Pelleas’s head went down over his sword as though in thought.
“It would seem,” he said presently, “that beauty is a closed book, save to the few. It is good to find a heart that understands.”
“Ah, that know I well,” she chimed; “in Avangel they had souls like clay; they saw nothing, understood nothing. I think I would rather die than be soul blind.”
“So many folk,” said the man, “seem to live as though they were ever scanning the bottom of a pot. They never get beyond reflections on appetite.”
As they talked, Morgan la Blanche came in from behind the looped curtains, with silks, samites, siclatons, and sarcanets in her arms. She had found some rich chest in the bower accomplice to her fingers, and had revelled gloriously. She sat herself down near Pelleas, and began to laugh and chatter like a pleased child. The dainty stuffs were tossed this way and that, gathered into scarves or frills, spread over her lap and eyed critically as to colour, before being bound in a bale for her journey. Vain and vapid as her behaviour seemed, there was more in this little woman’s heart than either Pelleas or Igraine could have guessed. Her whole mood was false. Foolish as she seemed on the surface, she was more keen, more subtle by far than Igraine, whose whole soul spelt fire and courage.
As the day drew towards evening, Morgan became more stiff and silent. Her eyes were bright as the jewels round her neck; they would flash and waver, or fall at times into long, sidelong stares. More than once Igraine caught the girl’s face in hard thought, the pert lips straight and cruel, the eyes hungry and very shallow. It reminded her of Morgan’s look in the morning, when she was in such stark fear of the heathen and of death. Yet while she watched her, smiles and glib vivacity would sweep back again as though there had been but a transient cloud of thought over the girl’s face.
With the shadows lengthening, they turned, all three of them, into the garden, and found ease on a grass bank beneath the black boughs of a great cedar. The arch of the dark foliage cut the sky into a semicircle of azure. All about them the grass seemed dusted with dim flowers—blue, white, and violet. A rich company of tiger lilies bowed to the west. Dense banks of laurels and cypresses stood like screens of blackest marble, for the sun was sinking. As they lay under the tree, they could look down upon the water, sheeny and glorious in the evening peace. Further still, the willows slept like a mist of green, with the fields Elysian and full of sweet stupors, the woods beyond standing solemn and still at the beck of night.
Morgan, who had brought the lute with her, began to touch the strings, and to sing softly in a thin, elfin voice—
My heart is open at the hour of night
When lilies swoon