It was the morning of Tristan’s second Sabbath there. He was on the terrace burnishing his arms, when Isabel, Rosamunde’s woman, crept out to him from the tower. He was to take horse and follow her lady that morning. She had need of him, and trusted his honour.
Tristan, having saddled and bridled his horse, rode out and met Rosamunde at the gate. She was mounted on a white palfrey, her woman Isabel beside her on a mule. Tristan saluted them, a silent discretion in his deep-set eyes. To him Rosamunde’s beauty was as the breath of June.
They rode out down the slope of the hill, where the gardens amid the thickets were ablaze under the noon sun. Rosamunde was clad in a green robe, with a girdle of red leather shaped to her figure. She rode on before Tristan and the woman Isabel, as though not sorry of solitude and freedom from stone walls. There was a calm unapproachableness about her, which, when she so willed it, became as a wall of glimmering ice. Her words, often imperious and curt, would have suggested insolence on the lips of one less fair. Tristan had seen her angered but once. There had been something of the splendour of a stormy sunset about the mood, a red rush of passion that had bewitched him more than smiles.
As they left the town behind a screen of poplars, Rosamunde called Tristan to her, but gestured Isabel to remain behind. Her lips had much scorn on them that day, scorn for her husband, jejune and jealous pedant that he was. Of the red wine of her love Lord Ronan had tasted little. She was unsmirched as a rose, pure as an ivory palace conceived in some deep dream.
Tristan eyed her over his massive shoulder, wondering much what was in her heart. A mask of thought covered her face, as she gazed ahead into the deeps of the woods. True, there was much in her heart to breed unrest, yet Tristan was as a child in a temple, ignorant of the many and manifold visions stirring within her brain. La Vallée Joyeuse stretched out before her, like a calm sea untouched by the wind. Yet beyond the mountains the black banners of war gathered. Fanaticism was streaming like fire to purge and to destroy. Had not the Pope armed the southern nobles against the land? Had not Sir Parsival put his legate to the sword?
Rosamunde, great lady that she was, feared not for herself the peril of a zealot’s war. The people of La Vallée Joyeuse were to her as children. She was their lady, and they loved her, even because she was gracious and merciful, a friend set above them like an altared saint. It was her spirit that had opened their rude hearts to Samson’s heresy. She, the first convert in mind and soul, had drawn them after her, as a shepherdess draws her sheep.
As for the lords and barons of the Seven Streams, they were scattered wide amid their woods and hills. Samson had preached and they had listened. Mewed in their mountains and their forest gloom, they were deaf to the thunder of ecclesiastic wrath. Ronan of Joyous Vale, first lord of the province, was mere selfish clay, careless of his people, jealous of his wife. His very malice made her mute to him. On Samson, rugged Titan piling mountains against the Papal Jove, rested the one ambition of the land.
Drawing Tristan to her that day, Rosamunde unbosomed something of her care to him. There was a serene stateliness in all her words, a tender dignity as of one who stoops, from love, not pride. The man seemed nothing but a casual friend, cast in her path by the hand of circumstance. She trusted him, had trusted from the first, because his face was ugly and his words came slow.
Tristan gathered the truth from her as they rode through the meadows. There was much shrewdness in his turbulent brain. Moreover, Rosamunde had taken hold upon his heart. Sympathies are warm where love treads fast; comprehension kindles when the torch burns bright.
“Lady,” he said to her, in his curt, calm way, “of the burden you bear—I am wise—in measure. Our cross bulks the heavier when the shoulder is chafed.”