IV
The stems thinned about them suddenly, and the sky grew great beyond a more meagre screen of boughs. To the west, breaking the blood-red canopy with an edge of agate, rocks towered heavenwards, smiting golden-fanged into a furnace of splendour. Waves of light beat in spray upon the billowy masses of the trees, dying in the east into a majestic mask of gloom.
Yeoland and the man in red came forth into a little glade, hollowed by the waters of a rush-edged pool. A stream, a scolloped sheet of foam, stumbled headlong into the mere, vanishing beyond like a frail white ghost into the woods. A fire danced in the open, and under the trees stood a pavilion of red cloth.
The man dismounted and held the girl's stirrup. A quick glance round the glade had shown her bales of merchandise, littering the green carpet of the place, horses tethered in the wood, men moving like gnomes about the fire. Even as she dismounted, streaks of steel shone out in the surrounding shadows. Armed men streamed in, and piled their pikes and bills about the pines.
At the western end of the glade, a gigantic fir, a forest patriarch, stood out above the more slender figures of his fellows. The grotesque roots, writhing like talons, tressled a bench of boughs and skins. Before the tree burnt a fire, the draught sweeping upwards to fan the fringe of the green fir's gown. The man in the black harness took Yeoland to the seat under the tree. The boughs arched them like a canopy, and the wood fire gave a lusty heat in the gloaming.
A boy had run forward to unhelm the knight in the red cloak. Casque and sword lay on the bench of boughs and skins. The girl's glance framed for the first time the man's face. She surveyed him at her leisure under drooping lids, with a species of reticent interest that escaped boldness. It was one of those incidents to her that stand up above the plain of life, and build individual history.
She saw a bronzed man with a tangle of tawny-red hair, a great beak of a nose, and a hooked chin. His eyes were like amber, darting light into the depth of life, alert, deep, and masterful. There was a rugged and indomitable vigour in the face. The mouth was of iron, yet not unkind; the jaw ponderous; the throat bovine. The mask of youth had palpably forsaken him; Life, that great chiseller of faces, had set her tool upon his features, moulding them into a strenuous and powerful dignity that suited his soul.
He appeared to fathom the spirit of the girl's scrutiny, nor did he take umbrage at the open and critical revision of her glances. He inferred calmly enough, that she considered him by no means blemishless in feature or in atmosphere. Probably he had long passed that age when the sanguine bachelor never doubts of plucking absolute favour from the eyes of a woman. The girl was not wholly enamoured of him. He was rational enough to read that in her glances.
"Madame is in doubt," he said to her, with a glimmer of a smile.
"As to what, messire?"