“Not for glory,” he said, “shall I leave you here. It is not easy to run from love.”
“Why go, then?” she cried, turning away her head, her hands playing with the rich girdle about her body. “Is duty the sorry nag that bears you hence? Before Heaven, Tristan, if you refuse me this, I will return to Holy Guard and live among ruins.”
His dark eyes followed her as she drifted to and fro in her blue gown over the brilliant grass. She was very lovely even in her anger, with her warm cheeks and her eager eyes. Yet Tristan, having a will more strong than her wrath, determined to take her at her word.
“So be it,” he said, solemnly enough; “I will send Telamon with you and twenty men. The Gloire will bear you straight to the sea; Lilias’s barge is moored in the shallows. Man can promise no safer place than Holy Guard; if the worst comes to the worst, you can sail for the north.”
Rosamunde looked at him, sudden wistfulness shining through the mask of wrath, as though she half doubted the truth of his words. There was no wavering of Tristan’s eyes, no loosening of the determined mouth. Her pride waxed in her as she gazed on his face, perhaps because she felt that she had earned his pity, in that she had failed him when he needed her love.
“So be it, then,” she said, turning away under the trees. “I shall be ready for Telamon before the sun is at noon.”
CHAPTER XLII
Like a proud star, Rosamunde of Joyous Vale had set in the far west, over the wilds and the deep woods that stretched towards the sea. Lilias’s forsaken barge had borne her away down the silver curves of the mighty Gloire, with Telamon at the helm and ten men toiling at the oars. From a tower on the walls of Agravale Tristan had watched the gilded poop disappear into the gloom of the woods. In anger Rosamunde had parted from him, because he had set his duty before her love and had dared to deny her the tyranny of tears. Tristan wondered, as he watched from the tower, whether he would behold her face again.
“To horse, to horse!”
Such was the trumpet’s cry that noon. Tristan and his men tightened up the girths, rode out from Agravale under the sun at its zenith, wound down the steep road towards the river, crossed the stone bridge, and held for the south. Their horses’ hoofs rang on the old Roman road that stretched over the meadows like a great beam. They had taken certain of the peasant folk with them as guides, men who knew all the mountain passes and the narrow defiles of St. Isidore’s Gate.