BOOK III

THE WAR IN WALES

I

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 implacable 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.

II

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.

III

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 amphitheatre, 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.

IV

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.

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, "buckling 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."

VI

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.

VII

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."