TINTAGEL

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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.

“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.

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.

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—

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!”

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.

There are few men of such despicable fibre that they are wholly ruled by the egotism of the flesh. Your complete villain is no frequent prodigy, being more the denizen of the regions of romance than of the common, trafficking, trivial world. There are bad men enough, but few Neros. Give a human being passions, pride, and intense egotism, and his potential energy for evil is unbounded. Virtue is often a mere matter of habit or circumstance. Joseph might have ended otherwise if Potiphar’s wife had had more wit; and as for Judas, he was unfortunate in being made banker to a God.

Gorlois of Cornwall was beholden to his own strenuous, north-winded nature for any trouble he might incur in his madness against Igraine. However much he braved it out to his own conscience, he knew well enough whether he was content or no. He was a strong man, and selfish, resentful, and very human. He was no Oriental monster, no mere Herod. What magnanimity he possessed towards his wife had been frozen into a wolfish scorn by the things that had passed in Garlotte’s valley in Wales. Moreover, he had a bad woman at his elbow. Like many a vexed and restless man, he had turned to ambition, and the darker features of his character were being developed thereby. A king had wronged him; it was easy for a great noble to lay plots against a king. War and the clamour of war became like the prophetic sound of a storm from afar in his ears.

Little comment had followed upon the disappearance of the lad Jehan on the day when Gorlois and his knights had ridden hunting. No one cared for the lad; no one missed him materially. Casual gossip arose thereon in the guard-room. The lad had risked the halter or the branding-iron, and sundry threats were launched after him at random. Mark of the guard shrugged his shoulders and laughed.

“There’s pluck in the lad,” he said, “for all your bullying. By my faith, I guess he grew tired of kicks and leavings, and of being cursed by so many sons of the pot. Bastard or no bastard, the lad’s no fool.”

The guard-room scoffed complacently at the notion. Jehan do anything in the world but snivel! Not he! These gentlemen judged of a man’s worth by the animal propensities of the creature. They weighed a man as they would weigh an ox—for flesh, and the breed in him. Mark, making a show of warming to his wine, enlightened his men further as to Jehan’s disappearance.

“The lad and I went to bathe,” he said; "there was a ship in the offing, and sailors had come ashore to get water by St. Isidore’s spring. They wanted a lad for cabin service, so I took two gold pieces, and told them to kidnap Jehan."

A laugh hailed the confession, a laugh that changed to a cheer when Mark won accomplices by casting largesse for a scramble on the guard-room floor.

“I wish them luck of him,” said the captain, pocketing silver; “devil of a spark could I ever knock out of the lad.”

“May be you hit too hard.”

“May be not. I’ll lay my fist against a rope’s-end for education.”

“Mark takes his wine like a gentleman,” quoth one.

“May he get drunk on pay day.”

“And sell another Joseph into Egypt.”

The woman Malmain came in to join them, corpulent and thirsty. Superabundant and colossal, she impressed a strenuous and didactic mood upon the company, grumbling like a volcano, emitting a smoke of mighty unfeminine gossip. Her black eyes wandered continually towards Mark of the guard. She watched him with a certain air of possession amid all her sweat and jabber, laughing when he laughed, making herself a coarse echo to his will.

Some one spoke of Gorlois’s wife. So personal a subject moved Malmain to mystery on the instant. She tapped her forehead with her finger; shook her head with a significance that was sufficient for the occasion.

“Mad!” said the captain of the guard.

Malmain sucked her lips and yawned with her great chasm of a mouth.

“She was always that,” she said with a hiccough.

“Paradise, eh?”

“And golden harps!”

“And, damme, no beer!”

There was a certain flavour in the last remark that made the men roar.

“I wonder where they’ll bury her,” said the captain.

“Throw her into the sea.”

“Gorlois’s little wench won’t weep her eyes out.”

Malmain smote a stupendous hip, and tumbled to the notion. The settle shook and creaked under her as though in protest.

“We’ll all get married,” she said; “Mark, my man, don’t blush.”

Babylon was compassed round! The same evening a soldier on the walls of Tintagel saw a dim throng of sails rise whitely out of the west. The streaks of canvas stood above the sea touched by the light of the setting sun. There was something ominous in these gleaming sails sweeping in a wide half-circle out of the unknown. A motley throng of castle folk gathered on the walls. Men spoke of the barbarians and of Ireland as they watched the ships rising solemn and silent from the west. Gorlois himself climbed up into a tower and gazed long at these sails whose haven was as yet unknown. He learnt little by the scrutiny. The ships had hardly risen above the purple twilight when night came and shrouded the whole in vague and impenetrable gloom.

Gorlois ordered the castle into a state of siege, and with the night an atmosphere of suspense gathered about Tintagel.

About midnight some dozen points of fire burst out redly on the hills. Sudden and sinister they shone like beacon fires, but by whom lit the castle folks could not tell. Men idled on the walls, shoulder to shoulder, talking in undertones, with now and again a bluff oath to invoke courage. The black infinite, above, around, seemed to hem the place as eternity hems the soul. War and death lurked in the dark, and on the rocks the sea kept up a perpetual moan.

Gorlois walked the walls with several of his knights. He was restless, and in no Christian temper, for the dark muzzled him. Not that he feared the unknown, or the perils that might lurk on hill or sea. He had the soul of a soldier, loved danger for its own sake, and took a hazard as he would take wine. Yet there are certain thoughts that haunt a man for all his hardihood, thoughts that may not weaken him though they may chafe his temper. Such to Gorlois was the memory of a starved face looking out at him scornfully from the gloom, the face of Igraine, his wife.

That night Gorlois’s mind was prophetic in dual measure. Like a good captain he scanned the human horizon for snares and enmities, old feuds and the vengeances of men. The dark sky seemed to hold out two scrolls to him tersely illumined as to the near future. To Gorlois they read—

The barbarians,

or

The King!

Forewarned thus in spirit, he kept to the walls till dawn. The sea sang for him stern epics of tumult and despair. Large projects were moving in his mind like waters that bubble up darkly in a well. He was in a mood for great deeds, alarms and plottings, lusts, gnashings, and the splendid agonies of war.

