The woman entered, with her mangled child in her arms. She was pale
as her little burden. She gazed, with a wild love and despairing
tenderness, on the still, all but dead face, white and clear from loss
of blood and terror.
The knight rose. The light that had been confined to his eyes, now shone
from his whole countenance. He took the little thing in his arms, and,
with the mother's help, undressed her, and looked to her wounds. The
tears flowed down his face as he did so. With tender hands he bound them
up, kissed the pale cheek, and gave her back to her mother. When he went
home, all his tale would be of the grief and joy of the parents; while
to me, who had looked on, the gracious countenance of the armed man,
beaming from the panoply of steel, over the seemingly dead child, while
the powerful hands turned it and shifted it, and bound it, if possible
even more gently than the mother's, formed the centre of the story.
After we had partaken of the best they could give us, the knight took
his leave, with a few parting instructions to the mother as to how she
should treat the child.
I brought the knight his steed, held the stirrup while he mounted, and
then followed him through the wood. The horse, delighted to be free
of his hideous load, bounded beneath the weight of man and armour, and
could hardly be restrained from galloping on. But the knight made him
time his powers to mine, and so we went on for an hour or two. Then
the knight dismounted, and compelled me to get into the saddle, saying:
"Knight and squire must share the labour."
Holding by the stirrup, he walked along by my side, heavily clad as he
was, with apparent ease. As we went, he led a conversation, in which I
took what humble part my sense of my condition would permit me.
"Somehow or other," said he, "notwithstanding the beauty of this country
of Faerie, in which we are, there is much that is wrong in it. If there
are great splendours, there are corresponding horrors; heights and
depths; beautiful women and awful fiends; noble men and weaklings. All
a man has to do, is to better what he can. And if he will settle it
with himself, that even renown and success are in themselves of no great
value, and be content to be defeated, if so be that the fault is not
his; and so go to his work with a cool brain and a strong will, he
will get it done; and fare none the worse in the end, that he was not
burdened with provision and precaution."