“There honour enters.”
“You kill him, all the same.”
Morgan tossed the quilt aside, thrust a pair of glimmering feet out of the bed, and stood at Gorlois’s elbow. She took the tablet of wax and held it over a lamp that was burning till the wax softened and suffered the lettering to be effaced. Gorlois’s great sword hung from the carved bed-post. Morgan took it and buckled it to the man with her plump, worldly little hands.
“Let it not fail,” she said.
Gorlois kissed her lips.
“There will be no King; and the heir—well, you are a great soldier, and men fear your name.”
She kept him with her awhile and then bade him farewell. The sun was high in the heavens when Gorlois, in glittering harness, rode out alone from Tintagel, and passed away into the wilds.
VI
There was a preternatural brightness over sea and cliff that day. Headland and height stood limned with a luminous grandeur; the sea was a vast opal; mountainous clouds sailed solemn and stupendous over the world. Towards evening it grew still and sultry, and storms threatened. A vapoury leviathan lowered black out of the east, devouring the blue, with scudding mists spray-like about his belly. The sky changed to a sable cavern. In the west the sun still blazed through mighty crevices, candescent gold; the world seemed a chaos of glory and shadow. Sea-birds came screaming to the cliffs. The walls of Tintagel burnt athwart the west.