They took leave of each other there; the leper hobbling away with eyes down-turned, his bell jangling at his thigh. Tristan, full of a great-hearted pity, watched him with a smile upon his mouth. He felt his own hale body warm to the wind, his face fresh as dew-washed grass. The man with his sores and his lonely despair loomed like a dark cloud over the sun.
Tristan cast a last glance at him over his shoulder as he descended the road. The leper had drawn to the great cross where it towered solitary under the open sky. He had fallen on his knees at the foot thereof, and clasped the beam with his arms. He was kneeling thus when Tristan left him, clinging like a wrecked voyager to the feet of the Christ.
CHAPTER IV
Tristan rode on down the sandy road, pondering what the leper had told him that morning concerning Joyous Vale, how the valley lay in peril of the sword. These priests, he vowed in his own heart, were too given to meddling with the souls of others. For a few subtilties twisted from a theologian’s tongue, they would let war loose upon an innocent province, and teach with violence what they could not teach with truth. Tristan was not a man who needed the superfluous unction of a priest’s pardon.
Rounding a great rock that overhung the road, he saw Sir Ronan’s hold smile up at him from beside the lake. About the walls and terraces rose many roofs, the ruddy hoods of many houses gathered about their giant sire. The place looked peaceful as a child asleep, bowered round with green, touched by the waters of the lake. Pastures pillared with poplars and aspens stretched towards the darker confines of the woods.
Tristan, glad in his heart of the beauty of it all, followed the road where it plunged abruptly into a thicket of pines. There was a patient gloom under the sweeper boughs. Squirrels ran ruddy-coated up the trees, peering black-eyed at him as he passed, and gorse ringed the dark aisles with gold.
As Tristan rode through the pine wood that day, he heard the sound of singing coming down to him upon the breeze. It was a woman’s voice that sounded through the woods, so richly that the tall trees listened and smiled under the noon sun. Tristan drew rein on the grass by the road. He had never heard such a voice before, a voice that set the welkin quivering as with vibrations of tremulous light.
Riding on again with a smile on his face, he saw the woodland break away before the meadows of the town. The sky grew broad above the trees, and still the rich voice sounded through, now hushed, now rising like a lark towards the clouds. Tristan could catch the words of the song as he walked his horse over the spongy turf.
Rounding a bank of furze in bloom, he saw under the shade of a cedar tree a ruined shrine grown round with thorns. Many flowers were a-bloom in the grass, and a rivulet went splashing down towards the great lake in the valley. A gradual slope heaved away from the wood, and by the shrine in the long grass a woman sat on a fallen stone, with her face turned towards the town.
Tristan dismounted, and, having tethered his horse, he stood under cover of the bank of furze and watched the woman by the shrine. She had ceased her singing, like one whose thoughts were too deep and solemn for further song. She was sitting with her chin upon her palms, staring into the distant south. Tristan saw the curve of her neck, white and clear as the moon’s rim, the amber of her netted hair, the rich folds of her green gown.