Very early before it was light he had taken a plunge and a swim in the pool, a swinging burst through the still water that had made him revel in his great strength. He had come up from the pool like a god refreshed, and had put on his red harness while the mists rose from the valley, and the birds chanted in the ghostly trees. When the day was fully awake he walked the grass-path in the garden like a watchman, with the scent of honeysuckle and thyme in his nostrils, and a blaze of flowers at his feet. As he paced up and down with his face turned to the sky, he sang in a mellow bass a song of Guyon’s, the Court minstrel—
“When the dawn has come,
My heart sighs for thee and the gleam of thy hair;
Eyes deep as the night
When the summer sky arches the world.”
So sang Pelleas as he paced the grass with his eyes wandering ever towards the doorway of the cottage.
Presently Igraine came out to him, and stood under the shadow of the porch. Her hair hung lustrous about a face that was white and drawn, despite a smile. Certainly a haze of red flushed her cheeks when Pelleas came up with a glory of love in his eyes, took her hands and kissed them, as though there was no such divine flesh in the whole wide world. How wonderful it was to be touched so, to have such eyes pouring out so strong a soul before her face, to know the presence of a great love, and to feel the echoing passion of it in her own heart!
After the barren months of winter, and the long bondage in Tintagel, it seemed ah idyllic thing to be so served, so comforted. And was this faery time but for an hour, a day, and no longer? Was she but to see the man’s face, to feel the touch of his hands, the grand calm of his love, before losing him, perhaps for life? Her heart fluttered in her like a smitten bird. And Pelleas, too, what a thrust lurked for the man, a blow to be given in the name of truth. How could she speak to him of Gorlois when he came and looked at her with those eyes of his?
Igraine had never felt such misery as this even in the gloomy galleries of Tintagel. It tried her courage to the death to face Pelleas’s wistful gaiety, and the adoration that beamed on her from his eyes.
“Dear heart, it is dawn—it is dawn!”