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.