“How else?”
“As a wife—by the church.”
“Ah!”
“Or no help of my hand.”
Again there was silence. A coal fell in the brazier, and seemed like a rock down a precipice. The black eyes that stared down Gorlois were full of light, and strangely scintillant. Gorlois listened, with his limbs asleep and his brain in thrall, while the man spoke like a very Michael out of a cloud. The clear glittering plot given out of Merlin’s lips came like a dream vivid to the thought of the dreamer. If Gorlois obeyed he should have his desire, and catch Igraine to a white marriage-bed by law and her own willing. The fire died down in the brazier, and the bowl ceased to smoke perfumes. Gorlois saw the man gather his black robe with his glittering fingers, and move like a wraith round the room, to stand beckoning by the door. In another minute Gorlois was under the stars, with the house and its yews a black mound against the sky. Like a sleeper half wakened he took full breath of the night air, and stretched his arms up above his head. But it was not to sleep that he passed back through the void streets to the house of the knight Accolon.
To return to Igraine housed for the night in the little hermitage. At the first creep of dawn, when daffodils were thrown up against the eastern sky, she left her pallet bed in the cell and went out into the hermit’s garden. The recluse was down at the brook drawing water, whither the dog and the doves had followed him. Igraine passed through the garden—spun over as it was with webs of dew. To her comfort she found her ankle scarcely troubling her, for she had feared pain or stiffness after the walk of yesterday. Going down the dale, she patted the old dog’s head, and picked up the pitcher as the recluse gave her good-morning.
“You are an early soul, sister. My dog and I come down to the brook each morning as the sun peeps over the hill.”
“You are not lonely,” said Igraine.
The old man tightened his girdle, looked over the solemn piers of the woods, sniffed the air, and hailed an autumn savour.
“Not I,” he said. “I have my dog and my doves, and folk often lodge here, and I have word of the world and how the Saxons vex us. The good people near bring me alms and pittances, or come to ask prayers for their souls, and”—with a twinkle—“for their bodies, too.”