to the soul, to draw the heart into the night of foliage as into a cavern. Over all was the glowing ægis of the setting sun.

Igraine saw the man on the forest’s edge where an arch of gloom struck into the inner shadows. He was facing the west, motionless as stone on his black horse, with the slanting light plucking a dull red gleam from his harness. There was a mystery about him that seemed to harmonise with the stillness of the trees and the black yawn of the forest galleries. Igraine imagined that he might be in a mood at last to speak with her if he believed her human. At all events, if he took to the trees, and she did not lose him, she would have the vantage of him and his horse in such a barricaded place.

It began to grow dark very quickly as she passed down the gradual slope towards the forest. The trees towered above her, a black mass rising again towards the east. Keen to see the man’s mood, she hurried on and found him still steadfast in the great arch, that seemed like the gate of the wilderness, ready to abide her. A hundred paces more and her heart began to beat the faster, and the moil of the day’s march dwindled before the influx of a rosier idyl. Every step towards Pelleas seemed to take her higher up the turret stair of love till her lips should meet those that bent at last from the gloom to hers. Pride and vexation lay fallen far below, dropped incontinently like a ragged cloak; a more generous passion shone out like cloth of gold; she was no longer weary. Her eyes were very bright, her face full of a splendid wistfulness, as she neared the man under the trees, looking up to see his face.

Twilight lay deep violet under the wooelshawe, while horse and man were dim and impalpable, great shadows of themselves. Igraine could not see the man’s face for the mask over the mezail of his helmet, and he was silent as death. She was quite close to him now and ready to speak  his name, when he wheeled suddenly, looked back at her, and pointed into the wood with his long spear. She ran forward and would have taken hold of his bridle, but he waved her back and slanted his spear at her in mute warning. Igraine, heart-hungry, could hold herself no longer.

“Man—man, are you stone?”

He rode straight ahead into the night of the trees and said never a word. Igraine drew her breath.

“Pelleas.”

“Ah, Igraine.”

The voice that came to her was muffled like the voice of a mourner, yet the girl thought she caught the old deep tone of it like the low cry of the wind.

“Why do you vex me?”

“Follow!”

“Pelleas, Pelleas, I am no nun!”

“Follow!”

“I kept this truth from you too long.”

“Follow!”

“Pelleas, would you hurt my heart more?”

“Follow; God shall make all plain and good.”

She gave in with a half-sob, and bent quietly to the man’s mood, though she had no notion what he purposed in his heart, or what his desires were in mystifying her thus. No doubt it would be well in the end if Pelleas bade her follow like a penitent and promised ultimate peace. At least he had not turned her away, and she trusted him to the death. He was a strong, deep-sensed soul, she knew, and her deceiving may have made him bitter in measure, and not easily appeased. In this queer trial of endurance, this tempting of her temper, she thought she read a penance laid upon her by the man for the way she had used his love.

They were soon far into the wood, with the western sky dwindling between the innumerable pillars of the trees. It began to be dark and utterly silent save for the rustle of the dead leaves as they went, and the shrilling chafe of bridle  or scabbard, or the snort of the great horse. Wherever the eye turned the forest piers stood straight and solemn as the columns in a hypostyle hall in some Egyptian temple. The fretwork of boughs roofed them in with hardly a glimmering through of the darkening sky above. There was a pungent autumn scent on the air that seemed to rise like the incense of years that had fallen to decay on the brown flooring of the place, and there was no breath or vestige of a wind.

Presently as the day died the wood went black as the winter night, and Igraine kept close by the man, with his armour giving a dull gleam now and again to guide her. They were passing up what seemed to be a great arcade cut through the very heart of the wood, as though leading to some shrine or altar, relic of Druid days, or times yet more antique. The tunnel ran a curved course, bending deeper and deeper as it went into the dense horde of trees. So dark was the wood that it was possible to see but a few paces in advance, and Igraine wondered how the man kept the track. She was close at his stirrup now, with the dark mass of him and his horse rising above her like a statue in black basalt. Though he never spoke to her, and though she touched no part of him, his horse, or his harness, she felt content with the queer sense of trust and proximity that pervaded her. There was magic in the mere companionship. As she had humbled her will to Pelleas’s the night when he had taken her from the beech tree in Andredswold, so now in like fashion she surrendered pride and liberty, and became a child.

Suddenly the trackway straightened out into a great colonnade that ran due south between trees of yet vaster girth. Igraine felt the man rein in and abide motionless beside her as she held to the stirrup and waited for what next should chance. Silence seemed like depths of black water over them, and they could hear each other take breath like the faint flux and reflux of a sea. Igraine saw the man lift his spear, a dim streak less black than the vault above, and hold it as a sign for her to listen. Her blood began to tingle a very little. There was something far  away on the dead, stagnant air, a sort of swirl of sound, shrill and harmonious, like a wind playing through the strings of a harp. It was very gradual, very impalpable. As the volume of it grew it seemed to rush nearer like a wind, to swell into a swaying plaintive song smitten through with the wounded cry of flutes. It gave a notion of wood-fays dancing, of whirling wings and flitting gossamer moonbright in the shadows. Igraine’s blood seemed to spin the faster, and her hand left the stirrup and touched the man’s thigh. He gave never a word or sign in the dark. She spoke to him very softly, very meekly.

“What place is this, Pelleas?”

She saw him bend slightly in the saddle.

