‘My Kate, my fairest! Mine eyes have been hungry for a sight of thee.’
And Catherine, in her horned head-gear and flutter of spangled veil, was almost swallowed up in his hearty embrace; and the fervency of his great love so far warmed her, that she clung to him, and tenderly said, ‘My lord, it is long since I saw you.’
‘Thou wert before me! Ah! forgive thy tardy knight,’ he continued, gazing at her really enhanced beauty as if he had eyes for no one else, even while with lip and hand, kiss, grasp, and word, he greeted her companions, of whom Jaqueline of Hainault and John of Bedford were the most prominent.
‘And the babe! where is he?’ then cried he. ‘Let me have him to hold up to my brave fellows in the court!’
‘The Prince of Wales?’ said Catherine. ‘You never spake of my bringing him.’
‘If I spake not, it was because I doubted not for a moment that you would keep him with you. Nay, verily it is not in sooth that you left him. You are merely sporting with use.’
‘Truly, Sir,’ said Catherine, ‘I never guessed that you would clog yourself with a babe in the cradle, and I deemed him more safely nursed at Windsor.’
‘If it be for his safety! Yet a soldier’s boy should thrive among soldiers,’ said the King, evidently much disappointed, and proceeding to eager inquiries as to the appearance and progress of his child; to which the Queen replied with a certain languor, as though she had no very intimate personal knowledge of her little son.
Other eyes were meanwhile eagerly scanning the bright confusion of veils and wimples; and Malcolm had just made out the tall head and dark locks under a long almost shrouding white veil far away in the background behind the Countess of Hainault, when the Duke of Bedford came up with a frown of consternation on his always anxious face, and drawing King James into a window, said, ‘What have you been doing to him?’—to which James, without hearing the question, replied, ‘Where is she?’
‘Joan? At home. It was the Queen’s will. Of that another time. But what means this?’ and he signed towards his brother. ‘Never saw I man so changed.’