Tristan rose up suddenly, and began to stride to and fro before her. He loved Rosamunde, knew it in that moment with all the strongest fibres of his heart. He had hoped too much, trusted too much to the power of his own faith. He turned and faced her there, calm outwardly, miserable within.
“Must this thing be?” he asked her.
There was such deep wistfulness in those words of his that she bent her head and would not look into his face.
“Tristan,” she said, “I pray you plead no further with my heart. I shall turn nun; there is the truth.”
“As you will, madame,” he answered; “ ’tis not for me to parley with your soul.”
He stood motionless with head thrown back, his eyes gazing upon the darkening windows of the east. The sound of the running waters surged in his ears; the colours and odours of the place seemed to faint into the night. As for Rosamunde, she moved never a muscle. The man’s great faith seemed to fill her with a gradual shame.
“Tristan,” she said at last, “have I not said that I am weary of the world, its passions and its inconstant smiles? Guard me for one short week, and I will ask no more.”
There was that inexplicable perversity in her heart that at certain moments makes a woman traitorous to her own desires. Rosamunde, passionate pessimist, beckoned her own fate on with a bitterness that Tristan could not fathom.
“Listen,” she said. “In the province of the Seven Streams there stands the great convent of Holy Guard, set on a headland above the sea. ’Tis many leagues south of Joyous Vale, by the great river that parts our province from Duchess Lilias’s lands. The Papists have spared the place, since Samson was never there. Thither, Tristan, shall you take me. I will turn nun, and take the veil.”
Tristan watched her, listening like a man to the reading of his own doom. Rosamunde did not look at him. Her fair head was bowed down over her knees.