When the grey veil rose from the world many faces looked out east and west from Tintagel for sign of legions or of ships at sea. Strange truth! not a sail showed upon the ocean, not a spear or shield glimmered on the eastern hills. The threatenings of the night seemed to have cleared like the leaden cloudscape of a stormy sky.

Gorlois, scarred, brooding, sinister, appealed his knights as to the event.

“Not a ship, not a shield,” he said, “yet I’ll swear we saw watchfires on the hills. Were we scared for nothing?”

“Devil’s beacons,” quoth one.

“I have heard sailors tell of the phantom fleet of the Phoenicians.”

“Have a care,” said Sir Isumbras of the wrinkled face; “I remember me of the taking of Genorium; given the chance of an ambuscado, the good captain—”

Gorlois cut in upon his prosings.

“Scour the country, well and good,” he said, "send out your riders; we will see whether there is a Saxon betwixt Tintagel and Glastonbury."

Gorlois had hardly delivered himself, and the company was passing from the battlements, when a trumpet-cry thrilled the solitary morning air. Gorlois and his knights halted at the head of the turret-stair, and looked out from the walls towards the east. A single figure on horseback was moving along the ridge leading to the headland. The rider was clad in black, and his horse-trappings were of sable. He carried neither spear nor shield, but only a herald’s long trumpet balanced upon his thigh. He rode very much at his leisure, as though the whole world could abide his business.

Gorlois eyed him blackly under his hand.

“I was wrong, sirs,” he said.

Old Isumbras’s wrinkles deepened. He tapped the walls with the scabbard of his sword, and waxed oracular after an old man’s fashion. Gorlois turned his broad back on him.

“There is trouble in yonder gentleman’s wallet,” he said.

They passed with clashing arms down the black well of the stairway to the court. Gates were rumbling on their hinges. The herald had ridden over the bridge, and the guards had given him passage. He was brought into the court where Gorlois stood in the centre of a half-circle of knights. The herald wore a cap of crimson velvet and a mask over his face. He walked with a certain stately swagger; it was palpable that he was no common fellow.

There was no parley on either part. Those who watched saw that this emissary carried a case of scarlet cloth and a naked poniard. He gave the case into Gorlois’s hands, but threw the poniard on the stones at his feet. A fine insolence burnt in his stride and gesturing. Gorlois’s scar seemed to show up duskily upon his cheek, and he looked as though tempted to tear the mask from the stranger’s face. An incomprehensible dignity waved him back, and while he dallied with his wrath, the man turned his back on him and marched unconcernedly for the gate. The court bristled with steel, but none hindered or molested him. They heard the gate roll to, and the rattle of hoofs on the bridge. The sound died rapidly away, leaving Tintagel silent as a ruin.

Gorlois picked up the poniard, for none of his men stirred, and cut the woven band that held the lappets of the case. The white corner of a waxen tablet came to light. Gorlois drew the tablet out, held it at arm’s length, and read the inscription thereon. His face grew hard and vigilant as he read, and he seemed to spell the thing over to himself several times before satisfied to the letter. He stood awhile in thought, and then leaving his knights to their conjectures, walked away to that quarter of the castle where Morgan la Blanche had her lodging.

He found the woman couched by the window that looked out towards the sea. Though dawn had but lately come, she was awake, and sat combing her hair, while a kitten slept on the blue coverlet covering her lap. Wine and fruit stood on the table near the bed, with scented water, a rouge-pot, and a bowl of flowers. Morgan was smothered in fine white linen, banded at neck and wrists with sky-blue silk. A kerchief of gold gossamer work covered her shoulders.

Gorlois touched her lips, and let her hair run through his fingers like water.

“Minion, you are awake early.”

Morgan’s face shone white, and her eyes looked tired and faded. She had heard rumours and had watched the night through, being tender-conscienced as to her own skin. Adversity, even in its meaner forms, was a thing insufferably insolent, a cloud in the absolute gold of a sensuous existence. Being quick to mark any shadowing of the horizon, she was undeceived by Gorlois’s mere smile. She caught his hand and stared up at him.

“Well!”

“What troubles you?”

“Is it to be a siege?”

Gorlois stretched his strong neck, laughed, and eschewed subtlety. It interested him to see this worldling ruffled, Morgan, whose chief care was how the world might serve her.

“Read,” he said, putting the tablet into her hands.

Morgan sat up in bed with her fair hair streaming over her shoulders. She traced out the words hurriedly with a white finger-tip. Her eyes seemed to grow large as she read; her hands trembled a very little. At the end thereof she dropped the tablet into her lap and looked at Gorlois with a certain petulant dread.

“How did the man hear of all this?”

“God knows!”

“Treachery!”

Gorlois jerked his belt and said nothing.

The woman Morgan sat and hugged her knees. She looked out to sea with a frown on her face, and the blue coverlet dragged in tight folds about her waist. The kitten woke up and began to play with Morgan’s hair as it trailed down upon the bed. She cuffed the little beast aside, and looked at Gorlois. Her eyes now were steely and clear, and very blue under her white forehead.

“Obviously, he has learnt all,” she said.

Gorlois nodded morosely.

“And this matter is to be between you alone?”

“I have his word.”

“And he is a fool for truth.”

Silence held them both awhile, and Morgan seemed to dally with her thoughts. Her lips worked loosely as though moving with her mind. The kitten clawed its way up the coverlet and rubbed its glossy flank against the woman’s arm.

“What of an ambush?” she suggested mildly.

Gorlois darted a look at her and shook his head.

“No; it shall be fair between us.”

“Honour!”—with a sneer.

“I am a soldier.”

“By the prophet, that is the strange part of it all. You go out to kill a man, and yet trouble about the method.”

“There honour enters.”

“You kill him, all the same.”

Morgan tossed the quilt aside, thrust a pair of glimmering feet out of the bed, and stood at Gorlois’s elbow. She took the tablet of wax and held it over a lamp that was burning till the wax softened and suffered the lettering to be effaced. Gorlois’s great sword hung from the carved bed-post. Morgan took it and buckled it to the man with her plump, worldly little hands.

“Let it not fail,” she said.

