“I have cooked for my comrade in arms, and he will not eat what I have cooked.”
Martin straightened up, and left his hunting for nails among the trampled nettles.
“It was not churlishness on my part.”
“I know. You must do things fiercely, Martin Valliant, with your whole heart, or not at all.”
“My hunger is fierce,” he confessed, smiling gravely. “No food could be sweeter than what your hands have prepared.”
He was shy of her, and voiceless, all through that meal, and there was an answering silence in Mellis’s heart, for though so short a time had passed since their lives had been linked together, she was forgetting Martin the monk in regarding Martin Valliant the man. She began to look at him with a vivid and self-surprised curiosity; his shyness infected her; she became conscious of the deep wonder light in his eyes. Hitherto she had been a creature of impulses, a wild thing blown along by the wind of necessity; but of a sudden she saw the man as a man, and her heart seemed to cease beating for a moment, and her thoughts to stand still.
He was the very contrast of herself, with his tawny hair tinged with red, and his frank, steadfast, trusting eyes. Regarded as a woman, Mellis was a fine, lithe, white-skinned creature, and Martin Valliant matched her in the matter of bodily beauty. There was no gnarled uncouthness about his strength. He carried himself like a king’s son, and without any arrogance of conscious pride. The soul of the man seemed to show in his movements, a steady, gentle, unflurried soul, capable of great tendernesses, of great wraths, and of strange renunciations.
Her eyes grew wayward, more shadowy; they avoided his. A new subtlety of feeling stole into the hearts of both of them. The sun shone, the woods were green, the wild flowers were bright in the lush grass. When a blackbird sang Martin Valliant felt that the bird’s song and his heart were one.
He broke away, for the grosser hunger was soon satisfied.
“I shall not sleep till that gate is up.”