Chapter XIV: Book IV: Tintagel (1)

I

The castle of Tintagel stood out above the sea on a headland that rose bluffly above the white foam that girdled it. The waves swinging in from the west seemed to lift ever a hoarse chant about the place with their perpetual grumbling against the cliff. Colour shifted upon the bosom of the sea. Blue, green, and grey it would sweep into the west, netted gold with the sun, banded with foam, or spread with purple beneath the drifting shadow of a cloud. Hills rose in the east. Between these crags and the sea rolled a wilderness cloven by green valleys and a casual stream. Tintagel seemed to crown a region grand and calamitous as the sea itself.

The sun was going down over the waters, watched by a flaxen-haired lad squatting on the wall of an outstanding turret. His legs dangled over the battlements, and his heels smote against the weathered stone. There was a premature look of age upon his face, a certain wistful wisdom as though he had completed his novitiate early in the world. His blue eyes, large and sensitive as a dog's, stared away over the golden edge of the sea.

This was Jehan the bastard, a pathetic shred of humanity, thin and motherless, blessed with nothing save a dreamy nature that stood him in poor stead in such a hold as Tintagel. Like any mongrel owned of none, he was given over largely to the cuffs and curses of the community. Men called him a fool, and treated him accordingly. He was scullion, horse-boy, pot-bearer, by turns. The men of the garrison could make nothing of a lad who wept at a word, never showed fight, but crept away to mope and snivel in a corner. He had earned epithets enough, but little else; and the rude Philistines of the place, beings of beer and bone, knew little of those finer instincts with which Nature chooses on occasion to endow a soul.

At times Jehan would creep away up this turret stair to live and breathe for a season with no friend save the ever-complaining sea. He would perch himself on the battlements with the salt wind blowing through his hair, the rocks beneath him boiling foam from the waves that swept in from the west. The perch was perilous enough, but the lad had no fear of the windy height, or of the waves breaking against the pediment of the cliff. To him man alone was terrible. There appeared to be a confident understanding between Nature and himself, a sense of good fellowship with his surroundings, such as the chamois may feel for its mountain pinnacle, and the bird for the tree that bears its nest.

Jehan's thin face was turned often towards the central tower of the castle, a square campanile that stood in the centre of the main court, forming a species of citadel or keep. High up in the wall there was a window, a streak of gloom that showed nothing of the room within. Over Jehan this window possessed a peculiar influence. It was the casement-royal of romance. Day by day, ever since Gorlois had come south again, the lad had watched for the white oval of a face that would look out momentarily from the shadow. Sometimes he saw a woman's hand, a golden head glimmering in the sun. Jehan had seen Gorlois's wife brought a second time into Tintagel. Her staring grief had taken strange hold upon his heart. Ever since, with the kindled chivalry of a boy, he had done great deeds in dreams, handled a sword, taken strong men by the throat. The imagined event had fired the soul in him, and made him the disciple of these sad and wistful eyes.

A bell smote in the court below. Its iron clapper dinned the fancies out of Jehan's head, calling him to the menial realities of life. It was the supper hour, and the men of the guard would be strenuously inclined over the steaming pot, the wine-jar, and the twisting spit. Jehan left his turret with the pathetic cynicism of an autumn twilight. Little drudge that he was, he yet had the inward independence to despise the folk who fed like swine, and terrorised him with pure blatant barbarism. He could listen to their blasphemy, their ribald songs, and breathe the moral garlic of their tongues with a disrelish that never wavered. He had none of the innate impudence of youth. Had he been of coarser fibre the men would soon have made a lewd and insolent imp of him, but he was spared such a fate by a certain spiritual instinct that recoiled from the vapouring brutality of it all.

There seemed more ribaldry abroad in the guard-room that night than was customary even in so pious a place. The company, much like a pack of hounds, hunted jest after jest from cover, and gave tongue royally with a zest that would have been admirable in any other cause. Lamps swirled ill-smelling smoke about the room. There was a lavish scattering of armour along the benches, and the floor was dirtier than the floor of any tavern.

Jehan's ears tingled as he went among the men, climbing over sprawling legs, edging between stools and benches. The air reeked of mead, and the miasma of loose talk rising from twenty throats. A woman's name was tossed from tongue to tongue, bandied about with a familiar insolence that made him blush for her like a brother. His heart burnt with the bestial impudence, the sweat, the foul breath of it all. Yet before these red-bearded faces, these vociferous mouths, he was a coward, hating himself for his fear, hating the men for the sheer tyranny of the flesh that awed him.

To hear in this den such things spoken of a woman, and of such a woman! That she was true his quick instinct could aver in the very maw of the world. There was the silver calm of the full moon in her face, and she had for him the steadfastness, the incomprehensible eloquence, of the stars. Were these men blind, that the staring grief, the divine scorn, that had smitten him from the first with a vague awe, were invisible to them? Their coarse cynicism was brutally incomprehensible to Jehan. Having a soul, he could not see with the eyes of the sot or the adulterer, nor had he learnt to mistrust the intelligence of his own heart.

As he laboured from man to man with his jug of mead to keep the brown horns brimming, he thought of the golden head that had glimmered in the criss-cross light of the yews in the castle garden. The woman had been faithless, to put popular report mildly; and Gorlois was a hard man; he would see her dead before he pitied her. Jehan was so far gone in dreams for the moment that he tripped over an outstretched pair of legs, and shattered his stone jar on the floor.

