When he had gone, Dame Alianora laughed contentedly. “Mon bel esper! my fairest hope! The man called me that in his verses—thirty years ago! Yes, I may trust you, my poor Osmund.”
So they set out at cockcrow. He had procured for himself a viol and a long falchion, and had somewhere got suitable clothes for the Queen; and in their aging but decent garb the two approached near enough to the appearance of what they desired to be thought. In the courtyard a knot of servants gaped, nudged one another, but openly said nothing. Messire Heleigh, as they interpreted it, was brazening out an affair of gallantry before the countryside; and they esteemed his casual observation that they would find a couple of dead men on the common exceedingly diverting.
When the Queen asked him the same morning, “And what will you sing, my Osmund? Shall we begin the practise of our new profession with the Sestina of Spring?”—old Osmund Heleigh grunted out: “I have forgotten that rubbish long ago. Omnis amans, amens, saith the satirist of Rome town, and with reason.”
Followed silence.
One sees them thus trudging the brown, naked plains under a sky of steel. In a pageant the woman, full-veined and comely, her russet gown girded up like a harvester’s might not inaptly have prefigured October; and for less comfortable November you could nowhere have found a symbol more precise than her lank companion, humorously peevish under his white thatch of hair, and constantly fretted by the sword tapping at his ankles.
They made Hurlburt prosperously and found it vacant, for the news of Falmouth’s advance had driven the villagers hillward. There was in this place a child, a naked boy of some two years, lying on a doorstep, overlooked in his elders’ gross terror. As the Queen with a sob lifted this boy the child died.
“Starved!” said Osmund Heleigh; “and within a stone’s throw of my snug home!”
The Queen laid down the tiny corpse, and, stooping, lightly caressed its sparse flaxen hair. She answered nothing, though her lips moved.
Past Vachel, scene of a recent skirmish, with many dead in the gutters, they were overtaken by Falmouth himself, and stood at the roadside to afford his troop passage. The Marquess, as he went by, flung the Queen a coin, with a jest sufficiently high flavored. She knew the man her inveterate enemy, knew that on recognition he would have killed her as he would a wolf; she smiled at him and dropped a curtsey.
“This is remarkable,” Messire Heleigh observed. “I was hideously afraid, and am yet shaking. But you, madame, laughed.”