A certain season of youth seemed to have come down upon Uther, and lighted up the solemn tenor of his mood. His face grew mellow with the calm of a great content; he was reasonable as to the future, not moved to any extravagant outburst of unrest; the constant overshadowing of the cross seemed to give his faith a tranquil greenness—a rain-refreshed calm that pervaded his being like moist quiet after a wind.
“Merlin, what of the night?”
“Sire, I am well provided; I have a pavilion near a brook where a damsel serves me.”
“I go to Caerleon. You have conjured me back into the spring of life; my heart is beholden to you. Take my hand—and remember.”
“Sire, I am your servant.”
When Uther had passed, a streak of scarlet, into the blue twilight of the darkening wood; when the dull clatter of hoofs had dwindled into an ecstasy of silence, Merlin, white as the faint moon above, found again the pool under the trees by the high-road to Caerleon. Going on his knees by the brink he looked into its waters, black, sheeny, mysterious, webbed with a flickering west-light, sky mosaics dim and ethereal between swart-imaged trees. Still as a mirror was the pool, yet touched occasionally with light as from a rippling star-beam, or a dropped string from the moon’s silver sandals. Merlin bent over it, his fateful face making a baleful image in the water. Long he looked, as though seeking some prophetic picture in the pool. When night had come he rose up with a transient smile, folded his cloak about him, and passed like a wraith into the forest.
VII
While Gorlois was lowering over an imagined shame, and Uther given to brooding on a vision, the Knight of the Cloven Heart wandered through wild Wales and endured sundry adventures that were hardly in concatenation with the distaff or the cradle.