A "God curse you," and lavish largesse in the way of kicks, recompensed the dreamer for this contempt of office. Jehan, bruised, spattered with mead, crawled away under the benches, and took refuge in a dark corner, where he could recover his wits behind the piled pikes of the gentlemen who cursed him. Such incidents were the trivialities of a menial existence. Jehan wiped his face on his sleeve, choked down his sobs with a dirty fist, and devoutly hoped to be forgotten.

Meanwhile a broad figure had stood framed in the doorway, and drawn the attention of the company from the boy squirming like an eel along the floor. Jehan, peeping round the pile of pikes, saw a woman in a scarlet gown standing under a lamp that flared on the threshold. The woman was of unusual girth and height. Her black hair streamed about her sensual red face like clouds about a winter sun. Her neck was like the neck of a bull, and her bare arms would have shamed the arms of a smith. Jehan watched her as he would have watched a natural enemy, a thing whose destiny was to be brutish and to destroy.

Men called her Malmain, the evil-handed. She was a cub of the forest, strong as a bear, cruel as any wolf. Years ago she had been caught as a child in the woods, tracked down to a rocky hole, a whelp that clawed and bit, and knew nothing of the speech of men. She had been brought to Tintagel and bred in the place, the pet of the soldiery, who had taught her the use of arms and the smack of wine. In ten years she had grown to her full strength, a creature wise in all the uncomely things of life, coarse, bold, and violent. Last of all, Gorlois, with a genius for vengeance, had given her charge of Igraine, his wife.

The woman was good to look upon in a large, florid fashion. She came in and sat herself down on a stool at the end of one long wooden table, and stared round with her hard brown eyes. One man passed her a cup, another the wine jar. She tossed the former aside with an air of scorn, and buried her face in the mouth of the jar. When she had taken her pull she spat on the floor with a certain quaint deliberation, and wiped her mouth on the back of her bare arm.

A wicked innuendo came from a man grinning at her elbow. Malmain laughed and pulled at her lip. Her presence conferred no leavening influence upon the place, and her sex made no claim for decorum. She was more than capable of caring for herself in the company of these gentlemen of the guard, for she could take her laugh and liquor with the best of them, and claim a solid respect for a fist that could smite like a mace.

She flustered up a sigh that ended in a hiccough. "I am tired," she said, stretching her arms and showing the breadth and depth of her great chest.

"Go to bed, fragile one, and shake the castle."

"Little chance of that; who says I snore?"

"Gildas the trumpeter."

"Curse him; how should he know?"

The man questioned grinned, and shrugged his shoulders.

"I meddle no further," he said. "How is the lord's wife?"

Malmain licked her lips and reached for the pot. She tilted it with such gusto that the liquor overflowed and ran down her chin. After more cat's-pawing and a snivel she waxed communicative with a matter-of-fact coarseness, and like an old hound soon had the rest tonguing in her track.

"Gorlois will break her yet," quoth one.

"Or bury her."

"A fit fellow, too,--and a gentleman; why can't she knuckle to him and play the lady?"

"The woman's worth three of that chit with the white face; a fine brat ought to come of it."

Malmain showed her strong white teeth.

"Somehow," she said, "there's no more cross-grained creature than a woman with a grievance, especially when she has been baulked of her man. Let a woman speak for a woman, though I break the spirit of her with a whip. There's less fighting now; by Jesus, you should see her bones staring through her skin."

Jehan had listened to their talk behind the pile of pikes in the corner. The blatant cynicism of it all chilled him like a March wind. He thought of the sad, strong face, the patient scorn, the youth, the prophetic May of her of whom they spoke. There was a certain terrible realism here that tore the tender bosom of his dreams.

The room stifled him with its smoke and stew. Crawling round by the wall on all fours, he gained the door and crept out unnoticed into the dark. In the sky above the stars were shining. The world seemed big with peace, and the face of the heavens shone mild and clear as the face of God.

Jehan stood under the shadow of the wall and looked at the window high up in the tower. It was black and lustreless, and only the dust of the stars shone up in the vast canopy of gloom. Jehan shook his fist at the dark pile of stone. Then he went up to the roof of the little turret and watched the sea foaming dimly on the rocks below.

II

"I would have you know, madame, that every woman is pleasing to man,--saving his own wife."

"Who in turn is pleasing to his friend,--even if he chance to be a king."

The woman on the couch tossed her slipper from her small foot, and struck a series of snapping chords from the guitar that she held in her bosom. There was a certain rich insolence in her look,--a sensuous wickedness that was wholly poetic. The man bent forward from his stool, lifted the slipper, and kissed the foot whence it had fallen. He won a smile from the face bowered up in cushions, a smile like sunlight on a brazen mirror, brilliant, clear, metallic. There was a fine flush on her face, and the star on her bosom rose and fell as her breathing seemed to quicken and deepen for the moment. Her fingers plucked waywardly at the strings as she looked out from the window towards the sea.

"I love life," she said.

"Surely."

"The pomp, the pride, the glory of being great. I have a future for you."

A kind of spiritual echo burnt in the man's eyes.

"And my wife?"

"You are still something of a madman."

"So you say."

"I--indeed!"

