As I rode round the lists, a white hand from under the sister’s daïs—to whom belonging I well could guess—threw me a flower, the which fell under my sleek charger’s hoofs and was stamped into the trodden mold. And then the trumpet sounded. “Avant!” called the glittering marshal—and we met in mid career.
Seven strong knights did I jerk from their high-peaked saddles that morning, and won a lady’s golden head-ring, and rode round about the circus with it on my lance-point. When I came under where Isobel sat, I saw her fair cheeks redder than my ribbons with maiden expectation; but, as I passed without a sign, they grew whiter than her lawn. And then I reined up and deposited that circlet at the footstool of her sister. The proud, cold maid accepted the homage as was her duty, but scarcely deigned to lower her eyes to the level of my helmet-plumes while her father put it on her forehead.
A merry time we had in that courtly place waiting for the signal to start; and much did I learn and note—soon the favorite gallant in that goodly company, the acknowledged strongest spearman in the lists, the best teller of strange stories by an evening fire! But never an inch of way could I make with the impenetrable girl on whom my wayward heart was set, while the other—the younger—made her sweet self the pointing stock of high and low, she was so blindly, so obviously in love.
One day it came to a climax. We met by chance in a glade of black shadows among the cedar branches, I and that damsel in white, and, finding I would not woo her, she set to work and wooed me—so sweet, so strong, so passionate, that to this day I cannot think how I withstood it. Yes, and that fair, slim maid, renowned through all the district for her gentle reticence, when I would not answer love with love, and glance for glance, fired up with white-hot passion, threw hesitance to the wind, and besought and knelt to me, and asked no more than to be my slave, so sweet, so reckless in her passion, that it was not the high-born English lady who knelt there, but rather it seemed to me my dear, fiery, untutored British Princess! Fool I was not to see it then, witless after so much not to guess the tameless spirit, the intruder soul that poor girl at my feet held unwitting in her bosom!
She came to me, as I have said, all in a gust of feeling unlike herself, and, when I would not say that which she longed to hear, she wrung her hands, and then down she came upon her knees and clipped me round my jeweled belt and confessed her love for me in such a headlong rush of tearful eloquence I durst not write it.
“Lady,” I said, lifting the supple girl to her feet. “I grieve, but it is useless. Forget! forgive! I cannot answer as you would.”
“Ah, but,” she answered, rushing again to the onset, sighing as now the hot, strange love that burned within her, and now her sweet native spirit strove for mastery—(“surely, I think, I am possessed), I will not take ‘No’ for an answer. I am consumed (oh! fie to say it) for thee. I am not first in thy dear affection—why, then, I will be second. Not second! then I will be the hundredth from thy heart! My light, my life and fate, I cannot live without thee. Oh! as you were born by your mother’s consummated love, as thou hast ever felt compunction for a white-cheeked maid, have pity on me! I tell thee I will follow thee to the ends of the earth (Lord! how my tongue runs on!). For one moiety of that affection perhaps a happier woman has I will serve thee through life. Thou hast no wife, ’tis said, to hinder; thou art a soldier, and a score of them, ere I was touched with this strange infection, have sued hopeless for but a chance of that which is proffered thee so freely. Truth! they have told me I was fair and tall, with a complexion that ridiculed the water-lilies on the moat, and hair, one said, was like ripe corn with a harvest sun upon it (it makes me blush”—I heard her whisper to herself—“to apprise myself like this), and yet you stand there averse and sullen, with eyes turned from me, and deaf ears! Am I a sight so dreadful to you?”
“Maid!” I cried, shutting out her suppliant beauty from my heart—overfull, as I thought it, of that other one, her sister—“no man could look at you and not be moved. The wayward Immortals have given you more sweetness than near any other woman I ever saw—‘a sight so dreadful to me?’—why, you are fairer than an early morning in May when the new sun gets up over the wet-flowered hawthorns! And for this very reason, for pity on us both, stand up, and dry your tears! Believe me, dear maid, where I go you cannot come. You tread the rough soldier’s path! Why, those pretty velvet buskins would wear out in the first march. And turn those dainty hands to the rough craft of war, to scouring harness and grooming chargers—oh! that were miserable indeed; those cherry lips are worse suited than you know for the chance fare of camp and watchfire, and those round arms would soon find a sword was heavier than a bodkin—there, again forget, forgive—and, perhaps, when I come back——”
But why should I further follow that sad love-scene under the broad-spreading cedars? Let it be sufficient for you that I soothed her as well as might be and stanched her tears and modified my coolness, taking her pretty hands and whispering to as dainty and greedy an ear as ever was opened to hear, perhaps, a little more of lover friendliness than I truly meant, and so we parted.