Compline. Night in his cell. “Ah, if the noble and rich visions were but more real! Ah, if I had the power to move and make move! Ah, if the picture would become Herself—for me, for me!”
CHAPTER IV
Montjoy rode through a dewy June morning. He crossed the bridge, his horse’s hoofs sounding deeply, an air from the sea filling nostrils, the light striking sails of fishing boats gliding away below the arches where all widened. Montjoy was bound for Damson Wood.
Montjoy rode homeward in the evening, after a day in the deep wood, after a visit to Damson Hill graveyard. His two stout serving men, riding the brown and the roan behind him, thought it a strange visit.
Nearing the bridge Montjoy checked the black horse and turning slightly, looked back at Saint Leofric’s mound. There was now full, level flow of reddened light, and the mound was bathed in it. The church stood up in that light, the cloister walls were made faery.
“Oh, Hugh and Hugh! I walk in your heart and I see the dark engines, and I walk in your mind and it is a hold for sorceries!”
He put his horse into motion. “Such a plan and such a course could never have come to Mark! Though it might have come to Prior Matthew.”