He bent forward with a sudden eruption of passion and kissed her foot again, till she drew it away under the folds of her dress.

"Ah, you are still a little mad," she said, turning and smiling at him with her quick eyes; "bide so, my dear lord; I can suffer it."

"And yet--"

"I hate her! I hate her! I hate her!"

"Bah!--she cannot harm you."

"I hate her for being a martyr, for being strong, for thinking herself a saint. Pah!--how I could scratch her proud, big face. She humiliates me because of her misery, because she is contented to suffer. It is impossible to trample such a woman underfoot."

The man gave a queer laugh.

"You are still envious."

"I envious,--I!"

"Because she is never humbled, never asks mercy."

"Curse her, let her die! Come and fan me, I am sleepy."

On the southern side of the central tower, between it and the State quarters of the castle, lay the garden of Tintagel. It was a lustrous nook, barriered by grey walls, sheltered from the sea wind, and open to the full stare of the sun. Sombre cypresses lifted their spires above flower-beds mosaicked red, gold, and blue. The paths were tiled with coloured stones, and bordered with helichryse. In the centre of all a pool glimmered from a square of bright green grass.

The window in the tower that had so seized upon the lad Jehan's heart looked out upon this square of colour that shone beneath the extreme blue of the summer sky. The casement was an open mihrab whence tragedy could look out upon the world. The glory of the sea, the sky, the cliffs, contrasted with the twilight tint of the prison room.

Gorlois's wife sat in the window-seat and watched the waves and the horizon with vacant eyes. She was clad in a tattered gown of grey. Her hair had been shorn close, leaving but a golden aureole over neck, ears, and forehead. One hand was wrapped in a blood-stained cloth, and there were marks left by a whip upon her face. Her gown reached hardly to her ankles, showing bare feet and wheals, where the scourge had been. She was very frail, very worn, very spiritual.

Her face was the face of one who looks into the solemn sadness of the past. Her lips were pressed together as in pain, and a certain divine despair dwelt in her deep eyes like light reflected from some twilight pool. The muscles stood limned in her neck like cords, and the fingers of one hand were hooked in the neck-band of her gown.

Many days had passed since the life in Garlotte's valley. They had taught Igraine the deeds that might result from the stirring of the passions of such a man as Gorlois. It was a strenuous age, and men's souls were cast in large mould either to the image of good or evil. Even Boethius could not escape the malice of a great king. Attila had scourged the nations with a scourge of steel. Old things were passing amid disruption and despair. Gorlois had caught the Titanic, violent spirit of the age. His personality had won a lurid emphasis from tragedies that shook the world.

Igraine had suffered many things, shame, torture, famine, since she had fallen again into his power. The man had shown no pity, only a fine fecundity in his devices for the breaking of her spirit. He could be barbarous as any Hun, and though she had guessed his fibre, it was not till these latter days that she learnt to know him more fully to her own distress. It was not the physical alone that oppressed her; Gorlois had imagination, ingenuity; he made her moral sufferings keener than the lash, and subordinated the flesh to the spirit. Igraine withstood him through it all. She felt in her heart that she was going to die.

As she sat at the window, the sound of laughter came up suddenly from the garden, glowing in the sunlight. Mere mockery might have been its inspiration, so light, so merry, and so mellow was it. Igraine heard it, and leant forward over the sill to gain a broader view of the tiled walks and flower-beds below. She saw a woman dart out of a doorway in the wall opposite, and run in very dainty fashion, holding her skirts gathered in one hand, the other flourishing a posy of red roses. As she ran she laughed with an unrestrained extravagance that had in it something sensual and alluring.

Igraine watched her with a badge of colour in her cheeks. The woman in the garden was clad in a tunic of sky-blue silk that ran down her body like flowing water. The tunic was cut low at the neck so as to show her white breast, whereon shone a little cross of gold. Her hair shimmered loose about her in the sunlight like an amber veil. Her lips were tinctured with vermilion; her face seemed white as apple blossom, and shadows had been painted under her lids. She moved with a graceful, sinuous air, her blue gown rippling about her, her small feet, slippered with silver embroidery, flashing glibly over the stones.

A man was following her among the cypresses, and Igraine saw that it was Gorlois, sunburnt and strong, with ruddy arms, and the strenuous zest of manhood. There was something unpleasing in the muscular movement of his mood. He was Græcian and antique, a Mars striding with the red face of no godly love; sheer bovine vigour in the curves of his strong throat.

Igraine saw the woman run round the garden, laughing as she went, her hair blowing behind her in the sunlight. She turned up the central path that led to the pool, with its little lawn closed by a balustrade of carved stone. Morgan la Blanche stood by the water and watched Gorlois abjuring the paths and striding towards her, knee-deep in blue and purple. He leapt the balustrade, and stood looking at the woman laughing at him through her hair.

The red roses were thrust into Gorlois's face as he came to closer quarters. There was a short scuffle before the girl abandoned herself to him with a kind of sensuous languor. Igraine saw her body wrapped up in the man's brown arms.

It was a minute or more before the two became aware of the face at the window overhead. Igraine found them staring up at her, Gorlois's swarthy face close to the woman's light aureole of hair as she stood buttressed against his broad chest. By instinct Igraine drew back into the room, till pride conquered this shrinking impulse. She leant forward upon her hands and stared down at the two, allegorical as Truth shaming Falsehood.

