CHAPTER III

THE DREAM LADY OF AVALON

Like a disk of glowing gold the sun had set upon hill

and dale. The gardens of Avalon lay wrapt in the mists of evening. Like

flowers seemed the fair women who thronged the winding paths. From

fragrant bosquets, borne on the wings of the night wind came the faint

sounds of zitherns and lutes.

He, too, was there, mingling joyous, carefree, with the rest, gathering

the white roses for the one he loved. Dimly he recalled his delight, as

he saw her approach in the waning light through the dim ilex avenue, an

apparition wondrous fair in the crimson haze of slowly departing day,

entering his garden of dreams. With strangely aching heart he saw them

throng about her in homage and admiration.

At last he knelt before her, kissing the white hand that lay passive

within his own.

How wonderful she was! Never had he seen anything like her, not even

in this land of flowers and of beautiful women. Her hair was warm

as if the sun had entered into it. Her skin had the tints of ivory.

The violet eyes with the long drooping lashes seemed to hold the

memories of a thousand love thoughts. And the small, crimson mouth, so

witch-like, so alluring, seemed to hold out promise of fulfilment of

dizzy hopes and desires.

"It is our golden hour," she smiled down at him, and the white fingers

twined the rose in her hair, wove a girdle of blossoms round her

exquisite, girlish form.

To Tristan she seemed an enchantment, an embodied rose. Never had he

seen her so fair, so beautiful. On her lips quivered a smile, yet there

was a strange light in her eyes, that gave him pause, a light he had

never seen therein before.

She beckoned him away from the throng. "Come where the moonlight

dreams."

Her smile and her wonderful eyes were his beacon light. He rose to his

feet and took her hand. And away they strayed from the rest of the

crowd, far away over green lawns, emerald in the moonlight, with, here

and there, the dark shadow of a cypress falling across the silvery

brightness of their path. Little by little the gardens were deserted.

Fainter and fainter came the sounds of lutes and harps. The shadows of

the grove now encompassed them, as silently they strode side by side.

"This is my Buen Retiro," she spoke at last. "Here we may rest--for

awhile--far from the world."

They entered the rose-bower, a wilderness, blossoming with roses and

hyacinths and fragrant shrubs--a very paradise for lovers.--

The bells of a remote convent began to chime. They smote the silence

with their silvery peals. The castle of Avalon lay dark in the

distance, shadowy against the deep azure of the night sky.

When the chimes of the Angelus had died away, she spoke.

"How wonderful is this peace!"

Her tone brought a sudden chill to his heart.

As she moved forward, he dropped his wealth of flowers and held out his

hands entreatingly.

"Dearest Hellayne," he said, "tarry but a little longer--"

She seemed to start at his words, and leaned over the back of the stone

bench, which was covered with climbing roses. And suddenly under this

new light, sad and silent, she seemed no longer his fair companion of

the afternoon, all youth, all beauty, all light. Motionless, as if

shadowed by some dire foreboding, she stood there and he dared not

approach. Once he raised his hand to take her own. But something in her

eyes caused the hand to fall as with its own weight.

He could not understand what stayed him, what stayed the one supreme

impulse of his heart. He did not understand what checked the words that

hovered on his lips. Was it the clear pure light of the eyes he loved

so well? Was it some dark power he wot not of?

At last he broke through his restraint.

"Hellayne--" he whispered low. "Hellayne--I love you!"

She did not move.

There was a deep silence.

Then she answered.

"Oh, why have you said the word!"

What did she mean? He cried, trembling, within himself. And now he was

no longer in the moonlit rose-bower in the gardens of Avalon, but in a

dense forest. The trees meeting overhead made a night so black, that he

saw nothing, not even their gnarled trunks.

Hellayne was standing beside him. A pale moonbeam flickered through the

interwoven branches.

She pointed to the castle of Avalon, dim in the distance. He made a

quick forward step to see her face. Her eyes were very calm.

"Let us go, Tristan!" she said.

"My answer first," he insisted, gazing longingly, wistfully into the

eyes that held a night of mystery.

"You have it," she said calmly.

"It was no answer," he pleaded, "from lover to lover--"

"Ah!" she replied, in her voice a great weariness which he had never

noted before. "But here are neither loves nor lovers.--Look!"

And he looked.

Before them lay a colorless and lifeless sea, under the arch of a

threatening sky. Across that sky dark clouds, with ever-changing

shapes, rolled slowly, and presently condensed into a vague shadowy

form, while the torpid waves droned a muffled and unearthly dirge.

