She tightened her girdle, smoothed her gown, and eyed Tristan under drooping lids.
“Samson is a handsome fellow,” she said.
Tristan pursed up his mouth and answered her nothing. Rosamunde and the preacher had passed deeper into the wood, and were out of sight and hearing. Tristan would have given much to have known what passed between them under the trees.
“Samson,” said the girl at his elbow, “Samson, sirrah, has the wit to be courteous to a lady. He has no tongue like a tag of undressed leather, nor a face like a dinted buckler red with rust.”
Tristan played with the buckle of his sword belt and wished the woman Isabel a man.
“Ha, cousin,” she ran on, “I have heard of a horse-boy stealing a pair of red shoes, because they had covered a lady’s toes. As for her heart, it was a pearl, a great white pearl, sirrah, not to be breathed upon and handled by grooms. Hark! holy saints, what’s amiss in the wood?”
Isabel had started from her malice like a woman who sees a snake twisting at her feet. She stood rigid, with eyes dilating, her lips apart, the colour gone from her face. Through the alleys of the wood had come a sudden outcry, the loud voice of a man challenging a foe, the passionate declaiming of an angry woman. Tristan, with his back taut as the straining mast of a ship, stood snuffing the air, his muscles quivering, his broad chest spread. In the flash of a second he had plunged down the grass ride at a run, unbuckling his sword as he ran, flinging aside belt and scabbard. Voices, passionate and clamorous, were playing through the trees. They winged on Tristan’s heels, as he sped with tight mouth and kindling eyes under sun and shadow.
Coming upon a narrow glade in the wood, he saw the scene spread out before him. With her back to a tree stood Rosamunde, her eyes ablaze, her head held high. Before her, with uplifted knife, his robe gathered as a buckler in his left hand, stood Samson the Heretic, fronting four armed men who crouched round him like hounds about a boar. Even as Tristan came, they sprang together upon the monk, dragging him down in a moiling heap upon the grass. The fourth snatched out at Rosamunde, caught the neckband of her gown, rent it to the girdle as she strained from him with both hands set upon his face.
Tristan leapt in as though his blood had changed to fire. The man who had seized on Rosamunde sprang away with a red throat and an empty doom. Turning, Tristan plunged upon the three, who struggled and writhed over the powerful figure of the priest. Plucking the uppermost by the girdle, even as he would have plucked a beetle from a stone, Tristan threw him full against the stem of a tree. The man’s breath groaned out of him; he twitched and lay still. Samson, bleeding in the brow, had risen upon the others with a hand on either throat. Tristan, dodging round, ran his sword through the body of the taller man. Samson, bleeding and breathless, rose from the carcass of the other, and made way for Tristan’s blow.
Sudden silence fell upon the pool of death. Rosamunde stood with Tristan and the monk, staring at the brief havoc their hands had wrought. The grass was stained with red. Samson, shaking the blood out of his eyes, turned to Tristan with outstretched hand. Their manhood seemed to meet in that one strong grip. Rosamunde, tearing cloth from the border of her gown, came forward and caught Samson by the sleeve.