The woman, meanwhile, had drawn aside from Gorlois's arms. She was pulling the roses to pieces, and scattering the red petals on the water, and there was a peevish sneer upon her lips.

"Ever this white death," she said.

Igraine saw the impatient gesturing of Morgan's hands, the tap of the embroidered slipper on the grass. The woman's words seemed to trouble Gorlois; he stood aside, and did not look at her, even when she edged away, watching him over her shoulder. It was a conflict of dishonourable sensations. Morgan jerked a quick look from her large blue eyes at the window overhead. There was nothing but rampant egotism upon her face, and it was evident that she trusted on Gorlois to follow her. He was staring swarthily into the water as though he watched the fish moving in the shallow basin. He hardly heeded Morgan as she picked up her pride and left him. Other thoughts seemed to have strong hold upon his mind, and he stood at gaze till the blue gown disappeared under the arch of the door it had so lately quitted.

Gorlois leant against the balustrade and pulled his moustachios. His eyes had no very spiritual look, and his red lower lip drooped like an unfurled scroll. More than once he cast a quick, restless glance at the window in the tower. Irresolution seemed to run largely through his mood, and it was some while before he gathered his manhood and passed up an avenue of cypresses towards the tower. At the foot of the stairway he stood pulling his lip, and staring at the stones, oppressed by a certain dubiousness of thought.

Climbing the stairs, he found the woman Malmain in an alcove, asleep on a settle. Her head had fallen back against the wall, her mouth was agape, and she was snoring with her black hair tumbled over her face. Gorlois woke her with his foot.

The woman started up with the growl of a watch-dog, stared, and stood silent. Gorlois, curt as a man burdened with a purpose, spoke few words to her. She opened a door by a certain, mechanical catch, went in, and closed it after her.

Half an hour passed.

The door rolled again on its hinges. Malmain came out and stood before Gorlois on the threshold. She was breathing hard, and sweat stood on her face. Gorlois gave her a look and a word, passed in, and slammed the door after him. Malmain sat down on the settle, wiped her face, and listened.

For a minute or more she heard nothing. An indefinite sound broke the silence, like the moving of branches in a wind at night. There was the sound of hard breathing, and the creaking of wood. Something clattered to the floor.

"God judge between you and me."

The voice was half-stifled as with the choking bitterness of great shame. Malmain grinned in her corner, and leant her head against the door to listen the better.

"What of God!" said the man's voice with a certain hot scorn; "what is God?"

"Take your knife and end it."

"Madame wife, there is good in you yet."

There was silence again, like a lull betwixt ecstasies of rain. Presently the woman's voice was heard, low, sullen, shamed.

"Man--man, let me die!"

"Own me master."

"You--you! How can I lie in my throat!"

"Is truth so new a thing?"

"You have taught me to love death."

Malmain heard Gorlois's hand upon the door. She opened it forthwith; he came out upon the threshold. His hands were trembling, and his face seemed dull, his eyes passionless.

"I shall tame you yet," he said.

"You can kill me!" came the retort from the room.

III

There was in Tintagel a certain man named Mark, a legionary of the guard. The castle had known him two months or less, when he had come south into Cornwall with Gorlois's troop from Caerleon. He was an olive-skinned mercenary, black of beard and black of eye. In the guard-room he had become vastly popular; he could harp, tell a tale, hurl the bar, with any man in the garrison. He was strong and agile as a panther, and as ready with his tongue as he was with his sword. His comrades thought him a merry rapscallion enough, a good fellow whose life was rounded comfortably by the needs of the flesh. He could drink and jest, eat, sleep, and be happy.

Women have quick instinct for a man of mettle, one whose capabilities for pleasing are somewhat of a perilous kind. Malmain of the Forest had taken note of Mark's black eyes, his olive skin, the immense self-control that seemed to bridle him. He had a fine leg, and a most gentlemanly hand. Moreover, his inimitable impudence, his supple wit, took her fancy, seeing that he was a man who professed a superb scorn for petticoats, and posed as being wise beyond his generation. There was a certain insolent independence about him that seemed to make of him a philosopher, a person pleased with the puerilities of others.

It came about that Malmain--clumsy, lumbering creature--took to heaving stupendous sighs under the very nose of Mark of the guard. She had not been bred to reservations. If she liked a man, she told him the truth, with a certain admirable frankness. If she hated him, he could always rely upon her fist. Any ethical principle was like a book to her--very curious, no doubt, but absolutely beyond her understanding.

Now the man Mark was a person of intelligence and discretion. He needed the woman's friendship for diplomatic reasons snared up in his own long skull, and since such partisanship could be won by a look and a word, he soon had Malmain very much at his service. Shrewd and cunning wench that she was in the course of nature, she was somewhat easily fooled by the man's suave impudence. She haunted Mark like a shadow when off her duty,--a very substantial shadow, be it noted,--and made it extravagantly plain that she was blessed after all with some of the sentiments of a woman.

One evening, being in the mood, she caught him in a bye-passage as he came off guard. He was in armour, and carried a spear slanted over his shoulder. His burnished casque seemed to give a fine setting to his strong, sallow face.

Malmain, generous creature, filled the passage like a gate. Her face matched her scarlet smock, and she was grinning like some grotesque head from the antique. Mark came to a halt, and leaning on his spear, looked at her in the most bland manner possible. He did not trust women overmuch, and he mistrusted Malmain in particular. Moreover, she smacked of the wine-cask.