“It is called the Ghost Forest,” he said.

“What are the sounds we hear?”

“Who can tell!”

Igraine had hardly heard him, when a streak of phosphor light flickered among the trees, coming and going incessantly as the great trunks intervened. It neared them in gradual fashion, and then blazed out sudden into the open aisle, a man in armour riding on a great white horse, his harness white as the moon, his face pale and wide-eyed, his hair like a mass of twisted silver wire. A misty glow haloed him round, and though he rode close there seemed no sound at all to mark his passing. As he had come, so he went, with streaks of flickering light that waxed less and less frequent till they died in the dark, and left the place empty as before. Igraine thought the air cold when he had gone.

She felt the black horse move beside her, and they went on as before into the night of the trees. The noise of flute and harp that had ceased awhile bubbled up again quite near, so that it was no longer the ghost of a sound, but noise more definite, more discrete. It had a queer way of dying to a sighing breath, and then gathering gradually into an ascending burst of windy melody. Igraine could almost fancy that she heard the sweep of wings, the soft thrill of silks trailing through the trees, yet the man on the horse  said never a word as they went on like a pair of mutes to a grave.

The colonnade opened out abruptly on a great circular clearing in the wood shut in by crowded trunks, its open vault above cut by a dense ring of foliage. A grey light came down from the sky, showing great stones piled one upon another, others fallen and sunk deep in rank grass and brambles. The man halted his horse in the very centre of the clearing, with Igraine beside him, watchful for what should happen, and for the moment when Pelleas should unbend.

Hardly had she looked over the great cromlechs, black and sinister in that solitary wilderness, than the whole wood about them seemed dusted suddenly with points of fire. North, south, east, and west torches and cressets came jerking redly out of the night, flitting behind the trees in a wide circle, gathering nearer and nearer without a sound. They might have been great fireflies playing through the aisles and ways, or goblin lamps carried by fairy folk. Igraine drew very close to the man’s horse for comfort, and looked up to see his face, but found it dark and hidden. Her hand crept up past the horse’s neck, rested on the mane a moment, and ventured yet further to meet the man’s hand, where it gripped the bridle. For a minute they abode thus without a sound, watching the weird torch-dance in the wood.

With a sudden gibber of laughter and a swirl of pipes the throng of lights seemed to seethe to the very margin of the clearing. Queer phantastic shapes showed amid the trees, and the great circle grew wide with light, and the grey cromlechs surprised in sleep by the glare and piping. At that very moment Igraine had a thought of some one looking deep into her eyes, of a will, a power, streaming in upon her like sunlight into a sleepy pool. Her desire went from the man on the black horse into the square shadow of the great central cromlech, where an indefinite influence seemed to lurk. Looking long under the roofing stone, she grew aware of a tall something standing there, of a pair of  eyes like the eyes of a panther, of a lean white hand moving in the shadows.

The eyes under the cromlech seemed to follow Igraine like fire, and to burn in upon her a foreign influence. Rebellious and wondering, she stiffened herself against a spiritual combat that seemed moving upon her out of the dark. She could have smitten the eyes that stared her down, and yet the magnetic stupor of them kindled up things in her heart that were strange and newly sensuous. She felt her strength sway as though her soul were being lifted from her, and she was warmed from top to toe like one who has taken wine, and whose being swims into an idyllic glorification of the senses. Again her desire seemed turned to the man in red harness, yet when she looked the saddle was empty, and the horse held by an armed servant, who wore a wolfs head for covering. Still mute with fear, desire, and wonder, she saw a tall figure move into the full glare of the torches, a figure in red harness with a shield of green, and a red dragon thereon, and with head unhelmed. The armour was like the armour of Pelleas, but the face was the face of the man Gorlois.

And now the eyes under the shadow of the cromlech were full and strong upon Igraine. Breathing fast with a hand at her throat she stepped back from Gorlois—hesitated—stood still. She was very white, and her eyes were big and sightless like the eyes of one walking in a dream. For all her strength, her scorn, and the tricking of her heart, she was being swept like a cloud into the embraces of the sun. Reason, power, love, sank away and became as nothing. A shudder passed over her. Presently her hands dropped limp as broken wings, and her body began to sway like a tall lily in a breeze. A gradual stupor saw her cataleptic; she stood impotent, played upon by the promptings of another soul.

Gorlois went near to her with hands outstretched, stooping to look into her face. A sudden light kindled in her eyes, her lips parted, and new life flooded red into her  cheeks as at the beck of love. She bent to Gorlois full of a gracious eagerness, a wistful desire that made her face golden as dawn. Her hand sought his, while the shadowy shape under the cromlech watched them with never-wavering eyes. Gorlois’s arms were round her now all wreathed in her hair; her face was turned to his; her hands were clasped upon his neck. Another moment and he had touched her lips with his.

A sound of flutes, the tinkling of a bell, and a solemn company came threading from the trees, guests, acolytes, torch-bearers, in glittering cloth of gold, with a great crucifix to lead them. Gorlois and Igraine were hand in hand near the stone that hid the frame of Merlin. A priest in a gorgeous cape drew near, and began his patter. The vows were taken, the pact sealed, with the noise of a chant and music. Thus under the benedictions of the great trees, and the spell of Merlin, Gorlois and Igraine were made man and wife.

Myth | Fantasy | Sci-fi | Romance | Romantic | Classic Fiction