“Peace, friend,” said the Countess Sylvia with a queenly look. “My words are as I want them. I speak this Castilian in what sort I choose; and I would have him to know that if I speak him soft he shall yet feel my dagger. I have three hundred men of valiance, and I care not if the rude Castilian were the King of the Russ.”
Surely a glance so flashing and a bearing of such high disdain never shone about a mortal creature as those that enhanced this noble thing, as she sat as staunch as an arrow before the council board, awaiting the delivery of the cartel from the most powerful prince in Spain.
CHAPTER XVIII
OF THE AMBASSADOR OF THE RUDE CASTILIAN PRINCE
When the ambassador came into the room, the duke rose from his stool, and having carefully and politely removed the grease from the fingers of his right hand, held out his hand for the cartel in an imperious manner.
“Señor Ambassador,” said he, with the inimitable air which requires a grandee of I know not how many quarterings to support, “I understand you to come from our nephew of Castile. I will heed this, his mandate, carefully.”
Upon receiving the parchment sealed massively in wax he removed the grease from the fingers of his left hand and proceeded with patient dignity to peruse the challenge.
In the meantime, the Countess Sylvia, seated at the board in the midst of her council, was in a fury.
“Look at that old man!” she cried out. “Look at his thumbs! Why does he use them upon the missive of the Castilian? Look, Sirrah Red Dragon, he is reading it upside down!”
“Silence there at the top of the table,” said the duke, with the grandeur of one who has wielded an unquestioned authority for threescore years, yet having vainly endeavoured to peruse the document in the manner his daughter had indicated. “Do you read it to us, good plenipotentiary. Silence there, I say! If you do not close your trap, you hulks, I will have you flogged with severity. Silence, I say again! Ods nig and nog! was ever one who is old and a parent beset with so much incivility!”
While the ambassador, a dark man in a dusty riding suit of Cordovan leather, and accompanied by a retinue of three as dusty as himself, proceeded to read the terms of the cartel aloud to the duke, his lordship’s grace fell again to devouring the ortolan. By the time the messenger had reached the part in which the Castilian bade his uncle deliver up his castle hard by the city of Toledo, and bade him retire to his lesser manor in the province of Leon, the old man began to babble and whimper, and finally to break into tears.