Dawn climbing red over pinewoods piled on the hills; dawn optimistic yet ominous, harbinger of war and such perils as set the heart leaping and the blood afire; dawn that cried unto the world, "Better one burst of heroism and then the grave, than a miserable monotony of nothingness, a domestic surfeiting of the senses with a wife and a fat larder."
Out of the east climbed the man on the stolen horse, riding out of the dawn with the lurid phantasms of the night still running riot in his brain. No sleep had smoothed the crumpled page, or touched the memory with unguent to assuage the smart. Maledictions, vengeances, prophecies of fire and sword rushed with the red dawn over the hills.
With forty miles behind him, he came on his jaded, sweaty beast towards his own castle of Gambrevault, forded his own stream, saw his mills gushing foam, heard the thunder of the weir. How eternally peaceful everything seemed in the dewy amber light of the dawn! Away rolled the downs, billows of glorious green, into the west. Gambrevault’s towers rose against the blue; he saw the camp in the meadows; his own banner blowing to the breeze.
The meadows that morning were quiet as a graveyard, as the Lord Flavian rode through to the great gate of Gambrevault. Soldiers idling about, stiffened up, saluted, stared in astonishment at the grim, morose-faced man, who rode by on a foundered horse, looking neither to the right hand nor the left. He cut something of a figure, as though he had been in a tavern brawl, and had spent the night snoring in a cow-house. Yet there was an indescribable power and dignity in the tatterdemalion rider for all his tumbled look. The compressed lips, knotted brow, smouldering eyes spoke of phenomenal emotions, phenomenal passions. Not a man cheered, and the silence was yet more eloquent than clamour. He rode in by the great gate, and parrying the blank glances and interrogations of his knights, called for two esquires, and withdrew to his own state rooms.
His first trouble was to acknowledge such necessities as hunger and cleanliness. He contrived to compass both at once, eating ravenously even while he was in the bath. His next command was for his harness, and his esquires armed him, agog for news, even waxing inquisitive, to be snubbed for their pains.