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

U&I

UTHER AND IGRAINE

BOOK III : The War in Wales

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

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Aurelius Ambrosius the king was dead, taken off in Winchester by the hand of a poisoner. He had been found stark and cold in his great carved bed, with an empty wine-cup beside him, and a tress of black hair and a tress of yellow laid twined together upon his lips. The signet-ring had gone from his finger, and by the bed had been discovered a woman’s embroidered shoe dropped under the folds of the purple quilt. The truth, sinister enough in its bare suggestions, was glossed over by the court folk out of honour to Aurelius, and of love to Uther the king’s brother. It was told to the country how an Irish monk sent by Pascentius, dead Vortigern’s son, had gained audience of the king, and treacherously poisoned him as he drank wine at supper. The tale went out to the world, and was believed of many with a sincere and honest faith. Yet a certain child-eyed woman, wandering on the shores of Wales for sight of Irish ships, could have spoken more of the truth had she so dared.

Uther Pendragon had been hailed king at York before the bristling spears of a victorious host. But a week before he had marched against the heathen on the Humber, and overthrown them with such slaughter as had not been seen in Britain since the days when Boadicea smote the Romans. At the head of his men he had marched south in a snowstorm to be thundered into Winchester as king and conqueror. Twelve maidens of noble blood, clad in ermine and minever, had run before him with boughs of mistletoe and bay. Five hundred knights had walked bareheaded,  with swords drawn, behind his horse. The city had glistened in a white web of frosted samite, sparkled over by the clear visage of a winter sun.

There were many great labours ready to the king’s hand. Britain lay bruised by the onslaughts of the barbarians; her monks had been slain, her churches desecrated. The pirate ships swept the seas, and poured torch and sword along the sunny shores of the south. Andredswold, dark, saturnine, mysterious, alone waved them back with the sepulchral threatening of its trees. Yet, for all the burden of the kingdom upon his broad shoulders, Uther gave his first care to the honouring of the dead. Aurelius Ambrosius was buried with great pomp of churchmen and nobles at Stonehenge, and a royal mound raised above the tomb. At Christmastide, with snow upon the ground, a great gathering was made at Sarum of all the petty kings, princes, and nobles of the land. Hither came Meliograunt, king of Cornwall, and Urience of the land of Gore. Fealty was sworn with solemn ordinance to Uther Pendragon the king, and common league bonded against the heathen and the whelps of the north.

There were other perils brewing for Britain over the sea. Pascentius, dead Vortigern’s son, had been an outcast and a wanderer since the days when the sons of Constantine had sailed from Armorica to save the land from the blind lust and treason of his father. He had been a drifting fire beyond the seas, an intriguer, a sower of sedition, a man dangerous alike to friend and foe. Beaten like a vulture from the coasts of Britain, he had turned with treasonable hope to Ireland and its king, Gilomannius the Black, a strenuous potentate, boasting little love for Ambrosius the king. Here, in Ireland, a kennel of sedition had arisen. Pascentius, keen, hungry plotter, had toiled at the task of piling enmity against those who had destroyed his father amid the flames of Genorium. A great league arose, a banding of the barbarians with the Irish princes, a union of the Saxons who ravaged Kent with the wild tribesmen  over the northern border. Month by month a great host gathered on the Irish coast. Many ships came from the east and from the south. Mid-winter was past before Gilomannius embarked, and, setting sail with a fair wind, turned the beaks of his galleys for the shores of Wales.

Noise of the gathering storm had been brought to Uther as he journed through the southern coasts, rebuilding the churches, recovering abbey and hermitage from their desolate ashes. His zeal was great for God, and his love of Britain well-nigh as noble. Warned thus in due season, he marched for the west, calling the land to arms, assigning for the gathering of the host Caerleon upon Usk, that fair city bosomed in the fulness of its woods and pastures. Many a knight had answered to his call; many a city had sent out her companies; the high-roads rang with the cry of steel in the crisp winter weather.

Duke Gorlois had come from Cornwall from his castle of Tintagel, bringing many knights and men-at-arms by sea, and the Lady Igraine his wife, in a great galley whose bulwarks glistened with shields. In Caerleon Gorlois had a house built of white stone, set upon a little hill in the centre of the city. To Caerleon he brought this golden falcon of a woman, this untamable thing that he had kept prisoned in the high towers of Tintagel. He mewed her up like a nun in his house of white stone, so that no man should see the fairness of her face. She was wild as an eyas from the woods, fierce and unapproachable, and sharp of claw. Robbed of her liberty, had she not sought to take her own life with a sword, and to throw herself from the battlements of Tintagel? Gorlois had won little love by Merlin’s subtlety, and he feared the woman’s beauty and the spell of her large eyes.

It was the month of February and clear crisp weather. The white bellies of the Irish sails had shown up against the grey blue stretch of the sea, a white multitude of canvas that had sent the herdsmen hurrying their flocks to the mountains. Horsemen had galloped for Caerleon, and the  cry of war went up over wood and water. Flames licked the night sky. From Caerleon to St. Davids, from St. Davids to Eryri, the red blaze of beacon-fires told of the ships at sea.

The cry of the storm arose in Caerleon, and the tramp of armed men sounded all day in her streets. The great host lodged about the city broke camp and streamed westwards along the high-road into Wales. Bugles blew, banners flapped, masses of sullen steel rolled away into purple of the winter woods. Bristling spears and lines of skin-clad shields vanished into the west like the waves of a solemn sea. On the walls of Caerleon stood many women and children watching the host march for the west, watching Uther the king ride out with his great company of knights and nobles.

At the casement of an upper room in Gorlois’s house stood a woman looking out over Caerleon towards the sea. She was clad in a mantle of furs, and in a tunic of purple linked up with cord of gold. A tippet of white fur clasped with a brooch of amethysts circled her throat. Her hair was bound up in a net of fine silk, and there was a girdle of blue silk about her loins, and an enamelled cross upon her bosom. She stood with her elbows resting on the stone sill, and her peevish face clasped between her hands. Her eyes looked very large and lustrous as she stared out wistfully over the city.

In the great court below horses champed the bit and struck fire from the ringing flags. Men in armour clanged to and fro; rough voices cried questions and counter-questions; bridles jingled; spear-shafts clattered on the stones. Now a clarion blared as a troop of horse thundered by up the street, their armour gleaming dully past the courtyard gate. The growl of war hung heavy over Caerleon, a grim sullen sound that seemed in keeping with the restless chiding of the wind.

Igraine’s face was hard as stone as she watched the men moving in the courtyard below. She looked older than of  yore, whiter, thinner in cheek and neck, her great eyes staunch though sad under her netted hair. Her face showed melancholy mingled with a constant scorn that had rarely found expression with her in the old days, save within the walls of Avangel. She looked like one who had endured much, suffered much, yet lost no whit of pride in the trial. Though she may have been blemished like a Greek vase smitten by some barbaric sword, she was her self still, brave, headstrong, resolute as ever. The shame of the things she had suffered had perhaps wiped out the gentler outlines of her character and left her more stern, more wary, less honest, more deep in her endeavours. There was no passive humility or patience about her soul, and she was the falcon still, though caged and guarded beyond her liberty.

As she stood at the casement with the prophetic murmur of war in her ears, it seemed to her as though life surged to her feet and mocked her bondage like laughing water. The desire of liberty abode ever with her even to the welcoming of stagnant death. She thirsted for her freedom, plotted for it, dreamt of it with a zeal that was almost ferocious. Her life seemed a speculation, a perpetual aspiration after a state that still eluded her. In the Avangel days she had been wild and petulant. Then Pelleas had come through the green gloom of early summer to soften her soul and inspire all the best breath of the woman in her. Again, thanks to Gorlois, she had fallen with the usual reaction of circumstance upon evil times; the change had discovered the peevish discontent of the girl hardened into the strong wilfulness of the woman.

She hated Gorlois with a fanatical immensity of soul. When the man was near her she felt full of the creeping nausea of a great loathing, and she waxed faint with hate at the veriest touch of his hands. His breath seemed to her more unsavoury than the miasma of a gutter, and it needed but the sound of his voice to bring all her baser passions braying and yelping against him. He had driven the religious instinct out of her heart, and she was in revolt against  heaven and the marriage pact forged by the authority of the Church. She had often vowed in her heart that she could do no sin against Gorlois, her husband. He had no claim upon her conscience. The bondage had been of his making; let God judge her if she scorned his honour.

Standing by the window watching the knights saddling for their lord’s sally, she heard heavy footsteps mounting up the stairs, and the ring of steel-tipped shoes along the gallery. The footsteps were deliberate, and none too fast, as though the man walked under a burden of thought. A shadow seemed to pass over Igraine’s face. She slipped from the window, ran across the room, shot the bolt of the door, and stood listening. A hand tried the latch. She knew well enough whose fist it was that rattled on the oaken panels. Her face hardened to a kind of cold malevolence, and she laughed noiselessly in her sleeve.

A terse summons came to her from the gallery.

“Wife, we ride at once.”

The man could not have made a worse beginning. There was a suggestion of tyranny in a particular word that was hardly temperate. Igraine leant against the door; she was still smiling to herself, and her hands fingered the embroidered tassel of the latch.

“We are late on the road; I can make no tarrying.”

The door quivered a moment as though shaken by a gusty wind. Everything was quiet again, and Igraine could hear the man breathing. Putting her mouth to the crack between post and hinge-board she laughed stridently as though in scorn.

“Igraine!”

The voice was half-imperative, half-appealing.

“My very dear lord!”

“Are you abed?”

“No, dear lord.”

“Open to me; I would kiss your lips before I sally.”

“You have never kissed me these many days.”

“True, wife; is it fault of mine?”

 

“Nor shall again, dear lord, if I have strength.”

She heard the man muttering to himself a moment, but this time there was no smiting of the door, no fume and tempest. His mood seemed more temperate, less masterful, as though he were half heavy at heart.

“Igraine—”

“Why do you whimper like a dog?” she said; “go, get you to war. What are you to me?”

“When will you learn reason?”

“When you are dead, sire.”

“Perhaps I deserve all this.”

“Are you so much a penitent?”

Her mockery seemed to lift Gorlois to a higher range of passion, and there was great bitterness in his voice as he tossed back words to her with a quick kindling of desire.

“Woman, I have been hard in the winning of you, but, God knows, you are something to me.”

“God knows, Gorlois, I hate you.”

His hand shook the door.

“Let me in, Igraine.”

“Break down the door; you shall come at me no other way.”

“Woman, woman, I am a fool; my heart smarts at leaving you.”

“You sound almost saintly.”

“I have left Brastias in charge of you.”

“Thanks, lord, for a jailer.”

Igraine drew back from the door and stood at her full height with her hands crossed upon her bosom. She quivered as she stood with the intense effort of her hate. Gorlois still waited without the door, though she could not hear him moving. The silence seemed like the deep hush that falls between the blustering stanzas of a storm.

“Igraine!”

It was a hoarse cry, quick and querulous. Igraine had both her fists to her chin in an attitude of inward effort, as though she racked herself to give utterance to the impla cable temper of her scorn. Her face had a queer parched look. When she spoke, her voice was shrill like a piping wind.

“Gorlois.”

“Wife.”

“Would you have my blessing?”

“Give it me, Igraine.”

“Go then, and look not to me for comfort. When you are in battle, and the swords cry on your shield, I shall pray on my knees that you may get your death.”

Gorlois gave never a sound as he stood by the barred door with his hand over the mezail of his helmet. It seemed dark and gloomy in the gallery, and the staunch oak fronted him like fate. His eyes were full of a dull light as he turned and went clanging down the stairway with slow, heavy tread. His sounding footsteps died down into the din of arms that came from the great court. Igraine ran to the window and watched him and his men ride out, smiling a bleak smile as the last mailed figure gleamed out by the gate.

Chapter II

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When Gorlois and his knights had gone, Igraine unbarred the door, and passed down the narrow stair to the state chamber of the house, where a fire was burning. It was a solemn room, shadowed with many arches, with vaults inlaid with marble, its walls painted green and gold, its glimmering casements lozenged with fine glass. Furs were spread upon the mosaic floor; painted urns held flowers that bloomed in the mock summer of the room.

Igraine stood and warmed herself before the fire. From an altar-like pillar near she took storax and galbanum from brazen bowls, and scattered the resinous tears upon the flames. A pungent fragrance rose up into her nostrils. The flicker of the fire played upon her face, and set a lustre  in her eyes. It was winter weather, and the warmth was welcome.

The refrain of her talk with Gorlois still ran at fever heat like a wild song through her brain. She was stirred to the deeps of her strong soul. For Gorlois she had no measure of pity. He was a rotten tree to her, a slab of granite, anything but quick flesh and blood capable of aspiration and desire. She hated him more for his pleading than for his tyranny, fearing to be pleased by one she dreaded. He was strenuous and obstinate. She knew that it would be great joy to her if she saw his face no more, and if his body crumbled in the rain on some bleak coast in Wales.

As she stood by the fire and looked into it with pondering eyes she heard a curtain drawn and the sound of a footstep on the threshold. Turning briskly, like one accustomed to suspicions, she saw the man Brastias in the doorway looking at her half-furtively, as though none too proud of the office thrust upon him. He had great grey eyes and a calm face. Bending stiffly to Igraine with his hand over his heart, he turned aside to a cabinet by the wall, took therefrom an illumined scroll of legendary tales, and sat down on a bench to read, as though he had no other business in the room.

Igraine’s long lip curled. She knew the meaning of the man’s presence there shrewdly enough. Going to a window she opened the casement frame and looked out on the winter scene. Usk winding silver to the sea, the purple roll of the bleak bare woods, the far sea itself dying a sullen streak into a sullen sky. It was dreary enough, and yet it suited her; she could have welcomed thunder and the rend of forked fire above the woods. Thought was fierce in her with the wind crying about the house like a wistful voice, the voice of days long dead.

To be free of Gorlois!

To cast off her present self like a rotten cloak!

To adventure liberty, though the peril were shrill as the wind through the swaying pines on the hillside!

 

To deal with Brastias!

Now Brastias was a grave-faced knight, neither young nor old, but a very boy in the matter of the mock wisdom of the world. He was possessed of one of those generous natures that looks kindly on humanity with a simple optimism born of a contented conscience. He was a devout man, a soldier, and a gentleman. Moreover, he owned a holy reverence for women, a reverence that led him into a somewhat extravagant belief in the sincerity of their truth and virtue. He was blessed too in being nothing of a cynic in his conceptions of honour.

Gorlois knew the man to the heart, and trusted him, a fact well proven by the faith imposed upon him in his wardenship of the Lady Igraine. Brastias hated the task as much as he hated the telling of a lie. There are some men whose whole instinct is towards truth. They are golden souls, often too easily deceived with a gross dross that makes an outward show of kindred colour.

Brastias was no stranger to Igraine, for he had served her as one of the knights of the guard in the great castle of Tintagel. He was a man who could look into a woman’s eyes and make her feel instinctively the clear honour of his soul. There was nothing of the flesh about Brastias. And it was in this chivalrous faith of his that Igraine discovered a credulity that might make him prone to believe a certain profession of faith that was taking sudden and subtle form within her mind. Months ago, she would have hesitated before the man’s grey eyes. But feeling herself sinned against, and stirred by the shame of the past, she found ample justification for herself in the lie Gorlois had practised for her undoing.

She left the window, and went and stood by the fire, with her back to the man.

“Brastias,” she said, quite softly.

The man looked up from the scroll, and seemed ill at ease.

“I trust your duty is pleasant to you?”

 

Brastias’s eyelids flickered nervously, and he cleared his throat.

“May the Virgin witness,” he said, “I have no love of the task.”

“My Lord Gorlois trusts you?”

“He has said so, madame.”

“And am I not his wife?”

Brastias put the scroll aside with a constrained deliberation. He felt himself wholly in the wrong, as he always did before a woman, and his wit ran clumsily on such occasions. It had needed but the observation of a child to mark the gulf between Gorlois and his wife. Gorlois had spoken few words on the matter, had given commands and nothing more. Brastias was not the man to tamper officiously with the confidences of others. He thought much, said little, and bided quiet for Igraine to speak.

She stood half-turned towards the fire, with her face in profile, and her hands hanging limply at her side. Looking for all the world like a penitent, she spoke with a certain unconscious pathos, as though she touched on a matter that was heavy upon her heart.

“Brastias, I may call you a friend?”

“I trust so, madame.”

“Then there is no reason for me to be backward in speaking of the truth?”

The man bowed and said nothing.

“Come then, Brastias, tell me honestly, have I seemed to you like a woman who loved her husband?”

The girl’s blue eyes were staring hard into the man’s grey ones. There was little chance of prevarication before so blunt a question, and Brastias’s courtesy, like Balaam’s ass, refused to deny the scrutiny of truth. Igraine could read the man’s face like a piece of blazened parchment.

“Never fear to be frank,” she said; “your belief hangs on your face like an alphabet, and that shows me how much you know of a woman’s heart.”

“Pardon me, madame.”

 

“Never blush, man, you would have said that I had as little love for Gorlois as for the dirtiest beggar in Caerleon?”

Brastias frowned mildly and agreed with her, remembering as he did a certain wild scene on the battlements of Tintagel.

“And doubtless you would say that it pained me not a whit to see Gorlois my lord ride out from Caerleon into the wilds of Wales?”

There was such reproach in her voice that Brastias fell into confusion before her eyes, reddened, and began to excuse himself.

“Your ladyship’s behaviour,” he said, with an ingenuous look and an intense striving after propitiation,—“your ladyship’s behaviour would hardly warrant me in believing that my Lord Gorlois was vastly dear to you. And, pardon me, a woman does not seek to run away from her husband.”

“You insinuate—”

Brastias felt himself in the mire, and groaned in spirit.

“Madame, I would say—”

“Yes, yes, I understand you.”

“Give me leave—”

“Not another word.”

Igraine smiled softly to herself, turned her back on Brastias and stared long into the fire. The man stood by, watching her with a humbled look, his fingers twisting restlessly at the broidery of his black tunic. Igraine traced out the mosaic patterns on the floor with the point of her shoe.

“I think you men are all fools,” she said.

Brastias’s silence might have suggested contradiction.

“Have you ever loved a woman?”

The man shifted, and went red under his straight fair hair. His eyes took a dreamy look.

“Yes,” he said, as though half-ashamed.

Igraine hung her head and sighed.

“Perhaps,” she said, growing suddenly shy and out of countenance, "perhaps you may have learnt the lesson of  the froward heart, the heart that comes by love when it is in peril of great loss."

Brastias drew a quick, deep breath.

“By the Virgin, that’s true,” he said.

Igraine turned to the fire and hid her face from the man. There was a pathetic droop about her shoulders, a listless curving of her neck, that made Brastias picture her as burdened with some immoderate sorrow. He was an impressionable man, not in any amorous sense, but in the matter of sympathy towards his fellows. He thought he heard a catch in the girl’s breathing that boded tears. Her hair looked very soft and lustrous as it curved over her ears and neck.

“Madame Igraine.”

No answer. Brastias went a step nearer.

“Listen to me.”

A slight turning of the head in response.

“What ails you, madame?”

“Never trouble.”

“I beseech you, tell me.”

The man was quite afire; his face looked bright and eager, and his eyes shone.

“Gorlois has gone to the war.”

The words were jerked out one by one.

“Madame!”

“War—and death.”

“Courage, madame, courage. On my soul, you are not going to say—”

“Brastias, you understand.”

“Then?”

“Man, man, don’t drag it out of me; don’t you see? are you blind?”

Brastias invoked a certain saint by the name of Christopher, and straightway emphasised his words by falling down on his knees beside Igraine. She had contrived to conjure up tears as she bent over the fire. Brastias found one of her hands and held it.

 

“This will be my lord’s salvation.”

“Think you so?”

“On my soul, my dear lady, I thank our Lord Jesu from my heart. For I know my Lord Gorlois, and the bitterness that weighed him down, though he spoke little to me on this matter, being staunch to you, and to his courtesy. And by our Lord’s Passion, madame, I love peace in a house, and quiet looks, and words like laughing water, for there is never a home where temper rules.”

“Brastias, you shame me.”

“God forbid, dear lady, there’s no gospel vanity in my heart. I speak but out.”

The man’s quaint outburst of gladness touched Igraine’s honesty to the core, but she had no thought of recantation, for all the pricking of her conscience. She passed back to the open window and leant against the mullion, while Brastias rose from his knees and followed her.

“I am faint,” she said, “and the fresh wind comforts me.”

“Courage, madame; Duke Gorlois fights for Britain and the Cross; what better blessing on his shield?”

Igraine was looking out toward the sea and the grey curtain of the sky cut in places by dark woods and the sweep of dull green hills. There was a wistful droop about her figure that made Brastias molten with intent to comfort, and dumb with words of sympathy that died inarticulate in his throat. He stood there, a man muzzled by his own sincerity, bankrupt of a syllable, though he commanded his wit to be nimble with stentorian cry of conscience. He felt hot in his skin and vastly stupid. By the time he had lumbered up some passable fancy, Igraine had turned from the window with a quick intelligence kindling in her eyes.

“Brastias.”

“Madame.”

“Listen to me, I have come by a plan.”

A sudden flood of sunlight streamed through a rent in the grey canopy of clouds. The landscape took a warmer tinge, the purple of the woods deepened. Brastias saw the  sudden gleam of light strike on Igraine’s hair. Her head was thrown back upon her splendid neck, and her eyes seemed large with love.

“I will show Gorlois how I love him,” she said.

Brastias’s face was still hazed in conjecture.

“I will wipe out the past.”

“Ah!”

“We will follow Gorlois to the war, you and I, Brastias, together. What say you to that?”

The man looked at her with clear grey eyes, and with a transient immobility of feature that changed swiftly to a glow of understanding. The words had gone home to him like a trumpet-cry; their courage warmed him, and he was carried with the wind.

“A great hazard—and a noble,” he said, with a flush of colour; “the peril is on my neck, and yet—I’ll bear it.”

Igraine’s face blazed.

“Brastias, you will go with me?”

“By my sword, to the death.”

“Come hither, man; I must kiss your forehead.”

Brastias knelt to her again with crossed hands. She looked into his grey eyes and touched his forehead with her lips.

“Thus I salute honour,” she said.

“My lord’s lady!”

“You have trusted me.”

“Else had I been ashamed.”

The man went away to arm, warm at heart as any boy. Igraine stood a moment looking into the fire with an enigmatic calm upon her face. For Brastias she felt a throttled pity, an impossible admiration that only troubled her. Her lust for liberty bore her like a storm-wind, and her hate of Gorlois made her iron at heart. She could dare anything to fling off the moral bondage that cramped and bound her like a net.

While Brastias was away arming and ordering horses, she went to a little armoury on the stairs and filched away a short hauberk and a sheathed poniard. She wore these  under a gown of black velvet bound with a silver girdle, and a cloak of sables hooded and lined with sky-blue cloth. She had a strange joy of the knife at her girdle as she passed down the stairway to the court.

A few silent servants gaped at her as she passed from the house. Brastias came out to her in armour. In the court she heard the cry of steel bridles, the sparking of hoofs on the stones. They were soon mounted and away under the great gate and free of Caerleon in the decline of the day. The west had no colour, and a wind pined in the trees as they swept into the twining shadows of the woods, and saw the boughs clutch each other against the sullen sky. Soon night came in a black cowl, and with a winter wind that roamed the woods like the moan of a prophecy. Igraine, riding with her bridle linked in that of Brastias, pressed on for the west with a mood that echoed the roar of the trees.

Chapter III

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A man in black armour, a lady in a cloak of sables, a pine forest under a winter sky.

Myriad trunks interminably pillared, grey-black below, changing to red beneath the canopy of boughs; patches of grey-blue sky between; a floor overgrown with whortleberry and heather, and streaked seldom by the sun. Through the tree-tops the veriest sighing of a wind, a sound that crept up the curling galleries like the softly-taken breath of a sleeping world. Away on every hand oblivious vistas black under multitudinous green spires.

