“Good men that you are,” he said, buckling his shield over his shoulders, “you ride the waves better than the back of a horse. When I have need of brown sails and a strong keel, I will send to Purple Isle and call you over. To my sire and to Dame Joan, my mother, commend me.”
They tossed their rough blessings on him as he climbed the bank, rattled the sweeps in the rowlocks, waved their fur-lined caps. Tristan saluted them with his drawn sword, a warm colour on his ugly face. They were still watching him and waving their brown fists when he disappeared from their sight into the woods.
There was a strenuous tone in the man’s stout heart that day. The world lay open at his feet, like a broad and glorious plain, unfolding its many phases to his ken. Tristan, great boyish Titan, with a heart of gold, welcomed the sun as it smote through branches upon his face. He was glad of the woods and of their solemn liberty, glad of the hills, and the broad, beaming valleys. Purple Isle had held him overlong in its girdle of foam. The wide world smiled on him; the beacon of romance burnt red upon the hills.
He followed the path that morning that the peasant had described to him, a path that wound over uplands under the shadows of ancient trees. The woods were virgin to Tristan’s heart. There were no such broad-shouldered giants in Purple Isle with its waving pines and stunted myrtles. The great oaks stood to him for sinew and strength. Their gnarled loins spoke of the sap of centuries, their limbs of a hundred battles with the wind. Youth ran riot in him that April day. He was as a Bacchanal intoxicated with the wine of being. He smote the great trees as he passed, bluff, open-handed buffets that would have shaken a Hercules. Once, in the joy of strength, he grappled an oak sapling as he would have grappled a python, wrestled with it, bent it beneath the might of his broad back till the stem splintered and surrendered to his grip. He tossed the broken tree aside with the smile of a conqueror, strode on through the woods, singing as he went.
He had come to the brim of a valley, and had halted to gaze over the meadows with their dark knolls of trees, when a shrill cry stirred him like a wail of a hostile trumpet. Wild and inarticulate, it eddied through the woods, terror breathing in the cry, as of life struggling in the toils of death. The voice grew and gathered, died again into an eerie whimper. Tristan, stiff as a wooden image, heard it with quickened pulses and a sudden solemnity that overspread his countenance like a cloud.
Pushing through a thicket of hollies, he came to a great break in the woods, where the forest gloom gave place to an open valley, a golden bowl brimming with sunlight. In green meadows a castle stood amid the windings of a stream. Peace seemed throned above the olive thickets, the shimmering water, and the gilded meadows. Yet from a stone bridge that linked the sandy highway where it crossed the stream, there rose other voices to denounce the dream.
Tristan, standing under the woodshawe, beheld a knot of figures swaying to and fro over the keystone of the bridge. Swords were tossing, men struggling together betwixt the parapets. The few seemed caught and trampled by the many. Even as he watched, a horseman broke from the pool of grappling, foining figures, and galloped northwards up the sandy road. An archer, standing on the parapet of the bridge, loosed a shaft at the fugitive, a shaft that found its billet in the rider’s back. Tristan saw him thrust his arms to the sky, twist in the saddle, and fall heavily to earth. His horse, whinnying with fear, left the high road, and cantered over the fields towards the thicket where Tristan stood.
Tristan was not a youth given to the subtle balancing of thought. Being barren of all fear, save the fear of God, he obeyed without debate the prick of impulse. Leaving the thicket, he hallooed to the riderless brute trotting towards him over the meadows. The horse halted, tossed up his head with ears agog, pawed the earth as he cast about from side to side. It was a superb beast, black as a raven, with a single white star on the forehead. Tristan called to him, advancing step by step. There was a magic in the man that made all wild things trust him and obey. The great beast suffered him to approach over the grass. Tristan’s hand touched the sleek, foam-flecked muzzle. He caressed the brute’s ears, took firm hold of the bridle, mounted at one spring, knew himself the master.
“God helps him who helps himself,” he said, with a certain quaint sententiousness, running his fingers through the long black mane.
Being imbued, despite his strenuous vigour, with some hard-headedness of discretion, he ignored the blood-spilling in the valley, content to shepherd the prize to his own good cause. Turning back into the woods, he rode southwards from the place, keeping diligent watch, however, lest any hot-handed gentleman should be following on his heels. Seemingly they were busied with the purging of their own pastures, for Tristan saw no more of them that day.