Now Tristan was not a woman’s man, and in Purple Isle his ugly face had won him little favour among the girls. He remembered how Grizzel, the fishwife’s child, black of eye and red of face, had mocked and taunted him on the moors, with her bare-legged wenches at her back. He remembered how he had wished them men for the sake of the clods they had thrown at his head. Yet though the woman by the shrine was as none of these, he wavered a moment behind the bank, as though half in awe of her because she was fair.
Hearing his footsteps in the grass, she turned—and saw him, and rose up from the stone. She was as tall as Tristan, and older than he was both in face and years and in knowledge of life. Her golden hair was knotted up in a caul, her green gown dusted with violets and bordered with blue.
She seemed to shake the thoughts out of her heart as she rose up and looked Tristan over. Yet there was no aloofness in her eyes, nay, her very soul seemed to shine therein as she stood considering his face. She smiled a little as she saw the bronzed, uncomely countenance somewhat abashed and sullen before her.
“Would you speak with me?” she asked.
Tristan was mute for the moment, like one whose words stumbled one against each other.
“We are strangers,” she added, still smiling at him out of her great eyes; “is my speech foreign to your ears?”
Perhaps it was her complete fearlessness of manner that smote Tristan from the first moment that she spoke to him. An atmosphere of stateliness seemed to surround her, an intangible magic that held him despite his strength. Though he could crush the brow of an ox with his fist, he seemed half in awe of the woman whose face, with all its fairness, showed no fear.
“Madame,” he said, squaring his shoulders, “though a stranger here, your words are my words. Tristan le Sauvage is my name, and I have come from Purple Isle, over the sea. For the rest, I have a quest upon me, and I carry a sword.”
There was a species of defiance in his voice, as though he viewed the subtler sex with a boy’s suspicions. Nor was the meaning of his mood lost upon the woman.
Matching frankness with simplicity, she gave him welcome to the Land of the Seven Streams.