The woman’s face seemed white under the sweep of her sable hood. Its expression was very purposeful, its mouth firm and resolute, its air indicative of a deliberate will. Her eyes stared into the wood over her horse’s head with a constant care, dropping now and again a quick side-glance at the man in black armour riding on her flank. She spoke  seldom to him, and then with a certain assumption of authority that seemed to trouble his equanimity but little. Often she would lean forward in the saddle as though to listen, her eyes fixed, her mouth decisive, her hand hollowed at her ear to concavitate some sound other than the wind-song of the trees. It was evident that she was under the spell of some strong emotion, for she would smile and frown by turns as though vexed by perpetual alternatives of feeling.

The man at her side watched with his grey eyes the path curling uphill between the trees. Having his own inward exposition of the woman’s mood, he contented himself wisely with silence, keeping his reflections to himself. He was not a man who blurted commonplaces when lacking the means of inspiration. And he was satisfied with the fancy that he understood completely the things that were passing through the woman’s mind. He believed her troubled by those extreme anxieties of the heart that come with war and the handiwork of the sword. Perhaps he was fortunate in being ignorant of the truth.

The interminable trees seemed to vex the woman’s spirit as their trunks crowded the winding track and shut the pair in as with a never-ending barrier. But for an occasional patch of heathland or scrub, no lengthy vista opened up before them. Tree-boles stood everywhere to baulk their vision, silent and stiff like sullen sentinels. The horses plodded on. Igraine’s impatience could be read upon her face, and discovered in her slighter gestures. It was the impatience of a mind at war within itself, a mind prone through the chafe of trouble to be vexed with trifles; sore, sensitive, and hasty. Brastias watched her, pretending to be intent the while on the path that wandered away into the mazes of the wood. He was a considerate creature, and he suffered her petulance with a placid good-humour, and a certain benevolence that was the outcome of pity.

Igraine jerked her bridle, and eyed the trees as though they were the members of a mob thrusting themselves between her and her purpose. She was inclined to be  unreasonable, as only a woman can be on occasions. Brastias, calm-faced and debonair, contented himself with sympathy, and refrained from reason as from the handling of a whip.

“That peasant fellow was a liar,” he said, by way of being companionable.

“Yes, the whelp.”

“I’ll swear we’ve ridden two leagues, not one.”

“The fellow should have a stripe for every furlong.”

“Rough justice, madame.”

Igraine laughed.

“If justice were done to liars,” she said, “the world would be hideless, scourged raw.”

Brastias edged his horse past an intruding tree and chuckled amiably.

“It would be a pity to spoil so much beauty.”

“Eh!”

“The women would come off worst.”

Igraine flashed a look at him.

“Balaam’s ass spoke the truth,” she said.

They had not gone another furlong when Brastias reined in suddenly and stood listening. He held up a hand to Igraine, looking at her with prophetic face, his black armour lustreless under the trees.

“Hark!”

Igraine stared into his eyes. Neither moved a muscle for fully a minute.

“A trumpet-cry!”

Brastias lowered his hand.

“From the host. And the ‘advance,’ by the sound on’t.”

“Then we shall be out of the woods soon.”

“Go warily, madame; it would be poor wisdom to stumble on an Irish legion.”

“Brastias, I would not miss the day for a year in heaven.”

As they pushed uphill through the solemn shadows of the forest, a sound like the raging of a wind through a wood came down to them faintly from afar. It was a sullen sound, deep and mysterious as the hoarse babel of the sea,  smitten through with the shrill scream of trumpets like the cry of gulls above a storm. In the alleys of the pine forest it was still as death, and calm beneath the beniscus of the tall trees.

Igraine and Brastias looked meaningly at each other as they rode. The sound needed no words to christen it. The two under the trees knew that they heard the roar of host breaking upon host, the cataractine thunder of a distant battle.

Pushing on as fast as the forest suffered, the din became more definite, more human, more sinister in detail. It stirred the blood, challenged the courage, racked conjecture with the infinite chaos it portended. Victory and despair were trammelled up together in its sullen roar; life and death seemed to swell it with the wind-sound of their wings; it was stupendous, sonorous, chaotic, a tempest-cry of steel and many voices merged into the grand underchant of war.

Igraine’s face kindled to the sound like the face of a girl who hears her lover’s lute at night under her window. Blood fled to her brain with the wild strength of the strain humming like a wind through the trees. She was in the mood for war; the tragedy of it solemnised her spirit, and made her look for the innumerable flash of arms, the rolling march of a multitude. For the moment it was life, and the glorious strength of it; death and the dust were hid from sight.

Yet another furlong and the red trunks dwindled, and the sombre boughs fringed great tracts of blue, and to the north mountains rose up dim and purple under an umbrage of clouds. To the west the sea appeared solemn and foamless, set with pine-spired aisles, and a great company of ships at anchor. Nigh the shore the grey pile of a walled town stood out upon green meadows. Igraine and the man pushed past the outlying thickets, and drew rein upon a slope that ran gradually down from them like the great swell of a sea.

Tented by the dome of the sky lay a natural amphi theatre, shelving towards the sea, but rising in the east by rolling slopes to a ridge that joined the mountains with the forest. The valley was a medley of waste land, scrub, gorse, and thicket, traversed by the white streak of a road, and closed on the west by the grey walls of the town rising up above the green. It was a wild spot enough. However still and solitary it may have seemed in its native desertedness, however much the haunt of the wolf and the boar, it seethed now like a cauldron with the boiling stir of battle. Men swarmed through scrub and thicket; masses of steel moved hither and thither, met, mingled, broke, and rallied. Wave rushed on wave. Bodies of horsemen smoked over the open with flashing of many colours and the glittering pomp of mail, to roll with clanging trumpets into some vortex of death. The whole scene was one shifting mass of steel and strife, dust and disorder, galloping squadrons, rolling spears, rank on rank of shields a-flicker in the sun. And from this whirlpool of humanity rose the dull grinding roar of war, fierce, stupendous, clamorous, grand.

To the trained eye of the soldier the chaos took orderly and intelligent meaning, and Brastias stood in his stirrups and pointed out to Igraine the main ordering of the hosts. Uther Pendragon held the eastern ridge with his knights and levies; Gilomannius and Pascentius thrust up at him from the sea; while the valley between held the wreck of the countercharges of either host, and formed debatable ground where troop ran against troop, and man against man.

The masses of Uther’s army swept away along the ridge, their arms glittering over the green slopes, their banners and surcoats colouring the height into a terraced garden of war, the whole, a solemn streak of gold against the blue bosoms of the hills. To the north stood Meliograunt with his levies from Wales, and next him Duke Eldol and King Nentres headed the men of Flavia Cæsariensis. South of all the great banner of Tintagel showed where Gorlois and the southern levies reared up their spears like a larch-wood in  winter. Brastias pointed them all out to the girl in turn, keeping keen watch the while on the shifting mob of mail in the valley.

Igraine, stirred by the scene, urged on from the forest, and the knight following her, they crossed some open scrubland, wound through a thicket of pines, and stood at gaze under the boughs. Igraine’s eyes were all the while turned on the banner of Tintagel, and from the common mob of mailed figures she could isolate a knight in gilded harness on a white horse, Gorlois, her husband. The mere sight of him set her hate blazing in her heart, and seemed to pageant out all the ills she had suffered at his hands. Her feud against the man was a veritable insanity, a species of melancholia that wrapped all existence in the morbid twilight of self-centred bitterness. As she looked down upon the host there was a kind of overmastering madness of malice on her face, an emotion whose very intensity paled her to the lips, and made her eyes hard and scintillant as crystal. She was discreet for all her violence of soul. Turning to Brastias, who was scanning the valley under his hand, she pointed to the banner with a restless eagerness of manner that might have hinted at her solicitude for Gorlois, her lord.

“See yonder,” she said, “is not that the Lord Gorlois on the white horse by yonder standard?”

Brastias turned his glance thither, considered for a moment, and then agreed decisively.

“Love is quick of eye,” he said with a smile.

“Let us ride down nearer.”

“I care not for the hazard, madame.”

“Who fears at such a season?”

“By my sword, madame, not your servant; I am but careful of your safety.”

“Fear for me, Brastias, when I fear for myself.”

“Methinks, madame, that would be never.”

“Brastias, I believe you.”

Igraine’s courage had risen to too high an imperiousness  for the moment to brook baffling or to endure restraint. She had been lifted out of herself, as it were, by the storm-cry of battle, and by the splendour of the scene spread out before her eyes. A furlong or more down the hillside a little hillock stood up amid a few wind-twisted thorns, proffering rare vantage for outlook over wood and dale. She was away like a flash, and several lengths ahead before Brastias had roused up, put spur to horse, and cantered after her. The man saw the glint of her horse’s hinder hoofs spurning the sod, and though the wind whistled about his ears, he was left well in the rear for all his spurring. Igraine, with her hair agleam under her tossed-back hood, and her cheeks ruddied by the wind, headed for the rising ground at a gallop, gained it, and drew rein on the very verge of a small cliff that dropped sheer to the flat below. The hillock was like a natural pulpit, its front face a perpendicular some twenty feet high, while its hinder slope tailed off to merge into the hillside. Gorlois’s mailed masses stood but a hundred paces away, and Igraine could see him clearly in his gilded harness under the banner of Tintagel.

Brastias galloped up to her with a mild bluster of expostulation.

“You court danger, madame.”

“What if I do, Brastias, to be near my lord.”

“Your sanctity lies upon my conscience.”

“I take all such care from you.”

“Madame, that is impossible; duty is duty both night and day, in battle and in peace; duty bids me fear for my lord’s wife.”

Igraine found certain logic invincible in the argument, and made good use of it; she meant to rule Brastias for her own ends.

“Fear,” she said; "I forget fear when I am nigh Gorlois, my husband; and who can gainsay me the right of watching over him? I forget fear when I think of Britain, the king, and my lord, and had I a hundred lives I could cast  them down to help to break the heathen, and serve my country."

“Amen,” said Brastias, signing the cross upon his breast.

Sterner interests quashed any further polite bickerings that might have risen from Igraine’s pride of purpose, for Brastias, with the instinct of a soldier, marked some large development in the struggle that had been passing in the valley below them. The scattered lines of horse and foot that had been thrown forward by Uther to try the strength and spirit of the Irish host, were falling back sullenly uphill before the masses of attack poured up from the flats by Gilomannius the king. The whole battle had shifted to the east. Bodies of horse were spurring uphill, driving in Uther’s men, cutting down stragglers, harrowing the slopes for the solid march of the black columns of foot that were creeping up between the thickets, winding like giant dragons amid furze and scrub. It was a grand sight enough, the advance of a great host, a rocking sea of spears pouring up in the lull that had fallen over the valley as though the battle took breath and waited. Uther’s men kept their ground upon the ridge, watching in silence the advance of Gilomannius’s chivalry. Only a brief wild cry of trumpets betokened the gathering of the waves of war.

Even at this juncture Brastias racked his wit and courtesy to persuade Gorlois’s lady to fall back and watch from the shelter of the woods. He pointed out her peril to Igraine, besought, argued, cajoled, threatened. All he gained was a blunt but half-smiling declaration from the woman that she would hold to her post on the hillock till the battle was over, or some mischance drove her from the place. Brastias caught her bridle, spurred round, and tried to drag her back by main force, but she was out of the saddle instanter, and obstinate as ever. In the end the man capitulated, and gave his concern to the fortunes of war.

The sudden uproar that sounded out along the hillside made mere individual need dull and impossible for the moment. The shock of the joining of the hosts had come  like the fall of snow from a mountain—a sound sweeping down the valley, echoing among the silent fastnesses of the hills. Men had come pike to pike, shield to shield, upon the ridge. Mass rushed upon mass, billow upon billow. From the mountains to the forest the sweat and thunder of strife rolled up from the long line of leaping steel, from the living barrier, steady as a cliff. It was one of the many Marathons of the world where barbarism clawed at the antique fabric of the past.

Igraine’s glance was stayed on Gorlois and the southern levies about the banner of Tintagel. Her hate surged up the green slope with the onrush of the Irish horde, and brandished on the charge in spirit towards the tall figure in the harness of gold. She saw Gorlois in the press smiting right and left with the long sweep of his sword. In her thirst for his destruction she grudged him strength, harness, sword, the very shield he bore. She was glad of his courage, for such would militate against him. Moment by moment her desire honoured him with death as she thought him doomed to fall beneath the surge of steel.

A sudden shout from Brastias brought her stare from this chaos of swords. The man was standing in his stirrups, and pointing to the west with his face dead white and his mouth agape.

“By God, look!”

Truth to tell, there was little need of the warning. A dull rumble of hoofs came up like thunder above the shriller din around. Igraine, looking to the west, saw a black mass of horsemen at the gallop, swaying, surging, rocking uphill full for Gorlois’s flank. The sight numbed her reason for the moment. She was still as stone as the column swept past the very foot of the hillock—a flood of steel—and plunged headlong upon Gorlois’s lines, hewing and trampling to the very banner of Tintagel. An oath from Brastias made her turn and look at him. He had his hand on his sword, and his face was twisted into a snarl of wrath and shame as he stood in his stirrups and watched the fight.

 

“My God!” he cried, “my God! they run.”

It was palpable enough that the southern line was breaking and crumbling ominously before the rush of Gilomannius’s knights. Little bunches of men were breaking away from the main mass like smoke, and falling back over the ridge. Igraine guessed at Brastias’s pride and fury, saw her chance of liberty, and took it. She set up a shrill cry that stirred his courage like a trumpet-cry.

“My Lord, my Lord Gorlois, Brastias, what of him?”

The man’s sword had flashed out.

“Send me to death, lady, only to strike a blow for Britain.”

Igraine spread her hands to him like a Madonna, and made the sign of the cross in the air. Brastias lifted up his drawn sword, kissed it, and saluted her with the look of a hero. Then he wheeled his horse, plunged down from the hillock, and rode full gallop into the battle. Igraine soon lost sight of his black harness in the mêlée, and since he met his death there, she saw Brastias alive no more.

Despite the grim uproar of the overthrow, despite the taunts of a patriot pride, there was an under-current of gladness through her thought as she watched Gorlois’s men giving ground upon the ridge. Her lord’s shame was her gratification. To such a pitch of passion was she tuned that she could find laughter for the occasion, and a shrill cry of joy that startled even her own ears when the banner of Tintagel quivered and went down into the dust. Men were falling like leaves in autumn, and the southern wing of Uther’s host seemed but a rabble—trampled, overridden, herded, and smitten over the ridge. Everywhere the swords and spears of Gilomannius’s knights and gallowglasses spread rout and panic, while the wavering mass gave ground, rallied, gave again, and streamed away in flight over the hillside. She could see no sign of Gorlois, and with a whimper of hate the strong doubt of his escaping the slaughter took hold on her heart, and found ready welcome there. She was rid of Brastias—good fellow that he was—and though she  honoured him, she loved liberty better. Liberty enough! Gorlois her lord had been slain. Such were her reflections for the moment.

Pendragon’s host seemed threatened with overthrow. The southern wing had been driven off the field by a charge of horse; Gilomannius held the southern portion of the ridge, and pressed hard on Meliograunt, both flank and face. The imminent need of Britain was plain enough even to Igraine, yet a sense of calm and liberty had come upon her like the song of birds or the gush of green in springtide. Even her patriotism seemed dim and unreal for the moment before the treasonable gratitude that watched the overthrow of Gorlois’s arms. She was alone at last, solitary among thousands, able after the bitterness of past months to pluck peace from the very carnage of battle. Trouble had so wrought upon her mind that it seemed a negation of all probable and natural sentiment, a contradiction of the ethical principles of sense.

The day was fast passing, and the grand fires of a winter sunset were rolling all the caverns of the west into a blaze of gold and scarlet. The pine forest, black and inscrutable as night, stood with its spines like ebony to the fringe of the west, while the slanting light lit the glimmering masses of steel on hill and valley with a web of gold. To the north the mountains towered in a mystery of purple, a gleam of amber transient on their peaks.

Sudden and shrill came a cry of trumpets from the hills, a sinister sound that seemed to issue in the climax of the last phase of a tragedy. Igraine’s eyes were turned northwards to the green slopes of the higher ground where the great banner of the Golden Dragon had flapped over Uther the King. Here a great company of knights, the flower of the host, had stood inactive throughout the day. With a cry of trumpets this splendid company had moved down to charge the masses of Gilomannius’s men, who now filled the shallow valley east of the ridge, and threatened King Meliograunt and the whole host with overthrow. Uther  had ridden out to lead the charge with his own sword. It was one of those perilous hours when some great deed was needed to grapple victory from defeat.

The rest of the scene seemed blotted out as Igraine watched from her hillock the glittering mass rolling downhill with the evening sun striking flame from its thousand points of steel. On over the green slopes, past the pavilions of the camp, it gathered like a wave lifting its crest against a rock, on towards the swarm of men squandered in pursuit of Gorlois’s broken line, on to where Gilomannius formed his knights for the charge. The green space dwindled and dwindled with the rush and roar of the nearing gallop. Igraine saw the rabble of Saxons, light-armed kerns and Irish gallowglasses, split and crack like a crumbling wall. For a short breath the black mass held, with Uther’s storm of mail cleaving cracks and wedges in it—streaks of tawny colour like lava through the vineyards and gardens of a village. Then as by magic the whole mass seemed to deliquesce, to melt, to become as mist. All visible was a thunderstorm of horsemen tearing like wind through a film of rain with scattering fringes of cloud scudding swiftly to the west. The knights had passed the valley and were riding up the slope, hewing, trampling, crushing, as they came. Gilomannius’s columns that had pushed Gorlois’s men into rout had become a rabble in turn—wrecked, scattered to the wind, trodden down in blood and dust. They were streaming away in flight over the ridge, scampering for scrub and thicket, no lust in them save the lust of life. Igraine saw them racing past on every quarter, a blood-specked, dust-covered herd, their hairy faces panting for the west and the ships on the beach. Not a hundred paces away came the line of trampling hoofs and swinging swords, a demoniac whirlwind of iron wrath that hunted, slew, and gave no quarter.

Beyond the summit of the ridge, and all about the hillock where Igraine stood, the glittering horde of knights came to a halt with a great shout of triumph. Right  beneath Igraine and the straight face of the hillock a man in red armour on a black horse, with a golden dragon on his helmet, stood out some paces before the ranks of the splendid company. A great cry rolled up, a forest of swords shook in the sun. The knight on the black horse stood in his stirrups, and with sword and helmet upstretched in either hand lifted his face to the red triumph fire of the west. Igraine knew him—Pelleas, Uther, the King.

Chapter IV

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The sun had rolled back between the pylons of the west. Night was in the sky, night in her winter austerity—keen, clear, aglitter with stars as though her robe were spangled with cosmic frost. The mountains’ rugged heads were dark to the heavens, and the sea lay a faintly glimmering plain open to the beck of the moon.

The Irish host had broken and fled at sunset before Uther’s charge and the streaming spears of Eldol and King Nentres. The green meadows, the wild scrubland, had been chequered over with the black swarm of the flying soldiery; the whole valley had surged with swords and the sound of the slaughter. By the grey walls of the town it had beleaguered, the driven host had turned and rallied in despair to stave off to the last the implacable doom that poured down from the hills. It was the vain effort of a desperate cause. Broken and scattered like dust along a highway, there had been no hope left them but their ships. The battle had ended in the very foam of the breaking waves. Crag and cliff, rock-citadel and yellow sand, had had their meed of blood and the shrill sound of the sword. The great ships had saved but a remnant, and had put out to sea in the dusk, their white sails like huge ghosts treading the swell of the twilight waters. Yet with night there had come no ceasing of the carnage. Despair had turned to  front victory; Irish gallowglass and heathen churl, forsaken by their ships and hemmed in by sea and sword, had fought on to the end, finding and knowing no mercy. Gilomannius the King and Pascentius were dead, and the blood of invasion poured out like water.

Now it was night, and in the clear passionless light of the moon a figure in a cloak of sables moved towards the mound where Gorlois of Cornwall had flown his banner early in the day’s battle. Everywhere the dead lay piled like sheaves in a cornfield, their harness glinting with a ghastly lustre to the moon—piled in all attitudes and postures, staring blankly with white faces to the sky, or prone with their lips in blood, contorted, twisted, clutching at throat and weapon, mouths agape or clenched into a grin, man piled on man, barbarian upon Briton. Dark quags chequered the grass with the sickly odour of shed blood, and sword and spear, shield and helmet, flickered impotently among the dead.

Igraine went among the bodies like a black monk seeking some still quick enough to be shriven before their souls took flight from the riven clay. Her cloak was gathered jealously about her as she threaded her way among the huddled figures, peering under helmets, scanning harness narrowly in her death-inspired quest. Casting hither and thither in the moonlight, she came to a tangled bank of furze, and beyond it a low hillock that seemed piled and paved with the bodies of the slain. Here had stood the banner of Tintagel, and here the prowess of Gorlois’s household knights had fallen before the charge of Gilomannius’s chivalry. Igraine saw the medley of mail, the dead horses, jumbled figures, wreck of shield and spear rising out above her in the moonlight, cloaked with a silence grim and irrefutable, as though Death himself sat sentinel on the pyramid of carnage. Half shuddering at the sight like an aspen, for all the intent that was in her heart, she drew near, determined and resolved to search the mound. Compelled to climb over the dead and to set her foot on the  breasts and shoulders of the slain, her tread lighted more than once on a body that squirmed like a dying snake. Strong to do the uttermost after that day of revelation she struggled on, loathing the task, her shoes clammy with the blood-sweat of death. On the summit of the mound she came upon Gorlois’s white horse lying dead by the wreathing folds of the fallen banner of his house.

A whimper of joy came up into Igraine’s heart. Sinister as the sign seemed, she was soon searching the mound with an alert desire in her eyes that prophesied no vestige of pity for the thing for which she sought. Hunt as she would, and she was marvellously patient over the gruesome business, no glint of Gorlois’s golden harness flattered her hate as she searched the mound. Many a good knight lay there, some that she had known at Tintagel, and hated because they served her husband, but of Gorlois she found no trace. As a last hope, she dragged aside the great standard and found a dead man there sheeted in its folds, a man in black armour with his face to the sky—Brastias, who had ridden with her from Caerleon.

She stood a moment looking down at him with a sudden feeling of awe such as had not come upon her through all that day. A white face lay turned to the sky,—a face that had looked kindly into hers with a level trust,—and smiled with a wealth of manly sympathy. It was a simple thing enough, nothing but one death among many thousands, but it touched Igraine to the core, and made her ashamed of the lies she had given him. She found herself wondering like a child whether Brastias was in heaven, and whether he watched her and her thoughts with his calm grey eyes. The notion disquieted her. She bent down, took his naked sword from his hand, and shrouded him again in the gorgeous blazonry of the flag for which he had died, and so left him with a sigh.

As she climbed back again from the mound, a gashed and clotted face heaved up and stared at her from a heap of slain. It was the face of a man who had struggled up on  his hands to look at her with mouth agape, dazed after a sudden waking from the stupor of a swoon. For a moment in the moonlight she thought it was Gorlois by certain likeness of feature, but discovered her error when the man spoke to her in gibberish she did not understand. He began to crawl towards her with a certain air of menace that made her start back and rear up the sword she had taken from dead Brastias. The threat of steel proved needless enough, for the man dropped again with a wet groan, and seemed dead when she went and bent over him with thoughts of succour.

Passing back again to her hillock, she stood there brooding and looking out towards the west. A great bell in the town by the sea was pulsing heavily as though for the dead, and there were many cressets flaring on the walls, and torches going to and fro in the meadows. The sound of a triumph hymn chanted by hundreds of deep voices floated up like a prayer from the western meadows.

