Eudol climbed down, splashed through the water, and came up puffing sympathy. Igraine tried to walk, but gave up with a wry face. The men helped her to the grass bank, where she sat down, with Eudol fussing round her like an old woman. He sent the men on to the manor to bring a bed; and seeing that Igraine had grown white from the wrench, he ran for the wine-flask at his saddle-bow and urged her to drink. The girl had more fear of a spoilt journey than a cracked bone, and feeling faint for the moment, she suffered Eudol, and took the wine. The old man was on his knees by her stroking her hand, his thin beard wagging, and his glazed eyes vinously sympathetic. When the men came back with the bed they laid Igraine thereon, and bore her through the meadows to the house, Eudol following like a spaniel at their heels.
VII
While Igraine slept in the abbey dormitory and dreamt of Pelleas, the man Gorlois burnt on the grid of his own passions, and found no peace for his soul.
The night sky was not a whit more black than his spirit, and his sinister cogitations were chequered ever with palpitating points of fire. The restless fever of an unfed leopard seemed his, and he was in and out of his tumbled, sleepless bed ten times before dawn. Only a boar-hound kept him company, a savage red-eyed brute whose temper suited that of his master; the dog followed Gorlois as he wandered from bed-chamber to atrium, out from the peristyles to the garden, down walks of yew and cypress, between the beds of helicryse and asphodel, over the smooth lawns clear in the eye of the moon. There was an evil thing in Gorlois’s thought, a thing fit for beggarly disrelish, yet very white and lovely to look upon. He stalked like a ghost in the night, biting his lips, looking into the dark with red and eager eyes. How often he reached out in naked thought and clasped only the air. He cursed himself and the woman, honoured and abused her in one breath, grew hot and cold like a live coal played upon by a fickle wind.
As soon as dawn came he had a plunge and a swim in a pool in the garden, and having suffered the ceremony of a state toilet, went out unattended into the town. It was the very hour when Igraine was shaking her fist at Winchester for thought of him, but Gorlois was spared the prick of self-knowledge and the frank truth of the girl’s distaste. He thought her nothing more than a shrew, and the possessor of a splendid temper. His long legs and the heat at his heart soon took him down through the quiet streets and the market square to Radamanth’s house.
Early as was the hour, the goldsmith had escaped sloth and was busy at his ledgers in his little counting-house behind the parlour. Gorlois came in in great state, with the serving wench who announced him feasting her curiosity on his face with a sheepish giggle. Radamanth, fetched from his figures, bowed very low, and made the gentleman a most obsequious welcome. He was wondering what Gorlois’s humour might be after the repulse of yesterday. To tell the truth, Radamanth felt somewhat ashamed of the trick he had served Igraine, and he was none too eager to meet his niece, seeing that she still seemed determined to hide her anger in her room. His doubts as to Gorlois’s mood were set at rest by that gentleman’s somewhat saturnine opening.
“Radamanth!”
“Your honour’s servant.”