II
" I WOULD have you know, madame, that every woman is pleasing to man,--saving his own wife."
"Who in turn is pleasing to his friend,--even if he chance to be a king."
The woman on the couch tossed her slipper from her small foot, and struck a series of snapping chords from the guitar that she held in her bosom. There was a certain rich insolence in her look, a sensuous wickedness that was wholly poetic. The man bent forward from his stool, lifted the slipper, and kissed the foot whence it had fallen. He won a smile from the face bowered up in cushions, a smile like sunlight on a brazen mirror, brilliant, clear, metallic. There was a fine flush on her face, and the star on her bosom rose and fell as her breathing seemed to quicken and deepen for the moment. Her fingers plucked waywardly at the strings as she looked out from the window towards the sea.
"I love life," she said.
"Surely."
"The pomp, the pride, the glory of being great. I have a future for you."
A kind of spiritual echo burnt in the man's eyes.
"And my wife?"
"You are still something of a madman."
"So you say."
"I--indeed!"
He bent forward with a sudden eruption of passion and kissed her foot again, till she drew it away under the folds of her dress.
"Ah, you are still a little mad," she said, turning and smiling at him with her quick eyes; "bide so, my dear lord; I can suffer it."
"And yet-"
"I hate her! I hate her! I hate her!"
"Bah!--she cannot harm you."
"I hate her for being a martyr, for being strong, for thinking herself a saint. Pah !--how I could scratch her proud, big face. She humiliates me because of her misery, because she is contented to suffer. It is impossible to trample such a woman underfoot."'
The man gave a queer laugh.
"You are still envious."
"I envious,--I!"
"Because she is never humbled, never asks mercy."
"Curse her, let her die! Come and fan me, I am sleepy."
On the southern side of the central tower, between it and the State quarters of the castle, lay the garden of Tintagel. It was a lustrous nook, barriered by grey walls, sheltered from the sea wind, and open to the full stare of the sun. Sombre cypresses lifted their spires above flower-beds mosaicked red, gold, and blue. The paths were tiled with coloured stones, and bordered with helichryse. In the centre of all a pool glimmered from a square of bright green grass.
The window in the tower that had so seized upon the lad Jehan's heart looked out upon this square of colour that shone beneath the extreme blue of the summer sky. The casement was an open mihrab whence tragedy could look out upon the world. The glory of the sea, the sky, the cliffs, contrasted with the twilight tint of the prison room.
Gorlois's wife sat in the window-seat and watched the waves and the horizon with vacant eyes. She was clad in a tattered gown of grey. Her hair had been shorn close, leaving but a golden aureole over neck, ears, and forehead. One hand was wrapped in a blood-stained cloth, and there were marks left by a whip upon her face. Her gown reached hardly to her ankles, showing bare feet and wheals, where the scourge had been. She was very frail, very worn, very spiritual.
Her face was the face of one who looks into the solemn sadness of the past. Her lips were pressed together as in pain, and a certain divine despair dwelt in her deep eyes like light reflected from some twilight pool. The muscles stood limned in her neck like cords, and the fingers of one hand were hooked in the neck-band of her gown.
Many days had passed since the life in Garlotte's valley. They had taught Igraine the deeds that might result from the stirring of the passions of such a man as Gorlois. It was a strenuous age, and men's souls were cast in large mould either to the image of good or evil. Even Boethius could not escape the malice of a great king. Attila had scourged the nations with a scourge of steel. Old things were passing amid disruption and despair. Gorlois had caught the Titanic, violent spirit of the age. His personality had won a lurid emphasis from tragedies that shook the world.