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As the boat moved in its slow arc I saw the turrets and domes of the palace outlined against the sky and the cluster of lanterns at the landing stage. The fires must have been replenished, the light from them lay red across the water, reaching almost to the opposite shore. A boat with a lantern at its prow was crossing the water and it passed through this reflection of the fire and the lantern was not reddened but silvered by it.
"We must not stay long," she said, thus unwittingly adding to my discontent.
"When will we have time for ourselves," I said, "without some one watching, someone waiting?"
"Soon now, my love. We must be patient."
This came in the deeper, surer tone of the woman she had become, but the soft endearment and the ceaseless need for patience before the tyra
"You will be my true knight before the world," she said. "You will be my husband, if you so desire. When next we meet it will be to exchange our vows and make our betrothal known. Now we must return, I must rejoin my uncle and brother. They will be wondering what has befallen me."
So calmly uttered had these words been that I had obediently taken up the paddle before the promise in them came fully home to me. When it did so I could find no words but those of adoration, and these came in a rush. As I swung the little boat round and headed for the fires that were still blazing at the lakeside, my exultation knew no bounds, I blessed the sky and the water, the very night itself, for my good fortune, and as I did so, at that same moment, we crossed in our boat some invisible line and entered the territory of the mirrors: the leaping fires and the lanterns clustered at the landing stage and those on the boats returning to the palace and the shifting reflections of all these on the water and even the drops from my paddle that were caught in the starlight, all began to wheel and tilt and multiply and stretch away, rank upon rank, into a distance that seemed infinite, the heat haze above the fires shimmered over the water and a multitude of boats trembled in this heat and the ripples of it played like a soundless music on the turrets and towers of the palace and suddenly, between one thrust of the paddle and the next, I saw an exact copy of Alicia sitting behind me, somewhere on the water, her bosom and face illuminated.
An exclamation of wonder rose to my lips at this celebration of my happiness – for so I took it to be. But it was never uttered, because Alicia had made no sound at all and her face had not changed, nor her posture on the seat, and so I knew that she could not have seen this spectacle, only I had seen it, it was I who had my face towards the turning mirrors.
It may seem strange to one who reads this, as it sometimes seems strange to me when I recall it, that I made no mention to Alicia of the tricks my eyes played me. I could have done so, though briefly, as we drew nearer to the fires. Perhaps I was unwilling that such a difference should be declared at a moment when all else united us in joyful thoughts of the future. And then, there was so little time: this riotous breeding of images was short-lived, we were soon again in the world I knew. I would tell her another time, I thought, I would tell when we were next together. Once we had made our vows public we would have more time together and more freedom in our talk.
I did not bring the boat as far as the jetty, but grounded it higher up on the shore and this time it was an easy step from the boat to the land and so I got no second wetting as I helped her out. I would have walked with her and lighted the way but she did not wish it. "There is light enough," she said. "It is not far." She turned to face me, still in the shadow of the trees. She raised her hands and brought them together in a gesture that seemed at first like prayer. "I leave you my ring," she said, "as an earnest of my love, until the time we can be together."
I slipped the ring from the little finger of my left hand and I swore my love and service to her and we exchanged the rings.
"I told you true when I said you are splendid," she said in low tones.
"You will always be so. You will always be my splendid Thurstan."
She came into my arms and kissed me and her body pressed against mine and somewhere in my stomach I felt a movement like a fish leaping. Then she was gone through the trees to where the boats and the lanterns waited.
XVII
All through the hunt, from sunrise when we rode out, her image stayed in my mind. The time passed as in a dream, when the thoughts and feelings belong only partly to what is before our eyes, and there is an attendant life that runs along beside us. While we waited for the finding and unharbouring of the hart, while I held myself in readiness for the chase and listened for the baying of the scent, while we followed the ruses and doublings of the quarry as he ran back on his own tracks to strengthen the scent then bounded sideways to confuse the hounds or entered and left the streamlets that run through the woods so as to break his traces, while I galloped with the others and followed the sound of the horn and shouted with all the power of my lungs and ducked the low branches, amidst all this hullabaloo and headlong career, I still drifted on the dark lake, still heard the words of love and promise she had given me, still felt the ring where it lay threaded against my breastbone. And when this splendid animal was worn down at last and lost its faith in flight and turned to confront the dogs, when Bertrand, as Lord of the Hunt, brought his mount forward and lifted his bulk in the saddle and plunged his lance through the shoulder and pierced the heart, my pity for it and my admiration for the stand it had made were deepened by memories of Alicia's words and glances, her face bright-eyed in the light of the lantern, and the beauty of the hart's slaying was the beauty of her hands as she raised them in the dimness of the trees to take off her ring.
It was late when we regained the palace; there had been much to do – as generally in a hunt that is well conducted – in the flaying and butchering of the hart and the rewarding of the dogs. And here again Bertrand showed me his favour, as he had the day before at the Assembly.
When the hart had been laid on its back and the scrotum and testicles removed and the skin of the throat slit up the length of the neck, and we had sounded the death on our horns and the dogs had bayed the death and been granted a brief time to tear at the throat, so as to remind them that the hart was their true and noble quarry, when the skin had been well and neatly peeled away by the huntsman and his varlets, Bertrand, whose prerogative it was to make the first cuts of the jointing, turned courteously to me and graciously asked me, before all that company – and her brother Adhemar among them – to assist him in it.
Bertrand of Bo