He raised himself determinedly on his elbow and scrutinised his visitor. He saw beside him a comfortable, motherly looking creature, apparently some sixty years of age, with a sort of Dutch-cap on her head topped by a falling hat, and fat white curls rolled forward from the nape of her neck. Her face, sloping down from the forehead and up from the throat, came as it were to a sharpish prow at the tip of the nose. Its expression was of a rather mechanical humour, and the eyes seemed deliberately unspeculative. Only the mouth, looking lipless as a lizard’s, was a determined feature. For the rest, in dress and manner, she appeared the very antithesis of the loud and truculent trollop who had thrust a quarrel upon, and a sword into him, three nights ago.
And this was the famous chevalier, the enigma, the epicene, upon the question of whose sex the accumulated erudition of a King’s Bench had once been brought to bear—with indefinite result. This was the hermaphrodite dragoon and lady-in-waiting; the author, the plenipotentiary, and at the last, in this year of grace, the astonishing tireuse-d’armes, who had excelled, on their own ground, the Professors St George and M. Angelo, and who now replenished one pocket of her purse by giving lessons in the admirable art of fencing.
And, at this point of his cogitations, Mr Murk said—
“The chevalier is at least a wonderful actress.”
Thereat madame chirred out a little indulgent laugh.
“It is well said!” she cried. “Monsieur is un homme d’esprit.”
“And I take no shame,” said Ned, “to have let her in under my guard.”
She looked at the young man seriously.
“The shame was mine, mon petit—the shame of the necessity was mine to wound you at all.”
“You had not intended to kill me, then? It was not plotted with my lord?”