Gorlois drew back, and said never another word. Igraine watched him furtively as his keen profile hung near her in the dusk clear as marble. Now and again his eyes gleamed out upon her and made her fear the moment, while the oars swung out over the smiling stream, and the black woods started by like night.
Soon the lights of Winchester showed up against the northern sky, and far ahead over a straight stretch of water they could see the lanterns and torches of the folk who kept festival. A golden mist and the noise of music came down to them, as they surged under the great water-gate and ran on through the city amid a glimmering web of lights and laughter. Soon the barge found the shallows under white walls, and Igraine was standing on the steps leading to Radamanth’s garden, with a starry sky sweeping like a wheel above the world.
Gorlois went slowly from her down the steps, with a face that was dark and brooding. Torchlight glimmered on the fillet of gold about his hair, on the splendid setting of his baldric, and the scabbard of his sword. At the water’s edge he lifted up his face to her out of the night.
“It shall be life or death,” he said.
Then he was swept away with a red flare of torches over the river, and Igraine went solemn-eyed to bed.
V
Not a word of Uther yet, no sound of his name in Winchester, though Igraine lived on in Radamanth’s house, and hoped for light in the dark.
Gorlois had had the truth, and she wondered what would come of it. Lulled by an ingenuous reasoning into the belief that she would be free of the man, she began to breathe again and to take liberty in her hand. She did not think Gorlois could plague her longer after the blunt answer she had given him. His pride would drag him aside, make further homage impossible, and there the matter would end.
If Igraine believed this, then she was in very gross error. Many men never show their true fibre till they are given the blunt lie, and Gorlois was never more himself than when baffled. There was much of the hawk about him, and Igraine had underrated his pride if she expected it to take league with her against its kinsman passion. Her measure only uncovered the darker side of the man’s nature, and sounded the doom of a lighter, gayer chivalry. Gorlois’s pride and self-love never dragged in the wind, but held him taut to the storm, as though determined to weather all the perversities of which a woman’s heart is capable. In truth, Igraine had done the very thing least likely to free her from the man’s thought; she had taunted his passion and thrown down a challenge to his pride.