The white heat of the drama seemed cooled for the moment. Over the flickering scales of the little mere the girl’s white face, tumbled hair, and blue smock showed, as she half-floated and half-paddled with her hands. Nearer still, the leather-jerkined, fur-breeched figure of the man bent like a baffled satyr baulked of evil. On the green slope of the bank the mailed splendour of chivalry waited like Justice to uphold the right.
The man in the mere wore the short Roman sword, or parazonium; any more effective weapon that he had possessed had been thrown aside in the heat of the chase and in the imagined security of his rough person. He had the face of a wolf. In girth and stature he seemed a young Goliath, a savage thing bred in savage times and savage places, and blessed with the instincts of mere barbarism. Igraine’s disrelish equalled her heat as she looked at him, and slanted her great sword over her shoulder.
In another instant the scene revived, and ceased to be a mere picture. The girl in the pool had found a footing, and her half-bare shoulders showed above the water. The man, with his short sword held behind him, was splashing through the shallows with a grin on his hairy face that meant mischief. Igraine, every whit as hot as he, held her horse well in hand, and put her shield before her. Matters went briskly for a minute. The man made a rush; Igraine spurred up and sent him reeling with the charging shoulder of her horse; the short sword pecked at nothing, the long one struck home and drew blood. A second panther leap, a blow turned by the shield, a counter cut that made good carving of the fellow’s skull. The shallows foamed and crackled crimson; hoofs stirred up the mire; a plunge; a noise of crossed steel; a last sweep of a sword, and then victory. Igraine’s horse, neighing out the spirit of the moment, trampled the fallen body as it had been the carcase of a slaughtered dragon.
The girl in the pool waded back at the sight, her blue smock clinging about her, and showing an opulent grace of shoulder, arm, and bosom—a full figure swept by the damp tangle of her dark brown hair. She had full red lips, eyes of bright blue, a round and ruddy face, that told of a mind more for tangible pleasures than for spiritual aspiration. She came up out of the shallows like a water-nymph, her frightened face already all aglow with a smile of gratitude, mild shame, and infinite reverence. Going down on her knees amid the water-weeds and flags, she held up her playful hands as to a deliverer direct from heaven. “Grace, Lord, for thy servant.”
With the peril past, Igraine could not forego the sly scrap of mischief that the occasion offered; her white teeth gleamed in a smile under her helmet, as she wiped her sword on the horse’s mane, before sheathing it.
“Give Heaven thy thanks,” she said, with a quaint sententiousness of gesture. “Be sure in thy heart that it was a mere providence of God that I heard thy screaming. As for yon clod of clay, we will bury it later, lest it should pollute so goodly a pool. For the rest, child, I am an old man, and hungry, and would taste bread.”
The girl jumped up instantly, with a shallow and half-puzzled smile. The voice from the helmet was young, very young, and full of the free tone of youth; yet both manner and matter were sage, practical, leavened with a hoary-headedness of intention that seemed to baulk the inferences suggested by such panoply of arms. With a bob of a curtsey, she took the knight’s bridle, and led the horse some fifty paces round the pool, where, under the imminent shoulder of a cedar tree, a little cabin nestled under a hood of ivy. It was built of rough timber from the forest, and thatched with reeds; honeysuckle clustered over its rude façade, and thrust fragrant tendrils into its reed-latticed windows, where an early rose or so shone like a red star against the russet-wood. A garden full of flowers lay before the rustic porch that arched the threshold; and an outjutting of the pool brought a little fiord of dusky silver up to the very green of the path, a streak of silver blazoned with violet flags, golden marigolds of the marsh, and a lace-like fringe of snowy water-weed in bloom. All around, the great trees, those solemn senators, stood with their green shoulders bowed in a strong dream of deep eternal thought.
Igraine left the saddle and suffered the girl to tether her horse to a cedar bough. Her surcoat of violet and gold swept nearly to her ankles, and saved from any marring the infinite art of the anomaly that veiled her sex. Her man’s garb seemed every whit as worthy of a woman, nor did it hinder that loving grace that made her beauty of body the more admirable and rare.
The girl came back with more bendings of the knee, and led Igraine amid the flowers to the porch of the forest dwelling. Once within, she drew a settle close to the doorway, spread a rug of skins thereon, and again bowed herself in homage.
“Let my lord be seated, and I will serve him.”