Gorlois kissed her lips.

“There will be no King; and the heir—well, you are a great soldier, and men fear your name.”

She kept him with her awhile and then bade him farewell. The sun was high in the heavens when Gorlois, in glittering harness, rode out alone from Tintagel, and passed away into the wilds.

There was a preternatural brightness over sea and cliff that day. Headland and height stood limned with a luminous grandeur; the sea was a vast opal; mountainous clouds sailed solemn and stupendous over the world. Towards evening it grew still and sultry, and storms threatened. A vapoury leviathan lowered black out of the east, devouring the blue, with scudding mists spray-like about his belly. The sky changed to a sable cavern. In the west the sun still blazed through mighty crevices, candescent gold; the world seemed a chaos of glory and shadow. Sea-birds came screaming to the cliffs. The walls of Tintagel burnt athwart the west.

Presently out of the blue bosom of an unearthly twilight a vague wind rose. Gusts came, clamoured, and died into nothingness. The world seemed to shudder. The dry bracken and grass on the hillsides hissed as the wind came seldom and tumultuous. The roadway smoked. In the valleys the trees moaned, shivered, and stood still.

Mark of the guard stood in the garden leaning on his spear, watching the storm gathering above. It was his guard that night over the stairway leading to Igraine’s room, and he stood under the shadow of the tower.

A red sword flashed sudden out of the east, and smote the hills. Thunder followed, growling over the world. Then rain came, and a whirlwind seemed to fly from the face of the storm. In the west a burning crater still poured gold upon a restless and afflicted sea.

It grew dark very rapidly, and a thundering canopy soon overarched Tintagel. Now and again flaming cracks of fire ran athwart the dome of the night, lighting battlements and sky with a weird momentary splendour. Rain rattled on the stones and drifted whirling against door and casement. Small torrents formed along the walks; every spout and gully gushed and gurgled. Like an underchant came the hoarse cry of the sea.

Mark had withdrawn under the arch of the tower’s entry. A cresset flamed and spluttered higher up the stairway, throwing down an ineffectual gleam upon the man’s armour as he stood and looked into the night. The storm fires lit his face, making it start out of the dark white and spiritual, with largely luminous eyes. He held motionless at his post like a Roman soldier watching the downfall of Pompeii.

Solitude possessed garden, court, and battlement, for no one stirred on such a night. The knights of the garrison were making merry in the great hall, and the men of the guard, unpestered by their superiors, had gathered a great company in the guard-room to emulate their officers. The scullion knaves and wenches had fled the kitchen; the sentinels had sneaked from the walls. There was no fear now of a leaguer. Had not Duke Gorlois declared as much before his sally?

Mark alone stood to his post, listening to the laughter that reached him between the stanzas of the storm. His face was like the face of a statue, yet alert and eager for all its calm. More than once he went out through the storm of rain to the great gate and stood there listening while the wind howled overhead. About midnight the noise of gaming and revelling seemed suddenly to cease, as when folk hear the tolling of a bell for prayer. Only the wind kept up its hooting over the walls.

Mark stood a long while by the guard-room door with his ear to the planking. Seldom a quavering cry came out to him, and the place grew empty of human sound. All Tintagel seemed asleep, though many casements still shone out yellow against the gloom. Mark slipped to the main gate. There was a postern in it for service after dark. He drew back the bolts and loosed the chain from the staple, and leaving the small door ajar, passed back to the tower’s entry.

Thunder went rolling over the sea. Mark left his spear by the porch and went up the first few steps of the stairway. He took the cresset from its bracket, carried it down, and tossed it into the court, where the flames spluttered out in the rain. Darkness accomplished, he went up the stairway to the short gallery leading to Igraine’s room. At the top he stood and listened. He heard the sound of breathing, and knew that it came from the woman Malmain who slept in the alcove before the door.

Mark smote the wall a ringing blow with the handle of his poniard. A bench creaked; some one yawned and began to grumble. It was so dark that the very walls were part of the prevailing gloom.

“Who’s there?”

Mark stood aside.

“The cresset’s out on the stairs.”

Two arms came groping along the wall.

“You’ve been asleep, cherub.”

“Mark!”

“You were forgetting our tryst.”

A thick sensual laugh sounded from the stairhead. Something opaque moved in the dark; a pair of arms felt along the passage; a hand touched Mark’s face. Malmain’s arms wrapped the man’s body; she lifted him to her with her great strength, and kissed his lips.

“Rogue!”

Once, twice, a streaking shadow rose and fell with the faintest glinting of steel. There was a staggering sound, a wet cough, a sharp-drawn breath, and then silence. Malmain fell against the wall with her hands to her side, held rigid a moment, and then slid into a heap. Mark bent over the woman and gripped her wrist.

In a short while he left the body lying there and moved to the door. Sliding his long fingers over the panels, he found the spring that marked the catch. Light streamed through into the gallery and fell upon Malmain as she lay huddled against the wall, her hair trailing along the floor like rills of blood.

A lamp burnt in the room, showering a thin silvery lustre from its pedestal, leaving the angles in dull brown shadow. The room was bare and bleak as a beggar’s attic. The one window had been shuttered up against the rain, and the crazy lattice shook in the wind. The whole tower seemed to quake, pressed upon by the broad shoulders of the storm.

Gorlois’s wife lay asleep on a rough bed in the centre of the room. Mark went forward and stood over her. The light fell upon Igraine’s face and haloed it with a quiet radiance. Her hands were folded over her breast, and the man looking upon her face saw it drawn and haggard even in sleep. It had a kind of tragic fairness, a stained beauty like the wistful strangeness of an autumnal garden. It was pale, piteous, thin, and spiritual. The flesh shone like white wax; the short hair glimmered like a net of gold.

So changed, so ethereal, was the face of the sleeper, that the man stood and looked at her with gradual awe. Passed indeed was the blood-red rose of life, green summer with its ecstasy of song. Autumn’s rich tapestries of bronze and gold were falling before the wind of winter and the shrill sword of death. The woman on the bed looked like some pale princess slumbering out her doom in some baleful tower.

