Seven days had passed, and Tristan was still lodged under Rosamunde’s
roof. Of his sister Columbe he had won no word, yet he tarried in Joyous
Vale in Rosamunde’s service. The woman had need of a loyal sword.
Tristan had learnt to serve her there with the quick instinct of a
great-hearted dog. There was much of the mother in her mood towards the
man; nor did she dower his face with any deeper passion.
Shadows had deepened round Joyous Vale, and vague rumours had come from
the south, whisperings of sword and torch and the march of armed men. A
shepherd had seen dim sails upon the sea. As to what summer would bring
to them, prophecy stood silent. Rosamunde’s state was no easy one, as
Tristan had gathered, for she was watched and spied upon by her
husband’s men. Ronan’s jealousy was as a snake coiled in the grass,
ready to dart and flesh its fangs. She could no more trust him than she
could trust a priest. Moreover, his malice hindered her cause, barred
her from plotting to save her people. Samson alone could help her in
this, and Ronan’s jealousy kept the two apart.
It was the morning of Tristan’s second Sabbath there. He was on the
terrace burnishing his arms, when Isabel, Rosamunde’s woman, crept out
to him from the tower. He was to take horse and follow her lady that
morning. She had need of him, and trusted his honour.
Tristan, having saddled and bridled his horse, rode out and met
Rosamunde at the gate. She was mounted on a white palfrey, her woman
Isabel beside her on a mule. Tristan saluted them, a silent discretion
in his deep-set eyes. To him Rosamunde’s beauty was as the breath of
June.
They rode out down the slope of the hill, where the gardens amid the
thickets were ablaze under the noon sun. Rosamunde was clad in a green
robe, with a girdle of red leather shaped to her figure. She rode on
before Tristan and the woman Isabel, as though not sorry of solitude and
freedom from stone walls. There was a calm unapproachableness about her,
which, when she so willed it, became as a wall of glimmering ice. Her
words, often imperious and curt, would have suggested insolence on the
lips of one less fair. Tristan had seen her angered but once. There had
been something of the splendour of a stormy sunset about the mood, a red
rush of passion that had bewitched him more than smiles.
As they left the town behind a screen of poplars, Rosamunde called
Tristan to her, but gestured Isabel to remain behind. Her lips had much
scorn on them that day, scorn for her husband, jejune and jealous pedant
that he was. Of the red wine of her love Lord Ronan had tasted little.
She was unsmirched as a rose, pure as an ivory palace conceived in some
deep dream.
Tristan eyed her over his massive shoulder, wondering much what was in
her heart. A mask of thought covered her face, as she gazed ahead into
the deeps of the woods. True, there was much in her heart to breed
unrest, yet Tristan was as a child in a temple, ignorant of the many and
manifold visions stirring within her brain. La Vallée Joyeuse stretched
out before her, like a calm sea untouched by the wind. Yet beyond the
mountains the black banners of war gathered. Fanaticism was streaming
like fire to purge and to destroy. Had not the Pope armed the southern
nobles against the land? Had not Sir Parsival put his legate to the
sword?
Rosamunde, great lady that she was, feared not for herself the peril of
a zealot’s war. The people of La Vallée Joyeuse were to her as children.
She was their lady, and they loved her, even because she was gracious
and merciful, a friend set above them like an altared saint. It was her
spirit that had opened their rude hearts to Samson’s heresy. She, the
first convert in mind and soul, had drawn them after her, as a
shepherdess draws her sheep.
As for the lords and barons of the Seven Streams, they were scattered
wide amid their woods and hills. Samson had preached and they had
listened. Mewed in their mountains and their forest gloom, they were
deaf to the thunder of ecclesiastic wrath. Ronan of Joyous Vale, first
lord of the province, was mere selfish clay, careless of his people,
jealous of his wife. His very malice made her mute to him. On Samson,
rugged Titan piling mountains against the Papal Jove, rested the one
ambition of the land.
Drawing Tristan to her that day, Rosamunde unbosomed something of her
care to him. There was a serene stateliness in all her words, a tender
dignity as of one who stoops, from love, not pride. The man seemed
nothing but a casual friend, cast in her path by the hand of
circumstance. She trusted him, had trusted from the first, because his
face was ugly and his words came slow.
Tristan gathered the truth from her as they rode through the meadows.
There was much shrewdness in his turbulent brain. Moreover, Rosamunde
had taken hold upon his heart. Sympathies are warm where love treads
fast; comprehension kindles when the torch burns bright.
“Lady,” he said to her, in his curt, calm way, “of the burden you
bear—I am wise—in measure. Our cross bulks the heavier when the
shoulder is chafed.”
