Tristan scowled at her betwixt the brows, and unbent nothing to her coquetry.
“Ha, cousin,” he said, “men find the moon dull when the sun is away.”
“Sun!” she retorted, “you ugly stump! Keep your eyes wide. I am too bright for such as you.”
“Shine hard,” he said to her with a smile. “I shall have no need of a shield.”
She tightened her girdle, smoothed her gown, and eyed Tristan under drooping lids.
Tristan pursed up his mouth and answered her nothing. Rosamunde and the preacher had passed deeper into the wood, and were out of sight and hearing. Tristan would have given much to have known what passed between them under the trees.
“Samson,” said the girl at his elbow, “Samson, sirrah, has the wit to be courteous to a lady. He has no tongue like a tag of undressed leather, nor a face like a dinted buckler red with rust.”
Tristan played with the buckle of his sword belt and wished the woman Isabel a man.
“Ha, cousin,” she ran on, “I have heard of a horse-boy stealing a pair of red shoes, because they had covered a lady’s toes. As for her heart, it was a pearl, a great white pearl, sirrah, not to be breathed upon and handled by grooms. Hark! holy saints, what’s amiss in the wood?”
Isabel had started from her malice like a woman who sees a snake twisting at her feet. She stood rigid, with eyes dilating, her lips apart, the colour gone from her face. Through the alleys of the wood had come a sudden outcry, the loud voice of a man challenging a foe, the passionate declaiming of an angry woman. Tristan, with his back taut as the straining mast of a ship, stood snuffing the air, his muscles quivering, his broad chest spread. In the flash of a second he had plunged down the grass ride at a run, unbuckling his sword as he ran, flinging aside belt and scabbard. Voices, passionate and clamorous, were playing through the trees. They winged on Tristan’s heels, as he sped with tight mouth and kindling eyes under sun and shadow.
Coming upon a narrow glade in the wood, he saw the scene spread out before him. With her back to a tree stood Rosamunde, her eyes ablaze, her head held high. Before her, with uplifted knife, his robe gathered as a buckler in his left hand, stood Samson the Heretic, fronting four armed men who crouched round him like hounds about a boar. Even as Tristan came, they sprang together upon the monk, dragging him down in a moiling heap upon the grass. The fourth snatched out at Rosamunde, caught the neckband of her gown, rent it to the girdle as she strained from him with both hands set upon his face.