The woman edged close, and shook a fist in his face with a certain bluff enthusiasm.

"A bargain! a bargain!"

The passage was open to the west, and a glare of sunlight shimmered into Mark's eyes. He could only see the woman as a great blur, a mass of trailing hair, a loose, exuberant smock haloed with gold.

"Ha! my cherub, you seem in fettle."

The fist still flickered in his face.

"A bargain! a bargain!"

"Mother of mercy! you are in such a devil of a hurry."

"A kiss for what's in my hand."

"A buffet--big one--a rush-ring, or a garter?"

"That tongue of yours; look and see, look and see!"

Malmain spread her fingers. The man saw a ring of gold carved in the form of a dragon, with rubies for eyes, and a collar of emeralds about its throat. Lying in the woman's moist, fat palm, it glimmered in the slant light of the sun. Mark's eyes glittered as he looked at it.

"I had the thing from the woman above," quoth Malmain, jerking her thumb over her shoulder.

"A bribe?"

"Who'd bribe me? Not a woman!"

"Honest soul."

"'That ring looks well on your finger,' said I. 'I shall have it.' 'Never!' said she. 'That's too big a word,' said I. So I forced it off, for all her temper, and broke her finger in the doing of it."

A transient shadow seemed to pass across the man's face, the wraith of a ghost-wrath insensible to the world.

"Close the bargain, cherub."

"A buss for it."

"Twenty kisses in a week, and my mug of supper beer." He had the ring.

Malmain did not stand alone in her devotion to Mark of the guard. The man had come by another friend in Tintagel, a friend without influence, it is true, but one, at least, who possessed abundant individuality, and the charm of an ingenuous nature. Mark was no mere bravo when he turned partisan to the lad Jehan, and took him within the pale of his mothering wit. He had a profound knowledge of men, and a philosophic insight into character that had not been gained solely on the march or in the ale-house. By profession he appeared a devil-may-care gentleman of the sword, a man of bone and muscle, the possessor of a vigorous stomach. These attributes were mere stage properties, so to speak, necessary to him for the occasion. For the rest, he knew what he knew.

Mark had seen more than cowardice in the sensitive face of the lad. He had discovered the soul beneath the surface, the warmer, bolder personality behind the deceit of the flesh. Jehan appealed to him as a friendless thing, a vial of glass jostled in the stream of life by rough potsherds and sounding bowls. Mark took the lad in hand and made a disciple of him in less than a week. He humoured the lad, encouraged him, treated him like a comrade, drew the soul out of his limp, starved body. Jehan had never fallen upon such a friend before. He was bewitched by the man's personality. This Mark with the strong face and the falcon's eye seemed to see deep into the finer sentiments of life, to think as he thought, to conceive as he conceived. Jehan, unconscious little idealist that he was, bubbled over into innumerable confidences and confessions of feeling. This dark-eyed man, who never laughed at him, whose voice was never blatant and threatening, seemed to exert a magnetic influence upon his spirit. Jehan throned him a species of demigod, and idolised him as he had idolised few living things on earth before.

There was more method in Mark's friendship than his comrades of the guard ever dreamt of in their thick noddles. They had many a laugh at Malmain and many a jest at her expense, but their wit never worked beyond vulgar banality. As for Jehan, his existence certainly seemed to better itself so far as they were concerned, though what the man Mark could see worth patronising in the lad, they were at a loss to discover. Jehan grew less servile, less diffident, more open of countenance. He hided a cook-boy of his own age in a casual scuffle. Mark had used a strong arm and a stronger wit for him on occasion, and the little bastard was no longer cuffed at the random pleasure of every gentleman of Gorlois's guard.

Jehan often spoke to Mark of the lady of the tower whose hair was like the red-gold cloak of autumn. The man seemed ready to hear of her beauty and her distress, and all the multitudinous tales concerning her given from the guard-room. He kindled to the romantic possibilities of the affair, and was as full of sentiment as Jehan himself could wish. Saying little at first, he watched the lad with keen, discerning eyes, as though tracing out the trend, depth, and sincerity of his sympathies; nor was he long ignorant of the strain of chivalry that was sounding in the lad's heart. The more generous sentiments leapt out in a look, a word, a colouring of the cheek. Given inspiration, it was possible to make a fanatic of the boy, a hero in the higher rendering of the term.

In due course the man grew more communicative, less of a listener. Jehan heard of Avangel, of the island manor in Andredswold, of Pelleas, and of the days in Winchester. The whole tragedy was spread before him like a legend, some mighty passion throe of the past. He listened open-mouthed, with blue eyes that searched the man's face. Mark had taken to himself of a sudden an air of mystery and peril. Jehan knew by intuition that these matters were to be kept secret as the grave. Great pride rose in him at being held worthy of such trust. He felt even aggrieved when Mark spoke to him of discretion, with a finger on his lip. Such a secret was like a hoard of gold to the lad. It pleased him with a sense of responsibility and of faith, and Jehan loved honour, for all his novitiate amid the morals of the guard-room.

