Before the hostelry the column came to a halt with grounded pikes. The woman on the white horse stirred from her stupor, looked up, and saw Fulviac. He was standing with slouched shoulders in the gallery above her, his hands gripping the wooden rail. Their eyes met in a sudden mesmeric stare that brought badges of red to the girl’s white cheeks. There was the look upon his face that she had known of old, when perilous care weighed heavy upon his stubborn shoulders. His eyes bewildered her. They had a light in them that spoke neither of anger nor reproach, yet a look such as Arthur might have cast upon fallen Guinivere.
They took her from her horse, and led her mute and passive into the steel-thronged inn. Up a winding stair she was brought into a sombre room whose latticed casements looked towards the west. By an open window stood Fulviac, chin on chest, his huge hands clasped behind his back. Colgran, in dusky harness, was speaking to him in his rough, incisive jargon. The woman knew that the words concerned her heart. At a gesture from Fulviac, the free-lance cast a fierce glance at her, and retreated.
The man did not move from the window, but stood staring in morose silence at the reddening west. Hunched shoulders and bowed head gave a certain powerful pathos to the figure statuesque and silent against the crimson curtain of the sky. The very air of the room seemed burdened and saturated with the gloomy melancholy of the man’s mood. War, with its thousand horrors, furrowed his brow and bowed his great shoulders beneath its bloody yoke. Her woman’s instinct told her that he was lonely, for the soul that had ministered to him breathed for him no more.
He turned on her suddenly with a terse greeting that startled her thoughts like doves in a pine wood.
There was a bluff bitterness in his voice that forewarned her of his ample wisdom. Colgran had surrendered her, heart and tragedy in one, to Fulviac’s mercy. A looming cloud of passion shadowed the man’s face, making him seem gaunt and rough to her for the moment. She remembered him standing over Duessa’s body in Sforza’s palace at Gilderoy. Life had too little promise for her to engender fear of any man, even of Fulviac at his worst.