“Peace, Sir Count,” she said scornfully. “You are an honest good fellow, and you have well served the grace of his lordship, but you must know I can make no abatement of my resolve. The bloody-minded prince shall perish like a felon. He shall suffer every rigour that can be devised by the outraged gentle mind and nature of a daughter. It is not for naught that this uncivil wolf of the forest is come into the sheep-fold.”
“I pray you, madam,” said the Count of Nullepart, “graciously to permit me to remind you that, should the life of the King’s majesty be forfeit, his great host will raze your father’s castle to the earth. And personally I have no doubt that if a hair of this prince’s head sustains an injury, you and all its other contents will be put to the sword.”
“You speak truly, Sirrah Count,” said madam. “But I myself will raze this castle to the earth, and all of us who are within it shall die upon our swords.”
With his rare address the Count of Nullepart continued long to urge the more humane aspect of the matter, but the heart of his mistress was not to be moved. It was in vain that he exerted all those powers of wise enchantment in the use of which he was without a peer. His entreaties had no happier result than that the Countess Sylvia consented to postpone her measures upon the royal person of Castile against the return of her redoubtable captain, Sir Richard Pendragon, the English barbarian robber, than whom this unlucky prince had no more relentless and bitter foe.
“I am indeed between the vulture and the kite,” said the King with a wry smile, while we were leading him away from this unfortunate audience. “My amiable, gentle, and dove-like cousin is desirous to cut off my ears, and proposes to slay me an inch at a time. I shall therefore be curious to learn the measures that are proposed by my friend of England. He will, doubtless, ordain that I am cooked in a pot.”
We conducted the royal captive to the apartment in which he had supped. In this comfortable place we laid him that he might abide the return of not the least of his enemies. In so doing, however, we ventured to disobey the explicit will of our mistress. As we had left her presence she had enjoined us strictly that “the vile spawn of darkness be thrown among rats into the deepest and slimiest of the dungeons underground.”
The King slept soundly after his late fatigues, but there was no repose that night for any others within the castle. The minds of all, from that of madam herself to that of the meanest scullion, were filled by a single theme. What had befallen Sir Richard Pendragon?
Already the exploits of the English giant had given to his name and personality something of a supernatural cast. Nor was this merely the view of the commonalty; it was shared by our mistress and the highly sagacious Count of Nullepart. Under the direction of such a leader we knew that great haps were toward in the darkness. And so lively and profound were our speculations of their nature, that excitement and anxiety reigned through all the long hours of the night.
CHAPTER XXXV
OF SIR RICHARD PENDRAGON’S RETURN
The dawn came, yet Sir Richard Pendragon came not. I then made a proposal to our mistress, who had spent the night like a veritable captain walking upon her battlements. It was that I should be permitted to sally out into the plain with the hundred men remaining in our hands, in order that I might seek for our good friends, and if they were in need of succour to bear it to them.