Igraine’s sleep was shallow and ineffectual, a restless stupor impressed upon a troubled mind. The storm seemed to figure in her dreams. A kind of splendid misery played upon her face, such misery as floods forth from some old legend, strange and sad. Her hands tossed to and fro over the coverlet like fallen flowers stirred by a wind. Her lids drooped over half-opened eyes.

A sudden gust broke the catch of the casement, and swung the frame into the room. All the boisterous laughter of the storm seemed to sweep in with the wind. With the racket Igraine woke and started up in bed upon her elbow. The lamp flame, draught-slanted over the rim, gave but a feeble light; the room was filled with wavering darkness.

Mark stood back from the bed. There was blood upon his tunic. For a moment he was speechless like a man caught in a theft.

In the dim light and to the half-awakened senses of the sleeper, the intruder stood for Gorlois, beard, face, and figure. A moment’s hesitancy lost Mark the lead. The door stood wide. What ensued came crowded into the compass of a few seconds.

Igraine, quick to conceive, jerked the coverlet from the bed. Before Mark could prevent her, she had thrown it over the lamp and smothered the flame. The room sank into instant darkness and confusion. Mark’s voice sounded above the storm. Then came the slamming of a door, and silence save for the blustering of the wind.

Igraine stood on the threshold in the dark, and drew her breath fast. She had shut the man in the room, and the door opened only from without by a spring catch. Mark of the guard was trapped.

And Malmain!

Igraine remembered the woman, and heeding nothing of the voice that called to her from the room, groped her way to the stairhead, expecting at every step to hear the woman’s challenge start out of the gloom. At the end of the gallery she nearly tripped and fell over some inanimate thing. Reaching down out of curiosity she drew her hand back with a half cry, her fingers fouled with a thick warm ooze. An indefinite terror seized her in the dark. She went reeling down the stairway, clutching at the walls, grasping the air. A faint outcry still followed her from the room above.

In the garden rain still rattled, and scud blew from the pools. Igraine stood motionless under the shadow of a cypress, with her face turned to the sky. Her ragged gown blew about her bare ankles, and the wind whirled rain into her face. She drew deep breaths and stretched out her hands to the night, for there was the kiss of liberty in this cold, shrill shower.

Anon the old fear urged her on, companioned now by a reawakened courage. She was weak and starved, but what of that! The storm seemed to enter into her soul with its blustery vigour, crying to her with the multitudinous echoes of the night. What was the mere peril of the flesh to one who had faced spiritual torture more keen than death!

Creeping round under the shadow of the wall with quick glances darted into the dark she made her way round the court to the great gate. The gate-house was dark as the sky, and there was no tramping of sentinels from wall to wall. Igraine crept into the yawn of the archway, brushing along the stones. With each step she listened for the rattle of a spear, and looked for the armed figure that should clash out on her from the gloom. She won the gate and leant against it, breathless from mere suspense. Her fingers groped over the great beams, touched an outstanding edge, and tugged at it. The edge moved; a door came open and let in the wind.

Igraine stood a moment and pondered this mystery in her heart. She had chanced on nothing in the whole castle save one man and a corpse. Some strange doom might have fallen upon the place like the doom that smote the Assyrians in their sleep.

Plain before her stood the open gate and liberty. The hint was sufficient for the occasion. Igraine, leaving Tintagel to the unknown, gathered her rags round her and passed out into the night.

A rolling country spread with moor, wood, and crag. A storm creeping black out of the east over the tops of a forest of pines. On the slope of a hill covered with a mauve mist of nodding scabei and bronzed tracts of bracken, two horsemen motionless in armour. Far away, the glimmer of a distant sea.

Uther the King wheeled his horse and pointed northwards towards the pine woods with his sword. The challenge came plainly in the gesture. There was no need for vapouring or for heroics; a quick stare—eye for eye—said everything a soldier could desire.

Uther, on his black horse, rode with loose bridle, looking straight ahead into the darkness of the woods. He carried his naked sword slanted over his shoulder. Frequent streams of sunlight flashed down upon his harness and made it burn under the boughs, leaving his face calm and solemn under the shadow of his helm. Gorlois held some paces away, stiff and arrogant, watching the man on his flank with restless, smouldering eyes. It was a silent pilgrimage for them both, a pilgrimage to a shrine whence, for one of them, there might be no return.

A shimmering curtain of sunlight spread itself suddenly before them among the pines. The two men rode out into an oval glade palisaded by the innumerable pillars of the wood, bowered in by rolling heights of dusky green. On all sides the spires made a jagged circle of the sky. A pool, black as obsidian, slept in the sun. Heather bloomed there, girdling the confines of wood and water with a blaze of purple.

Uther dismounted and tied his horse to a tree. His deliberation in no way pandered to Gorlois’s self-esteem; there was to be no flurry or bombast in the event. No one was to witness this judgment of the sword; chivalry and malice alike were to be locked up in the heart of the forest. A smooth circle of grass lay on the northern side of the pool, promising well to the two who moved thither with nothing more eloquent than an exchange of gestures.

The heather swept away, a purple dirge to the black sounding of the pines, and a whorl of storm-laden clouds swam towards the sun. Uther, with a face strong as a god’s, swung his sword from his shoulder and grounded the point in the sod. His destiny waxed great in him in that hour. There was something inevitable in the quiet of his eyes.

“You are ready,” he said very simply.

Gorlois jerked a quick glance at him, and licked his lips. He, too, was in no mood for words or matters ethical. Temporal lusts ran strong in his blood.

“For a woman’s honour!”

“As you will, sire,” with a shrug.

“We have no need of courtesies.”

“Over a harlot!”

“Guard, and God pardon you.”

Both swords flickered up hotly in the sunlight. Gorlois, sinewy and full of fettle, gave a half-shout and sprang to engage. He had vast faith in himself, having come scatheless out of many such tussles; nor had he ever been humbled by man or beast. Vigorous as a March morning he launched the first blow, a grim cut laid in with both hands, a cut that rattled home half-parried on the other’s shoulder. Uther, quick for all his calmness, gave the point in retort, a lunge that slid under the Cornishman’s sword and made the muscles gape in Gorlois’s neck. There was blood to both.

