The Forest Lovers

If all this prove dull to the reader, I can only tell him that he had

better know his way about Morgraunt than lose it, as I have very often

done in the course of my hot-head excursions. There are so many

trackless regions in it, so many great lakes of green with never an

island of a name, that to me, at least, it is salvation to have solid

verifiable spots upon which to put a finger and say--"Here is

Waisford, here Tortsentier, here is the great river Wan, here by the

grace of God and the Countess of Hauterive is Saint Giles of Holy

Thorn." Of course to Isoult it was different. She had been a forester

all her life. To her there were names (and names of dread) not to be

known of any map. Deerleap, One Ash, the Wolves' Valley, the Place of

the Withered Elm, the Charcoal-Burners', the Mossy Christ, the Birch-

grove, the Brook under the Brow--and a hundred more. She steered by

these, with all foresters. What she did not remember, or did not know,

was that Maulfry had also lived in Morgraunt and knew the ways by

heart. Still, she had a better mount than the Lady of Tortsentier, and

Love for a link-boy.

However fast she rode for her mark, her way seemed long enough as she

battled through that shadowed land, forded brooks, stole by the edge

of wastes or swamps, crossed open rides in fear what either vista

might set bare, climbed imperceptibly higher and higher towards the

spikes of Hauterive, upon whose woody bluffs stands High March. Not

upon one beast could she have done what she did; one took her a day

and a night going at the pace she exacted. She knew by her instincts

where the herds of ponies ran. It was easy to catch and halter any one

she chose; no forest beast went in fear of her who had the wild-wood

savour in her hair--but it meant more contriving and another stretch

for her tense brain. For herself, she hardly dared stay at all.

Prosper's breast under a dagger! If she had stayed she would not have

slept. The fever and the fever only kept her up; for a slim and tender

girl she went through incredible fatigues. But while the fever lasted

so did she, alert, wise, discreet, incessantly active. Part of her

journey--for the half of one day--she actually had Maulfry in full

view; saw her riding easily on her great white Fleming, saw the glint

of the golden armour, and Vincent ambling behind her on his cob,

catching at the leaves as he went, for lack of something better. She

was never made out by them,--at a time like this her wits were finer

than her enemy's,--so she was able to learn how much time she had to

spare. That night she slept for three hours. As for her food, we know

that she could supply herself with that; and when the deer failed her,

she scrupled nothing (she so abject with whom she loved!) to demand it

of whomsoever she happened to meet. She grew as bold as a winter

robin. One evening she sat by a gipsy fire with as shrewd a set of

cut-throats as you would wish to hang. She never turned a hair.

Another night she fell in with some shaggy drovers leading cattle from

March into Waisford, and shared the cloak and pillow of one of them

without a quiver. Having dozed and started half-a-dozen times in a

couple of hours, she got up without disturbing her bed-fellow and took

to the woods again. So she came to her last day, when she looked to

see the High March towers and what they held.