He had drunk deep of old songs, and of the heroics of the harp. Such things were like moonlight to him, touching his soul with a lustre of idyllic truth. He began to dream dreams, and to speculate extravagantly as to the things that were yet hid from his knowledge. It was borne in upon his mind that Mark was this Pelleas in disguise, come to save Igraine from Gorlois and the towers of Tintagel. The notion took his heart by storm, and his sympathies hovered over the woman like so many scarlet-winged moths. He desired greatly to speak to Mark of that which was in his heart, but feared to seem mischievous and lacking in discretion.

Some three days after Malmain had given Mark the Lady Igraine's ring, Gorlois rode hunting with Morgan la Blanche and a train of knights and damsels. Half the castle turned out to see them sally with their ten couple of hounds in leash, and a goodly company of prickers and beaters. Gareth the minstrel rode with the company on a white horse and sang to the harp a hunting song, and then a chant d'amour. Morgan's laugh was as clear as a bell pealing over water as she rode at Gorlois's side in the sunlight, her silks and samites and gold-green tissues fluttering in the wind.

Jehan ran over the bridge to see them go down into the valley. The dogs tugged at the thongs, the boar spears glittered, the dresses threaded the maze of green as roses thread a briar. Jehan climbed a rock, exulting in the life, the spirit, the colour of it all. Gareth's strong voice came up from the valley as he sang of love and of the fairness of women. Jehan envied him his harp and the honour that it won him. It was his own hope to sing of the beauty of the world, the green ecstasy of spring, of autumn forests flaming to the sky, the eternal sorrow of the tortured sea. He came by this same desire in later years when he sang to Arthur and Guinevere and Launcelot of the Lake in the gardens of Caerleon.

A hand plucked him by the heel as he lay curled on the rock watching, the cavalcade flickering away into the green. Looking down, he saw the strong face of Mark of the guard. There was a smile on the man's lips, and to Jehan there seemed something prophetic in his eyes. He climbed down and stood looking into the other's face, the mute, trusting look of a dog.

Mark took him by the shoulder.

"The sea is blue and gold, and the 'Priest's Pool' like a violet well."

"There is time for a swim."

"We will watch for a sail from the cliffs."

"And you will tell me more of Pelleas and Igraine."

Mark was in a visionary mood; he used his spear as a staff and talked little. A sleepy sea bubbled a line of foam along the shore. Bleak slopes rolled greenly against an azure sky, and landwards crag and woodland stood steeped in a mist of sunlight. Jehan, sedulous and reverent, watched the passionless calm of thought upon the man's face. His eyes were turned constantly towards the sea with the hope of one waiting for a white sail from the underworld.

When they had gone a mile or more along the cliffs, they came to a path leading to a bay whose lunette of sand shone red gold above the foam. It was a place of crags and headlands, poised sea billows, purple waters pressing from the west. Jehan sat on a stone and waited. Mark took his cloak and bound it to the staff of his spear. Jehan watched him as he stood at his full height like a tall pine on the edge of the cliff and lifted his spear at arm's length above his head. Seawards, dim and distant like a pearl over the purple sea, Jehan saw a sail strike out of the vague west. Mark still held the cloak upon his spear. Jehan understood something of all this. His mind, packed with plots and subtleties, shone with the silvery aureole of romance.

The sail grew against the sky, and a ship loomed gradual out of the west. Mark shook the cloak from his spear, and climbed down the path that curled from the cliff with Jehan at his heels. Below, the waves swirled in amid the rocks and ran ripple on ripple up the yellow sand. The whole place seemed filled with the hoarse underchant of the sea.

In a narrow part of the track Mark stopped suddenly, and stood leaning on his spear. Jehan nearly blundered into him, but saved himself by the help of a tuft of grass. The man's face was on a level with the lad's, and his eyes seemed to look into Jehan's soul.

He pointed to the distant headland, where the towers of Tintagel rose against the sky.

"Death waits yonder," he said.

"For whom?"

"Igraine,--Gorlois's wife."

Jehan looked at him with all his soul. The man was no longer the quaint, vapouring soldier, but a being of different mould, keen, solemn, even magnificent. Jehan felt himself on the verge of romance; the man's face seemed to stare down fear.

"And Pelleas!" he said.

"Pelleas?"

"Art thou not Pelleas?"

Mark smiled in his eyes.

"Your dreams fly too fast," he said.

"And yet--"

"You would see some one play the hero. Who knows but that a bastard may save a kingdom."

Mark moved on down the path, stopping now and again to watch the ship at sea; Jehan followed at his heels. They reached the beach, and saw the waves rolling in on them from the west, with the white belly of a sail showing over the water. Mark made no further tarrying in the matter. Standing on a stretch of sand levelled smooth by the water, he traced a cross thereon with the point of his spear.

"Swear by the cross."

Jehan's face was turned to the man's, eager and enquiring.

"To whom shall I swear troth?" he said.

"To Gorlois's wife."

"Ah!"

"And to the King."

"The King!"

Jehan crossed himself with great good-will.

"By the blood of the Lord Jesu, I swear troth."

They went down close to the waste of waters, and let the spume sweep almost to their feet. A vast blue bank of clouds mountained the far west; the sea seemed deep in colour as an amethyst. Gulls were winging and wailing about the cliffs. Tintagel stood out in its strength against the sky, and they could see the waves white upon its rocks.

Mark took the ring Malmain had given him from a pouch at his belt, and held the gold circle before the lad's eyes.

"From the hand of Gorlois's wife," he said.