At the sound Igraine’s eyes were strangely full of tears. By some strange echoing of the mind the idyls of past days woke like the song of birds after a storm of rain. Clear in the dusk she seemed to see the red figure on the black horse, his face lit like a god’s by the slanting light from the west as he stretched his sword to heaven. Again the scene changed, and she saw him riding through the flowering meads of Andredswold, looking down on her with a grave and luminous pity. She was glad of him, glad of his great glory, glad that he had kissed her lips, and bewrayed the love to her that was in his heart. The scene and the occasion were strange enough for such broodings, yet her eyes were very dim as she stood in a half-dream and let the picture drift across her mind.

The revelation had come upon her with such suddenness that she had been for the moment like one dazed. She had watched Uther sweep on with his horde of knights, and had stood mute and impotent as one smitten dumb while the red harness and the golden dragon of Britain vanished again  into the moil of war. Now her whole soul yearned out with a wistfulness born of infinite regret. If he had only come to her alone; if he had only come to her as Pelleas in some gloom of green, she could have fallen down before his horse’s feet, kissed the scabbard of his sword, wept over his helmet, and burnished it with her hair. Sight of that dark sad face had made a beacon of her on the instant.

And Gorlois! If she had hated him yesterday, she hated him with a tenfold vigour since she had looked again upon Pelleas’s face. Certainly her malice had grown with an Antæan strength with each humbling of her heart to the dust, and the very thought of Gorlois seemed blasphemy against her soul at such an hour.

With the memory of Gorlois a cloud dulled the clear mirror of her mind, and her mood of dreams melted into mist. The strong sense of bondage, of ineffectual treason, came back with a fuller force as though to menace her with the fateful realism of her lot. A hand seemed to sweep down and wave her back with a meaning so sinister that even her hate stood still a moment as in sudden fear; she had some such feeling as of standing on the brink of a mysterious sea whose waves sang to her a song of peril, of misery and desire cooped up together in the dim green twilight of some coral dungeon. The lure of the unknown beat upon her eyes, while love and hate, like attendant spirits, beckoned her over the yawn of an open grave.

For the moment the importunity of her immediate need drew her from meditations alike bitter and divine. A battlefield after dark, with all its lust and pillage, was no pleasant place for a woman. The lights of the town still showed up brightly in the west, but Igraine had little desire of the teeming streets where victory would be matching blood with wine, and where the revels of the soldiery would celebrate the day in primal fashion. She was content to be alone under the stars, and even the dead seemed more sympathetic than the living at such an hour.

A wind had risen, and she heard the hoarse “salvé” of the  forest in the night. The thousand voices of the trees seemed to call to her with a weird perpetual clamour. She saw their spectral hands jerking and clutching against the sky, and heard the creak and gibber of the criss-cross boughs swaying in the wind. Leaving the hillock, and still bearing Brastias’s sword, she held across the open, seeing as she went the dark streaks that dotted the hillside—the bodies of men fallen in the flight. She gained the trees, and was soon deep among the crowded trunks, pondering on her lodging for the night.

Wandering hither and thither, looking for some more sheltered spot, her glance lighted on a dim swelling of the ground that proved to be an ancient mound or barrow. It had been opened in times past, probably in the search for buried treasure or for weapons. Brambles, weeds, and heather had roofed the shallow cutting into a little recess or cave that gave fair shelter from the wind, and Igraine, braving the notion of barrow ghost or spirit, claimed the place as a God-send, and took cover therein.

The last crumbs in her wallet finished, she sat with her face between her palms, brooding, big-eyed, in the night, like any Druidess wreathing spells in her forest solitude. The wind was crying through the trees, swaying them restlessly against the starry sky, making plaintive moan through all the myriad aisles. Igraine listened like one huddled among her thoughts to keep out the cold. Miserable as was her lodging, her mind seemed packed with the day’s battle; the whirl and thunder of it were still moving in her brain, a wild scene towered over by a man bare-headed on a black horse, holding his helmet to the setting sun. Often and often she heard the roar of hoofs and saw the rush of the charge that had trampled the banner of Tintagel and hurled Gorlois and his men in rout from the ridge. Had it been death or life with the man? Was he with the King hearing holy mass and lifting up the wine cup to heaven under a flare of lights, or lying stiff and pinched under the mild eyes of night? It was this thought,  holding hope and doubt in common yoke, that abode with her all the night in her refuge under the trees.

It was bleak enough, with a silvering of frost over the land, when darkness had rolled back over the western sea, uncovering the wreck of death that lay huddled on ridge and slope. Igraine was stirring early from the barrow. With the cold and her own thoughts she had slept but an hour, and at the first filtering of light through the branches she was glad and ready for the day. She wandered through the forest towards the open land that showed glimmering through the tree-boles, with no certain purpose moving in her mind. The future as yet was a blank to her, lacking possibilities, jealous of its secrets, saturnine as death itself. There shone one light above her that seemed to burn through the unknown; it had long led her from distant hills, yet even her red lamp of love beckoned her over a sepulchre.

Coming to the forest margin, she came full upon the incontestable handiwork of war. Under the sweep of a great pine lay the body of a knight in black harness, all blazoned with gold, while his grey horse was still standing with infinite patience by his side, nosing him gently from time to time. The man’s helmet, a visored casque, somewhat gladiatorial in type, had fallen off, and a young beardless face was turned placidly up to the blue, a white oval pillowed upon a tuft of heather. There was no blood or sign of violence visible save a blue bruise on his left temple; it seemed more than probable that he had been pitched from the saddle and found death in the fall.

Igraine stood and looked at him in some pity while the horse snuffed at her, staring with great wistful eyes as though for help or sympathy. The man was young, with a certain nobility of early manhood on his face, and it seemed to her very pitiful that he should be cut off thus in life’s spring. As she looked at him she noted that he was slim of figure, and not much above middle height. A sudden fancy took her on the instant. She tethered the horse, and  kneeling down by the man her fingers were soon busy at the buckles and joints of his armour. Ungirding his sword, she drew it from the scabbard and set it upright at his head, sheathing Brastias’s in its place. Having stripped off his armour and long surcoat she covered him reverently with her cloak, slung the horse’s bridle round her wrist, and gathering up his arms and helmet went back to the barrow where she had passed the night.

The wood had received a woman in the dress of a woman; it gave in exchange a knight on a grey horse—a knight in black armour blazoned with gold under a surcoat of violet cloth. The brazen helmet, visored and hooded with mail over nape of neck and throat, gleamed and flashed under the green boughs. There were three lilies, snow-white, and a cloven heart upon the shield, and the horse trappings were bossed and enamelled gold and blue.

Igraine rode out from the trees with the pomp of a Launcelot. The grey horse’s mane tossed in the wind, the furze rippled on the hillside, the cloud-ships sailed the blue with white sails spread. The girl was aglow with new life under her guise of steel. The essence of manhood seemed to have created itself within her as from the soul of the dead knight, and she suffered the glory of arms with a pride that was almost boyish.

Holding out from the trees at a solemn pace, she headed westward down the valley along the grass slopes that slid between scrub and thicket to the sea. On the road below her a company of spears trailed eastward uphill in a snakelike column that glittered through the green. Pushing on boldly across ground where the battle had raged hotly the night before, she reached the road as the head of the column swung up at a dull tramp on their march home for Caerleon. Gruffing her voice in her throat she hailed the knight who headed the troop for news of the battle of yesterday, posing as one late on the scene, and sore at having struck no blow for Britain.

The knight drew aside, and letting his men tramp by,  he gave tersely the tale of the fight as he had seen it from King Nentres’s lines.

“St. Jude be blessed,” said Igraine at the end thereof. “I am glad, friend, of these tidings. As for the field, it looks to have been as bloody a one as ever I set eyes on.”

“Bloody enough,” quoth the man, giving his moustache a twirl; “too bloody for Gilomannius and dead Vortigern’s whelp.”

“What of Uther?”

“Scarce a scratch.”

“King Meliograunt?”

“Wounded, but drunk as the devil.”

“And Gorlois of Cornwall?”

The man laughed as at a jest.

“Bedded in an abbey,” said he, “with a split face; mere flesh, mere flesh, nothing deeper.”

Igraine thanked him with her helm adroop, and turning her horse, rode back towards the forest heavy of heart.

Chapter V

---

The King’s house at Caerleon stood out above the Usk on a little hill whose slopes were set with shrubberies and gardens, the white pillars and broad façade glimmering above the filmy cloud of green that covered the place as with a garment. A great stairway ran to the river from the southern terrace that blazed in summer with flower-filled urns and stacks of roses that overspread the balustrade with crimson flame. It was a place of dawns and sunsets; of lights rising amber in the east over purple hills and amethystine waters; of quiet glows at evening in the west, with cypresses and yews carven in ebony against primrose skies; while in the burgeoning of the year birds made the thickets deep with melody; and all beyond, Caerleon’s solemn towers, roofs, casements bowered in green, rested  within the battlemented walls that touched the domes and leaf-spires of the woods.

It was noontide in Caerleon, and down the great stairway, with its rows of cypresses, its banks of yew and myrtle, a fair company was passing to the river, where many barges clustered round the water-gate like gilded beetles sunning their flanks in the shallows. Knights and churchmen in groups moved down from the palace talking together as they went. There had been a council of state in the King’s hall, a great assembling of the noble folk and prelatry, to consider the need of Britain, the cry of the martyred and the homeless from Kentlands and the east. Anderida, that great city of the southern shores, had fallen in a tempest of fire and sword; no single soul had escaped from its smoking walls; the barbarian had entered in and made great silence over the whole city. Now it was told that more galleys had come bearing the fair-haired churls from the sand-dunes and pinewoods, the rude hamlets of that Angle land over the sea. Vectis had been overrun, Porchester burnt to the ground, even the noble city of Winchester threatened despite its walls. Beast and robber had sole rule in Andredswold; much of nether-Britain was a wilderness, a wistful land given over to solitude and the wild creatures of the forest. Churches were crumbling; gillyflowers grew on the high altars, and ivy wrapped the tombs; sanctuary bells were silent, homes empty and still as death. Desolation threatened the south, while the valleys of Armorica oversea gave refuge to many who fled before the Saxon sword.

In the great hall of the palace Uther still sat in his chair of ivory under a gilded roof that mingled huge beams with banners, spears, and rust-rotted harness. The walls were frescoed with Homeric scenes—Helen meeting Paris in the house of Menelaus, Achilles slaying Hector, Ulysses and Calypso. Twelve painted pillars held the crossbeams of the hall, and from the fire on the great hearth a fragrant scent of burning cedar wood drifted upon the air. A long table covered with parchment, tablets, quills and inkhorns, and an  array of empty benches testified to the number of noble folk who had assembled at the royal conclave. A single councillor remained before the King—Dubricius, Bishop of Caerleon, a tall spare man, whose white hair and sensitive ascetic face bore testimony to an inward delicacy of soul.

Uther was clad in a tunic of scarlet, with a dragon in gold thread blazoned upon his breast. No crown, coronet, or fillet was on his brow; on his finger he wore the signet of Ambrosius, and his sword was girded to him with a girdle of embroidered leather. His look was much the same as when he rode as Pelleas in Andredswold and was nursed of his wound by Igraine in the island manor. Possibly there were more lines upon his face, a deeper dignity of sadness in his eyes. Circumstance had put upon him the cherishing of an imperilled kingdom, and with the charge his natural stateliness of soul had risen into a heroism of benignant chivalry. No more kingly man could have taken a land under the strong sweep of his sword. With the grand simplicity of a great heart he had grappled the task as a thing given of God, bending ever in prayer like a child before the inscrutable wisdom of heaven.

There had been grave business on his mind that day, and his face was dark with a cloud of care as he talked with Dubricius on certain matters that lay near his heart. Uther, like the men of old time, was superstitious and ever prone to regard all phenomena as possessing certain testamentary authority from the Deity. In mediæval fashion he referred all human riddles to religious instinct for their solving, and searched in holy writ for guidance with a faith that was typical of his character. Wholly a Christian in a superstitious sense, he gained from the very fervour of his belief a strength that seemed to justify his very bigotry.

It was a certain experience, that to his mystic-loving instinct omened history still dark in the womb of the future, and kept him closeted with Dubricius that day after knight and churchman had filed out from the conclave. In the twilight of the hall, with its painted frescoes and glimmering  shields, Dubricius listened to the King as he spoke of portents and visions of the night. Uther, with his elbow resting on the arm of his chair and his chin upon his palm, stared at the cedar wood burning pungently upon the hearth and catechised Dubricius on visionary belief. The old man looked keenly at the King under his arched white brows. He was as much a mystic in his creed as this son of Constantine, a believer in miracles and in manifestations in the heavens. Certainly unusual powers had been given to the early Church, and it was not for the atomic mind of man to deny their presence in any later age.

“My lord dreamed a dream,” said Dubricius tentatively when he had heard the tale to the end.

Uther quashed the suggestion with the calm confidence of a man sure of his reason.

“Never a dream, Dubricius.”

The old man’s eyes were very bright, and his face seemed full of a luminous sanctity.

“A vision, then, my lord?”

“I am no woman, Dubricius; I must believe the thing a vision, or damn my senses.”

“My lord, it is no mere woman’s part to see visions; search holy writ where the chosen of God—the great ones—were miraculously blessed with portent and with dream.”

Uther looked into the old man’s face as though for succour.

“I am troubled to know what God would have me know,” he said. “Dubricius, you are aged in the service of the Church!”

“My lord, I have no privilege from heaven in the rendering of dreams.”

“Am I then a Pharaoh disappointed of mine own soothsayers?”

“Sire, what of Merlin?”

“Merlin—”

"The man has the gift of prophecy and can speak with  tongues. Send for him, my lord; he is a child of the Church, though a mage."

Uther warmed himself before the fire of cedar wood, his face motionless in contemplative calm. Presently he turned, and looked deep into Dubricius’s vigil-hollowed eyes as though to read the thoughts therein.

“Merlin, the black-haired man who told Vortigern of the future!”

“He spoke the truth, my lord.”

“Sad truth for Vortigern.”

“Yet who should fear the truth?”

“Dubricius, to hear of death!”

“Death, my lord?”

“Remember Vortigern.”

“My lord, he was a planet lurid with murder, and so damned to darkness. Need the sun fear light?”

Uther smiled sadly in the old man’s face.

“You are too faithful a courtier, Dubricius.”

“My lord, you are the pillar of a distraught land; God be merciful and spare you to us.”

“I have done my duty.”

“Amen, sire, to that.”

Uther went and stood by the great window of the room with his arms folded upon his breast. His hollow eyes looked out over the city, and there was a gaunt grandeur of thought upon his face. He was not a man who galloped down destiny like a huntsman on the trail of a stag; deliberation entered into his motives, and he never foundered reason with over-use of the spur. Dubricius stood and watched him with the smile of a father, for he loved the man.

Presently Uther turned back towards the fire. Dubricius saw by his face that he had come by decision, and that his mind was steadfast.

“Merlin is at Sarum, my lord.”

“I shall not play Saul at Endor.”

“No, sire.”

 

“The man shall come to me with no jugglery in dark corners.”

“Wise forethought, my lord king.”

“I remember me, Dubricius, that you have little leisure to hear of dreams. I have given you the names of the holy houses to be rebuilt and consecrated in the name of God. We will save Britain by the help of the cross. God speed you.”

Alone in the half light of the hall Uther stood and stared into the fire, his eyes luminous in the glow, while the pungent scent of the burning wood swept up like a savour of eastern spices. There was intense feeling on his face, a kind of passionate calm, as he gazed into the red bosom of the fire. Presently, as though turning in thought from some enchantment of the past, he sighed wearily, put his black hair from his forehead with both hands, and looked at his image in a mirror of steel that hung from a painted pillar. There was a wistful look upon his strong face; he had a soul that remembered, a soul not numbed by time into mere painless recollection of the past. As in some mysterious temple, love, with solemn sound of flute and dulcimer, kept fire unquenched night and day upon the altar of his heart.

Rising up out of his mood of gloom, an earthly Hyperion whose face shone anew over Britain, he passed out, and calling to the guards lounging on the terrace, descended the stairway that sloped through gardens to the river. His state barge was in waiting at the gate, and entering in he was borne downstream towards the town whose white walls rose up amid the emerald mist of spring. Over all Uther cast his eye with a lustre look of love, a love that shone like the smile of a child at a mother’s face. Caerleon was dear to him beyond all other cities; its white walls held his heart with the whispered conjure word of “home.”

Landing at the great quay, where many ships and galleys lay moored, he passed up towards the market square with the files of his guard, smiling back on the reverences of the  people, throwing here and there a coin, happy in the honour that echoed to him from every face. Before the walls of a pilastered house his guards halted with a fanfare of trumpets, a sound that rolled the gates wide and brought a mob of servants to line the outer court. Knights came down from the house with heads uncovered. It was the King’s first entry into Gorlois’s atrium since the disbanding of the host after the war in Wales.

A face scarred with red across cheek and chin, with nose askew, one lower lid turned down, came out to Uther from the doorway of an inner room. There was a drawn look upon the man’s face, a sullen saturnine air about him as though he were vexed inwardly with the chafe of some perpetual pain. The pinched frown, the restless bloodshot eyes, the hunched shoulders, were all strange to Uther, who looked for Gorlois, the man of arrogant and imperial pride, whose splendour of person, carriage of head, and long lithe stride had marked him a stag royal from the herd of meaner men.

Uther, grave as a god, gripped the other’s thin sinewy fingers, his eyes searching Gorlois’s face with a large-minded scrutiny inspired by the natural sympathies of his heart. Gorlois, for his part, half crooked the knee, and drew a carved chair before the ill-tended fire. He had an Asmodean pride, and the look in Uther’s eyes was more troublesome to him than a glare of hate. His face never lightened from the murk of reserve that covered it like a mask, and it was the King who spoke the first word over the flickering fire.

“What of your wounds?” he said.

Gorlois’s black beard was down on his breast, and he looked only at the fire. He seemed like a man furtive beneath the consciousness of some inward shame, mocking his honour.

“My wounds are well, sire.”

“You look like a man newly risen from a sick bed.”

"If I look sick, sire, blame my physician; he has tinctured me to the level of perdition. Bodily I never felt in  better fettle. I could hew down a horse, and thrust my spear through a pine trunk. A man’s face is a fallacy."

Uther saw the scars, the harsh smile, and caught the twinge in the seemingly careless voice. He could comprehend some humiliation in the marring of personal comeliness, but not the humiliation that seemed to lurk deep beneath Gorlois’s pride. There was more here than the scarring of a cheek.

“There is some care upon you, Gorlois,” he said.

“Sire, you have much observation.”

“Your men have spoken of the change to you.”

“They are too discreet, God save their skins.”

“Pride, pride.”

“Sire, you are right; my pride suffers the inquisitiveness of kings, not subjects. Eagle calls to eagle; men are mere magpies. Chatter maddens me.”

“I grip your hand in spirit.”

Both men were silent for a while, the fire crackling sluggishly at their feet. Gorlois’s eyes were on the window and the scrap of green woodland in the distance; Uther’s eyes were on Gorlois’s face. The latter, with the sore sensitiveness of a diseased spirit, felt the look and chafed at it. His petulance was plain enough to Uther as he sat and watched him, and pondered the man’s trouble in his heart.

“Gorlois.”

“Sire.”

“I am no gabbler.”

“True, my lord.”

“You are trouble ridden.”

Gorlois’s eyes flashed up to Uther’s, faltered, and fell.

“What of that, sire?” he said curtly.

“You have a deadly pride.”

“I own it.”

Uther leant forward in his chair, and looked earnestly into the other’s face.

“I too am a proud man in my trouble,” he said, "buck ling up unutterable things from the baseness of the world, jealous of my inward miseries. Yet when I see a strong man and a friend chained with the iron of a silent woe, I cannot keep my sympathy in leash, so tell him to unburden to a man whose pride feels for the pride of others."

The words seemed to stir Gorlois from his lethargy of reserve and silence. Uther’s very largeness of soul, his stately faith and courtesy, were qualities that won largely upon the mind, lifting it above factious things to the serene level of his own soul. Gorlois, impulsive spirit, could not rebuff such a man as Uther. There was a certain calm disinterestedness in the King’s nature that made trust imperative and condemned secretiveness as churlish. Gorlois was an obstinate man in the extreme rendering of the epithet. He had spoken to no one of his trouble, leaving his thoughts to be inferred. Yet staunch sympathy like Gige’s ring has power over most hidden things of the heart, and Gorlois was very human.

“It is a woman, sire.”

“Mine was a woman, too.”

Gorlois scattered the half-dead embers with his foot.

“I married a wife,” he said.

“I had never heard it.”

“Few have.”

“The woman’s name?”

“Never ask it, sire; it will soon lie with her in the dust.”

“These are grim words.”

“Grim enough for the man of my own house,—my own familiar friend.”

“Mother of Christ,—your friend!”

“My brother in arms, sire.”

“The shedding of such blood seems like justice. Had I suffered thus—”

“Sire, you warm to my temper.”

“It should be the sword.”

“Mine yet waits white for blood.”

Gorlois, implacable, grim as a werewolf, threw open the  door of a closet and led Uther within the narrow compass of its walls. It was a little oratory, dim and fantastic, with lamps hanging from the roof, and black curtains over the narrow casement. Two waxen candles burnt with steady, windless flames upon the altar, and beneath their light glimmered a great sword, naked, and a cup half filled with purple wine. Gorlois took up the sword and touched it with his lips.

“For the man,” he said.

Then he set the sword down beneath its candle and touched the goblet with his fingers; his black eyes glittered.

“For the woman, sire.”

“And the candles?”

“I burn them till I have crushed the life out of two souls; then I can pinch the wicks between my fingers, and snuff them out in smoke.”

Chapter VI

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It was spring at Caerleon, and a web of green had swept upon the empty purple of the woods and shut the naked casements to the sun. The meadowlands were plains of emerald that glimmered gold; the gorge blazed with its myriad lamps lighting the dark gateways of the pine forests, and covering all the hillsides as with a garment of yellow. In the woods the birds sang, and hyacinths and dog violets spread pools of blue beneath the infinite greenness of the boughs. In Caerleon’s orchards the fruit trees stood like mounts of snow flecked with ethereal pink and a prophecy of green. Yew, cypress, cedar, reared their dark bosoms betwixt the gentler foliage, and many a bronze-leafed oak made mimic autumn with a mist of leaves.

In a forest glade that opened upon the high-road some three leagues eastward of Caerleon, an old man sat beside a shallow spring, whose waters lay a pool of tarnished silver  within the low stone wall that compassed them. The old man by the pool was clad in a ragged cloak of coarse brown cloth lined with rabbit skin; he had sandals on his feet, a staff and wallet by his side, and under the shadow of his hood of fur a peaky white beard hung down like an icicle under the eaves of a house. His hands were thin and white, and he seemed decrepit as he sat hunched by the well with a crust of brown bread in his lap and a little bronze pannikin that served him as a cup.

It was late in the day, and the great oaks that reached out their arms over the well stood solemn and still in the evening calm, while the cloud masses bastioned overhead were radiant with the lustre of the hour. The road curled away right and left into the twilight of the woods; no folk passed to and from Caerleon to throw alms to the beggar who squatted there like any old goblin man out of a tomb. From time to time he would turn and look long into the pool as into a mirror, as though he watched the future glimmering dimly in a magic well. He had finished his crust of bread, and his head nodded over his lap as though sleep tempted him after a day’s journey. Rabbits were scampering and feeding along the edge of the forest; a snake slid by in the grass like a streak of silver; far down the glade a herd of fallow deer browsed as though caring nothing for the huddled scrap of humanity by the well. The beggar man might have been dead, for all the heed he gave to the forest life that teemed so near.

