"I did," said Hugh simply. "There is much evil in the world—as Messer Fulke says—and most of it falls upon the peasants."
"But what else are they made for? It is their portion to serve, even as it is the portion of the horse or the dog or the oxen."
"They have souls," answered Hugh, puzzled. "They are people like us, are they not?"
"Oh, have your western monks decided so?" she said carelessly. "'Twas a point I thought otherwise upon."
So she tricked him out of the question he would have asked, at the same time involuntarily exposing a view of her own soul, the driving power of that hidden personality.
She was more than ordinarily interesting to talk to, for she had known exile since she was a child and had travelled in many countries—over practically all the known world. To Hugh, fresh from his quiet backwater in far-away England, she was a mine of information. He listened breathless to her off-hand stories of courts and rulers and tourneys. But of Constantinople she seldom spoke.
"'Tis a subject that irks me," she replied when he would have questioned her. "Forbear, Messer Hugh. An you were an exile seeing all that you loved and treasured seized by others, the glory and power that was rightfully yours in the possession of a usurper, you would know the sorrow that embitters me."
Then her big eyes flamed and her hand opened and shut, as she dropped her horse's rein.
"Oh, that I were a man!" she cried. "With a few stout knaves at my back I would storm the Triple-Wall and cast Alexius from his ill-gotten throne. I would bind him and his sycophants, tear out their eyes, and leave them to drag out their days with the rats in the dungeons of Blachernae."
"Are they very terrible dungeons?" asked Hugh idly.