The thirteenth was Countess of Hauterive, Châtelaine of High March, Lady of Morgraunt, etc. A very few days inhabitancy where Master Roy was of the party, had assured this lady that the page must be ridded. She wished him no ill: you do not wish ill to the earwig which you brush out of the window. Certainly if a boy had needs be stabbed by an Egyptian (who incontinent disappears and must be hunted) it were simpler Roy had fallen than the other. But she had no thought of amending the mistakes of Providence. Great ladies who are really great do not go to work to have inconvenient lacqueys stabbed. This at least was not the Countess of Hauterive's way. If Fulk de Bréauté had not been her lover as well as her husband, if he had been (for instance) only her husband, she would have despised Earl Roger fully as much for the affair on Spurnt Heath. No. But she meant Roy to go, and here was her chance.
The fourteenth was Melot, a maid of the kitchen. This young woman, whose love affairs were at least as important in her own eyes as could possibly be those of the Countess her mistress (whom she had hardly ever seen), or of Prosper (whom she conceived as a sexless abstraction, built for the purposes of eating and wearing steel), or of Roy (who, she assumed, had none)—this young woman, I say, was best pleased of them all. She was perhaps pretty; she had a certain exuberant charm, I suppose—round red cheeks, round black eyes, even teeth, and a figure—and was probably apt to give it the fullest credit. Roy's indifference, or reticence, or timidity (whichever it was) provoked her. There was either innocence, or backwardness, or ennui to overcome: in any case, victory would be a triumph over a kitchenful of adepts, and here was a chance of victory. So far she owned to failure in all the essays she had made. She had tried comradeship, a bite of her apple—declined. She had put her head on his shoulder more than once—endured once, checked effectively by sudden removal of the shoulder and upsetting of the lady a final time. She leaned over him to see what he was reading—he ceased reading. Comradeship was a mockery; let her next try mischief. For happy mischief the passionist must fume: he had looked at her till she felt a fool. She had tried innuendo—he did not understand it; languishing—he gladly left her to languish; coquetry elsewhere—he asked nothing better. She thought she must be more direct; and she was.
Isoult was in the pantry alone the second day of Prosper's quest. She stood at gaze out of the window, seeing nothing but dun-colour and drab where the sunlight made all the trees golden-green. Melot came in with a great stir over nothing at all, hemmed, coughed, sighed, heighoed. The block of a fellow stood fast, rooted at his window—gaping. Melot was stung. She came to close quarters.
"Oh, Roy," she sighed, "never was such a laggard lad with me before.
Where hast thou been to school?"
Thereupon she puts hands upon the dunce, kisses him close, grows sudden red, stammers, holds off, has the wit to make sure—and bundles out, blazing with her news.
In twenty minutes it was all over the castle; Prosper's flag was higher, and Isoult's in the mire. In thirty it had come to my lady's dresser. Isoult, in the meantime, purely unconscious of anything but a sick heart, had wandered up into the ante-chamber, and was poring over a Book of Hours of the Blessed Virgin, leaning on her elbows at a table.
The dresser, having assimilated the news, was only too happy to impart to the Countess. This she did, and with more detail than the truth would warrant. Half hints became whole, backstairs whispers shouted in the corridors; and all went to swell the feast of sound in the lady's chamber. It would be idle to say that the Countess was furious, and moreover untrue, for that implies a scarlet face; the Countess grew as grey as a dead fire. She was, in truth, more shocked than angry, shocked at such a flagrant insult to her mere hospitality. But gradually, as the whole truth seemed to shape itself—the figure she made, standing bare as her love had left her before this satyr of a man; the figure of Prosper, tongue in the cheek, leering at her; the figure of Isoult, a loose-limbed wanton sleepy with vice—before this hideous trinity, when she had shuddered and cringed, she rose up trembling, possessed with a really imperial rage. And if ever a grievously flouted lady had excuse for rage, it was this lady.
Her rages were never storms, always frosts. These are the more deadly, because they give the enraged more time. So she said very little to her dresser. It came to this—"Ah! And where is the woman now?"
The dresser replied that when she had passed by the woman was in the ante-chamber.
"Very well," said the Countess, "you may leave her there. Go." She pointed to a door which led another way. The dresser felt baulked of her just reward. But that was to come.