Yet it was soon evidenced that his faculties were keenly alive to all that passed about him by a marvellous perception of sound, a perception that made itself plain before the sun had drifted much further down the west. The old man had heard something that had not stirred the fallow deer browsing in the glade. A thin metallic sound shimmered on the air, the clattering cadence of hoofs far away upon the high-road. The beggar by the pool had lifted his head, and was listening with his hooded face turned towards the west, his thin fingers picking unconsciously at his beard.

 

Presently the deer browsing in the glade reared up their heads to listen, snuffed the air, and swept back at a trot into the forest. Jays chattered away over the trees; rabbits stopped feeding and sat up with their long ears red in the sunlight. The indifferent suggestion of a sound had grown into a ringing tramp that came through the trees like a blunt challenge to the solitary spirit of the place. Through the indefinite and mazy screens of green a glitter of harness and a streaking of colour glimmered from the wizard amber glow of the west. Three horsemen were coming under the trees,—one in lurid arms before, and two abreast behind in black. The beggar by the pool pulled his cowl down over his face, and stood by the roadside with his bronze pannikin held in a shaky right hand to pray for alms.

The knights drew rein by the pool, and he in the red harness flung down money from his belt, and required tidings in return:

“The Lord Jesus have mercy on your soul in death,” came the whine of gratitude; “what would your lordship learn from an old man?”

Uther considered him from the shadow of his casque. He had his suspicions, and was half wise in his conjectures. He could see nothing of the old man’s face, and so elected to be innocent for the moment.

“Grandfather, have you heard in your days of Merlin the prophet?”

“Have I heard of the devil, lording!”

“Were he to ride here, should you know his face?”

“Sir, I have seen no man these three hours. Yet, in truth, I did but now smell a savour as of hell; and there was a raven here, a black villain of a bird that croaked ‘Abracadabra to the letter.’”

Uther smiled.

“Are you from Caerleon?” he said.

“No, sire, it is Uther the King who comes from the City of Legions.”

“Uther, say you? Put back that hood.”

 

“My lord, lo! I bow myself; I have kept the tryst.”

The cowl fell back, the cloak was unwrapped, the beard twitched from the smooth, strong chin. The bent figure, feeble and meagre, straightened and dilated to a stature and bulk beyond mere common mould. A man with hair black as a raven’s wing, and great glistening eyes, stood with his moon-face turned up to Uther Pendragon. A smile played upon his lips. He was clad in a cloak of sombre purple, wreathed about with strange devices, and a leopard’s skin covered his shoulders; his black hair was bound with a fillet of gold, and there were gold bracelets upon his wrists. It was Merlin who stood before Uther under the arch of the great trees.

“The benisons of all natural powers be upon you; the God of the stars and the spirit fires of the heavens keep you. Great is your heart, O King, and great your charity. Bid me but serve you, and the beggar’s pence shall win you a blessing.”

The man bowed himself even to the ground. Uther left his horse tethered to a tree, and faced Merlin over the pool. Both men were solemn as night in their looks.

“Merlin,” said the King.

“Sire.”

“I have a riddle from the stars.”

“Speak it, O King.”

“To your ear alone.”

“Sire, pass with me into the forest.”

“Blessed be thy head if thou canst read the testament of the heavens.”

It was towards sunset, and the place was solemn and still as some vast church. In the white roadway the black knights stood motionless, with spear on thigh, their sable plumes sweeping like cloudlets under the dark vault of the foliage. Merlin, with the look of an eternity in his eyes, bowed down once more before Uther, and pointed with his hand into the dim cloister of the trees. Red and purple  passed together from the pool, and melted slowly into an oblivion of leaves.

In a little glade under a great oak, whose roots gripped the ground like talons, Uther told to Merlin the vision that had come to him in the watches of the night. He had stood late at his window, looking over Caerleon shimmering white under the moon, and had seen a star of transcendent glory smite sudden through the blue vault of the heavens. A great ray had fallen from the star, and from the ray had risen a vapour, a golden mist that had shaped itself into a dragon of gold, and from the dragon’s mouth had proceeded two smaller rays that had seemed to compass Britain between two streams of fire. Then, like smoke, both star and dragon had melted out of the heavens, and only the moon had looked down on Usk and the sleeping woods about Caerleon.

When Uther had spoken his whole soul in this mystery of the night, Merlin withdrew himself a little and looked long into the sky, his tall figure and strong face clear as chiselled stone in a slant gleam of the sun. For fully the third part of an hour he stood thus like a pillar of basalt, neither moving nor uttering a sound, while the sky fainted over the tree tops and flashed red fire from the armour of the King. Suddenly, as though he had caught inspiration from the heavens, prophecy came upon him like a wind at sunset. He stretched his hands to the sky. His body quivered; his eyes were as rubies in a mask of marble.

“I have seen, O King! I have looked into the palpitating web of the stars, into the glittering aisles of the infinite.”

Uther strode out from the tree trunk where he had leant watching the man’s cataleptic pose grow into the quick furor of prophecy.

“Say on,” he said.

Merlin swept a hand towards him with a magnificence of gesture.

"Thou art the star, the dragon is thy son. He shall compass Britain with a band of steel, beat back the wolves  of heathendom, and cast stupendous glory over Britain’s realm. His name shall shine in history, sun-bright, magnificent, and pure; his name shall be Arthur. Thus, O King! Uther of the Dragon, read I this vision of the night."

Uther, a gradual lustre in his eyes, looked long at the sun behind the swart pillars of the forest. He seemed to gather vigour from the glow. Prophecy was in his thought, a prophecy that tempted the inmost dreamings of the heart, and linked up the past with promise of the future. To love, to be loved, to win the woman among women! To beget a son, a warrior, a king; to harden his body like to an oak, temper his heart like steel; to set the cross in his hands and send him forth against the beast and the barbarian like a god! Such, indeed, were the idyls of a King!

“Merlin, I have no wife, and you speak to me of a son,” was his sole answer.

The retort echoed from the man.

“The King must wed.”

“This is no mere choosing of a horse.”

“Sire, you can learn to love. It is not so difficult a thing, no more than falling down upon a bed of roses.”

The retort was in no wise suited to Uther’s humour.

“I am no boy to be married on the moment to cap the reading of a vision.”

“Sire!”

“Bring me the woman I may love, if you are magical enough,—then bid me wed.”

“My lord, you mock me with a dream.”

“Not so.”

“She is dead then?”

“On my soul I know not.”

“Then, sire—”

“All women are dead to me save one. Conjure her into my being, and I will give you the wiser half of myself, even my heart.”

For an instant Merlin smiled—a smile like an afterglow in a winter sky,—clear, cold, and steely. He drew nearer  Uther, his purple robe with its fantastic scroll-work dim in the twilight, his black hair falling down about his face. His words were like silken things purring from his lips.

“My lord, tell me more.”

“You are a prophet. Read my past.”

“Sire, my vision fails at such a depth.”

“But not thy flattery.”

“Her name, sire?”

“I will read you a fable.”

Uther, his eyes lit as with a lustre of recollection, turned from Merlin and the ken of his impenetrable face. He leant against a tree trunk, and looked far away into the dwindling vistas of the woods. His voice won emphasis from the absolute silence of the place, and he spoke with the level deliberation of one reading aloud from some antique book.

“A woman befriended a knight who was smitten of a dread wound. It was summer, and a sweet season full of the scent of flowers,—odours of grass knee deep in dreamy meadows. The woman had red-gold hair, and eyes like a summer night; her mouth was more wistful than an opening rose; her voice was like a flute over moonlit waters. And the knight lost his soul to the woman. But the woman was a nun, and so, to save his vows, he battled down his love and left her.”

Merlin’s eyes took a sudden glitter.

“A nun, sire?”

“A nun.”

“With hair of red gold and eyes of amethyst. Her convent, sire?”

“Avangel. Burnt by the heathen on the southern shores.”

“And the nun’s name?”

“Igraine, Igraine.”

Merlin gave a shrill, short cry; badges of colour had stolen into his cheeks, and he looked like a Bacchanal for the moment.

“Sire, sire, the woman is no nun.”

 

Uther still leant against the tree, and looked into the distance with his hand shadowing his eyes. It might have seemed that he had not heard the words spoken by Merlin, or at least had not understood their meaning, so unmoved was his look, so motionless his figure. Unutterable thoughts were moving in his mind. There was a grandeur of self-suppression on his face as he turned and fronted Merlin with the quiet of a great strength.

“Man, what words are these?”

Merlin had recoiled suddenly within himself. He was silent again, subtle as steel, and very debonair.

“My lord, I swear she is no nun.”

“Give me fact, not assertion.”

“The woman is but a novice. I had the whole tale from one who knew her well at Radamanth’s in Winchester, where she found a home. She had grieved, sire, for Pelleas.”

“Pelleas—Igraine! My heart is great in me, Merlin; where saw you her last?”

“Wandering in a wood by Winchester.”

“Alone?”

“Alone in heart.”

“Where now?”

“My lord—I know not.”

“O God!—to see her face again.”

Merlin cast his leopard skin across his visage and stood like a statue, even his immense grandeur of reserve threatened for the moment with summary overthrow. In the taking of twenty breaths he had calmed himself again to stand with bare head and frank face before the King—a promise on his lips.

“My lord, give me a moon’s season to stare into this mystery. On the cross I swear it—I will bring you good news at Caerleon.”

“On the cross!”

“On the cross of your sword.”

"Merlin, if this thing should come to be, if life returns to one whose hopes were dead, you of all men in Britain  shall be next my heart. Behold—on the cross—I swear it."

A certain season of youth seemed to have come down upon Uther, and lighted up the solemn tenor of his mood. His face grew mellow with the calm of a great content; he was reasonable as to the future, not moved to any extravagant outburst of unrest; the constant overshadowing of the cross seemed to give his faith a tranquil greenness—a rain-refreshed calm that pervaded his being like moist quiet after a wind.

“Merlin, what of the night?”

“Sire, I am well provided; I have a pavilion near a brook where a damsel serves me.”

“I go to Caerleon. You have conjured me back into the spring of life; my heart is beholden to you. Take my hand—and remember.”

“Sire, I am your servant.”

When Uther had passed, a streak of scarlet, into the blue twilight of the darkening wood; when the dull clatter of hoofs had dwindled into an ecstasy of silence, Merlin, white as the faint moon above, found again the pool under the trees by the high-road to Caerleon. Going on his knees by the brink he looked into its waters, black, sheeny, mysterious, webbed with a flickering west-light, sky mosaics dim and ethereal between swart-imaged trees. Still as a mirror was the pool, yet touched occasionally with light as from a rippling star-beam, or a dropped string from the moon’s silver sandals. Merlin bent over it, his fateful face making a baleful image in the water. Long he looked, as though seeking some prophetic picture in the pool. When night had come he rose up with a transient smile, folded his cloak about him, and passed like a wraith into the forest.

Chapter VII

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While Gorlois was lowering over an imagined shame, and Uther given to brooding on a vision, the Knight of the Cloven Heart wandered through wild Wales and endured sundry adventures that were hardly in concatenation with the distaff or the cradle.

In rough ages might was right, and every man’s inclination law unto himself. To strike hard was to win crude justice; to ride a horse, to wear mail, to carry a sword, were characteristics that ensured considerable reverence from men less fortunate, by maintaining at least an outward arrogance of strength. Not only on these grounds alone did the Knight of the Cloven Heart hold at a disadvantage those folk of the wilderness who went—to speak metaphorically—naked. She made brave show enough, had a strong arm and a strong body, and could match any man in the mere matter of courage. The moral effect of her great horse, her shield and harness, and the sword at her side, carried her unchallenged through wood and valley where meaner wayfarers might have come to grief, or suffered a tumbling. The forest folk assumed her a knight under her helmet and her harness; a certain bold magnificence of bearing in no wise contradicted the assumption.

It would be wearisome to record the passage of two months or more, to construct an itinerary of her progress, to chronicle the events of a period that was solitary as the wilds through which she passed. She never slept a night under populous roof the whole time of these wanderings. Luckily it was fair weather, and a mild season; forest shade, such as it was, and the caves of the wilderness, a ruined villa, the forsaken hut of a charcoal burner, an empty hermitage,—such in turn gave her shelter from the placid light of the moon, or the black stare of a starless sky. She never ventured even among peasant folk unhelmeted. Her food was won from cottager or herdsman by such store of money as she  had about her, though many she came across were eager to appease so formidable a person with milk, and pottage, and the little delicacies of the rude home. Often her fine carriage and youthful voice won wonders from the bosom of some peasant housewife. She had her liberty, and was free to roam; the life contented her instincts for a season, and at least she was saved the sight of Gorlois. Since war had failed to loose her from the man, she would essay her best to keep him at a distance.

If hate repelled, love drew with dreams. Yet had Igraine been asked of peace at heart, she would have smiled and sighed together. There are degrees of misery, and solitary suffering is preferable to that publicity which is very torture in itself, a galling whip to the tender flanks of pride. In being free of Gorlois she was happy; in thinking of Uther and in contemplation of the shadows of the unknown she was of all women most miserable. A mood of self-concentration was settling slowly upon her like an inevitable season upon the face of the earth. Day by day a dream prophetic of the future was pictured in the imagery of thought till it grew familiar as an often looked on landscape that awakes no wonder and no strange unrest. The ordinances of man had thrust on her a damnable tyranny, and she was more than weary of the restrictions of the world. The inevitable scorn of custom had long taken hold upon her being, and she had been driven to that state when the soul founds a republic within itself, and creates its ethics from the promptings of the heart.

Uther was at Caerleon; she had heard the truth from many a peasant tongue. Caerleon therefrom drew her with magic influence, as a lamp draws a golden moth from the gloom, or the light in the night sky wings on the wild-fowl with the prophecy of water. Caerleon became the bourn of all her holier thoughts; strange city of magic, it held love and hate for her, desire and obloquy; though its walls were as a luring net scintillant with spirit gossamer, her very reason lulled her  fears to sleep, and turned her southwards towards Uskland and the sea.

It came to pass, on the very day that Uther spoke with Merlin in the forest, that Igraine rode over a stretch of hills by a sheep-track, and came down into a valley not many leagues from Caerleon. The place stood thick with woodland, ranged tier on tier with the peaked bosses of huge trees. That impenetrable mystery of solitude that abides where forests grow was deeply hallowed in this silent dale. The infinite majesty of nature had cast a spell there, and the vast oaks, like pyramids of gloom, caverned a silence that was utter and divine.

Glimmering beneath the huge, stupendous boughs, through darkling aisles and the colossal piers that held the innumerable roofing of the leaves, Igraine passed down through umbrage and still ecstasies of green, by colonnade and gallery,—interminable tunnels, where stray light struck slantwise on her armour, that it seemed a moving lustre in the solemn shade.

Deep in the woodland lay a valley, a pastureland girt round with trees, and where the meadows, painted thick with flowers, seemed all enamelled white and azure, green, purple, pink, and gold. A peace as from the sun shone over it like saffron mist. A pool gleamed there, tranquil and deep with shadows; all the trees that Britain knew seemed girdled round it—oak, beech and holly, yew, thorn and cedar, the elfin pine, the larch, whose delicate kirtle shames even broidery of silk. No sound save the cuckoo’s cry, and the uncertain twittering of birds, disturbed the sanctuary of that forest solitude.

Igraine, halting on the brink of the meadowland, looked down over wood and water. The quiet of the place, the clear glint of the pool, the scent of the meadows, brought back the valley in Andredswold, and the manor in the mere. She loved the place on the instant. Even a blue plume of smoke rising straight to the sky, and the grey-brown backs of a few sheep in the meadows, evidencing as they did the  proximity of man, failed to disenchant the solitary grandeur of the scene.

There is no stable perpetuation of peace in the world; care treads upon the heels of Mammon, and lust lies down by the side of love. Even in the quiet of the wilderness the hawk chases the lark’s song out of the heavens, and wind scatters the bloom from the budding tree. Thus it was that Igraine, watching from under the woods, saw the sheep scampering suddenly in the meadows as though disturbed by something as yet invisible to her where she stood. Their bleating came up with a tinge of pathos, to be followed by a sound more sinister, the cry of one in whom pain and terror leapt into an ecstasy of anguish—a shrill, bird-like scream that seemed to cleave the silence like the white blade of a sword. Igraine’s horse pricked its ears with a snort of wrath, as though recognising the wounded cry of some innocent thing. The girl’s pulses stirred as she scanned the valley for explanation of this discord, sudden as the sweep of a falcon from the blue. Nor was she long at gaze. A flickering speck of colour appeared in the meadowlands, the figure of a woman running through the grass like a hunted rabbit, darting and doubling with a whimpering outcry. Near as a shadow a tall streak of brown followed at full stride, terrible even in miniature. Hunter and hunted passed before the eye like the figures of a dream, yet with a fierce realism that whelmed self in an objective pity.

Never did Britomart herself, with splendid soul, find fitter cause in faerie-land than did the Knight of the Cloven Heart in that woodland dale. Igraine rode down from the trees, a burning figure of chivalry that galloped through the green, and bore fast for the scudding forms, that skirted round the pool. Like a stag pressed to despair, the hunted one had taken to the water, and was already waist deep in ripples that seemed to catch the panic of the moment. Plunging on past tree and thicket, Igraine held on, while sheep scattered from her, to turn and stare with the stupidest  of white faces at the horse thundering over the meadows. The pursuer had passed the water-weeds, and was to his knees in the pool when the Knight of the Cloven Heart came down to the bank and halted, like a mailed statue of succouring vengeance.

The white heat of the drama seemed cooled for the moment. Over the flickering scales of the little mere the girl’s white face, tumbled hair, and blue smock showed, as she half-floated and half-paddled with her hands. Nearer still, the leather-jerkined, fur-breeched figure of the man bent like a baffled satyr baulked of evil. On the green slope of the bank the mailed splendour of chivalry waited like Justice to uphold the right.

The man in the mere wore the short Roman sword, or parazonium; any more effective weapon that he had possessed had been thrown aside in the heat of the chase and in the imagined security of his rough person. He had the face of a wolf. In girth and stature he seemed a young Goliath, a savage thing bred in savage times and savage places, and blessed with the instincts of mere barbarism. Igraine’s disrelish equalled her heat as she looked at him, and slanted her great sword over her shoulder.

In another instant the scene revived, and ceased to be a mere picture. The girl in the pool had found a footing, and her half-bare shoulders showed above the water. The man, with his short sword held behind him, was splashing through the shallows with a grin on his hairy face that meant mischief. Igraine, every whit as hot as he, held her horse well in hand, and put her shield before her. Matters went briskly for a minute. The man made a rush; Igraine spurred up and sent him reeling with the charging shoulder of her horse; the short sword pecked at nothing, the long one struck home and drew blood. A second panther leap, a blow turned by the shield, a counter cut that made good carving of the fellow’s skull. The shallows foamed and crackled crimson; hoofs stirred up the mire; a plunge; a noise of crossed steel; a last sweep of a sword, and then  victory. Igraine’s horse, neighing out the spirit of the moment, trampled the fallen body as it had been the carcase of a slaughtered dragon.

The girl in the pool waded back at the sight, her blue smock clinging about her, and showing an opulent grace of shoulder, arm, and bosom—a full figure swept by the damp tangle of her dark brown hair. She had full red lips, eyes of bright blue, a round and ruddy face, that told of a mind more for tangible pleasures than for spiritual aspiration. She came up out of the shallows like a water-nymph, her frightened face already all aglow with a smile of gratitude, mild shame, and infinite reverence. Going down on her knees amid the water-weeds and flags, she held up her playful hands as to a deliverer direct from heaven. “Grace, Lord, for thy servant.”

With the peril past, Igraine could not forego the sly scrap of mischief that the occasion offered; her white teeth gleamed in a smile under her helmet, as she wiped her sword on the horse’s mane, before sheathing it.

“Give Heaven thy thanks,” she said, with a quaint sententiousness of gesture. “Be sure in thy heart that it was a mere providence of God that I heard thy screaming. As for yon clod of clay, we will bury it later, lest it should pollute so goodly a pool. For the rest, child, I am an old man, and hungry, and would taste bread.”

The girl jumped up instantly, with a shallow and half-puzzled smile. The voice from the helmet was young, very young, and full of the free tone of youth; yet both manner and matter were sage, practical, leavened with a hoary-headedness of intention that seemed to baulk the inferences suggested by such panoply of arms. With a bob of a curtsey, she took the knight’s bridle, and led the horse some fifty paces round the pool, where, under the imminent shoulder of a cedar tree, a little cabin nestled under a hood of ivy. It was built of rough timber from the forest, and thatched with reeds; honeysuckle clustered over its rude façade, and thrust fragrant tendrils into its reed-latticed  windows, where an early rose or so shone like a red star against the russet-wood. A garden full of flowers lay before the rustic porch that arched the threshold; and an outjutting of the pool brought a little fiord of dusky silver up to the very green of the path, a streak of silver blazoned with violet flags, golden marigolds of the marsh, and a lace-like fringe of snowy water-weed in bloom. All around, the great trees, those solemn senators, stood with their green shoulders bowed in a strong dream of deep eternal thought.

Igraine left the saddle and suffered the girl to tether her horse to a cedar bough. Her surcoat of violet and gold swept nearly to her ankles, and saved from any marring the infinite art of the anomaly that veiled her sex. Her man’s garb seemed every whit as worthy of a woman, nor did it hinder that loving grace that made her beauty of body the more admirable and rare.

The girl came back with more bendings of the knee, and led Igraine amid the flowers to the porch of the forest dwelling. Once within, she drew a settle close to the doorway, spread a rug of skins thereon, and again bowed herself in homage.

“Let my lord be seated, and I will serve him.”

“I am hungry, child; but first put off that wet smock of thine.”

The girl crept behind the door of a great cupboard, with a blush of colour in her cheeks. Cloth rustled for a moment; a circle of blue and a slim pair of legs showed beneath the cupboard door; soon she was back again in a gown of apple green, fastening it with her fingers over the full swell of her bosom.

“What will my lord eat?”

“What you have, child.”

“Bread and dried fruit, the flesh of a kid, new milk and cheese, a little cider.”

“Give me milk, child, a mere flake of meat, some cheese and bread, and I ask nothing more. I will pay you for all I take.”

 

“Lord, how should you pay me, when I owe more than life to your sword?”

The little shepherdess went about her business with a barefooted tread, soft as any cat’s. The cottage proved a wonder of a place. The great cupboard disgorged a silver-rimmed horn, wooden platter, a napkin white as apple blossom, red fruit piled up in a brazen bowl. The girl set the things in order on the table, with an occasional curious look stolen at the figure in mail on the settle—splendid visitant in so humble a place. And what a rich voice the knight had,—how mellow, with its many modulations of tone. His hands too were wonderfully shapen, fingers long and tapering, with nails pink as sea-shells. There surely must be a face worth gazing at, for its very nobility, under that great brazen helmet that glinted in the half light of the room.

The meal was spread, but the guest still unprepared. The forest child dropped a curtsey, and a mild suggestion that the knight should make a beginning.

“Will not my lord unhelm?”

A rich, mischief-loving laugh startled her for answer.

“Child, take the thing off if you will.”

The little shepherdess obeyed, and nearly dropped the helmet in the doing of it. A mass of gold fell rippling down over the violet surcoat; a pair of deep eyes looked up with a sparkling laugh; a satin upper lip and chin gave the lie to the nether part of the picture.

“Christ Jesu!” quoth the girl with the helmet, and again “Christ Jesu,” as though she could get no further.

Igraine caught her smock and drew her nearer.

“Come, little sister, kiss me for—‘thank you.’”

With a contradictory impulse the girl fell down on her knees and began to cry, with her brown hair tumbled in Igraine’s lap.