The swords began to leap and sing in the sunlight, and the forest echoed to the clangour of arms. Both men fought without shields, and for a season well within themselves, and there was much craft on either part. Cut and counter-cut rang through the pine alleys like the cry of axes whirled by woodmen’s hands. As yet there was no bustle, no wild smiting. Every stroke came clean and true, lashed home with the weight of arms and body.

Hate overset mere swordsmanship anon, and reason grew less and less as the men waxed warm. Gorlois, running in with a swinging buffet, stumbled over a heather tuft and caught a counter full in the face. The smart of it and a split lip quickened him immeasurably. The blades began to whirl with more malice, less precision. Matters grew tumultuous as leaves in a whirlwind. For some minutes there seemed nothing but a tangle of swords in the sun, a staggering chaos of red and gold.

Such fighting burnt itself to a standstill in less than three minutes. Uther drew back like a boar pressed by hounds. There was no whit of weakening in his mood, only a reassertive reason that would trust nothing to the fortune of a moment. The muscles stood out in his strong throat, blood ran from his slashed tunic, and he was breathing hard; but his manhood burnt strong and true. Gorlois, with mouth awry, eyed him with sword half up, and drew back in turn. His face streamed. He spat blood upon the heather.

“God! what work.”

It was Gorlois’s testimony, wrung from him by the stress of sheer hard fighting. The storm-cloud crept across the sun and overcharged the world with gloom. The pool grew more black in its purple bed; the forest began to weave the twilight into its columned halls.

“You lack breath, sire.”

“I wait for you,” Uther said.

But the man of Tintagel was in a sinister mood for the moment. Genius moved his sweating brain. He dropped into philosophic brevities as he spat blood from his bruised lips.

“All for a woman,” he said thickly.

“True.”

“Are you much in love, sire?”

Uther answered him nothing, but waited with his sword over his shoulder.

“She made fuss enough.”

Still silence.

“I never knew a woman so obstinate in making an end. And we buried her in the sand, where the waves roll at flood. Now, you and I lose our brains over a corpse.”

Uther’s sword shone again.

“Guard,” he said quietly.

A sudden gust came clamouring through the wood. The darkening boughs tossed and jerked against the sky, breathing out a multitudinous moan, a hoarse cry as of a smitten host. The east piled thunder over the world. It was the same storm that swept the battlements of Tintagel.

By the pool swords rang; red and gold strove and staggered over the heather. It was the death tussle and a sharp one at that. Destiny or not, matters were going all against Gorlois; his blows were out of luck; he was rent time on end and gave little in return. Rabid, dazed, he began making blind rushes that boded ill for him. More than once he stumbled, and was mired to the knees in the pool.

The end came suddenly enough as the light failed. Both men smote together; both swords met with a sound that seemed to shake the woods, Gorlois’s blade snapped at the hilt.

He stood still a moment, then plucked out his poniard and made a spring. A merciless down-cut beat him back. The fine courage, the strenuous self-trust, seemed to ebb from him on a sudden as though the blow had broken his soul. He fell on his knees and held his hands up with a thick, choking cry.

“Mercy! God’s mercy!”

“Curse you! Had you pity on the woman?”

“Sire, sire!”

Thunder rolled overhead, and the girdles of the sky were loosed. A torrent of rain beat upon the man’s streaming face; he tottered on his knees, and still held his hands to the heavens.

“I lied,” he said. “God witness, I lied.”

“Ah—!”

“The woman lives—is at Tintagel.”

“Man—”

“Give me life, sire, give me life; you shall have her.”

Uther looked at him and heaved up his sword. Gorlois saw the King’s face, gave a great cry, and cowered behind his hands. It was all ended in a moment. The rain washed his gilded harness as he lay with his blood soaking into the heather.

As the world grew grey with waking light Uther the King came from the woods, and heard the noise of the sea in the hush that breathed in the dawn. The storm had passed over the ocean, and a vast quiet hung upon the lips of the day. In the east a green streak shone above the hills. The sky was still aglitter with sparse stars, and an immensity of gloom brooded over the sea.

Gaunt, wounded, triumphant, he rode up beneath the banners of the dawn, eager yet fearful, inspired and strong of purpose. Wood and hill slept in a haze of mist; the birds were only beginning in the thickets, like the souls of children yet unborn calling to eternity. Beyond, on the cliffs, Tintagel, wrapped round with night, stood silent and sombre athwart the west.

Uther climbed from the valley as the day came with splendour, a glow as of molten gold streaming from the east. Wood and hillside glimmered in a smoking mist, dew-brilliant, wonderful. As the sun rose the sea stretched sudden into the arch of the west—a great pavement of gold. A mysterious lustre hovered over the cliffs; waves of light beat like saffron spray upon Tintagel.

The dawn-light found an echo on Uther’s face. He came that morning the ransomer, the champion, a King indeed; Spring bursting the thongs of Winter; Day thrusting back the Night. His manhood smote in him like the deep-throated cry of a great bell, voluminous and solemn. The towers on the cliff were haloed with magic hues. Life, glory, joy, lay locked in the grey stone walls. His heart sang in him, and his eyes were afire.

As he walked his horse with a hollow thunder of hoofs over the bridge, he took his horn and blew a blast thereon. There was a quiet, a lifelessness, about the place that smote his senses, bodying forth mystery. The walls were void against the sky. At the sound of the horn there came no stirring of armed men, no answering fanfare, no glimmering of faces at the casements. Only the gulls circled from the cliffs, and the sea made its moan along the strand.

Uther sat in the saddle and looked from tower to battlement, from battlement to gate. There was something tragic about the place, the silence of a sacked town, the ghostliness of a ship sailing the seas with a dead crew upon her deck. Uther’s glance rested on the open postern, an empty streak in the great gate. His face darkened somewhat; his eyes lost their sanguine glow. There was something betwixt death and treachery in all this quiet.

He dismounted and left his horse on the bridge. The postern beckoned him. He went in like a man nerved for peril, with sword drawn and shield above his head, ready for blows in dark corners. Again he blew his horn. The blast rang and resounded under the arch of the gate. No man came to answer or avenge it.

