“Speak the worst, Bertram Lyngern!” cried the old lady. “Thy Lord—”
It seemed to Bertram as if the only words that would come to his lips in reply were two lines of an inscription set up in many a church, and as familiar to all present as any hackneyed proverb to us.
“‘Pur ta pité, Jésu, regarde, Et met cest alme en sauve garde.’”
There was an instant’s dead silence. It was broken by the mother’s cry of anguish—
“Tom, Tom! My lad, my last lad!”
“Drowned, Master Lyngern?” asked a score of voices.
Bertram tacitly ignored the question. He walked languidly up the hall, and dropping on one knee before the Princess, presented to her a sapphire signet-ring—the last token sent by her dead husband. Constance took it mechanically; and Bertram, going back to his usual seat, filled a goblet with Gascon wine, and drank it like a man who was faint and exhausted.
“Sit, Master Lyngern, and rest you,” pursued the Dowager; “but when you be refreshed, give us to wit the rest.”
The tone of her voice seemed to say that the worst which could come, had come; and the dreadful fact known, the details mattered little.
Bertram attempted to eat, but almost immediately he pushed away his trencher, and regardless of etiquette, laid his forehead upon his arm on the table.