When persuasion and comforting had quieted her somewhat, she sat on the floor at Igraine’s feet, her round eyes big with an unstinted wonder. Even Igraine’s hunger and  the devoir done upon the new milk could hardly persuade the girl that this being in armour was no saint, but a very real and warm-blooded woman. She even touched Igraine’s fingers with her lips, to satisfy herself as to the warmth and solidity of the slim strong hand. She had never heard of such a marvel, a woman, and a very beautiful woman, riding out as a man, and doing man’s bravest work with courage and cleverness. The girl made sure in her heart that Igraine was some princess at least, who had been blessed with miraculous power by reason of her maidenhood and the magic innocence of her mind.

Igraine talked to the girl and soon began to win her to less devotional attitude with that graciousness of manner that became her so well at such a season. She forgot herself for the time, in listening to this child of solitude. The girl’s father—an old man—had died two winters ago, and she had buried him with her own hands, under a tree in the dale. Since his death, she had lived on in the cabin, alone, a forest child nurtured in forest law. Every Sabbath, Renan, a shepherd lad in a lord’s service, would come over the hills and pass the day with her. They were betrothed, and the lord of those parts had promised Renan freedom next Christmastide; then Renan and Garlotte were to be married, and the cabin in the dale was to serve them as a home.

Garlotte was soon chattering like any child. She talked to Igraine of her sheep and goats, her little corn-field on a sunny slope, her garden, her wild strawberry beds and vine, her fruit trees, and her marigolds. The lad Renan, bronze-haired and brown-eyed, sprang in here and there with irresistible romance. He could run like a hound, swim like an otter, fish, shoot with the bow, and throw the javelin a great many paces. He had such eyes, too, and such gentle hands. Igraine’s sympathies were quick and vivid on matters of the kind. The girl’s head was resting against her knees before an hour had gone.

The evening was still and sultry and the sky overcast.  When Igraine went to the porch after supper, rain had begun to fall, and there was the moist murmur of a heavy, windless shower through all the valley. The sheep had huddled under the trees. Infinite freshness, unutterable peace, brooded over the green meadows and the breathless leaf-clouds of the woods. For all the sweet, dewy silence a bitter discontent lay heavy upon Igraine’s heart, and woe made quiet moan in her inmost soul. Green summer swooned in the branches and breathed in the odours of honeysuckle, musk, and rose, yet for her there seemed no burgeoning, no bursting of the heart into song.

The girl Garlotte stood by and looked with a quaint awe into the proud, wistful face.

“What are you thinking of, lady?” she said.

Igraine’s lips quivered.

“Of many things, child.”

“Tell me of them.”

“What should you know, child, of plagues and sorrow, of misery in high places, of despair coroneted with gold, of hearts that ache, and eyes that burn for the love of the world that never comes?”

“I am very ignorant, dear lady, but yet I think you are not happy.”

“Is any woman happy on earth?”

“Yet you are so good and beautiful.”

“Child, child, beauty brings more misery than joy; it is a bright fire that burns upon itself.”

“Renan has told me I am beautiful.”

“So you are, and to Renan.”

“I never think of it, lady, save when Renan looks into my eyes and touches my mouth with his lips; then say in my heart, ‘I am beautiful, and Renan loves me, God be thanked!’”

The words echoed into Igraine’s soul. There was such pain in her great eyes that the girl was startled from the simple contemplation of her own affairs of heart.

“You are sad, lady.”

 

“Child, I am tired to death.”

“Bide with me and rest. See, I will feed your horse and give him water; he will do famously under the tree. There is my bed yonder in the corner; I spread a clean sheet on it this very morning. Shall I help you to unarm?”

“Thanks, child. How the rain hisses into the pool.”

“I love the sound, and the soft rattle on the green leaves. All will be fresh and aglister to-morrow, and the flowers will smile, and the trees shake their heads and laugh. How clumsy my fingers are; I am so slow over the buckles; ah! there is the last. I will put the sword and the shield by the bed. Shall we say our prayers?”

“You pray, child; I have forgotten how to these many months.”

Chapter VIII

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There is a charm in simplicity of soul, and in sympathies green in the first rich burgeoning of the mind, unshrivelled and untainted by the miserable misanthropies of the world. The girl Garlotte was as ignorant as you will, but she loved God, had the heart of a thrush in spring-time, and was possessed naturally of a warm and delicate appreciation of the feelings of others that would have put to utter shame the majority of court ladies.

Women of a certain gilded class are prone to judge by superficialities. Living often in an artificial air of courtesy, the very life about them is a cultured, perfumed atmosphere unstirred by the deeper wind-throbs of true passion, or the solemn sweep of the more grand emotions. Hypocrisy, veneered with mannerisms, propped with etiquette, pegged up with gold, passes for culture and the badge-royal of fine breeding. Of such things the girl Garlotte was indeed flagrantly ignorant; she had lived in solitudes, and had learnt to comprehend dumb things—the cry of a sheep in pain, the mute look from the eyes of a sick lamb. Her life  had made her quick to see, quick to discover. She had all the latent energy of a child, and her senses were the undebauched handmaids of an honest heart. She knew nothing of the trivial prides, the starched and petty arrogances, the small self-satisfactions, that build up the customs of the so-called cultured folk. She thought her thoughts, and they were generous ones, mark you, and spoke out on the instant without fear, as one whose words were in very truth the audible counterpart of the vibrations of her mind.

To Igraine at first there was some embarrassment in the ingenuous methods of this child of the forest. It was in measure disturbing to be confronted with a pair of blue eyes that looked at one like two pools of truth, and a pair of lips that naively remarked: “You seem pale, lady, and in pain; you slept little, and talked even when you slept. I am rosy and cheerful, and I sleep from dusk till dawn. What is there in your heart that is not in mine?” Still, with the abruptness once essayed, there was a refreshing sincerity in Garlotte’s openness of heart. It was as the first plunge into a clear, cool pool—a gasp at the first moment, then infinite warmth, intense kindling of all the senses, with the clean ripples bubbling at the lips and the swinging water buoying up the bosom. Garlotte recalled Lilith—Radamanth’s daughter—to Igraine, only that she had more penetration, more liberty of thought and character. The one was as a warm wind that lulled, the other a breeze blowing over open water—clean, invigorating, kind.

Igraine’s mood of unrest found refuge in the valley, and in Garlotte’s cottage. She won some measure of inward calmness in the simple life, the simple tasks, that kept the more sinister energies of the mind at bay. It contented her for a season with its companionship, its air of home, its green quiet and tranquil beauty. Garlotte’s cheerfulness of soul, like some penetrating essence, suffused itself upon Igraine, despite the militant savour of things more turbulent. She fell into temporary contentment almost against her will,  even as sleep enforces itself upon a brain extravagantly possessed by the delirium of fever.

For all the quiet of the place, circumstances were gathering and moving down upon her with that ghostly and inevitable fatefulness that constitutes true tragedy. No one could have seemed more hidden from the eye of fate than she in the deep umbrage of the trees, yet often when the heart imagines itself most secure from the factious meddling of the world, the far, faint cry of destiny smites on the ear like some sudden stirring of a wind at night.

It was late evening, on the fifth day of Igraine’s sojourn in the valley. The day had been dull, grey, and colourless, wrapped in a blue haze of rain that had fallen heavily, drenching the woods and making monotonous music on the water. Towards evening the sky had melted to a serene azure; the air was a web of shimmering amber, the west streamed through a mist of gold, and every leaf glittered with dew. A luminous vapour hovered over the little mere, and there were rain pools in the meadows that burnt with a hundred sunsets like clear brass.

Garlotte and Igraine had been bathing in the mere. They had come up from the water to dry themselves upon a napkin of white cloth, the bronze-gold and brown hair of each meeting like twin clouds, while their linen lay like snow on the trailing branches of a tree near the pool. Their limbs and shoulders gleamed against the silver-black mirror spread by the mere; their voices made a mellow sound through the valley as they talked. Igraine had fastened her violet surcoat about her beneath her breasts; Garlotte’s blue smock still hung from a branch above her head.

As they sat under the tree, drying their hair and looking over the pool to the forest realm beyond, Igraine told the girl much of the outer world as she had seen it; nor was her instruction unleavened by a certain measure of cynicism—a bitterness that surprised Garlotte not a little. The girl had great dreams of the glories of old cities, the  splendour of court life, the zest of a mere material existence.

“You do not love the great world,” she said.

“Once, child, I did. Everything outside a convent wall seemed good to me; I thought men heroes, and the world a faerie place; who has not! Thoughts change with time: that which I once hungered for, now I despise.”

“I have never been into a great city, not even into Caerleon. My father loved the country and said it was God’s pasture.”

“I would rather have a dog for a friend than most men, child. Man is always thinking of his stomach, his strength, or his passion; he is vain, dull, and surly often; takes delight in slaying dumb things; drinks beer, and sleeps like a log save for his snoring.”

“But Renan doesn’t.”

“There are some men, child, among the swine.”

“And the women?”

“I have known good women.”

“In the convent?”

“I suppose there they were good, just as stones that lie in the grass are good in that they do very little harm.”

“But they served God!”

“Mere habit, just as you eat your dinner.”

“A hard saying.”

“Your sayings would be hard, child, if you had learnt what I have learnt of the world.”

Garlotte pulled her blue smock from the tree and wrapped it round her shoulders.

“But you love God?” she said.

“What is God?”

“The Great Father who loves all things.”

“Methinks then I am nothing.”

“Nothing, Igraine?”

"You say God loves all men and women. Why, then, have I been cursed with perversities ever since I was born, tormented with contradictions, baffled, and mocked, till the  eternal trivialities of life now make my soul sick in my body?"

“Sorrow is heaven sent to chasten, just as rain freshens the leaves.”

“Old, old proverb. Rain comes from clouds; clouds hide the sun; how can sorrow be good, child, when it darkens the light of life, hides God from the heart, and makes the soul bitter?”

“That seems the wrong spirit, Igraine.”

“So meek folk say; we are not all mild earth to be smitten and make no moan. There are sea-spirits that lash and foam, fire-spirits that leap and burn. My spirit is of the flame; am I to be cursed, then, because I was born with a soul of fire?”

“We cannot answer all this, Igraine.”

“I hate to bow down blindly, to cast ashes on the head because a superstition bids us so.”

“I have faith!”

“I cannot see with my heart.”

“I would you could, Igraine.”

“Perhaps you are right.”

Garlotte put on her shift and frock with a sigh, and straightway went and kissed Igraine on the forehead. They sat close together under the tree and watched the valley grow dim as death, and the pool black and lustrous as a mirror turned to the twilight. Garlotte’s warm heart was yearning to Igraine; her arm was close about her, and presently Igraine’s head rested upon her shoulder. She began to tell the girl many things in a still, stifled voice; her bitterness gushed out like fermented wine, and for a season she was comforted—with no lasting balm indeed, for there was but one soul in the world that could give her that.

“Believe, Igraine, believe,” said Garlotte very softly.

“Believe—child!”

“That there is good for every one in the world if we wait and watch in patience.”

 

“I seem to have watched years go by, and life stretches out from me as a sea at night.”

“Look not there, Igraine, but into your own heart and into the gold of faith.”

“I have no heart to look to, child.”

“Save into a man’s. And it was a good heart.”

“Good as a god’s.”

“Then look into it still.”

“You speak like a mother.”

They had talked on into the dusk of night, forgetful of time, hearing only the dripping from the leaves, seeing nothing but the short stretch of water and herbage at their feet. Yet an hour ago a figure in a palmer’s cloak and cowl had come out from the western forest and stood leaning upon its staff, to stare out broodingly over the valley. The laurel green of the man’s cloak harmonised so magically with the green of grass and tree that it was difficult to isolate his figure from the framing of wood and meadow.

The pilgrim had stood long in the shadows and watched the two white forms come up out of the waters of the pool. He had seen them sit and dry their hair under the tree as the dusk crept down. While they talked he had passed down towards the cottage, accompliced by the trees, slipping from trunk to trunk, to enter the cottage itself while the girls’ faces were turned from it towards the pool. From one of the narrow casements his cowled face had looked out; he had marked Igraine’s red gold shimmering hair; he had seen her face for a moment, also the shield hanging in the room with its cloven heart and white lilies, the sword and helmet, the harness of workmanship so subtle. When he had seen all this he had stolen out again into the gloaming, a thin gliding streak of green under the gnarled thorns and the night-bosomed cedars. The forest had taken him to its depths again and the unutterable silence of its shades. The girls by the pool had heard no sound, nor dreamt of the thing that had been so near, watching like a veritable ghost through the mist of the mere’s twilight.

 

Caerleon slept under the moon, a dream city in a land of dreams. Its walls were like ivory in a dark gloom of green. The tower of the palace of the king caught a coronet from the stars, while in the window of an upper room a thin flame flickered like a yellow rose blown athwart the black foliage of the night. Within blood-red curtains breathed over the arched door; a little altar stood against the eastern wall, guarded above by angels haloed with gold, standing in a mist of lilies with wings of crimson and green. The silence of the hour seemed embalmed in silver—so pure, so still, so hallowed was it.

Uther knelt before the little altar in prayer; the light from the single lamp slanted down upon him, but left his face in the shadow. It was past midnight, yet the man’s head was still bowed down in his devotion. He was in an ecstasy of spiritual ascent to heaven, a mood that made the world a Patmos, and his own soul a revelation to itself. At such a time his imagination could mount with a mystery of poetic rapture. Angels drumming on golden bells or bearing diamond chalices of purple wine seemed to gaze deep-eyed on him from a paradise of snow and amethyst. Above all shone the Eternal Face, that clear sun of Christendom shining with wounded love through the crimson transgressions of mankind.

Deliberate footfalls and the rustle of a drawn curtain intervened between solitude and devotion. The curtain fell again; footfalls echoed away to die down into a well of silence; a tall man wrapped in a cloak stood motionless in the oratory. Uther, still upon his knees, turned to the window and the moonlight, with big prayerful eyes that questioned the intruding figure.

“Merlin,” he said, with a breath of prophecy.

“Even so, sire.”

“I was praying but now for such a thing.”

“Sire, pray no longer. I have kept my tryst.”

Uther rose up straightway from before the altar and stood before the square of the casement. The moonlight made a  halo of his hair, and lit his face with a whiteness that seemed almost supernatural. Strong as he was, his hands shook like aspen leaves; his lips were parted, and his eyes wide with the shadow of the night. Merlin stood in the dark angle of the room; his voice seemed to come as from a tomb; the single lamp flame shook and quivered in a fickle draught.

“Sire, the moon is not yet full.”

“And Igraine?”

“Sire.”

“Where?”

“Suffer me, sire, a moment.”

“Speak quickly. God knows, I have prayed like a Samson.”

Merlin cast his mantle from him, and stood out in the moonlight wrapped in the mystic symbolism of his robe. Sapphire and emerald, ruby and sardonyx, flashed with a ghostly gleam in the pale light, and caught the moonbeams in their folds. Merlin’s thin hands quivered like a spray of May blossom waving in the night wind, and his eyes were like the eyes of a leopard.

“Sire, thou wert Pelleas once.”

“I should remember it.”

“Thou art Pelleas again.”

“Again?”

“In thy red harness with thy painted shield, thy black horse; take them all.”

“The past rushes back like dawn.”

“Near Caerleon lies a valley.”

“There are twenty valleys.”

“Go north, sire, in thought. Pass the Cross on Beacon Hill, hold on for the Abbey of the Blessed Mary, take to the hills, go by a ruined tower, ford Usk, where there is a hermitage. Pass through a waste, cross more hills, go down into a valley that runs north and south.”

“I follow.”

“Go alone, sire.”

“Alone.”

 

“The valley is piled steep with forestland. Go down and fear not. In the valley’s lap lie meadowlands, a pool, a cottage. In that cottage you shall find a knight; his armour is gilded gold, his horse a grey, his shield shows a cloven heart set amid white lilies. Speak with that knight.”

“Yet more!”

“Speak with that knight, sire.”

“In peace?”

“If you love your soul.”

“And Igraine—Merlin, what of her?”

“That knight shall lead you to her. Sire, I have said.”

Chapter IX

---

It was early and a clear dewy morning when Uther rode down alone from the palace by a narrow track that curled through the shrubberies clothing the palace hill. A generous sky piled its blue dome with mountainous clouds that billowed up above the horizon. The laurels in the shrubbery flickered their leaves like innumerable scales of silver in the sun; amber sun rays slanted through the dense branches of the yews, and flashed on the red harness that burnt down the winding track. The wind sang, the green larches tossed their ’kerchiefs, in the distance the sea glimmered to the white frescoes of the sky.

Uther—Pelleas once more—tossed his spear to the tall trees, and burst into the brave swing of a chant d’amour. With caracole and flapping mane his horse took his lord’s humour. It was weather to live and love in, weather for red lips and the clouding down of perfumed hair. God and the Saints—what a grand thing to be strong, to have a clean heart to show to a woman’s eyes! What were all the baser fevers of life balanced against the splendid madness of a great passion!

Down through Caerleon’s streets he rode unknown of any on his tall black horse. It was pleasant to be unthroned  for once, and to put a kingdom from off his shoulders. With what a swing the good beast carried him, how the towers and turrets danced in the sun, how bright were the eyes of the women who passed him by. All the world seemed greener, the sky bluer, the city merrier; the laughter of the children in the gutter echoed out of heaven; the old hag who sold golden lemons under a beech tree seemed almost a madonna—a being from a better world. Uther laughed in his heart, and blessed God and Merlin.

It is one of the rare reflections of philosophy dear to the contemplative mind, how joy jostles pain in the world, and pleasure in gold and scarlet elbows the grey-cloaked form of grief. Even innocent merriment may throw a rose in the face of one who mourns, innocent indeed of the desire to mock. The throstle sings in the tree while the beggar lies under it dying. So Uther the King flashed hate in the eyes of one who watched,—knowing him only that morning as Pelleas the knight. In an old play the jealous man saw the devil ride by, and promptly followed him on the chance of finding his lost wife, deeming, indeed, the devil’s guidance propitious for such a quest.

It was the shield that caught Gorlois’s eye as he stood on a balcony of his house and looked out over Caerleon. The device smote him sudden as the lash of a whip. The red harness, the black horse, the painted shield, mingled a picture that burnt into his brain with a vividness that passed comprehension. He knew well enough to whom such arms should belong; had he not carried them fraudulently to his own doubtful profit? This knight must be that Pelleas whose past had worked such mischief with his own machinations, that Pelleas who had won Igraine the novice fresh from the shadow of her convent trees. Gorlois watched the man go by with a kind of superhuman envy twisting in him like a colic. The smart of it made him stiffen, go pale, gnaw his lip.

If this was the knight Pelleas, what then? Gorlois could not reason for the moment; his brain seemed a mass  of molten metal in a bowl of iron. Convictions settled slowly, hardened and took form. Igraine had loved the man Pelleas; Igraine was his wife; he had lost her and Brastias also; poison and the sword waited to do their work. Supposing then this Pelleas was in quest of Igraine; supposing they had come to know each other again; supposing Brastias and Pelleas were one and the same man. Hell and furies—what a thought was this! It goaded Gorlois into action. He would ride after the man, hunt him, track him, in hope of some fragment of the truth. Hazard and hate, blood and battle, these were more welcome than chafing within walls as in a cage, or frying on a bed as on a gridiron.

Gorlois’s voice rang through gallery and hall like a battle-cry.

“Ho, there!—my sword and harness.”

There was a grimness in the sound that made those who came to arm him bustle for dear life. They knew his black, furious humour, the hand that struck like a mace, the tyranny that took blood for trifles. The stoutest of them were cowards before that marred and moody face. Be as brisk as they would, they were too slow for Gorlois’s temper, a temper vicious as a wounded bear’s.

“God and the Saints—was ever man served by such a pack of stiff-fingered fools! The devil take your fumbling. Go and gird up harlots, or hold cooking-pots. On with that helmet.”

A fellow, very white about the mouth, clapped the casque on, and drew a quick breath when the angry eyes withered him no longer. Armlets, breastplates, greaves, cuishes, all were on. Gorlois seemed to emit fire like metal at white heat. He went clanging down stairway and through atrium to the courtyard, where a horseboy held a white charger. Gorlois cuffed the lad aside, mounted with a spring, took his spear from an esquire, and rode straight for the gate, his horse’s hoofs sparking fire from the courtyard stones. Half an hour or more had gone since Pelleas had passed by on his black horse, and Gorlois spurred at a  gallop through Caerleon, bent on catching sight of the red knight before he should have ridden into the covering masses of the woods.

Pelleas meanwhile rode on like a lad whose first quest led him into the infinite romance of the unknown. Woods and waters called; bare night and the blink of the stars summoned up that strangeness in life that is like wine to the heart of the strong and the brave. He was young again—young in the first glory of arms; the world shone glamoured as of old as he turned from the high-road to a bridle-track that led up through woods towards the north.

Holding on at a level pace he passed the woods and saw them rolling back like a green cataract towards the sea. Bare hills saluted him; the beacon height with its great wooden cross stood out against the sky; mile on mile of wooded land billowed out before him, clouded with a blue haze where the domes of the trees rose innumerably rank on rank. The Abbey of the Holy Mary lay low in meadows on his left, its fish pools shimmering in the sun, its orchards densely green about its walls. Two leagues or more of wood and wild, a climb over hills, a long descent, and Usk again shone out trailing distant in the hollows. A crumbling tower stood up above the trees. Pelleas passed close to it, giving antiquity due reverence as was his custom, looking up at its ivied walls, its crown of gillyflowers, its windows wistful as a blind man’s eyes. Another mile and Usk ran at his feet. A hermitage stood by the ford. Pelleas gave the good man a piece of silver and besought his prayers before he rode down and splashed through the river to the further bank. Heathland and scrub rolled to the east, merging into the blue swell of a low line of hills. It was wild country enough, haunted by snipe and crested plover, an open solitude that swept into a purple streak against the northern sky.

It was noon before Pelleas had made an end of its shadeless glare and taken to the hills that rose gently towards  the east. His red harness moving over the green was lost to Gorlois, who had missed the trail long ago in the woods beyond St. Mary’s. It was dusk when the Cornishman came guided to the ford, and learnt from the hermit there that the chase lay across Usk and eastward over the heath. Gorlois gave the man no piece of silver, only a savage curse to gag his alms-seeking. Night came and caught him in the open, and rather than wander astray in the dark he spent the night under a whin bush, calming his incontinent temper as best he might.

An hour past noon Pelleas stood on the last hill slope and looked down upon the massed woodland at his feet. Here at last was Merlin’s valley choked up with trees—a green lake of foliage that rippled from ridge to ridge. Pelleas, with the sun at his back, stood and looked down on it with a kind of quiet awe. So Godfrey and his knights looked down upon the holy city, so Dante saw Beatrice in his vision, and Cortez gazed at the Pacific in the west. Pelleas had taken his helmet from his head and hung it at his saddle-bow; there was a grand hunger on his face, a passionate calm, as he abode on the hill top with his tall spear a black streak against the sun.

Mystery waved him on to the great oaks whose tops rose like green flames to the blue of the sky. Could Igraine be in this valley? Would he set eyes on her that day, and see the bronze gloss of her hair go shimmering through some woodland gallery? It was nigh upon a year since he had seen her. It had been summer then, and it was summer now; his heart was singing as it had sung on that mere island when Igraine had looked into his eyes under the cedar tree. He had borne much, endured much, since then; time had hallowed memory and shed a crimson lustre over the past. Manwise, for the great love that was in him, he almost feared to look on her again lest she should have changed in face or in heart. Great God, what a thought was that! It had never smitten him before. Stiffened by his own strong constancy, he had dowered Igraine with equal  loyalty of soul, nor had considered the lapse of time and the crumbling power of hours. The thought brought a dew of sweat to his forehead and made him cold even in the sun. No, honour to God, the girl had a heart to be trusted, or he had never loved her as he did!