The guard-room door stood ajar; Uther thrust it open with the point of his sword and looked in. A grey light filtered through the narrow windows. The place was like the cave of the Seven Sleepers. Men, women, guards, servants, were huddled on the benches and on the floor. Some lay fallen across the settles; others sat with their heads fallen forwards upon the table; a few had crawled towards the door. They were cast in every posture, every attitude, bleak, stiff, and motionless. Some had froth upon their lips, glistening eyes, clenched fingers. The shadow of death was over the whole.

The King’s face was as grey as the faces of the dead. He had looked for human throes, perils, strong hands, and the vehemence of man. There was something here, a calm horror, a mystery that hurled back the warm courage of the heart. Prophecy lurked open-mouthed in the shadows. Uther shouldered his sword, passed out, and drew to the door.

In the great court he looked round him like a traveller who has stumbled upon a city wrapped in a magic sleep. Urged on by manifold forebodings, and knowing the place of old, he went first to the State quarters and hunted the rooms through and through. The same silence met him everywhere. In the great hall he came upon a ring of corpses round a table, a ring of men in armour, stiff and rigid as stone, with wine and fruit mocking their staring eyes. In the lodging of the women he found a lady laid on a couch by an open window. Her fair hair swept the pillow; her eyes were wide and glazed; an open casket lay on the bed, and strings of jewels were scattered on the coverlet. The woman’s face was white as apple blossom; she had a half-eaten pomegranate in her hand.

Uther passed from the death-chamber of Morgan la Blanche to the garden. The shadows of the place, the staring faces, the stiff hands clawing at things inanimate, were like phantasms of the night. He took the sea air into his nostrils, and looked into the blue realism of the sky. All about him the garden glistened in the dawn, the cypresses shimmered with dew, the pool was like a steel buckler on cloth of green. Here was the placid life of flowers making very death the more apparent to his soul.

As he stood in deep thought, half dreading what he still half knew, a voice called to him, breaking suddenly the ponderous silence of the place. A face showed overhead at the upper window in the tower; a hand beckoned and pointed towards the tower’s entry. Here at last was something quick and tangible in the flesh, something that could speak of the handicraft of death. Uther climbed the stairs and found Malmain’s body by the well. When he had looked at the woman’s face and seen blood he paid no more heed to her. She was only one among many.

Guided by a voice, Uther unlatched the door and passed in with sword drawn. A man met him on the threshold, a man with the face of a Dante, and shaven lip and chin. It was the face of Merlin.

Without the gate of Tintagel stood Uther the King looking out towards the eastern hills clear against the calm of the sky. He stood bare-headed, like one in prayer; his face was strong, yet wistful and patient as a sick child’s. At his elbow waited Merlin, silent and inscrutable. Much had passed between them in that upper room, that room more hallowed to Uther than the rock tomb of the Christ.

“Ever, ever night,” he said, stretching out his hands as to an eternal void.

Merlin’s eyes seemed to look leagues away over moor, hill, and valley. A strange tenderness played upon his lips, and there was a radiance upon his face impossible to describe. It was like the face of a lover, a dreamer of dreams.

“A man is a mystery to himself,” he said.

“But to God?”

“I know no God, save the god my own soul. Let me live and die, nothing more. Why curse one’s life with a ‘to be’?”

Uther sighed heavily.

“It is a kind of fate to me,” he said, “inevitable as the setting of the sun, natural as sleep. Not for myself do I fear it.”

“Let Jehovah follow Jupiter into the chaos of fable. Sire, look yonder.”

Merlin’s eyes had caught life on the distant hillsides, life surging from the valleys, life, and the glory of it. Harness, helm, and shield shone in the sun. Gold, azure, silver, scarlet, were creeping from the bronzed green of the wilds. Silent and solemn the host rolled gradual into the full splendour of the day.

Uther’s eyes beheld them through a mist of tears.

“King Nentres, King Urience, and the host,” he said.

“Even so, sire.”

“They were bidden to follow.”

“Loyal to their king.”

Uther watched them with a great pride stealing into his eyes; he smiled and held his head high.

“All these are mine,” he said.

Merlin’s face had kindled.

“Grapple the days to come,” he said; “let Scripture and old ethics rot. You have a thousand knights; let them ride by stream and forest, moor and mere. Let them ride out and sunder like the wind.”

“The quest of a King’s heart!”

“Sire, like a golden dawn shall she rise out of the past. Blow thy horn. Let us not tarry.”

Six days had passed. Once more the sun had tossed night from the sky, and kindled hope in the hymning east. The bleak wilderness barriered by sea and crag had mellowed into the golden silence of autumnal woods. The very trees seemed tongued with prophetic flame. The world like a young lover leapt radiant out of the dawn.

Through the reddened woods rode Uther the King with Merlin silent at his side. Gloom still reigned on the gaunt, strong face, and there was no lustre in the eyes that challenged ever the lurking shade of death. Six nights and six days had the quest been baffled. Near and far armour glimmered in the reddened sanctuaries of the woods. Not a trumpet brayed, though the host had scattered in search of a woman’s face.

At the seventh dawn the trees drew back before the King, where the shimmering waters of a river streaked the meads. Peace dwelt there, and a calm eternal, as of the Spirit that heals the throes of men. Rare and golden lay the dawn-light on the valley. The song of birds came glad and multitudinous as in the burgeoning dawn of a glorious May.

Uther had halted under a great oak. His head was bare in the sun-steeped shadows; his face was as the face of one weary with long watching under the voiceless stars. Hope, like a dewless rose, drooped shaken and thirsty with desire. Great dread possessed him. He dared not question his own soul.

A horn sounded in the woods, wild, clamorous and exultant. It was as the voice of a prophet cleaving the despair of a godless world. Even the trees stood listening. Far below in the green shadows of the valley a horseman moved brilliant as a star that portents the conception of a king.

Uther’s eyes were on the horseman in the valley.

“I am even as a child,” he said.

Merlin’s lips quivered.

“The dawn breaks, sire, the night is past. Tidings come to us. Let us ride on.”

Uther seemed sunk in thought; he bowed his head, and looked long into the valley.

