Such was the missive, one surely penned by as ungentle a hand as ever ministered to a woman’s heart. I tore it into a hundred fragments, and then grimly pointed my traducer to the narrow wicket in the remote wall leading down by a hundred stony stairs to the scullion places whence she had come. She turned and went a little way toward it, then came sobbing back, and burst out into grief anew, and “Alas! alas! Sir,” she cried, “this is the very worst task that ever I was put to! Shame upon Lady Alianora, and double shame upon me for doing her behests. I am sorry, Sir! indeed I am! Until you began that wonderful tale I thought ’twas but a merry game; but, oh, Sir! to see you there upon your knee, to see your eyes burning in the dark with true love for my false mistress—why, Sir, it would have drawn tears from the hardest stone in the mill down yonder. And ever as your talk went on just now, I kept saying to myself, Sure! but it must be a big heart which works a tongue like that; and when you had done, Sir, ah! before you were halfway through, though I could not stop you, yet I loathed my errand. I am sorry, Sir, indeed I am! I cannot go until I be forgiven!”
“There, there, silly girl,” I said, my wrath quenched by her red eyes and humble amendment, “you are fully absolved.”
She kissed my hands and dried her eyes, and swept together, with woman swiftness, the tattered things in which she had masqueraded, and then, as she was about to leave, I called her back.
“Stay one moment, damsel! How much had you for thus betraying me?”
“Two zequins, Sir,” she answered with simplicity.
“Why, then, here’s three others to say naught about this evening’s doings in the servants’ hall. You understand? There, go! and no more tears or thanks,” and, as the curtain fell upon her, I could not help muttering to myself, “What! two zequins to undo you, Phra, and three to mend it? Why, Phœnician, thou hast not been so cheap for thirteen hundred years!”
CHAPTER XII
Grim and angry, all that night I chewed the bitter cud of my rejection, and before the new day was an hour old determined life was no longer worth the living in that place. I determined to leave those walls at once, to leave all my songs unsung, my trysts unkept, to leave all my jolly comrades, the tiltyards and banquets. But I could not do this so secret as I would. The very paying off of my score down in the buttery, the dismissing of my attendants, each with largess, the seriousness I could not but give to my morning salutation of some of those I should never see again, betrayed me. And thus a whisper, first down in the vaulted guard-room, and then a rumor, and anon a widening murmur the news was spread, until surely the very jackdaws on the battlements were saying to themselves, “Phra is going! Phra!—Phra is going!”
Yes! and the tidings spread to that fair floor of a hundred corridors, where the Norman-arched windows looked down four score feet upon the river winding amid its shining morning meadows, bringing a sigh to more than one silken pillow. It reached the unhappy, red-eyed Isobel, and presently she tripped down the twining stone staircase, the loose folds of her skirt thrown over her arm to free her pretty feet, and in her hand a scrap of writing, a “cartel” she called it, seeming newly opened.
She came to the sunny empty corridor where I stood alone, and touched me on the arm as I watched from a lattice my charger being armed and saddled in the courtyard underneath, and when I turned held out her hand to me in frank and simple fashion. How could I refuse the proffer of so fair a friendship? and, pulling my velvet cap from my head, I put her white fingers to my lips. And was it true, she asked with a sigh, I was really going that morning, and so suddenly? Only too true, I answered, and, saving her presence, not so sudden as my inclination prompted. Much I saw she wished to question the why and wherefore, but of this, as of nothing touching her stern sister, would I tell her.