De Breauté started. He had been cowed for a moment by the flashing glance Aliva had given him as she entered the hall. He had been stabbed by a maddening pang of jealousy at the few words she had spoken. But in the silence which followed he regained courage, and plunged vehemently into the set speech he had prepared,--
"Most beauteous Lady Aliva, fairest daisy of an English meadow, witching Diana of the woods, behold in me a poor suppliant from outre mer, falling at your fair feet, wounded to death by the glance of your bright een, the victim of Venus venerie! I pray thee, proud damoiselle, to deign to look upon me with favour, and to fan with words of comfort the fire ardent your beauty hath enkindled!"
He paused for lack of breath, and then launched out again into Continental flowers of compliment and gallantry.
As he spoke he advanced gradually towards Aliva, bowing, his hand upon his heart.
The two were only about six paces apart. Slowly and deliberately Aliva took those six paces, with an expression of indignation and scorn. Her right fist was tightly clinched. She raised her arm, and (we must remember this was the thirteenth and not the nineteenth century) she struck the dark little Frenchman full in the face.
CHAPTER IV.
IN BEDFORD CASTLE.
A few weeks after William de Breauté, his face smarting and disfigured by a blow from a woman's hand, had ridden off from Bletsoe, his elder brother Fulke--"that disgrace to knighthood," as Ralph de Beauchamp had termed him--sat one morning in his wife's apartment in his castle of Bedford.
The lady's bower, as the private room of the châtelaine was called, was at Bedford pleasantly situated in the upper part of the great keep reared by Pain de Beauchamp. The interior arrangement of a Norman castle was usually as follows:--
The ground-floor, to which there was no entrance from without, was called the dungeon, and was used as a storehouse for the provisions which were necessary to enable the castle to stand a siege. Here, also, was the well, another necessity, and prisoners were also sometimes confined in the ground-floor, hence the application of the name to prisons in general. The greater part of the first floor was occupied by the large apartment called the hall. This was approached by steps outside the building, and was entered through a portal which was often highly ornamented. The great hall was common ground to all who had any right to enter the keep, but above it were the private rooms for the lord and his family, which were usually approached by a staircase built at one corner of the keep. The windows were very small: in the lower portion of the building were long narrow tunnels pierced through the thickness of the wall; but in the upper stories, where the walls were safe from attack by battering-rams or such engines, they were often splayed within at a wide angle. In the recess thus formed seats could be placed commanding a view through the narrow window, covered only by a wooden shutter, which could be hooked back when the weather permitted.