He would not suffer himself to believe that he had looked for her coming, or that her red mouth and her mysterious eyes had any message to move him. Yet that his manhood should leap in him when he saw her among the beech trees in her green cloak and blue cote-hardie, and with the white may bough over her shoulder, was a challenge to his pride. She brought some of the exultant rush of the year with her in the way she walked and the way she carried her head.
Life was at high noon in her, with a glow of the eyes and face. Fulk took some of the dry bracken and spread it upon the stone bench, and the casual haughtiness of the deed was a part of the morning’s comedy.
“I tell you, Fulk of the Forest, it is good to live. Run through the names of all the wines—malmsey, ypocrasse, basturde, clove, pyment, muscabell. They are nothing to the wind and the sun on the heath.”
Her mood itself was a cup of Spanish wine, and Fulk took a draught of it into his blood.
“That would be telling! Lying awake under the stars in Gascony and listening to the aspens chattering! Messire Fulk, change with me; take my body and give me yours.”
“What, to lie in a hermit’s cell, and with that braggart for doorkeeper!”
“No, no; to take my arms and mount my horse on a May morning and gallop after adventures. To fight and break spears, and drink with my comrade in arms; to make love to women! Oh! the brave world, the valour and fun, the cry of the trumpets, the snow and the winter sunsets! The wind on the heath has blown itself into my blood!”
Fulk looked at her curiously. She was like no woman of his imaginings—no soft, sleek, sly thing to be kissed for a month and then left to her needle and her prayer desk.
“If I changed with you,” he said, “I promise you that you would love the forest and the red deer, and the heath in bloom, and the laugh of the woodpecker, and the smell of the fern.”
“Ah, I promise you. The rich earth, and the red sap of our life. The great woods, the rivers that go down to the sea, the armed hosts in their battle harness, the strength and the valour, the galloping horses, the scorn of treachery, the eyes that look straight.”
He nodded towards the mouth of the quarry.
“There are eyes over yonder that look round corners and through bushes. The red beard is watching us, his head all swaddled up so that he looks like an old woman in a wimple.”