“I am your servant, Madonna; it is my duty to obey.”
“O, what an excellent servant! He will not stir from his post, though I drown.”
Laughing and wilful she stepped into the water, staggered a little, found her balance and went cautiously forward. The mud sucked at her dainty shoes, captured one, and still she was not deterred. She had almost reached the prize, when the sound of rolling wheels broke upon her ears. She paused aghast. We have heard what followed.
CHAPTER III.
THE COMPACT
Even as he spoke, Tiretta regretted, and blushed over, the nature of his mission. It was not its insolence—that was nothing in those days; it was its obvious misapplication. For here was no rustic Hebe, no frolic campagnarde, as he had at first inclined to suppose, but a damsel of position, as seemed somehow evident from her manner. That, eloquent to him of the inexplicable shibboleth of caste, told him, being a gentleman and a Gileadite, that he had presumed. He awaited in considerable trepidation her answer.
It followed, and without hesitation, witheringly enough.
“My will, monsieur, now and always, is to be spared the impertinences of strangers.”
If she could be more than gracious to her inferiors, Don Philip’s daughter could repel crushingly the undesired approaches of her equals. Tiretta, with a thorn in his heart, could not but observe, and admire, with what grace the bedraggled little beauty commanded the situation; how, sopped and ruffled as she was, she could triumph in her conscious indignation over unflattering circumstance. Her hair was tumbled, her pretty hat was awry; her two little feet peeped from their muddy fringe, and one had no shoe on it; yet, booted and martial as he was, she could make him feel his inferiority in a way that was at once a charm and a humiliation.
“Impertinence, madam,” he said, “is the last thing I made myself deputy for. If——”
She interrupted him: “You know the terms of your own service, monsieur, better than I. I would accept the lesser dishonour, if I were you, and go without more words.”