“Am I he who slew Gorlois?”

“Courage, sire.”

“My blood is as water, my heart as wax. Death and destiny are over my head.”

“Speak not of destiny, sire, and look not to the skies. In himself is man’s power. Thou hast broken the crucifix. Now trust thine own soul. So long as thou didst serve a superstition, thou didst lose thy true heaven.”

“And yet—”

“Thou hast played the god, sire, and the Father in heaven must love thee for thy strength. God loves the strong. He will let thee rule destiny, and so prosper.”

“Strange words!”

“But true. Were I God, should I love the priest puling prayers in a den? Nay, that man should be mine who moved godlike in the world, and strangled fate with the grip of truth. Great deeds are better than prayers. See! it is young Tristan who comes.”

The horseman in the valley had swept at a gallop through a sea of sun-bronzed fern. He was a young knight on a black horse, caparisoned in green and gold. A halo of glistening curls aureoled his boyish face; his eyes were full of a restless radiance, the eyes of a man whose heart was troubled. He sprang from the saddle, and leading his horse by the bridle, kissed the scabbard of Uther’s sword.

“Tidings, sire.”

“Tristan, I listen.”

The knight looked for a moment into the King’s face, but dared not abide the trial. There was such a stare of desperate calm in the dark eyes, that the lad’s courage whimpered, and quailed from the truth. He hung his head, and stood mute.

“Tristan, I listen.”

“Sire—”

“My God, man, speak out!”

“Sire—”

“The truth.”

“She lives, sire!”

A great silence fell within the hearts of the three, an ecstasy of silence such as comes after the wail of a storm. Merlin stroked his lip, and smiled, the smile of one who dreams. The King’s face was as the face of one who thrusts back hope out of his soul. He sat rigid on his horse, a scarlet image fronting Fate, grim-eyed and steadfast. There were tears in the eyes of Tristan the knight.

“What more?”

Tristan leant against his horse, his arm hooked over the brute’s neck.

“In the valley, sire, is a sanctuary; you can see it yonder by the ford. Two holy women dwell therein. To them, sire, I commend you.”

“You know more!”

“Sire, spare me. The words are for women’s lips, not for mine.”

“So be it.”

The three rode on in silence; Merlin and Tristan together, looking mutely in each other’s faces. Uther’s chin was bowed on his breast. The reins lay loose on his horse’s neck.

A grey cell of unfaced stone showed amid the green boughs beyond the water. At its door stood a woman in a black mantle. A cross hung from her neck, and a white kerchief bound her hair. She stood motionless, half in the shadow, watching the horsemen as they rode down to the rippling ford.

Autumn had touched the sanctuary garden, and the King’s eyes beheld ruin as he climbed the slope. The woman had come from the cell, and now stood at the wicket-gate, with her hands folded as in prayer. Tristan took Uther’s bridle. The King went on foot alone to speak with the anchoress.

“Sire,” she said, kneeling at his feet, “God save and comfort you.”

The man’s brow was twisted into furrows. His right hand clasped his left wrist. He looked over the woman’s head into the woods, and breathed fast through clenched teeth.

“Speak,” he said.

“Sire, the woman lives.”

“I can bear the truth.”

The anchoress made the sign of the cross.

“She came to us, sire, here in this valley, a tall lady, with golden hair loose upon her neck. Her feet were bare and bleeding, her robe rent with thorns. And as she came, she sang wild snatches, such as tell of love. We took her, sire, and gave her meat and drink, bathed her torn feet, and gave her raiment. So, she abode with us, gentle and lovely, yet speaking like one who had suffered, even to death. And yet, even as we slept, she stole away from us last night, and now is gone.”

The woman had never so much as lifted her eyes to the man’s face. Her hands held her crucifix, and she was pale as new-hewn stone.

“And is this all?”

The man’s voice trembled in his throat; his face shone in the sun.

“Not all, sire.”

“Say on.”

The anchoress had buried her face in her black mantle; her voice was husky as with tears.

“Sire, you seek one bereft of reason.”

“Mad!”

“Alas!”

“My God, this then is the end!”

An indefinite melancholy overshadowed the world. Autumn breathed in the wind; the year was rushing red-bosomed to its doom.

On the summit of a wood-crowned hill, rising like a pyramid above moor and forest, two men stood silent under the shadow of an oak. In the distance the sea glimmered; and by a rock upon the hillside, armed knights, a knot of spears, shone like spirit sentinels athwart the west. Mists were creeping up the valleys as the sun went down into the sea. A few stars, dim and comfortless, gleamed out like souls still tortured by the platitudes of Time. An inevitable pessimism seemed to challenge the universe, taking for its parable the weird afterglow in the west.

Deep in the woods a voice was singing, wild and solitary in the gathering gloom. Like the cry of a ghost, it seemed to set the silence quivering, the leaves quaking with a windless awe. The men who looked towards the sea heard it, a song that echoed in the heart like woe.

“Sire, there is yet hope.”

“Life grows dim, and dreams elapse in fire.”

Merlin pointed into the darkening woods. His eyes shone crystal bright, and there was a great radiance upon his face.

“Sire, trust thine own heart, and the god in thee. Through superstition thou hast been brought nigh unto death and to despair. Trust not in priestcraft, grapple God unto thy soul. The laws of men are carven upon stone, the laws of heaven upon the heart. Be strong. From henceforth scorn mere words. Trample custom in the dust. Trust thyself, and the god in thy heart.”

The distant voice had sunk into silence. Uther listened for it with hand aloft.

“Yonder—heaven calls,” he said.

“Go, sire.”

“I must be near her—through the night.”

“And lo!—the moon stands full upon the hills. You shall bless me yet.”

Dim were the woods that autumn evening, dim and deep with an ecstasy of gloom. Stars flickered in the heavens; the moon came, and broidered the trees with silver flame. A primÆval calm lay heavy upon the bosom of the night. The spectral branches of the trees were rigid and prayerful towards the sky.

Uther had left Merlin gazing out upon the shimmering sea. The voice called him from the woods with plaintive peals of song. The man followed, holding to a grass-grown track that curled purposeless into the gloom. Moonlight and shadow were alternate upon his armour. Hope and despair were mimicked upon his face. His soul leapt voiceless and inarticulate into the darkened shrine of prayer.

