“Oh, mother,” cried she, “methinks I’d give all Dordrecht to be once more in our own palace in The Hague, safe sheltered in mine own room, and rid of this armour which chafes me so!”
“Nay, daughter, speak not so loud, bend thy lips to mine ear, for truly it would shame you much should the men-at-arms without hear thy plaints.”
“But, mother—”
“Lower, dear child, speak lower. What! weeping? Countess of Hainault and Daughter of Holland shedding tears?”
“Thy daughter was I, mother, before I was Daughter of Holland. So fearsome am I of those cruel men we go to meet, with their spears and arrows. Methinks that already I feel them in my flesh”; and at the very thought there were fresh showers of tears.
“Can this be my brave Princess? Is this the maid of whom her father said, ‘Brave as a lad, with more wisdom than her years, and better fitted to rule than many an elder one’? Sure, child, the hailstones have in truth bewitched thee!”
“Ah, mother, I will be brave to-morrow, since needs I must. But say thou wilt not leave me this night? Stay with me; the darkness affrights me, mother.”
“Truly I had no thought not to stay with thee, dear child. See, give me thy hand, and I will sit beside thy couch till thou art fast asleep.”
Jacqueline threw herself on the couch which had been hastily spread in her tent, and made soft with the skins of fox and of bear, and drew over her buckskin doublet a cloak of frieze.
“Kiss me, mother, as though I were once more thy little daughter, and leave me not”; and holding her mother’s hand as she had done in babyhood, our poor little Daughter of Holland, from very weariness, fell fast asleep.