They broke fast that morning in the garden, it being the man’s custom to make his meals on the granite slab that served him as a bed. The little dale looked very green and gracious in the tranquil light, with its curling brook and dark barriers of trees. Igraine, as she sat on the great stone and ate the hermit’s bread, followed the brook with her thoughts, wondering whether it became the stream that ran through Eudol’s meadows. She was for Sarum that day, where she would throw off her grey habit and take some dress more likely to baffle Gorlois. She had enough money in her purse. Worldling again, she could give herself to winning sight of this Uther, and to learning whether he was the Pelleas she sought or no.
As she sat and fingered her bread, something she saw down the dale made her rigid and still as a priestess smitten with the vision of a god in some heathen oratory. Her eyes were very wide, her lips open and very white, her whole air as of one watching in a sudden stupor of awe. Another moment and she had broken from the mood like a torrent from a cavern. With eyes suddenly amber bright, she touched the hermit’s hand and pointed down the dale, gave him a word or so, then left him and ran down the hill.
A man on a black horse had ridden out from the trees, and was pushing his horse over the brook at a shallow spot not far away. His red armour glowed in the sun with a metallic lustre. Even at that distance Igraine had seen the red dragon rampant on a shield of green. As she ran down the grass slope she called the man by name, thinking to see him turn and come to her. Pushing on sullenly as though he had not heard the cry that went after him like winged love, he drew up the further slope without wavering, and sank like a red streak into the dense green of the trees.
X
Igraine forded the brook and followed the man by the winding path that curled away into the wood.
She was ever a sanguine soul, and the mere sinister influences that might have discouraged her in her purpose that morning were impotent before the level convictions of her heart. She had seen Pelleas ride in amid the trees; she was sure as death as to his cognizance and his armour. Now Pelleas, she could vow, had not heard her call to him, and if he had heard he had not understood; if he had seen he had not recognised. Doubts could have no place in the argument before such a justification by faith.
It was not long before she caught sight of the red glint of armour going through the trees. It came and went, grew and disappeared, as the path folded it in its curves or thrust out a heavy screen of green to hide it like a heavy curtain. The man was going as he pleased, now a walk, now a casual jog, now a short burst of a canter over an open patch. One moment Igraine would see him clearly, then not at all. Sometimes she gained, sometimes lost ground, yet the knight of the red harness never seemed to come within lure of her voice.
In due course she reached the place where the path ended bluntly on the Winchester high-road, and where the way ran straight as a spear-shaft, so that she could see Pelleas riding for Winchester with a lead of a quarter of a mile. The distant ringing tramp of hoofs came up to her like a mocking chuckle. Putting her hands to her mouth, she hallooed with all the breath left her by her run through the wood; yet, as far as she might see, the man never so much as turned in the saddle, while the smite of hoofs died down and down into a well of silence.