The voice came to him clearer in the forest calm. The gulf had narrowed; the words flew as over the waters of death. They were pure, yet reasonless, passionate, yet void, words barbed with an utter pathos that wounded desire.

For an hour the King followed in the woods, drawing ever nearer, waxing great with prayer. Anon the voice failed him by a little stream that quivered dimly through the grass. A stillness that was ghostly held the woods. The moonlight seemed to shudder on the trees. A stupendous stupor weighed upon the world.

A hollow glade opened sudden in the woods, a white gulf in the forest’s gloom. Water shone there, a mere, rush-ringed, and full of mysterious shadows, girded by the bronzed foliage of stately beeches. Moss grew thick about the roots; dead leaves covered the grass.

The man knelt in a patch of bracken, and looked out over the glade. A figure went to and fro by the water’s brim, a figure pale in the moonlight, with a glimmering flash of unloosed hair. The man kneeling in the bracken pressed his hands over his breast; his face seemed to start out of the gloom like the face of one who struggles in the sea, submerged, yet desperate.

Uther saw the woman halt beside the mere. He saw her bend, take water in her palms, and dash it in her face. Standing in the moonlight she smoothed her hair between her fingers, her hands shining white against the dark bosom of her dress. She seemed to murmur to herself the while, words wistful and full of woe. Once she thrust her hands to the sky and cried, “Pelleas! Pelleas!” The man kneeling in the shadow quivered like a wind-shaken reed.

The moon climbed higher, and the woman by the mere spread her cloak upon a patch of heather, and laid herself thereon. Not a sound ravaged the silence; the woods were mute, the air rippleless as the steel-surfaced water. An hour passed. The figure on the heather lay still as an effigy upon a tomb. The man in the bracken cast one look at the stars, crossed himself, and crept out into the moonlight.

Holding the scabbard of his sword, he skirted the mere with shimmering armour, went down upon his knees, and crawled slowly over the grass. Hours seemed to elapse before the black patch of heather spread crisp and dry beneath his hands. Breathing through dilating nostrils, he trembled like a craven who creeps to stab a sleeping friend. The moonlight showered vivid as with a supernatural glory. Tense anguish crowded the night with sound.

Two more paces, and he was close at the woman’s side. The heather crackled beneath his knees. He held his breath, crept nearer, and knelt so near that he could have kissed the woman’s face. Her head lay pillowed on her arm, her hair spread in a golden sheet beneath it. Her bosom moved with the rhythmic calm of dreamless sleep. Her lips were parted in a smile. One hand was hid in the dark folds of her robe.

Uther knelt with upturned face, his eyes shut to the sky. He seemed like one faint with pain; his lips moved as in prayer. A hundred inarticulate pleadings surged heavenwards from his heart.

Again he bowed himself and watched the woman as she slept. A strange calm fell for a season upon his face; his eyes never wavered from the white arm and the glimmering hair. Vast awe possessed him. He was like a child who broods tearless and amazed over the calm face of a dead mother.

Hours passed, and the man found no sustenance save in prayer. The unuttered yearnings of a world seemed molten in his soul. The moon waned; the stars grew dim. Sounds oracular were moving in the forest, the mysterious breathing of a thousand trees. Life ebbed and flowed with the sigh of a moon-stupored sea. Visions blazed in the night sky. The portals of heaven were open; the sound of harping fell like silver rain out of the clouds; the faces of saints shone radiant through purple gloom.

Hours passed, and neither sleeper nor watcher stirred. The night grew faint, the water flickered in the mere. The very stars seemed to gaze upon the destinies of two wearied souls. Death hid his countenance. Christ walked the earth.

A sudden sound of light, and the stirring of a wind. Far and faint came the quaver of a bird’s note. Grey and mysterious stood the forest’s spires. Light! Spears of amber darting in the east. A shudder seemed to shake the universe. The vault kindled. The sky grew great with gold.

It was the dawn.

Even as the light increased the man knelt and lifted up his face unto the heavens. Hope, glorious, seemed to fall sudden out of the east, a radiant faith begotten of spirit power. Banners of gold were streaming in the sky. The gloom elapsed. A vast expectancy hung solemn upon the red lips of the day.

Igraine sighed in her sleep. Her mouth quivered, her hair stirred sudden in the heather, tendrils of gold that shivered in the sun. Uther, kneeling, lifted up his hands with one long look to heaven. Prayer burnt upon his face. He strove, Jacob-like, with God.

A second sigh, and the long lashes quivered. The lips moved, the eyes opened.

“Igraine! Igraine!”

Sudden silence followed, a vast hush as of hope. The woman’s eyes were searching silently the man’s face. He bent and cowered over her like one who weeps. His hands touched her body, yet she did not stir.

“Igraine! Igraine!”

It was a hoarse, passionate cry that broke the golden stupor of the dawn. Sudden light leapt lustrous in the woman’s eyes; her face shone radiant amid her hair.

“Pelleas!”

The man’s arms circled her. She half crouched in his bosom, her face peering into his.

“Pelleas!”

“At last!”

A great shudder passed through her; her eyes grew big with fear.

“Speak!”

“Igraine.”

“Gorlois?”

“Gorlois is dead.”

Great silence held for a moment. The woman’s head sank down upon the man’s shoulder; madness had passed; her eyes were fixed on his with a wonderful earnestness, a splendid calm.

“Is this a dream?”

“It is the truth.”

Presently she gave a great sigh, and looked strangely at the sun. Her voice came soft as music over water.

“I have dreamed a dream,” she said, "and all was dark and fearful. Death seemed near, and shadows, and things from hell. I knew not what I did, nor where I wandered, nor what strange stupor held my soul. All was dark about me, horrible midnight peopled with foul forms. It has passed; now, I behold the dawn."

The man lifted up his voice and wept.

“My God! my God! out of hell hast thou brought my soul. Never again shall my vile lips blaspheme.”

And Igraine comforted him.

“Shall I not be your wife?” she said.

THE END