But her shoulders shook with a hard, tearless sob, and the Knight fled from the arbour.
As he paced the lawn, on which the Bishop had promenaded the evening before, Hugh cursed his rashness in speaking; yet knew, in the heart of his heart, that he could not have done otherwise. Mora's words concerning truth, gave him a background of comfort. Even so had he ever himself felt. But would it prove that his honesty had indeed shattered his chances of happiness, and hers?
A new name? . . . What might it be? . . . What the mischief, had the
Bishop named his palfrey? . . . Sheba? Nay, that was the ass!
Solomon? Nay, that was the mare! Yet—how came a mare to be named
Solomon?
In his disturbed mental state it irritated him unreasonably that a mare should be called after a king with seven hundred wives! Then he remembered "black, but comely," and arrived at the right name, Shulamite. Of course! Not Solomon but Shulamite. He had read that love-poem of the unnamed Eastern shepherd, with the Rabbi in the mountain fastness. The Rabbi had pointed out that the word used in that description signified "sunburned." The lovely Shulamite maiden, exposed to the Eastern sun while tending her kids and keeping the vineyards, had tanned a ruddy brown, beside which the daughters of Jerusalem, enclosed in King Solomon's scented harem, looked pale as wilting lilies. Remembering the glossy coat of the black mare, Hugh wondered, with a momentary sense of merriment, whether the Bishop supposed the maiden of the "Song of Songs" to have been an Ethiopian.
Then he remembered "Iconoklastes." Yes, surely! The palfrey was Iconoklastes. Now wherefore gave the Bishop such a name to his white palfrey?
Striding blindly about the lawn, of a sudden the Knight stepped full on to a flower-bed. At once he seemed to hear the Bishop's gentle voice: "I named him Iconoklastes because he trampled to ruin some flower-beds on which I spent much time and care, and of which I was inordinately fond."
Ah! . . . That was it! The destroyer of fair bloom and blossom, of buds of promise; of the loveliness of a tended garden. . . . Was this then what he seemed to Mora? He, who had forced her to yield to the insistence of his love? . . . In her chaste Convent cell, she could have remained true to this Ideal love of her girlhood: and, now that she knew it to have been called forth by love, could have received, mentally, its full fruition. Also, in time she might have discovered the identity of the Bishop with Father Gervaise, and long years of perfect friendship might have proved a solace to their sundered hearts, had not he—the trampler upon flower-beds—rudely intervened.
And yet—Mora had been betrothed to him, her love had been his, long after Father Gervaise had left the land.
How could he win her back to be once more as she was when they parted on the castle battlements eight years before?
How could he free himself, and her, from these intangible, ecclesiastical entanglements?