A mile more on the high-road, with her feet and the hem of her gown
dust-drenched, and she was still little nearer the man in the red
harness for all her hurrying. She could have vowed more than once that
he turned in his saddle and looked back at her as though to see how
near she had come to him on the road. A mile from the hermitage path
he turned his horse southwards from the track into a grass valley
headed by a ruined tower and hedged densely on either hand by pine
woods. Igraine, seeing from a slight rise in the road this change of
course, cut away crosswise with the notion of getting near the man or
of intercepting him before he should win clear law again. After all,
the effort added only more vexation. She saw the black horse pressed to
a canter and cross the point where she might have cut him off, while a
great stretch of furze that rolled away to the black palisading of the
pines came down and threw a promontory in her path. Pelleas was a mile
to the good when she had skirted the furze and the bend of the wood,
and taken a straight course southwards down the valley between the
pines.
All that morning the sport of hunter and hunted went on between the
novice in grey and the man on the black horse. For all her trouble
Igraine won little upon him, lost little as the hours went by; while
the rider in turn seemed in no wise desirous of being rid of her for
good. They passed the pine woods with their midnight aisles, forded a
stream, climbed up a heath, went over it amid the heather. From the
last ridge of the heath Igraine saw the country sloping away into
undulating grasslands, piled here and there with domes of thicketed
trees. Far to the south a dense black mass rose like a rounded hill
against the sky. The man in red was still about a mile in front of her,
riding slowly, a red speck in a waste of green. Igraine, having him in
view from her vantage point, lay down full length to rest and take some
food. She was tired enough, but dogged at heart as ever. She vowed that
if the man was playing with her she would tell him her mind, love or no
love, when she came up with him in the end.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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