“Laggard, to your cell. Draw water for penance on the morrow. You are too often idle for so young a wench.”
Rosamunde turned to her with a look of appeal. There were still tears upon her cheeks, and even for the sympathy of this round-backed scold she would have given much, so lonely was she.
“I go, sister,” she said. “I was but watching the sun go down, thinking of the years that have gone over my head.”
Julia sneered, and tilted her nose. It was well known in Holy Guard that Rosamunde had been of noble birth. The woman, grained with the hypocritic egotism of that narrow life, had created Rosamunde’s downfall with sisterly relish.
“Leave the past alone, girl,” she said, with a tightening of her mouth; “it was none too clean and godly, I warrant. I saw court life in Agravale before I found Our Lady here.”
“Who would doubt it?” said Rosamunde, with a tinge of scorn.
“Mortify your pride, my wench; we suffer no fire-flies in Holy Guard.”
“Nor any charity,” said Rosamunde, turning on her heel.
Drawing her gown about her—for the wind was keen—she passed from the terrace down the broad stairway to the lower platform of the abbey. Seeking her cell down gloomy passage-ways and galleries, she sat down on the wood, straw-palleted bed, miserable at heart, cold in body. The blue gloom of the night showed through a chink in the wall, a single star glimmering through with silver irony. The wind whistled into the cell as into the narrow throat of an empty tomb.
Yet while Rosamunde was moping in Holy Guard, grieving for liberty and that love she had lost to the world, Tristan won fame in the Seven Streams as a bold smiter and a hardy knight.