Jehan nodded.

"This ring was given her by that Pelleas."

"Yes."

"Who is Uther Pendragon, the King."

Jehan's blue eyes seemed to dilate till they looked strangely large in his thin white face.

"The King!" he said, in a kind of whisper.

Mark made all plain to him in a few words.

"The Lady Igraine loved Pelleas, as well she might, not knowing him to be Ambrosius's brother. It was this same great love that brought her in peril of Gorlois's sword. It is this same love that draws her down to her death--there in Tintagel. Uther Pendragon is at Caerleon; her hope is with him. You, Jehan, shall carry word of this to the King."

The lad's heart was beating like the heart of a giant. The world seemed to expand about him, to grow luminous with the glory of great deeds; he had the braying of a hundred trumpets in his ears. He heard swords ring, saw banners blow, and towers topple like smitten trees.

"I am the King's servant," he said.

"You have sworn troth; so be it. You shall go to the King, to Uther Pendragon, at Caerleon. Tell him you had this ring from a soldier, bribed to deliver it by the Lady Igraine. Tell him the evil that is done to her in the castle of Tintagel. Tell him all--withhold nothing."

Jehan flushed to the temples; his lips moved, but no words came from them. He stood stiff and erect, looking out to sea, following with his eyes the sweep of Mark's spear.

"I am the King's servant," he said.

The ship had drawn in towards the shore. She was lying to with her sails put aback, her black hull rising and falling morosely against the tumultuous purple of the clouds. Nearer still a small galley came heading for the shore with a gush of foam at her prow as the men in her bent to the oars. The galley came swinging in on the broad backs of the sluggish waves, and shooting the surf, grounded on the sands, the men in her leaping out and dragging her beyond the reach of the sea.

There was a more mellow light on Mark's face as he pointed Jehan to the boat, and the ship swaying on the sun-gilded waves.

"They will carry you to Caerleon," he said.

"And you, sire?"

"There is need of me at Tintagel."

"I have sworn troth."

Jehan stood and looked into the west at the clouds gold-ribbed, domed, snow, and purple. His face might have been lit by the warm glow of a lamp, so clear and radiant was it. He had thrust the King's ring into his bosom.

"The Lord Jesu speed me," he said; "through the Lady Igraine's face I am no longer a coward. God speed me to save her!"

Mark kissed him on the forehead.

"You have a soul in you," he said.

The man stood on the strand under the black cliffs and watched the boat climb the waves. He saw the galley hoisted up, the sails flapping in the wind as the ship sheered out and ran for the open sea. Her sails gleamed white against the tumultuous west, and the ridged waters hid her hull. Overhead, the gulls screamed and circled. Mark, shouldering his spear, turned back and climbed the cliff, with his face towards the towers of Tintagel.

IV

A galley came up the Usk towards dawn, towards dawn when the woods were hung with mist, and a vast quiet brooded over the world. The river made a moist murmur through reeds and sedge, seeming to chant of golden meads as it ran to wed the sea. All the eastern casements of Caerleon glimmered gold as the dawn struck over wood and hill; the city's walls smiled out of the night; her vanes and towers were noosed as with fire. The galley drew to the great quay, and poled to the steps as the city awoke.

A lad, with his russet mantle turned up over his girdle, passed up from the galley and the quay towards the southern gate of the city of Caerleon. His step was sanguine, his face deep with dreams. He seemed to personate "Youth" entering that city of woeful magic that poets and painters name "Romance."

Within the walls the stir of life had been sounded in by the clarions of the dawn. Seafaring men went down to the river and their ships. At the gate arms rang, tumbrils rumbled. Slim girls passed out into the orchards and the fields, under the trees all heavily grained, russet and green and gold. Women drew water at the wells. The merchant folk in the market square spread their stalls for the day--fruit, flesh, fish, cloth, and the fabrics of the East, armour and brazen jars, vases of strange device.

The city pleased the lad as he passed through its stirring streets, and took the vigour of it, the human symbolism, into his soul. His idealism shed a glamour over the place; how red and white were its maidens; how fair its stately houses; how splendid the clashing armour of its guards. In the market square he asked a wizened apple-seller concerning the palace, and was pointed to the wooded hill where white walls rose above the green. Jehan solaced himself with a couple of ruddy apples from the stall. It was early yet for the palace, so the seller said, and Jehan sat down by a fountain where doves flew, and thought of his errand as he watched the folk go by.

The sun was high before he came to the great gate leading to the gardens of the King. It chanced to be a great day at Caerleon, a day of public appeal, when Uther played patriarch to his people, and sat to hear the prayers of the wronged or the oppressed. Hence it followed that Jehan, pressing in at the gate, found himself one among many, one of a herd, a boy among his elders. In the antechamber of the palace he was edged into a corner, elbowed and kept there by stouter clients who, as a mere matter of course, shouldered a boy to the wall. Argument availed nothing. Men were used to plausible tales for winning precedence, and each considered his especial matter the most pressing in the eyes of justice. The crowd overawed him. The doorkeepers thrust him back with their staves when he waxed importunate and attempted to parley. Often he bethought him of the ring, but, being quick to suspect theft in such a mob, he kept the talisman tight in his tunic, and trusted to time and the powers of patience.

