A man with a hooked nose and high cheek bones heeled his horse forward, and saluted.
“Ride hard, find the hermitage, be wary, watch at a distance for sight of the Lady Igraine. If she is at the hermitage, gallop back to Sarum before nightfall. I shall be in Sir Accolon’s house. Attend me there.”
The man saluted again, turned his horse instanter, and rode hard into the east. Gorlois, with a half smile on his lips, rode on with his troop for Sarum.
In Sarum town there was a queer house of stone, very dark and very saturnine. It was hid away behind high walls, and hedged so blackly with yews and hollies that it seemed to stand in the gloom of a perpetual twilight. After dark a sullen glow often hung above the trees; casements would blaze blood-red light into boughs creaking and clutching in the wind; or there would be a moony glimmer on the glass, and belated folk passing near might hear voices or elvish music about them as though dropped from the stars. It was the house of Merlin,—the man of dreams,—wrapped in the gloom of immemorial yews.
That night Gorlois sat in a room hung with black velvet, where a brazier held a dying fire, and a bowl thereon steamed up perfumes in a heavy vapour. A man with a face of marble and eyes like an eternal night was chaired before him, with his long, lean, restless fingers continually touching the cloud of hair that fell blackly over his ears. His fingers were packed with rings gemmed with all manner of stones—jasper, sardonyx, chrysolite, emerald, ruby, and the like. His gown was of black velvet, twined all about with serpent scrolls of white cloth. On his breast was brooched a great diamond that blazed and wavered back the glow from the fire.
Gorlois sat in his carved chair stiff as any image. His strenuous soul seemed mewed up by the psychic influence of the man before him. He spoke seldom, and then only at the other’s motion—at a curious gesture of one of those long, lean hands. The room was as silent as the burial hall of a pyramid, and it had the air of being massed above by stupendous depths of stone.
Presently the man in the black robe began to speak with deliberate intent, holding his voice deep in his throat so that it sounded much like the voice of an oracle declaring itself in the noise of a wind.
“The woman is beautiful beyond other women.”
“Like a golden May.”
“And true.”