“Ah,” she said, with a flash of the eye, “these valley folk are as
children to me. I have no babe of my own, so the burden is honest.”
Tristan recalled such war lore as he had learnt from the rough mariners
of Purple Isle. He would have served her more gladly with his sword than
with his tongue. She had tempted his counsel; he bent his brows and
played the philosopher.
“Madame,” he said, “I have heard men say that our fears are like
hillocks seen through mist, bulking like mountains through the fog. I
have found billows less big when I have breasted them. As for this land
of yours, it is a maze of mountains and of woods. You can baulk your
enemies, as King David baulked Saul.”
She plucked the strategy from the speech like a gem out of a casket, and
played with it to her own good comfort.
“To leave our homes,” she said, “and take to the wilds. There is wisdom
in the plan, and yet——”
Tristan attempted more stoical counsel.
“Better let your homes burn than your bodies,” he said. “Scattered and
in hiding, you will provide no martyrs for these holy ravagers. They
will return empty by their own tracks. Ten men are worth a hundred in
the mountains.”
“Ah,” she said, with sudden passionate scorn, “if I could but trust my
husband!”
“Trust yourself, madame,” quoth the man on the black horse.
“One staunch friend perhaps. What then?”
Tristan, full of the ready zeal of youth, set forth his faith to her
with a gesture of the hand. He went red under his black brows, as though
half ashamed of such an outburst of passion.
“Madame,” he said to her, “here is one sword more. I am young—you
smile, by God—I have the strength of three. No man in Joyous Vale shall
laugh twice in my face.”
“Ah, Tristan,” she said with deepened colour, “I trust you well. Why
should I burden you with another’s yoke? What is Joyous Vale to you?”
“Madame,” he said very simply, “my shoulders are broad; try them.”
“To-day, I trust you,” she retorted slowly. “We meet Samson in yonder
wood.”
Lines ran across Tristan’s broad forehead; his mouth hardened. He was as
a man who felt himself outfaced, disarmed. There was no guile towards
him in the woman’s heart, and yet his youth recoiled from her with
jealous spleen.
“Madame,” he said half sullenly, looking no longer on her face, “I have
promised faith to you. It is enough.”
Before them rose a great barrier of trees, a larch wood set upon the
green bosom of a hill, whose slopes fell away towards a vague wilderness
of pines. Many flowers and herbs were in bloom upon the hillside.
Tristan, sullen of face, drew apart from Rosamunde as they mounted the
slope and entered the alleys of the deepening wood. The sun poured
through, streaking and ribbing the gloom with gold. Rosamunde’s green
gown gleamed richly above her palfrey’s white flanks.
Deeper and deeper they threaded the shade, the grass track growing less
green, dusted with cones and the fallen wind wrack of the trees.
Whortleberry and heather grew there, with great pools of gorse. The
silence increased, hanging like a purple pall, the sunlight plashing
fitfully over the multitudinous boughs.
Deep in a dwindling aisle, they saw a man in a black robe seated upon a
fallen tree. He rose, came towards them, when he marked the white brow
of Rosamunde’s horse. Tristan, watching the woman’s face, a half-jealous
gleam deep in his eyes, saw the colour increase the rose-white richness
of her skin. She breathed more rapidly, held her head higher, watched
Samson keenly as he came towards her under the trees.
Drawing near, he put his cowl back from his face, kissed the hand she
stretched to him, held her stirrup while she dismounted. She cast her
bridle over Tristan’s wrist, threw a rapid glance at him as he sat
hunched and sullen upon his horse.
“Wait,” she said with an imperious tone tinging her voice, “watch, keep
guard.”
Tristan, turning with a word, took the white palfrey and his own black
horse, tethered them to a tree on the eastern side of the ride. Isabel
had joined him on her mule, a smile on her broad mouth as she noted the
man’s sour face. Samson and Rosamunde were pacing the grass together,
looking in each other’s eyes as they talked. There was much on either
tongue, question and counter-question, words as to the war and the
gathering in the south.
The woman Isabel had slipped lightly from her mule. She was a plump,
yellow-skinned wench, with roguish eyes and a red patch of colour over
either cheek-bone. Her tongue was equal to her temper. Tristan, leaning
against the trunk of a tree, paid no heed to her as he stared at Samson
and the lady. The man’s stride spoke of his power; he gesticulated as he
talked, and his words flowed fast. Rosamunde’s green gown swept the
grass in stately fashion. She walked with arched neck and supple waist,
her hair glimmering under its golden net, her red-slippered feet gliding
glibly over the turf. Tristan gazed at her and marvelled. For the moment
he half hated her for her loveliness and for the calm pride that kept
him chained.
