She sighed, hung her head, sat down at the foot of the tree. The man’s unselfish faith shamed her more and more. Perhaps, in her perversity, she strove to love him the less for the rough simplicity of his good faith. His very patience hardened her discontent.
Tristan, with a last look, left her there, and wandered away into the woods. A full moon climbed in the east, and the wide land was smitten with her mystery. The valleys were as lakes of glimmering mist, the hills like icy pinnacles gleaming towards the stars. The forest glades were white under the moon; the trees, tall, sculptured pyramids, their trunks as of ebony inlaid with pearl wherever the moonlight splashed the bark. The silence of the wilderness was as the silence of a windless sea.
Tristan wandered in the woods, his heart full of the strange, sad beauty of that summer night. The stars spoke of Rosamunde; the trees had her name unuttered on their lips. What was this woman that she should bring such bitterness into his life? Were there not others in the world as fair as she, with lips as red and eyes as magical? Strangeness; mystery. She was one with the moon, a goddess shrined in the gloom of forests dim. White and immaculate, beautifully strange, she was as an elf-child fated to doom men to despair.
Tristan passed back, found her asleep under the tree. He stood beside her, gazed on the sleeping face. There was silent faith in that slumber; trust in the man who guarded her honour. The moonlight streamed on the upturned face, shining like ivory amid the gleam of her hair. How white her throat was, how her bosom rose and fell with the long pale hands folded thereon.
A sudden warmth flooded Tristan’s heart, and youth cried in him like a desirous wind. Should this beauty be mured in stone, this red rose be hid by convent trees? Was she not flesh and blood, born to love and to be loved in turn—and what was life but love and desire?
He crept near on his knees, hung over her breathlessly, gazing on her face. God, but to wake her with one long kiss, to feel those white arms steal round his neck! They were alone, the two of them, under the stars. For many minutes Tristan hung there like a man tottering on a crag betwixt sea and sky. Passion whimpered in him; his heart smote fast. Yet even as he crouched over Rosamunde asleep, some dream or vision seemed to trouble her soul. Her hands stirred, her lids quivered, her breath came fast betwixt her lips. A shadow as of pain passed over the moonlit face. Tristan, motionless, heard her utter a low cry, saw tears gleaming upon her cheeks.
Pity, the strong tenderness of his nobler self, rushed back into the deeps as a wave from a cliff. The black thoughts flew from his heart like bats frightened by the light of the sun. Great shame seized on Tristan; he fell down at the foot of a tree and prayed.
CHAPTER XXIV
The fifth day towards evening Tristan and Rosamunde saw the sea, a wild streak of troubled gold under the kindling cressets of the west. Beneath them lay a valley full of tangled scrub and wind-worn trees. Westwards rose a great rock thrusting its huge black bastions out into the sea. Upon this rock rose the towers and pinnacles of Holy Guard, smitten with gold, wrapped in mysterious vapour. Into the east stretched a wilderness of woods, dim and desolate, welcoming the night.
Tristan and Rosamunde rode out from the woods towards the sea, while in the west the sun sank into a bank of burning clouds. The trees were wondrous green in the slant light; the whole world seemed bathed in strange ethereal glory. Holy Guard upon its headland stood like black marble above the far glimmerings of the sea.