He covered his eyes, overcome by a mastering fear of that dread shape

which he knew, yet knew not.

He knelt before her, took the hands he loved so well into his own and

pressed upon them his fevered lips.

"I do not understand--" he moaned.

She regarded him fixedly.

"I am another's wife--"

His head drooped.

"When my eyes first met yours they begged that my love for you might

find response in your heart," he said, still holding on to those

marvellous white hands. "Did you not accept my worship?"

She neither encouraged nor repulsed him by word or gesture. And he

covered her hands with burning kisses. After his passionate outburst

had died to silence she spoke quietly, tremulously.

"Tristan," she began, and paused as if she were summoning courage to do

that which she must. "Tristan, this may not be."

"I love you," he sobbed. "I love you! This is all I know! All I shall

ever know. How can I support life without you? heart of my heart--soul

of my soul?--What must I do, to win you for my own--to give you

happiness?"

A negative gesture came in response.

"Is sin ever happiness?"

"The priests say not! And yet--our love is not sinful--"

"The priests say truth." Hellayne interposed calmly.

He felt as if an immense darkness, the chaos of a thousand spheres,

suddenly encompassed him, threatening to plunge him into a bottomless

abyss of despair.

Then he made a quick forward step. Her face was close to his. Wide eyes

fastened upon him in a compelling gaze.

"Tell me!" he urged, his own eyes lost in those unfathomable

wells of dreams. "When love is with you--does aught matter? Does

sin--discovery--God himself--matter?"

With a frightened cry she drew back.

But those steady, questioning eyes, sombre, yet aflame, compelled the

shifting violet orbs.

"Tell me!" he urged again, his face very close to her face.

"Naught matters," she whispered faintly, as if under a spell.

Then her gaze relinquished his, as she looked dreamily out upon the

woods. There was absolute silence, lasting apace. It was the stillness

of a forest where no birds sing, no breezes stir. Then a twig snapped

beneath Hellayne's foot. He had taken her to his heart and, his strong

arms about her, kissed her eyes, her mouth, her hair. She suffered his

caresses dreamily, passively, her white arms encircling his neck.

Suddenly he stiffened. His form was as that of one turned to stone.

In the shadow of the forest beneath a great oak, hooded, motionless,

stood a man. His eyes seemed like glowing coals, as they stared at

them. Hellayne did not see them, but she felt the tremor that passed

through Tristan's frame. The mantle's hood was pulled far down over the

man's face. No features were visible.

And yet Tristan knew that cowled and muffled form. He knew the eyes

that had surprised their tryst.

It was Count Roger de Laval.

The muffled shadow was gone as quickly as it had come.

It was growing ever darker in the forest, and when he looked up again

he saw that Hellayne's white roses were scattered on the ground. Her

scarf of blue samite had fallen heedlessly beside them. He lifted it

and pressed it to his lips.

"Will you give it to me?" he said tremulously. "That it may be with me

always--"

There was no immediate response.

At last she said slowly:

"You shall have it--a parting gift--"

He seized her hands. They lay passively within his own.

There was a great fear in his eyes.

"I do not understand--"

She loosened the roses from her hair and garb before she made reply.

Silently, like dead leaves in autumn, the fragrant petals dropped one

by one to earth. Hellayne watched them with weary eyes as they drifted

to their sleep, then, as she held the last spray in her hand, gazing

upon it she said:

"When you gave them to me, Tristan, they were sweet and fresh, the

fairest you could find. Now they have faded, perished, died--"

He started to plead, to protest, to silence her, but she continued:

"Ah! Can you not see? Can you not understand? Perchance," she added

bitterly, "I was created to adorn the fleeting June afternoon of your

life, and when this scarf is torn and faded as these flowers, let the

wind carry it away,--like these dead petals at our feet--"

She let fall the withered spray, but he snatched it ere it touched the

ground.

"I love you," he stammered passionately. "I love you! Love you as no

woman was ever loved. You are my world--my fate-- Hellayne! Hellayne!

Know you what you say?"--

She gazed at him, with eyes from which all life had fled.

"I am another's," she said slowly. "I have sinned in loving you, in

giving to you my soul. And even as you stood there and held me in your

arms, it flashed upon me, like lightning in a dark stormy night--I saw

the abyss, at the brink of which we stand, both, you and I."--

"But we have done no wrong--we have not sinned," he protested wildly.