Shaking the bridle, he rode down into the murk of the trees. He had to slant his spear and to bow his head often as the great boughs swooped to the ground. The dim glamour of the place had a sinister effect upon his mind; it solemnised him, touched the spiritual chords of his heart, uncovered the somewhat gloomy groundwork of philosophy that lay deep under the fabric of religious habit. Merlin had told a tale and nothing more. God’s blessings were not man’s blessings, God’s ways not man’s ways. Pelleas had learnt to look for what he might have called the contradictions of divine charity. We are smitten when we pray for a blessing, chided when desirous of comfort. Life would seem at times a gigantic tyranny for the creation of patience. Pelleas remembered the past, and kept his hopes and desires well in hand.

Betimes he judged himself not far from the bottom of the valley, for through gaps in the foliage overhead he could see the woods on the further slope towering up magnificently to touch the sky. Still further the long galleries of the wood arched out upon grassland gemmed with summer flowers. Showers of sunlight told of an open sky. He was soon out of the shadows and standing under the wooelshawe, with the dale Merlin had pictured stretching north and south before his eyes.

The scene smiled up at him from its bath of sunlight—the green meadows flecked white, blue, and gold, the diverse foliage of the trees, the little pool smooth as crystal, the solemn barriers of the surrounding woods. He looked first of all for the cottage built of timber, and could not see it for its overshadowing trees. None the less, by the pool a girl in a blue smock stood looking up towards him, her face showing oval white from her loosened hair. Pelleas held his  breath for the moment, then saw well enough that it was not Igraine. Meanwhile the figure in blue had disappeared as though in fear of him; he could no longer see the girl from where he watched on the edge of the wood.

Riding out, he sallied down through the long grass with its haze of flowers, his eyes turned with a steadfast eagerness to the pool in the meadows. His impatience grew with every step, but he was outwardly cool as any veteran. First the brown thatch of the cottage came into view, then the blue smock of the girl who stood by the porch and watched. Last of all Pelleas saw a gleam of armour through the gloom of a cedar tree, heard the neigh of a horse, the jar of a swinging shield. The sight made his heart beat more briskly than ever ghost or goblin could have done. Pushing through the trees he came full upon a knight mounted on a grey horse, who was advancing towards him bearing on his shield the cognisance of a cloven heart.

The knight on the grey horse reined in and abode stone still in the meadows, the sunlight flashing on his helmet and such points of his harness uncovered by his surcoat. Pelleas as he rode down took stock of the stranger with an eagerness that was half jealous maugre his perspicuity of soul. What had this splendid gentleman to do with Igraine the novice? Truth to tell, Pelleas would rather have had some humbler person to serve as guide on such a quest.

The knight on the grey horse never budged a foot. Pelleas saw that he carried no spear and that his sword was safe in his scabbard. This looked like peace. Drawing up some three paces away, he scanned the strange knight over from head to foot, voted him a passable man, and admired his armour. And since his whole soul was set on a certain subject, he made no delay over courteous generalities, but came at once to the point at issue.

“Greeting, sir; I have ridden from Caerleon to speak with you.”

The knight in the violet surcoat swayed in the saddle  as though shaken by a spear thrust on his painted shield. Pelleas noted that both his hands were tangled up in the grey horse’s mane, though nothing could be seen of the face behind the fixed vizor of the helmet. A voice, husky, toneless, feeble, answered him after a moment’s silence.

“What would you with me, knight of the red shield?”

“There is a lady whose name is Igraine; I seek her. I have been forewarned that a knight lodging in this valley has knowledge of her, and you, messire, seem to be that knight.”

“That is the truth,” quoth the cracked, husky voice from the helmet.

Pelleas considered a moment and held his peace. There was something strange about this knight, something tragical, something that touched the heart. Pelleas’s instinct for superb miseries took hold of him with a queer, twisting grip that made him shudder. His dark eyes smouldered as he watched the strange knight, and gave voice to the grim thought that lay heavy on his mind.

“The lady is not dead?”

“No,” said the husky voice with blunt brevity.

“And she is well fortuned?”

“Passably.”

“Thank God,” said Pelleas.

There was a dry sob in the brazen helmet, but Pelleas never heard the sound. He was staring into the woods with large, luminous eyes, and a half smile on his lips, as though his thoughts pleased him.

“Is the Lady Igraine far from hence?” he asked presently.

“If you will follow me, my lord, I can bring you to her in less than an hour.”

Pelleas flushed red to the forehead, his dark eyes beamed. He looked a god of a man as he sat bareheaded on his black horse, his face aglow like the face of a martyr. The Knight of the Cloven Heart looked at him, flapped his bridle, and rode on.

 

Pelleas said never a word as they passed up the valley. There were deep thoughts in his heart, yearnings, and ecstasies of prayer that held him in a stupor of silence. His was a grandeur of mind that grew the grander for the majesty of passion. There was no blurting of questions, no gabbling of news, no chatter, no flurry. Like a mountain he was towering, sable-browed, impenetrable, while the thunder of suspense lasted. The knight on the grey horse watched him narrowly with a white look under his helmet that was infinitely plaintive.

At the northern end of the valley, on the very edge of the forest, stood a thicket of gnarled thorns still smothered with the snow of early summer. The Knight of the Cloven Heart drew rein in the long grass and pointed Pelleas to these white pavilions under the near umbrage of the oaks.

“Look yonder,” said the voice.

Pelleas answered with a stare.

“Would you see your lady?”

“Be careful how you jest, my friend.”

“I jest not, Uther Pendragon. Get you down and tether your horse; go in amid yon trees and look into the forest. I swear on the cross you shall see what you desire.”

Pelleas gave the knight a long look, said nothing, dismounted, threw the bridle over a bough. Then he thrust his spear into the ground and went bareheaded in among the trees. Standing under the shadow of a great oak, he peered long into the glooms, saw nothing living but a rabbit feeding in the grass.

Suddenly a voice called to him.

“Pelleas, Pelleas.”

It was a wondrous cry, clear and plaintive, yet tremulous with feeling. It rang through the woods like silver, bringing back the picture of a solemn beech wood under moonlight, and a girl tied naked to the trunk of a tree. A great lustre of awe swept over Pelleas’s face; his eyes were big and luminous as the eyes of a blind man; he groped with his  hands as he passed back under the May trees to the valley.

In the long grass stood a woman in armour, her helmet thrown aside, and her red gold hair pouring marvellous in the sunlight over her violet surcoat. Her head was thrown back so as to show the full sweep of her shapely throat; her face was very pale under her parted hair, while her lids drooped over eyes that seemed to swim with unshed tears. Her hands, slightly outstretched, quivered as with a shuddering impulse from her heart, and her half-parted lips looked as though they were moulded to breathe forth a moan.

Pelleas stood and stared at her as a dead man might look at God. He drew near step by step, his face white as Igraine’s, his eyes as deep with desire as hers. Neither of them said a word, but stood and looked into each other’s faces as into heaven—awed, solemnised, silenced. Above them towered the green woods; the meadows rippled from them with their broidery of flowers; the scent of the white May swept fragrant on the air. Solitude was with them, and the mild smile of Nature glimmered with the sunlight over the trees.

Igraine spoke first.

“Pelleas,” was all she said.

The man gave a great sob, fell on his knees, and would have kissed her surcoat. Igraine bent down to him with eyes that shone like two deep wells of love. Both her hands were upon Pelleas’s shoulders, his face was turned to hers.

“Kneel not to me.”

“Igraine.”

“Pelleas.”

“Let me touch you.”

“There, there, you have my hand.”

“My God, my God!”

Igraine gave a low cry, half knelt, half fell before him. Pelleas’s arms caught her, his face hung over hers, her hair fell down and trailed a golden pool upon the grass. She  put her hands up and touched his hair, smiled wonderfully, and looked at him as though she were dying.

“Kiss me, Pelleas.”

Pelleas drew a deep breath; his body seemed to quake; his whole soul was sucked up by the girl’s lips.

“Igraine,” was all he said.

Her face blazed, her hands clung about his neck.

“Again, again.”

“My God, have I not prayed for this!”

His eyes were large and wonderful to look upon. There was such awe and love in them that an angel might have looked thus upon the Christ and have earned no reproach. Igraine kissed his lips, crept close into his bosom, hid her face, and wept.

Chapter X

---

When Igraine had ended her tears, and grown calm and quiet, Pelleas took her hand and led her to a grass bank painted thick with flowers that sloped to the white boughs of a great May tree. He was radiant in his manhood, and his eyes burnt for her with such a splendour of pride and tenderness that she trembled in thought for the secret she had kept from him in her heart. He could know nothing of Gorlois, or he would not have come thus to her. The mocking face of fate leered at her like a satyr out of the shadows, yet with the joy of the moment she put the thoughts aside and lived on the man’s lips and the great love that brimmed for her in his eyes.

Pelleas sat in the long grass at her feet and looked up at her as at a saint. Never had she seen such glory of happiness on human face, never such manhood deified by the holier instincts of the heart. The sheer strength of his devotion carried her above her cares and made her content to live for the present, and to gird time with the girdle of an hour.

 

“You are no nun, Igraine?”

She smiled at him and shook her head.

“No, no, Pelleas.”

“Would to God you had told me that a year ago.”

“Would to God I had.”

“It would have saved much woe.”

Igraine hung her head. The man’s words were prophetic in their honest ignorance, and the whole tale had almost rushed from her that moment but for a certain selfishness that held her mute, a fear that overpowered her. She knew the fibre of Pelleas’s soul. To tell him the truth would mean to call his honour to arms against his love, and she dreaded that thought as she dreaded death.

“I was a fool, Pelleas,” she said, with a queer intensity of tone that made the man look quickly into her eyes.

“You did not know.”

“Pardon, Pelleas, I knew your soul, how true and strong it was. God knows I tried you to the end, and bitter truth it proved to me. If you had only waited.”

“Ah, Igraine.”

“Only a night; you would have had the truth at dawn.”

“I struggled for your soul and for mine, as I thought.”

“Yes, yes, you chose the nobler part, thinking me a mere woman, a frail thing blown about by my own passion. I loved you, Pelleas, for the deed, though it nigh brought me to my death.”

“God knows I honoured you, Igraine.”

“Too well; it had been better for us both if you had been more human.”

There was an anguish of regret in her voice, a plaintive accusation that made Pelleas wince to the core. He bent down and kissed her hand as it lay in her lap, then looked into her face with a mute appeal that brought her to the verge of tears.

“Courage, courage, dear heart.”

“God bless you, Igraine.”

“I am very glad of your love.”

 

“Come now, tell me how the year has passed.”

Igraine held his hand in hers and began to twist her hair about his wrist into a bracelet of gold. Her eyes faltered from his, and were hot and heavy with an inward misery of thought. The man’s words wounded her at every turn, and in his innocence he shook her happiness as a wind shakes a tree.

“There is little I can tell you,” she said.

“Every hour is as gold to me.”

“Would I had them lying in my lap.”

“We are young yet, Igraine.”

There was a joyousness in his voice that sounded to the girl like a blow struck upon empty brass, or like the laugh of a child through a ruined house. His rich optimism mocked her to the echo.

“I took refuge in Winchester,” she began, “with Radamanth my uncle, and lodged there many months. I watched for you and waited, but got no news of a knight named Pelleas. Week by week as my knowledge grew I began to think and think, to piece fragments together, to dream in my heart. I longed to see this Uther of whom all Britain talked. Ah, you remember the cross, Pelleas, which you left at my feet?”

Pelleas smiled. She put her hand into her bosom with a little blush of pride and looked into the man’s eyes.

“I have it here still,” she said, “where it has hung these many months. This scrap of gold first taught me to look for Uther.”

“Ah, Igraine, am I a king!”

“My king, sire. And oh! how long it was before I could get news of you; yet in time tidings came. Then it was that I left Winchester, went on foot through the land, and hearing again of you I set out for Wales and Caerleon with rumours of war in my ears. Even from Caerleon I followed you, even to the western sea, where I saw the great battle with Gilomannius, and the noble deeds you did there for Britain.”

 

Pelleas’s dark eyes flashed up to hers. A man loves to be noble in deed before the face of the woman he serves, a species of divine vanity that begets heroes. The girl’s staunch faith was a thing that proffered the superbest flattery.

“You are very wonderful, Igraine.”

“It was all for my own heart; and what greater joy could I have than to see you a king before the thundering swords of your knights.”

“You saw that, Igraine?”

“Do you remember a hillock by the pine forest on the ridge, where you reined in after the charge and uncovered your head to the sun?”

“As it were yesterday.”

“I stood on that hillock, Pelleas, and saw your face after many months.”

“Ah, Igraine, said I not you were very wonderful?”

“No, no, I am only a woman, only a woman.”

“God give me such a wife.”

The word was keen as the barb of a lance. Pelleas’s head was bowed over the girl’s hand as he pressed his lips to the gold circlet of hair, and he did not see the frown of pain upon her face. Wife! What a mockery, what bitterness! The sky seemed black for a moment, the valley bare with the blasts of winter and the moan of tortured trees. She half choked in her throat, and her heart seemed to fail within her like a bowl that is broken. Yet there was a smile on her face when Pelleas looked up from the circlet of her hair with the pride of love in his large eyes.

“What ails you, Igraine?”

“A mere thought of the past.”

“Tell it me.”

“No, no, it is a nothing, a mere vapour, and it has passed. How warm your lips are to my fingers. Tell me of yourself, Pelleas.”

“But this armour, Igraine?”

"I took it from a dead knight, God rest his soul. I have  wandered long in Wales, yet ever drew to Caerleon where folk spoke your name, yet never might I come near you, lest—lest you were too great for me."

“Child, child!”

“Uther Pendragon, King of Britain!”

“Let the world die.”

“And let us live; Pelleas, tell me of yourself.”

The man looked long over the valley in silence. His face was very grave, and his eyes were deep with thought as though the past awed him with the recollection of its bitterness.

“May I never pass such another night,” he said.

The words were curt and calm enough as though leaving infinite things unsaid. Igraine sat silent by him and still plaited her hair about his wrist.

“I went away in the dark, for I thought you were a nun, Igraine, and I would not break your vows. I was nearly blind for an hour. Twice my horse stumbled and fell with me in the woods, and once I was smitten out of the saddle by a tree. Dawn came, and how I cursed the sun. I seemed to see your face everywhere, and to hear your voice in every sound. Days came and went, and I hated the sight of man; as for my prayers, I could not say them, and I was dumb in my heart towards God. I rode north into the wilds, and into the fenlands of the east. Strange things befell me in many places. I fought often, beast and wild men and robber ruffians out of the woods. Fighting pleased me; it eased the wrath in my heart that seemed to rage up against the world, and against all things that drew breath. I wandered in the night of the forests, waded through swamps, took my food by the sword, and never blessed man or woman. I felt bitter and evil to the core.”

Igraine bent down and touched his forehead with her lips.

“Brave heart,” she said.

“You shall hear how I came by my own soul again.”

“Ah, tell me that.”

"It was as though a still voice came to me out of heaven.  I was riding in the northern wilds not far from rough coastland and the sea, and riding, came upon a little house of timber all bowered round with trees. It was a peaceful spot, flowers grew around, and the sun was shining, and I drew near, moved in my heart to beg food and rest, for I was half starved and gaunt as a monk from an African desert. What did I see there? A dead man tied to a tree and gored with many wounds; a woman kneeling dead before his feet, thrust through with a sword; a little child lying near with its head crushed by a stone or a club. The sword was a Saxon sword, and I knew who had done the deed; but sight of the dead folk by their empty home seemed to smite my pity like the thought of the dead Christ. I had pitied but myself and you, Igraine, and had wandered through the land like a brute beast mad with the smart of my own wound. Here was woe enough, agony enough, to shame my heart. Straightway I went down on my knees and prayed, and came through penitence and fire to a knowledge of myself. ‘Rise up,’ said the voice in me, ‘rise up and play the man. There is much sorrow in Britain, much shedding of innocent blood, much violence, and much brute wrath. Rise up and strike for woman and for babe, let your sword shine against the wolves from over the sea, let your shield hurl them from the ruined hearths of Britain, the smoking churches, and the children of the cross.’ So I rose up strong again and comforted, and rode back into the world to do my duty."

When Pelleas had made an end of speaking, Igraine’s eyes were full of tears. The simplicity of the man’s words had awakened to the full all the pathos of the past in her, and she was as proud of him as when she saw him hurl Gilomannius and his host down the green slopes towards the sea. Her lips quivered as she spoke to him—looking into his face with her eyes dim and shadowy with tears.

“Forgive me all this.”

“It has been good for me, Igraine, nor would I alter the days that are gone.”

 

“No, no.”

“We have found love again.”

“Ah, Pelleas!”

“What more need we ask?”

“What more?”

Her voice was half a wail. Again it was winter, and the wind blew as though at midnight; the flowers and the green woods were blurred before the girl’s eyes. Gorlois’s hard face and the grey walls of Tintagel came betwixt her and the summer. And, though the mood lasted but for a moment, it seemed like the long agony of days crushed into the compass of a minute.

Evening stood calm-eyed in the east. A tranquil heat hung over wood and valley, a warm silence that seemed to bind the world into a golden swoon. Not a ripple stirred in the grass with its tapestries of flowers; every leaf was hushed upon the bough; nothing moved save the droning bee and the wings of the butterflies hovering colour-bright over the meadows. The sky was a mighty sapphire, the woods carved emeralds piled giantwise to the sun. There was no discord and no sound of man, as though the curse of Adam was not yet.

Igraine had drawn Pelleas’s great sword from its sheath. She held it slantwise before her, and pressed her lips to the cold steel.

“Old friend,” she said, “be ever true to me.”

Pelleas laughed and touched her hair with his hand. A kind of exaltation came upon them, and the zest of life crept through the bodies like green sap in spring. Igraine had filled her brazen helmet to the brim with flowers, and she scattered them and sang as they roamed into the hoar shadows of the woods:—

“Dear love of mine,

Where art thou roaming?

The west is red,

My heart is calling.” 

Never had the vaults seemed greener, the half light more mysterious under the massive trees. The far world was out of ken; they alone lived and had their being; the toil of man was not even like the long sob of a moonlit sea, or the sound of rivers running in the night.

The infinite strangeness of beauty shone over them like a wizard light out of the west. Igraine’s lips were very red, her face white in the shadows, her eyes deep with mute desire. Hand held hand, body touched body. Often she would lie out upon Pelleas’s arm, her head upon his shoulder, her hair clouding over his red harness. They were content to be together, to forget the world save so much of it as came within the ken of their eyes, and the close grip of their twined fingers. They said little as they swayed together under the trees. Soul ebbed into soul upon their lips, and a deep ecstasy possessed them like the throbbing pathos of some song.

As the day deepened Pelleas and Igraine turned back into the valley, hand in hand. The west burnt gold above the tree tops, the gnarled trunks were pillars of agate bearing Byzant domes of breathless leaves. By the white May trees the two horses stood tethered, black and grey against the grass. Loosing them, and taking each a bridle, they passed down through flowers to the cottage and the pool.

Garlotte met them there with her brown hair pouring over her shoulders, and a clean white kerchief over her throat and bosom. She came to them through a little thicket of fox-gloves that were budding early, white and purple. Her blue eyes quivered for a moment over Pelleas’s face as she made him a deep curtsey, and bent to kiss Igraine’s hand. There was a vast measure of sympathy in Garlotte’s heart, and yet for all her well-wishing she was troubled for the two, fearing for them instinctively with even her small knowledge of the world. She had learnt enough from Igraine to comprehend in measure that element of tragedy that had entered with Gorlois into her life. Her interest in the man Pelleas was no mere vulgar  curiosity, rather an intense pity that permeated her warm innocence of spirit to the core.

She had spread supper on the table, a much meditated feast that had kept her eagerly busy since she had guessed the name of the strange knight who had ridden down out of the woods. She had the pride of a young housewife in her creamy milk, her bread. She had made a tansy cake, and there was a rich cream cheese ready in the cupboard, and a fat rabbit stewing by the fire. Yet for all her ingenuous pride she felt much troubled when it came to the test lest her fare should seem rude and meagre to the great knight in the red harness. Certainly he had a kind face and splendid eyes, but would he not smile at her humble supper, her horn cups, and her plates of hollywood? Her cares were empty enough, but they were very real to the sensitive child who feared to seem shamed before Igraine.

Half the happiness of life lies in the kindly sensibility of others to our desire for sympathy. A surly word, a trivial ungraciousness, a small deed passed over in thankless silence, how much these things mean to a sensitive heart! Garlotte, standing in her cottage door, half shy and timid, found her small fears mere little goblins of her own invention. Igraine, radiant as the evening, came and kissed her on the lips.

“Little sister, you have been very good to me.”

The great knight too was smiling at her in quite a fatherly fashion. What a strong face he had, and what a noble look; she felt sure that he was a good man, and her heart went out to him like an opening flower. When he took her hand, and a lock of her hair and kissed it, she went red as one of her own roses, and was dumb with an impulsive gladness.

“Little sister, you have been very good to me.”

“Good, my lord, to you!”

“Child, Igraine can tell you how.”

“But the Lady Igraine, she saved my life!”

“Ah, I had not heard that. Tell me.”

 

Garlotte found her ease in a moment. The whole tale came bubbling up like water out of a spring. Pelleas’s strong face beamed; he touched Igraine’s hair with his fingers and looked into her eyes as only a man in love can look. Garlotte saw that she was giving pleasure, and felt a glow from head to heart. Surely this great, grave-faced knight was a noble soul; how gentle he was, and how he looked into Igraine’s eyes and bent over her like a tall elm over a slim cypress tree. She caught the happiness of the two, and from that moment her heart was singing and she had no more fear for herself and her poor cottage. Even the horn cups took a golden dignity, and her tansy cake and her cream seemed fit for a prince.

The three were soon at supper together round the wooden table, with honeysuckle and roses climbing close above their heads. Garlotte would have stood and waited on Pelleas and Igraine, but they would have none of it; so she was set smiling at the head of her little table, and constrained to play the lady under her own roof. It was a dull meal so far as mere words were concerned. Pelleas’s eyes were on Igraine in the twilight, and he had no hunger save hunger of heart; yet that the supper was a success there was no doubt whatever. Garlotte watched them both with a quiet delight; young as she was she was wise in the simple love of love, and so she mothered the pair to her heart’s content in her own imagination. If only Renan had been there to help her serve, and touch her hand under the table, what a perfect guest-hour it would have been.

When the meal was over she jumped up with a shy smile, took a rush basket from the wall, and went out into the garden. Igraine called her back.

“Where are you going, child?”

“Up the valley to the dead oak tree where herbs grow. I must make a stew to-morrow.”

“It will soon be dark.”

Garlotte swung her basket and laughed from her cloud of hair.

 

“You gathered herbs on Sunday, Igraine.”

“You squirrel!”

“Renan was here; you came home after dusk; good-by, good-by.”

They heard her go singing through the garden, a soft chant d’amour that would have gone wondrously to flute and cithern. It died away slowly amid the trees like an elf’s song coming from woodlands in the moonlight. Pelleas drew a deep breath and listened in the shadow of the room with his hands clasped before him on the table. He looked as though he were praying. Igraine’s eyes were glooms of violet mystery as she watched him, her hands folded over a breast that rose and fell as with the restless motion of a troubled sea. She called the man softly by name; her body bent to him like a bow, her hair bathed his face with dim ripples of gold as mouth touched mouth.

They went out into the garden together and stood under the cedar tree.

“Pelleas, my love, my own.”

“Heart of mine.”

“You will never leave me?”

“How should the sea put the earth from his bosom, or the moon pass from the arms of the night?”

“I am faint, Pelleas; hold me in your arms.”

“They are strong, Igraine.”

“There, let me rest so, for ever. Look, the stars are coming out, and there is the moon flooding silver over the trees. My lips burn, and I am faint.”

