“The good saint.”
Ogier laughed.
“My son,” he said, “I am getting grey, and I have seen many strange sights in my time. It has always puzzled me to discover where the devil all that virtue hides itself which the priests prate of, mostly to the women. Silence. Behold the virtue, my son, necessary to the honest fellow who would fill his pockets from the coffers of the Church. Come, now, I hear the trumpet in the court.”
Jocelyn, Bishop of Agravale, had possessed himself of some persuasions of piety in the hearts of the innocents to whom he ministered. He was a man who believed at least in cleansing the outside of the pot. To rule by means of the prerogative of righteousness, a man needs some little reputation for that virtue. And since the robes and insignia of office were scrupulously cleansed and burnished, Jocelyn found opportunities to pander in secret to the inner man. There was a subtle conviction in him that to be able to resist the devil, one must bow down and propitiate him at stated intervals. The occasional lapse made the intervening virtue the more easy. Priest that he was, he could not pose eternally, even to himself, as a species of waxen image in which the virile blood had been turned to milk.
It was publicly acknowledged in Agravale that the good Bishop rode regularly into the wilderness to eat grass like Nebuchadnezzar in order to purge the brain of the vain follies of human pride. He held long vigils in the woods, so his people believed; played the hermit under the winking stars. It was whispered that celestial visions had been spread before his eyes, that St. Pelinore had come down and walked the earth with him to his great comfort. Like Elijah in the wilderness, he was sustained by the grace of heaven, and by the dew of sanctity that descended upon his soul.
Thus Ogier and Tristan followed him that day from Agravale, two stalwart exemplars of the Church Militant. The Bishop rode a mouse-coloured mare, trapped with red harness and a saddle of carved ivory. He wore a plain black robe with a sable hood and a black mask over his face. Ogier rode a great white stallion, a huge beast, the only horse in Agravale who could bear his bulk. Tristan, with his red shield strapped between his shoulders and the episcopal white surcoat over his hauberk, rode beside Ogier on this saintly pilgrimage.
The three sallied from Agravale, leaving its white walls that climbed to the very verge of the great southern precipice. Its towers and turrets ascended towards the blue. Northwards the woods bristled under the sun, a glitter like blackened steel under the summer sky. The road wound under ancient trees. Many a huge ilex cast its gloom over the grass. The stone pine towered on the hills above the dense woods of beech and chestnut, and the valleys were full of primeval oaks, whose sinewy limbs stretched far over the sun-streaked sward.
As for Tristan, his mood partook of the silence of the woods. He was thinking of the Duchess Lilias, that she was not a dame to be flouted with impunity, nor one who could forgive the starving of her desire. Though the summer was flying he had no news of Rosamunde. So utterly had she vanished from the ken of the world, that some Old Man of the Sea might have mured her in a cave under amber-bosomed waves. That she was dead Tristan would not believe. There was an instinctive faith within his heart that Rosamunde lived, perhaps to her greater misery. Ogier himself might have the secret locked in his ungainly carcass, yet Tristan had no desire to betray his quest before he could mend matters to his credit.
Jocelyn had little to say to the pair as they rode through the wilds together. Once free of Agravale, he had put the mask from off his face, and rode with his cowl turned back, his sleek and sensuous face white in the sun. Tristan saw him smile often in a prophetic way, as though the pilgrimage were much to his liking. In a wallet at his saddle bow he had a flask of red wine, and the churchman’s lips were often puckered round the mouth of the flask.
As the day declined, they came to a wilder region, where pines grew thick and cranberries tufted half-hidden rocks. The track was a mere grass ride, two cubits broad, where Ogier and Tristan followed Jocelyn in single file. A desolate valley opened gradually before them, steeped on every side with the black umbrage of the woods. To the west a craggy peak smote the setting sun. In the lap of the valley lay a mere, an island rising black and dim above the silvered surface. Grassland gilded with asphodel dipped towards the water. Yellow flags grew in the shallows; there were lilies floating beyond the rushes.