What with giving way to women whose sex commended them, and men whose strength and egotism seemed vested in their elbows, Jehan was fended far from the door all day. A squabbling, querulous crowd filled the place; women with grievances, merchants who had been plundered on the road; peasants, priests, soldiers; beggars and adventurers; a Jew banker whom some Christian had taken by the beard; a farmer whose wife had taken a fancy to a gentleman's bed. It was a stew of envy, discontent, and misfortune. Jehan, whose none too sumptuous clothing did him little service, was shouldered casually into the background. "Take second place to a brat of a boy! God forbid such an indignity!" The vexed folk believed vigorously in the premiership of years.

It was well towards evening when Jehan, who had gone fasting save for a rye-cake, found himself the last to claim audience of the King. A fat pensioner, yawning phenomenally and dreaming of supper, eyed him with little favour from the top step of the stair. The day had been a crowded one, and the savoury scent of roast flesh assailed the senses of the gentleman of the "white wand." Jehan braved the occasion with heart thumping, produced the ring, and held it as a charm under the doorkeeper's nose.

There was an abrupt revulsion in the methods of this domestic demigod. Doors opened as by a magic word; servants went to and fro; bells sounded. A grey-bearded Pharisee appeared, scanned the lad over with an aristocratic contempt, beckoned him to follow. The man with the white wand refrained for a moment from yawning over the paltriness of the world at large.

Jehan, taken by galleries and curtained doors, and disenchanted somewhat with the palatial régime, found himself in a chapel casemented towards the west. Lamps burnt upon the altar, and a priest knelt upon the steps as in prayer. Sacramental vessels glimmered at the feet of the frescoed saints. A fragrant scent of musk and lavender lay heavy on the air.

Jehan saw a man standing by a window, a man girded with a sword, and garbed in no light and joyous fashion. The man's face possessed a kind of sorrowful grandeur, a solemn kindliness that struck home into the lad's heart. The eyes that met his were eyes such as women and children trust. Jehan guessed speedily enough that this was the King.

There was a certain intuition big in him, prophesying of the pain that burdened his message. He faltered for the moment, knelt down, looked into the man's eyes, and took courage. There was a questioning calm in them that quieted him like the dew of prayer. He took the ring and gave it into the King's hand.

"From the Lady Igraine," was his plea.

Now Jehan, though he looked no higher than Uther's knees, saw him rock and sway like some great poplar in a storm. A strange lull seemed to fall sudden upon the world. The lad listened to the beating of his own heart, and wondered. He had soul enough to imagine the large utterance of those few words of his.

A deep voice startled him.

"Your message."

He knelt there and told his tale, simply, and without clamour.

"It is the truth, sire," he said at the end thereof, "so may I drink again of the Lord's blood, and eat his bread at the holy table."

"My God, what truth!"

The man's voice swept the chapel like a wind, deep, sonorous, and terrible. The large face, the broad forehead, the deep-set eyes were turned to the casement and the west. The face was like the face of one who looks into hell. Jehan, on his knees, looked up and shivered. He had told the truth, and the storm awed him like a miracle. It seemed almost impious to be witness of a wrath that was as the righteous passion of a god.

"Gorlois tortures her?"

"To her death, sire."

"The whole--spare nothing."

"She is starved and scourged, and harlots mock her."

"God!"

"They drag her soul in the mire."

It was sunset, and all the sky burnt gold and crimson in the west. Every lozenge of glass in the casement shone red as with fire. Beyond Caerleon a mysterious gloom of trees rolled blackly against the chaos of the decline. The whole world seemed glamoured and steeped in a ghostly quiet. Usk, a band of shadowy gold, ran with vague glimmerings to the sea.

The King spread his arms to the west, and under his black brows his eyes smouldered.

"Am I Uther of Britain--and a King?"

And again in a deep half-heard whisper--

"Igraine! Igraine! thou art true unto death."

From the terrace below came sudden the sound of harping. It was Rivalin, the Court minstrel, singing as the sun went down--

"Quenched be all the bitter pain,
When the roses bloom again
Eyes shall smile through glimmering tears."

The face of the King was like the face of a man who sees a vision. All the glow of the hills seemed in his eyes. His hands shook as he stretched them to the west, the west that was a chasm of torrential gold.

"Igraine," he said, as in a dream.

And again--

"Tintagel will I hurl into the sea."

Jehan knelt and looked mutely at the King. The gloom of the roof seemed to cover him like a canopy, and the frescoes glimmered through the blue shadows. Uther wore a small crucifix about his neck. Jehan, full of a sense of tragedy, saw him tear the crucifix from its chain, and cast it at his feet. The priest at the altar, haloed by the glowing of his lamps, looked at the King, white and wondering. It was an exultant voice that made the chalice quiver.

"Hitherto I have served a God," it said; "now I will serve my own soul!"

V

The woman's face, haloed by the gloom of the casement, still looked out from Tintagel over the solitary grandeur of sea and cliff. Igraine saw ships pass seldom athwart the west, but they brought no hope for her, for she thought herself alone, and served of none. How should Uther the King know that she was mewed in Tintagel at Gorlois's pleasure! Had he not commended her to the calm orchards and cloisters of a nunnery? Even the ring he had given her had been stolen by sheer force. Days came and went, dawn flooded the eastern woods with gold, and evening tossed her torches in the west. To Igraine they were as alike as the gulls that wheeled and winged white over the blue waters.