“Courage, courage, dear heart.”

“How close you hold me! I could die so.”

“What is death to us, Igraine?”

“Or life?”

“God in heaven, and heaven on earth.”

“Your words hurt me.”

Chapter XI

---

How the birds sang that evening as a saffron afterglow fainted over the forest spires, and when all was still with the hush of night how the cry of a nightingale thrilled from a tree near the cottage!

The glamour of the day had passed, and now what mockery and bitterness came with the cold, calculating face of the moon. Igraine tossed and turned in her bed like one taken with a fever; her brain seemed afire, her hair like so much flame about her forehead. As she lay staring with wide, wakeful eyes, the birds’ song mocked her to the echo, the scent of honeysuckle and rose floated in like a sad savour of death, and the moonlight seemed to watch her without a quaver of pity. Her heart panted in the darkness; she was torn by the thousand torments of a troubled conscience, wounded to tears, yet her eyes were dry and waterless as a desert. Gorlois’s face seemed to glare down at her out of the idle gloom, and she could have cried out with the fear that lay like an icy hand over her bosom.

Pelleas slept under the cedar tree, wrapped in an old cloak, relic of Garlotte’s father. How Igraine’s heart wailed for the man, how she longed for the touch of his hand! God of heaven, she could not let him go again, and starve her soul with the old cursed life. His lips had touched hers, his arms had held her close, she had felt the warmth of his body and the beating of his heart. Was all this nothing—a dream, a splendid phantasm to be rent away like a crimson cloud? Was she to be Gorlois’s wife and nothing more, a bitter flower growing under a gallows, sour wine frothing in a gilded cup?

God of heaven, no! What had the world done for her that she should obey its edicts and suffer for its tyrannies? Gorlois had cheated her of her liberty, let him pay the price to the fates; what honour, indeed, had she to preserve for  him? If he was a brute piece of lust, a tyrant, a demagogue, so much the better, it would ease her conscience. She owed no fealty, no marriage vow, to Gorlois. Her body was no more his than was her soul, and a dozen priests and a dozen masses might as well marry granite to fire. How could a fool in a cape and frock by gabbling a service bind an irresponsible woman to a man she hated more than the foulest mud in the foulest alley? It was a stupendous piece of nonsense, to say the least of it. No God calling himself a just God could hold such a bargain holy.

And then—the truth! What a stumbling-block truth was on occasions! She knew Pelleas’s intense love of honour, the fine sensibility of his conscience, the strong thirst for the highest good, that made him the victim of an ethical tyranny. If he had left her after Andredswold because he thought her a nun, what hope now had she of holding him if he knew her to be a wife? And yet for all her love she could not bring herself to keep him wholly from the truth. For all her passion and the fire in her rebellious heart she was not a woman who could fling reason to the winds, and stifle up her conscience with a kiss. Besides, she loved Pelleas to the very zenith of her soul. To have a lie understood upon her lips, to be shamed before the man’s eyes, were things that scourged her in fancy even more than the thought of losing him. She trembled when she thought how he might look at her in later days if a passive lie were proven against her with open shame.

But to tell him of Gorlois, and the humiliation of that darkest hour of her life! Could such a man as Pelleas serve her longer after such a confession? He would become a king again, a stranger, a man set in high places far beyond the mere yearning of a woman’s white face. And yet, it was possible that his love might prove stronger than his reason; it was possible that he might front the world and frown down the petty judgments of men. Glorious and transcendent sacrifice! She could face calumny beside him  as a rock faces the froth of waves; she could look Gorlois in the eyes, and know neither shame nor pity.

Her mood that night was like the passage of a blown leaf, tossed up to heaven, whirled over the tree tops, driven down again into the mire. Strong woman that she was, her very strength made the struggle more indecisive and more racking. She could not renounce Pelleas for the great love she bore him, and yet she could not will to play a false part by reason of this same great love. Her soul, like a wanderer in the wilds, halted and wavered between two tracks that led forward into the unknown.

Garlotte was sleeping in the far corner of the cottage. The girl had given up her bed to Igraine, who envied her her quiet, restful breathing as she lay and listened. In her doubt she called and woke Garlotte from her sleep, hardly knowing indeed what she desired to say to her, yet half fearful of lying alone longer in the night with her own thoughts for company. Garlotte rose up and came across the room to the bigger bed. She knelt down; two warm arms crept under the coverlet, and a soft cheek touched Igraine’s.

“Why are you awake, Igraine?”

The warmth of the girl’s body, her quiet breathing, the sweep of her hair, seemed to bring a scent of peace and human sympathy into the moonlit room. Igraine put her arms about her, and drew her down to her side. Their white faces and clouding hair lay close together on the pillow.

“You are in trouble, Igraine?”

“How should I be in trouble?”

“You breathe like one in pain, and your voice is strange.”

“Hush, Garlotte.”

“Am I not right?”

“Pelleas must not hear us talking.”

They were silent awhile, lying in each other’s arms with no sound save that of their breathing. Igraine’s misery burnt in her and cried out for sympathy; Garlotte, half wise by instinct, yearned to share a trouble which she did not  wholly comprehend, to advise where she was partly ignorant. The girl felt a great stirring of her heart towards Igraine, but could say nothing for the moment. Having no better eloquence at command she raised her head and kissed the other’s lips, a warm, impulsive kiss that seemed as rich in sympathy as a rose in scent.

Igraine’s confidence woke at the touch of the girl’s lips; she hungered even for this child’s comfort, her simple guidance in this matter of life and love. It was easy enough to die, hard to exist as a mere spiritless Galatea devoid of soul.

“Garlotte!”

“Yes, Igraine.”

“Imagine that you were married to a man you hated, and you loved Renan.”

Garlotte raised herself in bed.

“And Renan loved you and knew nothing?”

“Yes.”

“Would you tell Renan the truth?”

Garlotte remained motionless, propped on her two hands, and looking out of the window into the streaming moonlight. Her brown hair touched Igraine’s face as she lay still and watched her. The room was very silent, not a breeze seemed stirring, the roses athwart the window were still as though carved in wood.

Garlotte spoke very softly, looking up with her face white and solemn in the moonlight.

“I should tell Renan,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because I love him.”

“Yes—go on.”

“I should not love him rightly in God’s eyes if I kept him from the truth.”

The coverlet rose and fell over Igraine’s bosom, and there was a queer twisting pain at her heart.

“But if you were never to see Renan again?” she said.

“If I told him the truth?”

“Yes, child.”

 

Garlotte dared not look into Igraine’s face; her lips were twitching, and her eyes were hot with tears.

“I do not know,” she faltered.

“Think, child, think!”

“I should not tell him.”

In half a breath she had contradicted herself with a little gasp.

“Yes, yes, I should tell him.”

“The truth?”

“Because I should not be happy even with him if I were acting a lie.”

Igraine gave a dry sob, and drew Garlotte down again to her side. They lay very close, almost mouth to mouth, their arms about each other’s bodies.

“I love Pelleas.”

“Yes, yes.”

“I will tell him the truth.”

“Ah, Igraine, it is best, it is best.”

“But it will kill me if I lose him.”

“Ah, Igraine, but he will love you all the more.”

It was Garlotte who broke into tears, and hid her face in the other’s bosom. Igraine’s eyes were as dry as a blue sky parched with a summer sun, and her voice failed her like the slack string of a lute. The moonlight slanted down upon them both. Before dawn they had fallen asleep in each other’s arms.

How many a heart trembles with the return of day; what fears rise with the first blush of light in an empty sky! The cloak of night is lifted from weary faces; the quiet balm of darkness is withdrawn from the moiling care of many a heart. To Igraine the dawn light came like a message of misery as she lay beside the sleeping Garlotte, and watched the gloom grow less and less in the little room. This dawn seemed a veritable symbol of the truth that she feared to look upon—and recognise. The night seemed kinder, less implacable, less grave of face. Day, like a pale justiciary, stalked up out of the east to call her to that  assize where truth and the soul meet under the eye of heaven.

How different was it with Pelleas under the eaves of the great cedar. He had slept little that night for mere wakeful happiness; the moon had kept carnival for him above the world; at dawn the stars had crept back from the choir stalls into the chambers of the night. He had known no weariness, no abatement of his deep calm joy. His heart had answered blithely to the dawn-song of the birds as though he had risen fresh from a dreamless sleep. The day to him had no look of evil; the sky was never grey; the flush in the east recalled no flashing of torches over a funeral bier. He rose up in the glory of his clean manhood, the strong kindliness of his great love. His prayers went to heaven that morning with the lark, and the Spirit of God seemed like a wind moving softly in the green boughs above his head.

Very early before it was light he had taken a plunge and a swim in the pool, a swinging burst through the still water that had made him revel in his great strength. He had come up from the pool like a god refreshed, and had put on his red harness while the mists rose from the valley, and the birds chanted in the ghostly trees. When the day was fully awake he walked the grass-path in the garden like a watchman, with the scent of honeysuckle and thyme in his nostrils, and a blaze of flowers at his feet. As he paced up and down with his face turned to the sky, he sang in a mellow bass a song of Guyon’s, the Court minstrel—

“When the dawn has come,

My heart sighs for thee and the gleam of thy hair;

Eyes deep as the night

When the summer sky arches the world.”

So sang Pelleas as he paced the grass with his eyes wandering ever towards the doorway of the cottage.

Presently Igraine came out to him, and stood under the shadow of the porch. Her hair hung lustrous about a face  that was white and drawn, despite a smile. Certainly a haze of red flushed her cheeks when Pelleas came up with a glory of love in his eyes, took her hands and kissed them, as though there was no such divine flesh in the whole wide world. How wonderful it was to be touched so, to have such eyes pouring out so strong a soul before her face, to know the presence of a great love, and to feel the echoing passion of it in her own heart!

After the barren months of winter, and the long bondage in Tintagel, it seemed ah idyllic thing to be so served, so comforted. And was this faery time but for an hour, a day, and no longer? Was she but to see the man’s face, to feel the touch of his hands, the grand calm of his love, before losing him, perhaps for life? Her heart fluttered in her like a smitten bird. And Pelleas, too, what a thrust lurked for the man, a blow to be given in the name of truth. How could she speak to him of Gorlois when he came and looked at her with those eyes of his?

Igraine had never felt such misery as this even in the gloomy galleries of Tintagel. It tried her courage to the death to face Pelleas’s wistful gaiety, and the adoration that beamed on her from his eyes.

“Dear heart, it is dawn—it is dawn!”

Pelleas held her hands, and waited for her lips to be turned to his. Instead, he saw lowered lids and quivering lashes, lips that were plaintive, a face white beneath a wealth of hair.

“Ah, Igraine, you do not look at me.”

Her eyes trembled up to his with a sudden infinite lustre.

“Pelleas!”

“Girl, girl!”

“Ah, I have hardly slept.”

“Nor I, Igraine.”

“I think I am worn out with thinking of you.”

“Ha, little woman, you are extravagant; you will die like a flower even while I hold you in my bosom.”

 

Garlotte came out from the cottage, and was kissed by Pelleas on the lips. The girl’s eyes were red and heavy; she had been crying but a moment ago in the shadow of the cottage room, and she was timid and very solemn. Pelleas looked at her like a big brother.

“Come now, little sister,” he said, with a rare smile; “methinks you must be in love too by your looks.”

“Yes, lord.”

“Said I not so? You women take things so to heart.”

“Yes, lord.”

“What a solemn face, little sister!”

Garlotte mastered herself for a moment, then burst into tears and ran back into the cottage. Pelleas coloured, looked troubled, glanced at Igraine, thinking he had hurt the girl’s heart with his words. Igraine’s face startled him as if the visage of death had risen up suddenly amid the flowers. He stood mute before her watching her starved lips, her drawn face, her eyes that stared beyond him with a kind of cold frenzy.

“Pelleas, Pelleas!”

It was like the wild cry of a woman over her dead love. The sound struck Pelleas with a vague sense of stupendous woe, a dim prophecy of evil like the noise of autumn in the woods. Before he could gather words, Igraine had turned and run from him as in great fear, skirting the pool and holding for the black yawn of the forest aisles. Pelleas started to follow her in a daze of wonder. Was the girl mad? Had love turned her brain? What was there hid in her heart that made her wing from him like a dove from a hawk?

By the trees Igraine slackened and turned breathless on the man as he came towards her through the long grass. Her eyes were dim and frightened, her lips twitching, and there was a bleak hunted look upon her face that made her seem white and old. Pelleas’s blood ran cold in him like water; a vague dread sapped his manhood; he stared at Igraine and was speechless.

 

The girl put her arm before her eyes and shook as she stood. Pelleas fell on his knees with a cry, and reached for her hand.

“Igraine, Igraine!”

She snatched her arm away and would not look at him.

“My God, what is this, Igraine?”

“Don’t touch me; I am Gorlois’s wife!”

A vast silence seemed to fall sudden on the world. It might have been dead of night in winter, with deep snow upon the ground and no wind stirring in the forest. To Igraine, swaying in an agony with her arm over her face, the silence came like the hush that might fall on heaven before the damning of a lost soul to hell. She wondered what was in Pelleas’s heart, and dared not look at him or meet his eyes. God in heaven! would the man never speak; would the silence crawl on into an eternity!

At last she did look, and nearly fell at the wrench of it. Pelleas was standing near her looking at her with his great solemn eyes as though she had given him his death. His face seemed to have gone grey and haggard in a moment.

“Gorlois’s wife!” was all he said.

Igraine hung her head, shivered, and said nothing. Pelleas never stirred; he seemed like so much stone, a mere pillar of granite misery. Igraine could have writhed at his feet and caught him by the knees only to melt for a moment that white calm on his face that looked like the mask of death.

A voice that was almost strange to her startled her out of her stupor of despair.

“How long have you been wed, Igraine?”

“Nine months, Pelleas.”

The man seemed to be struggling with himself as though he strove after the truth, yet could not confront it for all his strength. When he spoke his voice was like the voice of a man winded by hard running. He appeared to urge himself forward, to goad his courage to a task that he  dreaded. There was great anguish on his face as he looked into the girl’s eyes.

“I must speak what I know, Igraine.”

The words seemed slow with effort. Igraine watched him in silence, full of a vague dread.

“Gorlois has spoken to me of his wife.”

“Say on, Pelleas.”

Pelleas hesitated.

“The truth—tell me the truth.”

She was almost clamorous. Pelleas plunged on.

“Gorlois told me how his wife was faithless to him, how she had fled with Brastias, the knight who had ward over her at Caerleon. I never knew her name until this hour.”

The words might have fallen like the strokes of a lash. Igraine stood and stared at the man, her open mouth a black circle, her eyes expressionless for the moment, like the eyes of one smitten blind. The full meaning of the words numbed her and hindered her understanding. A babel of shame sounded in her ears. The sinister intent of the man’s accusation rose gradual before her reason like the distorted image of a dream. She felt cold to the core; a strange terror possessed her.

“Pelleas, what have you said to me?”

Her voice was a mere whisper. Pelleas hung his head and said never a word. His silence seemed to fling sudden fire into Igraine’s eyes, and her face flamed like a sunset. It might have been Gorlois who stood and challenged the honour of her soul.

“Man, tell me what is in your heart.”

Her voice was shrill—even imperious. Pelleas hung his head.

“Gorlois keeps poison for his wife,” were his words.

Igraine’s lips curled.

“A sword for Brastias.”

“Generous man.”

Pelleas was watching her as a prisoner watches a judge. He had a great yearning to believe. Fear, anguish, anger,  were in Igraine’s heart, but she showed none of the three as she stood forward and looked into the man’s eyes with a steadfastness no honour could gainsay.

“Pelleas!” she said.

“Girl!”

“Look into my eyes.”

He did so without flinching. Igraine took his sword and gave it naked into his hand.

“Listen! Gorlois told you a lie.”

“Igraine!”

“Do you believe me, Pelleas? If not, strike with the sword, for I will live no longer.”

The man gave a sudden cry, like one who leaps over a precipice, threw the sword far away into the grass, and falling on his knees, buried his face in his hands.

Chapter XII

---

Igraine stood and watched Pelleas as he knelt in the grass at her feet with his face hidden from her by his hands. She saw the curve of his strong neck, the sweep of his great shoulders. She even counted the steel plates in his shoulder pieces, and marked the tinge of grey in his coronal of hair.

Calm had come upon her with the trust won by the confessional of the sword. She felt sure of the man in her heart, and eased of a double burden since she had told him the truth and brought him to a declaration of his faith. She knew well from instinct that her honour stood sure in Pelleas’s heart.

Going to him, she bent and touched his head with her hand.

“Pelleas,” she said very softly.

The man groaned and would not look at her.

“Mea culpa, mea culpa!” was his cry.

Igraine smiled like a young mother as she put his hands  from his face with a gradual insistence. It was right that he should kneel to her, but it was also right that she should forgive and forget like a woman. Yet as she stood and held his hands in hers, Pelleas hung his head and would not so much as look into her face. He was convicted in his own heart, and contrite according to the deep measure of his manhood.

Igraine touched his hair softly with her fingers, and there was a great light in her eyes as she bent over him.

“Come, Pelleas, and sit by me under the trees, and I will tell you the whole tale.”

Never had she seemed so stately or so superb in Pelleas’s eyes as she stood before him that morning, strong and sorrowful with the burden of her past. He knelt and looked up at her, knowing himself pardoned, humbled to see love in the ascendent so soon upon her face as she looked down at him from her golden aureole of hair.

“I am forgiven?” he said.

“Ah, Pelleas!”

“You have shamed me; I am a broken man.”

He rose up half wearily and stood looking at her as though some mysterious influence had parted them suddenly asunder. So expressive were his eyes, that Igraine read a distant anguish in them on the instant, and fathomed his thoughts, to the troubling of her own heart.

“Look not so,” she said, “as though a gulf lay deep between us here.”

“How else should I look at you, Igraine, when you are wife to Gorlois?”

“Never in my soul.”

“How can that help us?”

Igraine winced at the words and took refuge in silence. She went and seated herself at the foot of a gnarled oak. Pelleas followed her and lay down more than a sword’s length away, leaving a stretch of green turf between, a thing insignificant in itself, yet full of meaning to the girl’s instinctive watchfulness. The man’s face too was turned  from her towards the valley, and she could only see the curve of his cheek and chin as she began to speak to him of that which was in her heart.

“You know the man Gorlois?” she said.

Pelleas nodded.

“In Winchester Gorlois saw my face and straightway pestered me as he had been turned into my shadow. By chance he had rendered me service, and from the favour casually conferred plucked the right of thrusting his perpetual homage upon me. I trusted Gorlois little from the beginning, and trusted him less as the weeks went by. His eyes frightened me, and his mouth made my soul shiver; the more importunate he grew the more I began to fear him.”

Pelleas shifted his sword and said nothing.

“A day came when the man Gorlois grew tired of courtesies, and would be gainsaid no longer. It was in Radamanth’s garden; we quarrelled, and the man laid hands upon me and crushed me against the wall to thieve a kiss. In my anger I broke from him and ran into my uncle’s house. The same night I fled to an abbey, the abbey of St. Helena, and left Winchester in my dress at dawn.”

Igraine could see the muscles of Pelleas’s jaw standing out contracted as though his teeth were clenched in an access of anger. He was breathing deeply through his nostrils, and his hands plucked at the grass with a terse snapping sound. These things pleased Igraine, and she went on forthwith.

"I left Winchester on foot at dawn and travelled towards Sarum, for I heard that Uther the King was there, and it was greatly in my mind, sire, to see his face. An old merchant friend of Radamanth’s overtook me on the road; at a ford the horse he had lent me fell and twisted my ankle. I was carried to Eudol’s house, and lay abed there many days, learning little to my comfort that Gorlois had ridden out and was hunting me through the countryside. Recovered of my strain, and fearful of Gorlois’s trackers, I  held on for Sarum through the woods, and lodged the same night in a hermitage in a little valley. Here the first piece of craft overtook me, for early in the morning outside the hermitage I saw a knight ride by on a black horse, bearing red harness, and armed at all points like to you."

Pelleas turned his head for the first time and looked at her as though with some sudden suspicion of what was to follow. Igraine saw something in his dark eyes that made her heart hurry. His face was like the face of a man who fronts a storm of wind and rain with brows furrowed and eyes half-closed. There was much that was threatening in his look, a subdued ominous wrath like a storm nursed in the bosom of a cloud.

Igraine told the whole quaint tale, how she followed Gorlois in faith, how she was led into the forest, bewitched there, and made a wife, mesmerised into a false affection for the man by Merlin’s craft. It was a grim tale, with a clear contour of truth, and credible by reason of its very strangeness. It was sufficient to manifest to Pelleas how Igraine’s strong love for him had lost her her liberty and made her the victim of a man’s lust.

When she had ended the tale Pelleas left the grass at her feet and began to pace under the trees like a sentinel on a wall. His scabbard clanged occasionally against his greaves. Masses of young bracken covered the ground between the trees with a rich carpet of green, and his armour shone like red wrath under the wreathing arcs of foliage. His face was dark and moody with the turmoil of thought, but there was no visible agitation upon him; nothing of the aspen, more of the unbending oak. Igraine leant against her tree and watched him with a curious care, wondering what would be the outcome of all this silence. Down in the valley the pool glistened, and she could see Garlotte walking in the cottage garden. How different was this child’s lot to hers. With what warm philosophy could she have changed Pelleas into a shepherd, and taken the part of Garlotte to herself.

 

Presently Pelleas stayed in his stride through the bracken, and came and stood before her, looking not into her face but beyond her into the deeps of the wood.

“Tell me more, Igraine.”

“What more would you hear from me?”

“That which is bitterest of all.”

“God, must I tell you that!”

“Let us both drink it to the dregs.”

Igraine’s face and neck coloured rich as one of Garlotte’s red roses, and she seemed to shrink from the man’s eyes behind the quivering sunlight of her hair. She put her hands to her breast and stood in a strain of thought, of struggle against the infinite unfitness of the past.

Pelleas saw her trouble, and his strong face softened on the instant. He had forgotten milder things in his grappling of the truth. Igraine’s red and troubled look revived the finer instincts of his manhood.

“Never trouble, child,” he said; “I know enough of Gorlois to read the rest.”

But Igraine, as by inspiration, had come by other reasons for telling out the whole to the last pang. She was at pains to justify herself to Pelleas, nor was she undesirous of inflaming him against Gorlois, her lord. She had wit enough to grasp the fact that Pelleas’s wrath might be roused into insurrection against custom and the edicts of the Church. A volcanic outburst might throw down the barriers of man and leave her at liberty to choose her lot. Moreover, her hate of Gorlois, an iconoclastic passion, had crushed the reverence of things existing out of her heart. A contemplation of her evil fortune had brought her to the conviction that she was exiled from the sympathies of men, a spiritual bandit driven to compass the instincts of a rebellious soul. In her hot impulse for liberty and the justification of her faith, she did not halt from making Pelleas feel the full malignity of truth. She neither embellished nor emphasised, but portrayed incidents simply in their glaring nakedness in  a fashion that promised to inflame the man to the very top of her desire.

Igraine’s cheeks kindled, and she could not look at the man for the words upon her lips. Pelleas’s face was like the face of man in torture. The woman’s words entered into him like iron; his wrath whistled like a wind, and the very air seemed tainted in his mouth. What a purgatory of passion was let loose into the calm precincts of the place! This burning vault of blue, was it the same as roofed the world of yesterday? The feathery mounts of green dappled with amber, and these flowers, had they not changed with the noon lust of the sun? There was a rank savour of fleshliness over the whole earth, and all life seemed impious, passionate, and unclean.

“My God, my God!”

