Eudol climbed down, splashed through the water, and came up puffing
sympathy. Igraine tried to walk, but gave up with a wry face. The men
helped her to the grass bank, where she sat down, with Eudol fussing
round her like an old woman. He sent the men on to the manor to bring
a bed; and seeing that Igraine had grown white from the wrench, he ran
for the wine-flask at his saddle-bow and urged her to drink. The girl
had more fear of a spoilt journey than a cracked bone, and feeling
faint for the moment, she suffered Eudol, and took the wine. The old
man was on his knees by her stroking her hand, his thin beard wagging,
and his glazed eyes vinously sympathetic. When the men came back with
the bed they laid Igraine thereon, and bore her through the meadows to
the house, Eudol following like a spaniel at their heels.
VII
While Igraine slept in the abbey dormitory and dreamt of Pelleas, the
man Gorlois burnt on the grid of his own passions, and found no peace
for his soul.
The night sky was not a whit more black than his spirit, and his
sinister cogitations were chequered ever with palpitating points of
fire. The restless fever of an unfed leopard seemed his, and he was
in and out of his tumbled, sleepless bed ten times before dawn. Only
a boar-hound kept him company, a savage red-eyed brute whose temper
suited that of his master; the dog followed Gorlois as he wandered from
bed-chamber to atrium, out from the peristyles to the garden, down
walks of yew and cypress, between the beds of helicryse and asphodel,
over the smooth lawns clear in the eye of the moon. There was an evil
thing in Gorlois's thought, a thing fit for beggarly disrelish, yet
very white and lovely to look upon. He stalked like a ghost in the
night, biting his lips, looking into the dark with red and eager eyes.
How often he reached out in naked thought and clasped only the air. He
cursed himself and the woman, honoured and abused her in one breath,
grew hot and cold like a live coal played upon by a fickle wind.
As soon as dawn came he had a plunge and a swim in a pool in the
garden, and having suffered the ceremony of a state toilet, went out
unattended into the town. It was the very hour when Igraine was shaking
her fist at Winchester for thought of him, but Gorlois was spared the
prick of self-knowledge and the frank truth of the girl's distaste. He
thought her nothing more than a shrew, and the possessor of a splendid
temper. His long legs and the heat at his heart soon took him down
through the quiet streets and the market square to Radamanth's house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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