She turned and left him and Harding went back to his work and laughed softly in his beard. "Dream on, my gold queen up yonder," said he, and blew on his waning fires. "You are not the metal I work in," said he, and the river rang again to his hammer on the steel.
But Rosalind went rapidly down to the waterside saying in her heart, "Now I will see whether I cannot get me a lordlier weapon of a better craftsman than you, and at my own price, Red Smith." And when she had come to the ferry she laid her full purse on the bank and cried softly into the night:
"Wayland Smith, give me a sword!"
And then she went away for awhile, and paced the fields till the first light glimmered on the east; and not daring to wait longer for fear of encountering early risers, she turned back to the ferry. And there, shining in the dawn, she found such a blade as made the father in her soul exult. In all its glorious fashioning and splendid temper the hand of the god was manifest. And in the grass beside it lay her purse, of its full store lightened by one penny-piece.
Now to this tale of legends revived and then forgotten, gossips' tales of Wishing-Pools and Snow-white Harts and a God who worked in the dark, we must begin to add the legend of the Rusty Knight. It lasted little longer than the three months of that strange summer of sports within the castle-walls of Amberley. It was at the jousting on Midsummer Day that he first was seen. The lists were open and the roll of knights had answered to their names, and cried in all men's ears their ladies' praises; and nine in ten cried Maudlin. And as the last knight spoke, there suddenly stood in the great gateway an unknown man with his vizard closed, and his coming was greeted with a roar of laughter. For he was clothed from head to foot in antique arms, battered and rusted like old pots and pans that have seen a twelvemonths' weather in a ditch. Out of the merriment occasioned by his appearance, certain of the spectators began to cry, "A champion! a champion!" And others nudged with their elbows, chuckling, "It is the Queen's jester."
But the newcomer stood his ground unflinchingly, and when he could be heard cried fiercely, "They who call me jester shall find they jest before their time. I claim by my kingly birth to take part in this day's fray; and men shall meet me to their rue!"
"By what name shall we know you?" he was asked.
"You shall call me the Knight of the Royal Heart," he said.
"And whose cause do you serve?"
"Hers whose beauty outshines the five-fold beauty in the Queen's Gallery," said he, "hers who was mistress here and wrongly ousted—the most peerless lady of Sussex, Proud Rosalind."