“God is not merciful,” she cried, “to those who grieve and sorrow here.”
He drew her down to him, so that his face was wreathed in the glory of her hair.
“Let us not judge,” he said, “those things which ever balk our ken. Are we not children? Wife, take courage.”
She clung to him, and kissed his lips, as though to shut the warm life in.
“Ah, Tristan, Tristan, that I also might die!”
CHAPTER XLVIII
A night and a day had passed, and Tristan lived on, though the blood still flowed from his wounded side. Blanche and Rosamunde had dressed the wound with oil and wine and diverse herbs, but the barb would suffer no healing there, and the red stream still ebbed slowly forth. They saw that Tristan weakened hour by hour, his great hands growing white as a young girl’s, his eyes shining like crystal in a mask of wax.
Rosamunde watched at his side, counting the hours by the dial of her heart, neither sleeping nor leaving him long alone. As she saw him weakening with his wound, the fiercer mood returned to her heart as though to defy the power of death. It was not against Tristan that it arose, this passionate anger that strove with Fate. To the man she was mild and tender as moonlight, gentle towards him as the hours sped by. Against God it was that her heart cried out, against the God who would not hear her prayers.
When the second evening came, with the night’s fatalism deepening in the east, she passed out from the room like one whose heart could bear up no longer against despair. It was not to weep that she sped away and climbed to the topmost wall of Holy Guard. Nor was it for prayer in the gentler sense, but rather to fling her burning wrongs full in the countenance of the heavens.
The sun was setting over the sea like some great slave of the Creator, doomed to tread an eternal track amid the planets of the sky. The clouds, like demons, scourged him on, breathing forth fire and purple smoke. Beneath on the rocks the sea complained, that mighty rhapsodist whose words declared the troubled destinies of all mankind. For as the wind is often hushed, luring the ocean into sleep, so doubt and anguish cease at times, only to mock mankind the more.