The man’s cry shook Igraine from her rage for truth. In her confessional she had been carried like a bird with the wind. Looking into Pelleas’s face she saw that he was in torment, and that her words had smitten him in a fashion other than she had foreseen. It was not wrath that burnt in his eyes, only a deep grieving, a frenzy of shame and anguish that seemed to cry out against her soul. A sudden stupor made her mute. With a great void in her heart she fell down amid the bracken with a sense of ignominy and abasement overwhelming her like a deluge.

Pelleas stood and shut his eyes to the sun. A red glare smote into his brain; love seemed numb in him and his blood stagnant. Prayer eluded him like a vapour. Looking out again over wood and valley, the golden haze, the torpor of the trees mocked him with a lethargy that smiled at the impotence of man.

And Igraine! He saw her prone beneath the green mist of the fern fronds, lying with her face pillowed on her arms, her hair spread like a golden net over the brown wreckage of the bygone year. To what a pass had their love come! Better, he thought, to have lived a king solitary on a throne  than to have wandered into youth again to give and win such dolor.

His face was dark as he stood and looked at the woman’s violet surcoat gleaming low under the bracken. How symbolical this attitude seemed of all that had fallen upon his heart—love cast down upon dead leaves! Igraine had feared his honour. Pelleas feared for it in another sense as he looked at the woman, and felt his pity clamouring for life. He could have given his soul to comfort her if no shame could have come upon her name thereby. As it was, some spiritual hand seemed at his throat stifling aught of love that found impulse on his lips. A superhuman sincerity chilled him into silence, and held him in bondage to the truth.

A face stared up from the bracken, wan, tearless, and tragic. The wistfulness of the face made him quail within his harness. He knew too well what was in Igraine’s heart, and the look that questioned him like the look of a wounded hare. Her eyes searched his face as though to read her doom thereon. There was no whimpering, no noise, no passionate rhetoric. A great quiet seemed to take its temper from the silence of the woods.

“Pelleas.”

“Yes, Igraine.”

“Tell me what is in your heart.”

Pelleas hung his head; he could not look at her for all his courage. She was kneeling in the bracken with her hands crossed over her breast and her face turned to his with the white wistfulness of a full moon. Pelleas felt death in his heart, and he could not speak nor look into her eyes.

“Pelleas.”

“Child.”

“You do not look at me.”

“Great God, would I were blind!”

The truth came crying to her like the wild cry of a bird taken by a weasel in the woods. A great sobbing shook her; she fell down and caught Pelleas by the knees.

 

“Pelleas, Pelleas!”

“My God, Igraine, I stifle!”

“Don’t leave me, don’t send me away.”

“What can I say to you?”

“Only look into my eyes again.”

Pelleas put his fists before his face; the girl felt him quiver, and he seemed to twist in an agony like a man dangling on a rope. Igraine’s hands crept to his shoulders; she drew herself by his body as by a pillar till her face met his and she lay heavy upon his breast.

“Pelleas!”

Her breath was on his lips, and her hair flooded over his hands like golden wine.

“Pelleas, Pelleas!”

The words came with a windless whisper.

“Have pity, Igraine.”

“I will never leave you.”

“Gorlois’s wife!”

“Never, never!”

“My God!”

“I am not his. Pelleas, take me body and soul; take me and let me be your wife.”

“How can I sin against your soul, Igraine?”

“Is it sin, then, to love me?”

“You are Gorlois’s wife before God.”

“There is no God.”

“Igraine!”

“I will have no God but you, Pelleas.”

The man took his hands from his face and looked into Igraine’s eyes. A strong shudder passed over him, and he seemed like a great ship smitten by a wave, till every fibre groaned and quivered in his massive frame.

A green calm covered the valley, and the whole world seemed to faint in the golden bosom of the day. Not the twitter of a bird broke the vast hush of the forest. The sunlit aisles climbed into a shadowland of mysterious silence, and an azure quiet hung above the trees. As for Pelleas  and Igraine, their two lives seemed knotted up with a cord of gold. They had mingled breath, and taken the savour of each other’s souls. Yet for all the glory of the moment it was but autumn with them—a pomp of passion, a red splendour dying while it blazed into the grey ruin of a winter day.

Igraine read her doom in the man’s face. It was the face of a martyr, pale, resolute, yet inspired. A dry sob died in her throat, and her hands dropped from the man’s shoulders. Pelleas stood back and looked at her with a warm light in his dark eyes, the green woods rising behind him like a bank of clouds.

“Igraine.”

She nodded, felt miserable, and said nothing.

“I cannot love you easily.”

Igraine’s eyes stared at him with a mute bitterness. She was a woman, and thought like a woman; mere saintly philosophy was beyond her.

“You are too good a man, Pelleas,” she said.

“I would hold my love in my heart like a great pearl in a casket of gold.”

“What comfort is there in mere splendid misery, and in such words?”

“How should I love you best?”

“Ah, Pelleas, ask your own heart.”

The man was an impossible being for mere mortal argument. He seemed to bear spiritual pinions that tantalised the intelligence of the heart. Igraine felt herself adrift and beaten, and she was hopeless of him to the core.

“Think you I shall be a saint, Pelleas,” she said, “when you have given me back to myself?”

“I shall pray for you.”

“And for a devil!”

She gave a shrill laugh, and twined her hair about her wrist.

“Ah, Pelleas! you know not what you do.”

“Too well, Igraine.”

 

“You are too strong for me, and yet—and yet—I should not have loved you so well if you had not been strong.”

“That is how I think of you, Igraine.”

“You love me more by leaving me.”

“I love you more by keeping you pure before my soul.”

A great calm had come upon Igraine. She was very pale and firm about the lips, and her eyes were staunch as steel. Her voice was as clear and level as though she spoke of trivial things.

“I shall not go back to Gorlois,” she said.

“Beware of the man.”

“Doubtless you would speak to me of a convent.”

Pelleas fell into thought, with his dark eyes fixed upon her face.

“As a novice.”

Igraine almost smiled at him.

“And not a nun?”

For answer he spoke three simple words.

“Gorlois might die.”

The stillness of the woods seemed like the hush of a listening multitude. A blue haze of heat hung over the rolling domes of the western trees, and never a wind-wave stirred the long grass. Mountainous clouds sailed radiant over ridge and spur, and it might have been Elysium where souls wandered through meads of asphodel.

Igraine looked long over the valley with its stately trees, its flowering grass and quiet pool in the meadows. She was vastly calm, though her eyes were full of a woe that seemed to well up like water out of her soul. She still twisted and untwisted a strand of her hair about her wrist, but for all else she was as quiet as one of the trees that stood near and overshadowed her.

“Pelleas,” she said.

The man came two steps nearer.

“Go quickly.”

 

“Igraine!”

“Man, man, how long will you torture me? I am only a little strong.”

The calm of tragedy seemed to dissolve away on the instant. Pelleas thrust his hands into the air like a swimmer sinking to his death. His heart answered Igraine’s exceeding bitter cry.

“Would we had never come to this!”

“I cannot say that, though my heart breaks.”

Pelleas fell down and clasped her with his arms about the knees. His face was hidden in the folds of her surcoat. Presently he loosed his hold, looked up, took a ring from his hand and thrust it into her palm.

“The signet of a king,” he said; “keep it for need, Igraine. Have you money?”

“I have money, Pelleas.”

“God guard you!”

Igraine was white to the lips, but she never wavered.

“Heaven keep you!” she said.

Her voice was hoarse in her throat, and she began to shiver as though chilled by a sleety wind.

“Go quickly, Pelleas; for God’s sake hide your face from me!”

“It is death; it is death!”

He sprang up and left her without a look. Igraine saw him go through the long grass with his hand over his eyes, staggering like one sword-smitten to the brain. He never stared back at her, but held straight for the cottage and the cedar tree where his black horse was tethered under the shade. She watched him mount and gallop for the forest, nor did she move till his red harness had died into the gloom of the trees.

Chapter XIII

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Down through the woods that morning rode Gorlois on his great white horse, with helmet clanging at saddle-bow, shield  hung at his left shoulder, spear trailing under the trees. He was hot, thirsty, and in a most evil temper. His bronzed face glistened with sweat, and the chequered webs of light flickering through the leaves flashed fitfully upon his golden harness. Since dawn he had ridden the hills in the glare of the sun till his armour blazed like an oven; it was June weather, and hot at that; his tongue felt like wood rubbing against leather; it was a damnable month for bearing harness.

Casting about over the hills he had come upon Garlotte’s valley, and seeing it green and shadowy, had plunged down to profit by the shade. Since the Red Knight was lost to him, it was immaterial whether he rode by wood or hill. On this account, too, Gorlois’s temper was as hot as his skin. He hated a baulking above all things; he was moved to be furious with trifles, and like the savage who gnashes at the stone that bruises his foot, he cursed creation and felt thoroughly at war with the world. A grim unreason had possession of him, such a mood as makes murder a mere impulse of the hand, and malice the prime instinct of the heart.

As he rode with loose rein the trees thinned suddenly, and the forest gloom rolled back over his head. Gorlois halted mechanically under the wooelshawe, and scanned the valley spread before him under the brown hollow of his hand. He had expected no such open land in this waste of wood—open land with water, a cottage, sheep feeding, and horses tethered under the trees. One of the horses tethered there was a black. The coincidence livened Gorlois’s torpid, sunburnt face with a cool gleam of intelligence. He sat motionless in the saddle and took the length and breadth of the valley under the keen ken of his black eyes.

The man swore a little oath into his peaked black beard. His face grew suddenly rapacious as he stared out under the hollow of his hand. He had seen a streak of red strike through the green wall far up the eastern slope that fronted him, a scrap of colour metallic with the hint of armour.  It went to and fro under the distant trees like a torch past the windows of a church. Gorlois’s hand tightened on the bridle. He watched the thing as a hawk watches a young rabbit in the grass.

Betimes he gave a queer little chuckle, and turned his horse into the deeper shade of the trees. He began to make a circuit round the valley, holding northwards to compass the meadows. He cast long, wary glances into the wood as he went; tried his sword to see that it was loose in the scabbard; took his helmet from the saddle-bow, and let down the cheek-pieces from the crown. Before long he kicked his stirrups away, rolled out of the saddle, and tied his horse to an oak sapling in a little dell. Going silently on foot over the mossy grass, stopping often to stare into the sunny vistas of the forest, moving more or less from tree to tree, he worked his way southwards along the eastern slope. Streaks of meadowland and the glint of water showed below him, and he heard the bleat of sheep far away, and the tinkling of a bell.

Presently the murmur of voices came to him through the woods. He ventured on another fifty paces, then stopped behind a tree to listen. There were two voices, he was sure of that: one was a woman’s, and the other had the sonorous vibration of a man’s bass. Gorlois’s eyes took a queer, far-away look, and his strong teeth showed between his lips.

He worked his way on through the trees with the cautious and deliberate instinct of a hunter. The two voices gained in timbre, character, and expression. Their talk was no jays’ chatter; Gorlois could tell that from the emphasis of sound, and a certain dramatic melody that ran through the whole. Soon the voices were very near. Going on his belly, with his sword held in his left hand, he crawled like a gilt dragon through a forest of springing fern. He crawled on till he was quite near the two who stood and talked under the trees. Lying flat, never venturing to lift his head, he crouched, breathing hard through  his nostrils and holding his scabbarded sword crosswise beneath his chin.

Gorlois’s face, scarred and drawn as it was, seemed as he listened a clear mirror for the portrayal of human passion. His black moustachios twitched above his angular jaw; his eyes took a rapacious and glazed look, and a shadow seemed to cover his face. He turned and twisted as he lay, and dug the points of his iron-shod shoes into the soft ground as though in the crisis of some pain. It was the woman’s voice that did all this for him. Every word seemed like the wrench of a hook in his flesh, as he cursed and twisted under the bracken.

Presently he lay still again, as though to listen the better. He could hear something of what was said to the man in the red harness, but the main drift of their talk was beyond him. Pelleas! Pelleas! He squirmed like a crushed snake at each sounding of the name. The bracken hardly swayed as he crawled on some twenty paces and again lay still, with his cheek resting upon the scabbard of his sword.

“Gorlois might die.”

Gorlois heard the words as plainly as though they had been spoken into his ear. A vast silence hung like thunder over the forest. Gorlois lay as though stunned with a stone, his dry mouth pressed to the cold steel of the sword. His eyes took a stubborn stare under the sweep of his casque. With gradual labour he raised himself upon his elbows, drew his knees up under his body, and lifted his head slowly above the sweep of green.

The ground fell away slightly from where Gorlois knelt in the bracken, and he could look down on the two who stood under the trees, while the fern fronds hid his harness. He saw a woman in violet and gold, her hair falling straight on either side of her face, and her arms folded crosswise over her breast. He saw also the knight in red harness, with his locked hands twisting above his head as in an agony, while his face was hidden by his arm. A passionate whisper of words passed between the two. Even when Gorlois  watched, the man in the red harness jerked round and fell on his knees at the woman’s feet. Gorlois suddenly saw his face; it was the face of Uther the King.

Gorlois dropped back under the bracken as though smitten through with a sword. He lay there a long while with his head upon his arms. A sudden breeze came up the valley, sounding through the trees, swaying the green fronds above the man’s harness, calling a gradual clamour from the woods. The overmastering image of the King seemed to frown down Gorlois for the moment, and he crouched like a dog—with the courage crushed out of his soul.

Betimes Gorlois’s reason revived from the stroke that had stunned it for a season. Like Jonah’s gourd a quick purpose sprang up and shadowed him from the too hasty heat of his own passions. He was a virile man, capable of great wrath and great resentment. Yet he was no mere firebrand. His malice, strangely enough, was one-handed and reached out only against the woman. For Uther he conceived a superhuman envy, a passion that rose above mere bloody expiation by the sword. Gorlois had the wit to remember the finer cruelties of a spiritual vengeance, the gain of wounding the soul rather than the flesh. His malice was a thing fanatical in itself, yet taken from the forge to be cooled and tempered like steel.

When he lifted his head again above the bracken, Uther had gone, and Igraine stood alone under the trees. She stood straight and motionless as some tall flower, her hair falling like quiet sunlight, unshaken by a wind. Her great beauty leapt out into Gorlois’s blood and maddened him. As she looked out over the valley, Gorlois, straining his neck above the bracken, could see that she watched Uther as he went down from her towards the pool. Even to Gorlois there was something tragic about the solitary figure under the trees, a stiff, grievous look as though woe had transformed her into a pillar of stone. To him the affair seemed a mere assignation, a hazardous passage of romance. Measuring the souls of others by his own morality, he  guessed nothing of the deeper throes that surged through the tale like the long moan of a night wind.

Gorlois saw Uther and his black horse disappear into the opposing bank of woodland. Viciously satisfied, he lay in the bracken and watched Igraine, coming by a queer pleasure in considering her beauty, and in the knowledge that her very life was poised on the point of his sword. How little she thought of the man-dragon lying in his gilded scales under the green of the feathery fronds. Gorlois felt a kind of arrogance of ownership boasting itself in his heart. Certainly he held a means more sinister than the sword wherewith to perfect his vengeance and to preserve his honour. A very purgatory, bolgia upon bolgia, stretched out in prospect for the souls of the two who had done him this great evil. Gorlois made much of it, with a joy that was hard and durable as iron.

Igraine stirred at last from her stupor of immobility. Walking unsteadily, as though faint in the heat, she passed out from the trees with their mingling of sun and shadow, and went down through the long grass towards the pool and the cottage. Gorlois knelt in the bracken, and watched her with a smile. There was little chance of her escaping, and he could be as deliberate as he pleased over the matter. He inferred with reason that the cottage served her as a lodging in this woodland solitude, where she lay hid from all the world save from Uther, whose courtezan she was. Gorlois laughed—a keen, biting laugh—at the thought of it all. At least he would go back for his horse and spear, and make a fitting entry before the woman who was his wife.

Igraine, walking as though in her sleep, came into the cottage, and almost fell into Garlotte’s arms. The girl looked frightened, and very white about the lips. She could find nothing in her heart to say to Igraine; she helped her to the bed, and ran to the cupboard to get wine.

“Drink it,” she said, the cup rocking to and fro in her hand.

Igraine did her best, but spilt much of the stuff upon her  bosom, where it made a stain like blood. She sat on the edge of the bed, and looked into the distance with expressionless eyes. Her hands were very cold. Garlotte chafed them between her own, murmured a word or two, but could not bring herself to look into Igraine’s face. From the valley the bleating of sheep came up with a sudden wind, and the red roses flung their faces across the latticed casement.

Igraine was looking through the window into the deep green of the woods. She could see the place where Pelleas had left her, even the tree under which she had stood when she had pleaded with him without avail. How utterly quiet everything seemed. Surely June was an evil month for her; had it not brought double misery—and well-nigh broken her heart? And the end of it all was that she was to go back to a convent, to grey walls, vigils, and the sounding of a bell. Even that was better than being Gorlois’s wife.

Suddenly, as she sat and stared out of the casement, her body grew tense and eager as a bent bow. Her eyes hardened, lost their dreamy look; the hands that had rested in Garlotte’s gripped the girl’s wrists with a force that made her wince.

“Saddle the horse.”

The words came in a hard whisper. Garlotte stared at her, and did not stir.

“Child, never question me; be quick, on your life.”

Igraine, a different woman in a moment, had started up and taken her shield and helmet from the wall. Her sword was girded to her. Quick as thought, she gathered up her trailing hair, thrust on the casque, strapped it to the neck-plate under her surcoat. Garlotte, vastly puzzled, but inspired by Igraine’s earnestness, had hurried out with saddle and bridle over her shoulder. As she ran through the garden, she looked up to the woods and saw the reason of Igraine’s flurry. A knight had come out from the forest on a white horse, his armour flashing and blazing in the noonday sun. He had halted motionless at the edge of the  woodland, as though to mark what was passing beneath him in the valley.

Garlotte found Igraine armed beside her, as she stood by the grey horse under the cedar, and tugged with trembling fingers at the saddle straps. Bit and bridle were quickly in place. Igraine, moved by a hurried tenderness, gripped Garlotte to her with both arms.

“God guard you, little sister.”

“Where are you going, Igraine?”

“God knows!”

“Who is yonder knight?”

“Gorlois, my husband.”

Igraine climbed into the saddle from the girl’s knee. She dashed in the spurs and went at a gallop over the meadows towards the south. Gorlois’s white horse was coming at full stride through the feathery grass. The man was riding crosswise over the valley, bent on cutting off Igraine from the southern stretch of meadows, and driving her back upon the woods. It was Igraine’s hope to overtake Pelleas, and to put herself behind the barrier of his shield. Gorlois, guessing her desire, drove home the spurs, and hunted her in earnest.

Igraine headed the man and won a lead in the first half mile. Her grey horse plunged like a galley in a rough sea, and she held to the pommel of her saddle to keep her seat. Gorlois thundered at full gallop in her wake, the long grass flying before his horse’s hoofs like foam. He had thrown away his spear, and his eyes were set in a long stare on the galloping horse ahead. The zest of the chase had hold of him, and he used the spurs with heavy heel.

The green woods rolled down on them as the valley narrowed to its southern end. Igraine had never wandered so far from Garlotte’s cottage, and the ground was strange to her, nor did she know how the country promised. Riding at full gallop, she saw with a shudder of fear a barrier of rock running serrate across her path and closing the narrow valley like a wall. Gorlois saw it too, and sent up a shout  that made Igraine’s hate flame up into a kind of rapture. To have turned right or left up the steep grass slope towards the woods, would have given back to Gorlois the little start she had of him. With a numb chill at her heart she abandoned all hope of Pelleas, and turned to face the inevitable, and Gorlois her lord.

The man came up like a wind through the grass, and drew rein roughly some ten paces away. He laughed as he stared at Igraine, an uncouth, angering laugh like the yapping of a dog. He looked big and burly in the saddle, and the muscles stood out in his neck as he tilted his square jaw and stared down at his wife. Igraine had not looked upon his face since he had been smitten in battle. Its ugliness seemed to match his soul.

Gorlois lifted up his voice and mocked her.

“Ha, my brave, you are trapped, are you? Mother of God, but you make a good figure of a man. These many months I have missed you, wife in arms. And you have served in the pay of my lord the King. Good service and good pay, I warrant, and plenty of plunder. I will have that harness of yours hung over my bed.”

Igraine suffered him not so much as a word. She was furious, and in no mood to be scoffed down and cowed by mere insolent strength. She looked into Gorlois’s libidinous face from behind the vizor of her helmet, and thought her thoughts. Gorlois ran on in his mocking fashion. His bronzed face gleamed with sweat, and a rough lascivious smile showed up his strong white teeth to her.

“Ha, now, madame! deliver, and let us have sight of you. The King loves your lips, eh! They are red, and your arms are soft. I warrant he found your bosom a good pillow. Uther was ever such a solemn soul, such a monk, such a father. It is good for the heart to hear of him knotted up in a woman’s hair.”

Igraine shook with the immensity of her hate.

“You were ever a foul-tongued hound,” she said.

“Am I your echo?”

 

“I wish you were dead.”

“So said the King.”

“So you spied on us?”

Gorlois set up a scoffing laugh, showing his red throat like a hungry bird.

“And saw my wife the King’s courtezan; ha, what a jest! Come, madame, let us be going; your honest home waits for you. I will chatter to you of moralities by the way.”

He had hardly delivered himself of the saying, when Igraine’s hand clutched at the handle of her sword. She jerked the spurs in with her heels. Her grey horse started forward like a bolt; blundered into Gorlois; caught him cross-counter, and rolled his white stallion down into the grass. Igraine had lashed out at the shock. Her sword caught Gorlois’s arm, and cut through sleeve and arm-guard to the bone. As he rolled with his horse in the grass, she wheeled round, and clapping in the spurs, rode hard uphill for the forest.

Gorlois, hot as a furnace, scrambled to his feet, and dragged his horse up by the bridle. Half off the saddle, with empty stirrups dangling, he went at a canter for the yawn of the wood. His slashed arm burnt as though it had been touched with a branding-iron; blood dripped down upon his horse’s white shoulder. He was soon steady in the saddle and galloping full pelt after Igraine, the ground slipping under his horse’s hoofs like water, the long grass flying like spray.

Igraine’s horse lost ground up the slope; he had less heart than Gorlois’s beast, and was weaker in the haunches. By the time they reached the trees, Igraine had twenty yards to her credit and no more. She saw her chance gone, and heard Gorlois close in her wake, caught sideways a glimpse of plunging hoofs and angry harness. Drawing aside suddenly with all her strength, she let Gorlois sweep up on her flank and pass her by some yards. Before he could turn, she rode into him as fast as she could gather; her sword clattered on his helmet,—sparks flew.

 

Gorlois wrenched round and put his shield above his head.

“By God,—hold off,—would you have me fight a woman?”

A swinging cut rattled on his shoulder-plate for answer.

Gorlois rapped out an oath and drew his sword.

“Hold off!”

His roar seemed to shake the trees. To Igraine it was the mere meaningless threatening of a sea. She struck home again and again while Gorlois foined with her; more than once she reached his flesh.

Gorlois’s grim patience gave way at last; a clean cut drew spurting blood from his shoulder.

“God curse you!—take it then.”

He swung his sword with a great downward sweep, a streak of steel that struck crackling fire from the burnished casque. Igraine’s arm dropped like a broken bough; for half a breath she sat straight in the saddle, swayed, sank slantwise, and slid down into the long grass. Her horse stood still at her side, looking at her with mild blue eyes.

Gorlois gave a queer short laugh. He looked frightened for the moment; the flush of anger had passed and left him pale. He dismounted, bent over Igraine, unstrapped her helmet. She was only dazed by the blow; blood trickled red amid her hair, and her blue eyes stared him in the face.

She lifted up a hand with a bitter cry of defiance.

“Strike, strike, and make an end.”

Gorlois’s grimness came back, and his eyes hardened.

“That were too good for you.”

“Devil!”

“By God, I shall tame you—never fear!”