Uther and Igraine

by Warwick Deeping

At times Jehan would creep away up this turret stair to live and breathe for a season with no friend save the ever-complaining sea. He would perch himself on the battlements with the salt wind blowing through his hair, the rocks beneath him boiling foam from the waves that swept in from the west. The perch was perilous enough, but the lad had no fear of the windy height, or of the waves breaking against the pediment of the cliff. To him man alone was terrible. There appeared to be a confident understanding between Nature and himself, a sense of good fellowship with his surroundings, such as the chamois may feel for its mountain pinnacle, and the bird for the tree that bears its nest.

Jehan’s thin face was turned often towards the central tower of the castle, a square campanile that stood in the centre of the main court, forming a species of citadel or keep. High up in the wall there was a window, a streak of gloom that showed nothing of the room within. Over Jehan this window possessed a peculiar influence. It was the casement-royal of romance. Day by day, ever since Gorlois had come south again, the lad had watched for the white oval of a face that would look out momentarily from the shadow. Sometimes he saw a woman’s hand, a golden head glimmering in the sun. Jehan had seen Gorlois’s wife brought a second time into Tintagel. Her staring grief had taken strange hold upon his heart. Ever since, with the kindled chivalry of a boy, he had done great deeds in dreams, handled a sword, taken strong men by the throat. The imagined event had fired the soul in him, and made him the disciple of these sad and wistful eyes.

A bell smote in the court below. Its iron clapper dinned the fancies out of Jehan’s head, calling him to the menial realities of life. It was the supper hour, and the men of the guard would be strenuously inclined over the steaming pot, the wine-jar, and the twisting spit. Jehan left his turret with the pathetic cynicism of an autumn twilight. Little drudge that he was, he yet had the inward independence to despise the folk who fed like swine, and terrorised him with pure blatant barbarism. He could listen to their blasphemy, their ribald songs, and breathe the moral garlic of their tongues with a disrelish that never wavered. He had none of the innate impudence of youth. Had he been of coarser fibre the men would soon have made a lewd and insolent imp of him, but he was spared such a fate by a certain spiritual instinct that recoiled from the vapouring brutality of it all.

There seemed more ribaldry abroad in the guard-room that night than was customary even in so pious a place. The company, much like a pack of hounds, hunted jest after jest from cover, and gave tongue royally with a zest that would have been admirable in any other cause. Lamps swirled ill-smelling smoke about the room. There was a lavish scattering of armour along the benches, and the floor was dirtier than the floor of any tavern.

Jehan’s ears tingled as he went among the men, climbing over sprawling legs, edging between stools and benches. The air reeked of mead, and the miasma of loose talk rising from twenty throats. A woman’s name was tossed from tongue to tongue, bandied about with a familiar insolence that made him blush for her like a brother. His heart burnt with the bestial impudence, the sweat, the foul breath of it all. Yet before these red-bearded faces, these vociferous mouths, he was a coward, hating himself for his fear, hating the men for the sheer tyranny of the flesh that awed him.

To hear in this den such things spoken of a woman, and of such a woman! That she was true his quick instinct could aver in the very maw of the world. There was the silver calm of the full moon in her face, and she had for him the steadfastness, the incomprehensible eloquence, of the stars. Were these men blind, that the staring grief, the divine scorn, that had smitten him from the first with a vague awe, were invisible to them? Their coarse cynicism was brutally incomprehensible to Jehan. Having a soul, he could not see with the eyes of the sot or the adulterer, nor had he learnt to mistrust the intelligence of his own heart.

As he laboured from man to man with his jug of mead to keep the brown horns brimming, he thought of the golden head that had glimmered in the criss-cross light of the yews in the castle garden. The woman had been faithless, to put popular report mildly; and Gorlois was a hard man; he would see her dead before he pitied her. Jehan was so far gone in dreams for the moment that he tripped over an outstretched pair of legs, and shattered his stone jar on the floor.

A “God curse you,” and lavish largesse in the way of kicks, recompensed the dreamer for this contempt of office. Jehan, bruised, spattered with mead, crawled away under the benches, and took refuge in a dark corner, where he could recover his wits behind the piled pikes of the gentlemen who cursed him. Such incidents were the trivialities of a menial existence. Jehan wiped his face on his sleeve, choked down his sobs with a dirty fist, and devoutly hoped to be forgotten.

Meanwhile a broad figure had stood framed in the doorway, and drawn the attention of the company from the boy squirming like an eel along the floor. Jehan, peeping round the pile of pikes, saw a woman in a scarlet gown standing under a lamp that flared on the threshold. The woman was of unusual girth and height. Her black hair streamed about her sensual red face like clouds about a winter sun. Her neck was like the neck of a bull, and her bare arms would have shamed the arms of a smith. Jehan watched her as he would have watched a natural enemy, a thing whose destiny was to be brutish and to destroy.

Men called her Malmain, the evil-handed. She was a cub of the forest, strong as a bear, cruel as any wolf. Years ago she had been caught as a child in the woods, tracked down to a rocky hole, a whelp that clawed and bit, and knew nothing of the speech of men. She had been brought to Tintagel and bred in the place, the pet of the soldiery, who had taught her the use of arms and the smack of wine. In ten years she had grown to her full strength, a creature wise in all the uncomely things of life, coarse, bold, and violent. Last of all, Gorlois, with a genius for vengeance, had given her charge of Igraine, his wife.