He awoke to find the woman Isabel at his elbow, peering with parted lips
into his face. She smiled in her eyes as they met his, touched her mouth
with a fat white hand, moved nearer to him with a little rustle of a
sigh like a summer breeze through orange bloom.
“Coz, we are well sorted,” she said with a titter. “A silver cross for
your thoughts, boy. Why so sour of face?”
Tristan scowled at her betwixt the brows, and unbent nothing to her
coquetry.
“Ha, cousin,” he said, “men find the moon dull when the sun is away.”
“Sun!” she retorted, “you ugly stump! Keep your eyes wide. I am too
bright for such as you.”
“Shine hard,” he said to her with a smile. “I shall have no need of a
shield.”
She tightened her girdle, smoothed her gown, and eyed Tristan under
drooping lids.
“Samson is a handsome fellow,” she said.
Tristan pursed up his mouth and answered her nothing. Rosamunde and the
preacher had passed deeper into the wood, and were out of sight and
hearing. Tristan would have given much to have known what passed between
them under the trees.
“Samson,” said the girl at his elbow, “Samson, sirrah, has the wit to be
courteous to a lady. He has no tongue like a tag of undressed leather,
nor a face like a dinted buckler red with rust.”
Tristan played with the buckle of his sword belt and wished the woman
Isabel a man.
“Ha, cousin,” she ran on, “I have heard of a horse-boy stealing a pair
of red shoes, because they had covered a lady’s toes. As for her heart,
it was a pearl, a great white pearl, sirrah, not to be breathed upon and
handled by grooms. Hark! holy saints, what’s amiss in the wood?”
Isabel had started from her malice like a woman who sees a snake
twisting at her feet. She stood rigid, with eyes dilating, her lips
apart, the colour gone from her face. Through the alleys of the wood had
come a sudden outcry, the loud voice of a man challenging a foe, the
passionate declaiming of an angry woman. Tristan, with his back taut as
the straining mast of a ship, stood snuffing the air, his muscles
quivering, his broad chest spread. In the flash of a second he had
plunged down the grass ride at a run, unbuckling his sword as he ran,
flinging aside belt and scabbard. Voices, passionate and clamorous, were
playing through the trees. They winged on Tristan’s heels, as he sped
with tight mouth and kindling eyes under sun and shadow.
Coming upon a narrow glade in the wood, he saw the scene spread out
before him. With her back to a tree stood Rosamunde, her eyes ablaze,
her head held high. Before her, with uplifted knife, his robe gathered
as a buckler in his left hand, stood Samson the Heretic, fronting four
armed men who crouched round him like hounds about a boar. Even as
Tristan came, they sprang together upon the monk, dragging him down in a
moiling heap upon the grass. The fourth snatched out at Rosamunde,
caught the neckband of her gown, rent it to the girdle as she strained
from him with both hands set upon his face.
Tristan leapt in as though his blood had changed to fire. The man who
had seized on Rosamunde sprang away with a red throat and an empty doom.
Turning, Tristan plunged upon the three, who struggled and writhed over
the powerful figure of the priest. Plucking the uppermost by the girdle,
even as he would have plucked a beetle from a stone, Tristan threw him
full against the stem of a tree. The man’s breath groaned out of him; he
twitched and lay still. Samson, bleeding in the brow, had risen upon the
others with a hand on either throat. Tristan, dodging round, ran his
sword through the body of the taller man. Samson, bleeding and
breathless, rose from the carcass of the other, and made way for
Tristan’s blow.
Sudden silence fell upon the pool of death. Rosamunde stood with Tristan
and the monk, staring at the brief havoc their hands had wrought. The
grass was stained with red. Samson, shaking the blood out of his eyes,
turned to Tristan with outstretched hand. Their manhood seemed to meet
in that one strong grip. Rosamunde, tearing cloth from the border of her
gown, came forward and caught Samson by the sleeve.
The monk knelt to her while she bound the green cloth about his
forehead. Tristan stood apart from them, his eyes still ablaze, his
great chest rising and falling beneath his hauberk. Jealousy, quenched
for the moment, rose again in the hot blood that played about his brain.
Turning upon his heel with a last glance at the man lying against the
tree, he strode away towards the horses, where the woman Isabel stood
with a face white as swan’s-down. To her querulous terror he gave no
heed, for there was still bitterness gnawing at his heart. If he had
been the wounded one, would Rosamunde have rent her gown?
Some minutes passed before she came towards them under the trees. She
came alone, pale and distraught, yet cold outwardly as stone. Samson had
parted from her in the woods; their words had been brief, significant as
silence. She said nothing to the two who waited; pointed them to their
saddles, and neither dared to question her, so imperious and clouded was
her face. Then they mounted, rode out, and headed homewards over the
fields.