“Ah God!” said Garin with strong emotion. “How beautiful are Thy circles that Thou drawest!”
She looked at him with parted lips. “Now, I will ask a question! I wearied, that autumn, of nuns’ ways and waiting ladies’ ways and my own ways. One day I said, ‘I will go be a shepherdess and taste the true earth!’” A smile hovered. “Faith! the experiment was short!—Now, my question.—Being a shepherdess, I was like to taste shepherdess’s fare in this so knightly world. Then came by a true knight, though his dress and estate were those of a squire.—My question:—I asked him, that day, ‘Where is your home?’ He answered, that squire, and I thought that he told the truth,—‘I dwell by the sea, a long way from here.’—Sir Garin de Castel-Noir, that was squire to Raimbaut the Six-fingered, neither dwelling nor serving by the sea but among hills, and not far away but near at hand, tell me now and tell me truly—”
“Jael the herd, I am punished! I thought to myself, ‘I am in danger from that false knight who will certainly seek me.’”
“Ah, I see!” said the princess; and she laughed at him in scorn.
“It is an ill thing,” said Garin, “to mistrust and to lie! I make no plea, my Lady Audiart, save that I do not always so.”
“Certes, no! I believe you there.... Let it go by.... That shepherdess could not, after all, be to you for trustworthiness like your Fair Goal—”
She ceased abruptly upon the name. The colour glowed in the west, the colour played and leaped in the faggot fire, the colour quivered in their own faces. Light that was not outer light brightened in their eyes. Their frames trembled, their tissues seemed to themselves and to each other to grow fine and luminous. There had been a shock, and all the world was different.
Garin spoke. “On a Tuesday you were Jael the herd. On a Thursday, in the middle of the day, you came with your ladies to a lawn by the stream that flows by Our Lady in Egypt—the lawn of the plane, the poplar and the cedar, the stone chair beneath the cedar, and the tall thick laurels rounding all.” He was knight and poet and singer now—Garin of the Golden Island—knight and poet and singer and another besides. “A nightingale had sung me into covert there. I followed it down the stream, from grove to grove, and it sung me into covert there. The laurels were about me. I rested so close to the cedar—so close to the stone chair! One played a harp—you moved with your ladies to the water’s edge—you came up the lawn again to the three trees. You were robed in blue, my princess; your veil was long and threaded with silver and gold, and it hid your face. I never saw your face that day—nor for long years afterward! You sat in the stone chair—”
“Stop!” said the Princess Audiart. She sat perfectly still in the rich dusk. Air and countenance had a strange hush, a moment of expressionless waiting. Then uprushed the dawn. He saw the memory awaken, the wings of knowledge outstretch. “Ah, my God!” she whispered. “As I sat there, the strangest breath came over me—sense of a presence near as myself—” The rose in her face became carnation, she sprang to her feet, turned aside. The fire came between her and Garin; she paced up and down in the shadowy space between the tree-trunks that were like the Saracen pillars.
Moments passed, then she returned and stood beside the stone.