Chapter VIII: Book II: Gorlois (4)

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

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

"You believe in a life of contrasts, father?"

The old man became suddenly more serious.

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

Igraine resumed her harrowing of reprobate green-stuff.

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

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

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

Igraine agreed with him like a sister.

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

IX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well, you be damned!" he said.

"What want you with the woman, lording?"

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

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

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

"Then speak out."

"She promised to pray for my woman."

Gorlois gave a laugh, and scoffed at the notion.

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

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

"Galleas of Camelford."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The woman is beautiful beyond other women."

"Like a golden May."

"And true."

"As a sapphire."

"Yet will not have you."

"Not a shred of me."

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

"The woman has great destiny before her."

"Ah!"

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

"Like ivy holds a tree."

"As a wife?"

Gorlois laughed.

"How else?"

"As a wife--by the church."

"Ah!"

"Or no help of my hand."

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

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

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

"You are not lonely," said Igraine.

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

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

Igraine remembered the peasant's little son.

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

The old man shook his head and smiled enigmatically.

"I have no dealings in such marvels," he said.

"The boy died."

"Of course."

"They will sell your dust some day."

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

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

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

"What think you of life?" said Igraine.

"You should know, sister, as well as I."

"But you see, father, I am not a nun,--only a novice."

He stared at her a moment with a slight smile.

"Remain a novice," he said.

"You advise me so!"

"Why subordinate your soul to chains forged of men."

"These seem strange words."

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

"Have you ever loved a man?"

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

"Is he worthy?"

"I believe him a noble soul."

"Naturally."

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

The hermit applauded.

"That sounds like honour," he said critically.

"I am seeking him to tell him the truth."

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

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

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

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

X

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

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

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

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

Another halloo and no echo.

"He's asleep, or deaf in his helmet."

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

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

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

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

"Sancta Igraine," she read--

"Ora pro nobis."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Man--man, are you stone?"

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

"Pelleas."

"Ah, Igraine."

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

"Why do you vex me?"

"Follow!"

"Pelleas, Pelleas, I am no nun!"

"Follow!"

"I kept this truth from you too long."

"Follow!"

"Pelleas, would you hurt my heart more?"

"Follow; God shall make all plain and good."

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

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

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

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

"What place is this, Pelleas?"

She saw him bend slightly in the saddle.

"It is called the Ghost Forest," he said.

"What are the sounds we hear?"

"Who can tell!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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