They sat down at the board, but though the bread was white and the honey sweet, little of either passed their lips. It fell to old Swartz to make an end of the loaf, and to sweeten his black beard with the honey.
“Deo gratias,” he said when Martin brought him his supper; “but I have been asleep and dreaming, and in my dreams I thought I heard a woman singing. You can leave me the wine bottle. I shall not play the swine with it.”
He looked shrewdly at Martin Valliant’s face, and saw that the green island had become a place of enchantment.
“Get you gone, Sir Greenshield. I shall be ready to sleep again, and this apple tree will serve as a tent. Black beards are not for such as you, and perhaps I was not dreaming when I slept.”
He cut himself a great hunch of bread.
“Think of the blood I have to make good! Take your youth, man, and thank God for it. You are welcome to any glory you have got out of the bloodying of my poll!”
Swartz watched Martin Valliant walk back toward the garden.
“His head is in Paradise,” he said to himself, “but he had the heart to remember my supper. May the wench be kind to him. It is all a midsummer madness—this love. Well, give me the madness, say I; good wine and a comely woman. The worms can have me when a wench will no longer give me a glint of the eye.”
Mellis had brought her lute with her from the Black Moor, and she had not touched its strings since she had sung to the burgher revelers in the tavern at Gawdy Town. And somehow all her grief and travail and yearning seemed to melt into an exultation that was like the beauty of an April day, a race of sunlight and of shadow.
As the sunset reddened, and the black bats began to flutter around on noiseless wings, the sound of her lute went over the water. Old Swartz heard it, and then her voice, deep, and strange, and very sweet, warming the heart like wine.