She silenced him with a gesture of her beautiful hands.

"Who may command the waters of the cataract, go here,--or go there?

Who may tell them to return to their lawful bed? I have neither power

nor strength, to resist your pleading. You have been life and love to

me, all,--all,--and all this you are to-day. And therefore must we

part,--part, ere it be too late--" she concluded with a wild cry of

anguish, "ere we are both engulfed in the darkness."--

And he fell at her feet as if stunned by a thunderbolt.

"Do not send me away--" he pleaded, his voice choked with anguish. "Do

not send me from you."

"You will go," she said softly, deaf to his prayers. "It is the supreme

test of your love, great as I know it is."

"But I cannot leave you, I cannot go, never to see you more--" and he

grasped the cool white hands of the woman as a drowning man will grasp

a straw.

She did not attempt, for the time, to take them from him. She looked

down upon him wistfully.

"Would you make me the mock of Avalon?" she said. "Once my lord

suspects we are lost. And, I fear, he does even now. For his gaze has

been dark and troubled. And I cannot, will not, expose you to his

cruelty. You know him not as I do--"

"Even therefore will I not leave you," he interposed, looking into

the sweet face. "He has not been kind to you. His pride was flattered

by your ready surrender, and your great beauty is but one of the many

dishes that go to satiate his varied appetites. Of the others you know

naught--"

She gave a shrug.

"If it be so," she said wearily, "so let it be. Nevertheless, I know

whereof I speak. This thing has stolen over us like a madness. And,

like a madness, it will hurl us to our doom."

Though he had seen the dark, glowering face among the branches, he

said nothing, not to alarm her, not to cause her fear and misgiving.

He loved her spotless purity as dearly as herself. To him they were

inseparable.

His head fell forward on her hands. Her fingers played in his soft

brown hair.

"What would you have me do?" he said, his voice choked by his anguish.

"Go on a pilgrimage to Rome, to obtain forgiveness, as I shall visit

the holy shrines of Mont Beliard and do likewise," she said, steadying

her voice with an effort. "Let us forget that we have ever met--that we

have ever loved,--or remember that we loved--a dream."--

"Can love forget so readily?" he said, bitter anguish and reproach in

his tones.

She shook her head.

"It is my fate,--for better--or worse--no matter what befall. As for

you--life lies before you. Love another, happier woman, one that is

free to give--and to receive. As for me--"

She paused and covered her face with her hands.

"What will you do?" he cried in his over-mastering anguish.

A faint, far-off voice made reply.

"I shall do that which I must!"

He staggered away from her. She should not see the scalding tears that

coursed down his cheeks. But, as he turned, he again saw the dark and

glowering face, the brow gloomy as a thunder-cloud, of the Count

de Laval. But again it was not he. It was the black-garbed, lithe

stranger, the companion of the hunchback, who was regarding Hellayne

with evil, leering eyes.

He wanted to cry out, warn her, entreat her to fly.--

But it was too late.

Like a bird that watches spellbound the approach of the snake, Hellayne

stood pale and trembling--her cheeks white as death--her eyes riveted

on the evil shape that seemed the fiend. But he, Tristan, also was

encompassed by the same spell. He could not move--he could not cry out.

With a bound, swift and noiseless as the panther's, he saw the sinewy

stranger hurl himself upon Hellayne, picking her up like a feather and

disappear in the gloom of the forest.

With a cry of horror, bathed from head to foot in perspiration, Tristan

started from his slumber.

The moonbeams flooded the chamber. The soft breeze of the summer night

stole through the open casement.

With a moan as of mortal pain he sat up and looked about.

Was he indeed in Rome?

Had it been but a dream, this echo of the past, this visualized parting

from the woman he had loved better than life?

Was he indeed in Rome, to do as she had bid him do, not in the misty,

flower-scented rose-gardens of Avalon in far Provence?--

And she--Hellayne--where was she at this hour?

Tristan stroked his clammy brow with a hot, dry hand. For a moment the

memories evoked by the magic wand of the God of Sleep seemed to banish

all consciousness of the present. He cast a fleeting, bewildered glance

at the dim, distant housetops, then fell back among his cushions,

his lips muttering the name of her who had filled his dream with her

never-to-be-forgotten presence, wondering and questioning if they

would ever meet again. Thus he tossed and tossed.

After a time he became still.

Once again consciousness was blotted out and the dream realm reigned

supreme.