The two old men who offered these last suggestions chuckled with malicious enjoyment, and two of the old women mumbled with their toothless gums as though tasting sweet morsels; but the third drew herself up with a kind of grotesque coquetry.
“You can tell by the green silk of his tunic that he is of some quality,” she reproved them. “Danishmen are ever the ones to adorn themselves. It occurs to my mind how, in Edgar’s time, when I was a girl, one was quartered in my father’s house. He changed his raiment once a day and bathed every Sunday. I used to comb his yellow hair when I took in his ale, of a morning.” Long after her voice had passed into a rattle, she stood in a simpering revery, her palsied hands resting heavily upon her stick, her blinking eyes fixed on the picturesque young foreigner musing in the sunshine.
Then the voice of the steward sounded sharply in the archway. There was an eager catching up of bags and baskets, a shuffling forward of unsteady feet, and the goody came out of her day-dream to throw herself into the strife over a jar of peppered broth.
The Danish page bent to pillow a very red cheek on the soft cushion of the dog’s head, then drew back and straightened himself stiffly as a strapping serving-lass, flagon-laden, came out of the door behind him. She saw the motion and looked down with a teasing laugh. “Aha, young Fridtjof! How do you like being sent to cool your heels on the doorstep while your master eats? What! I think that the next time you thrust your foot out to trip me up as I hand my lord his ale, you will attend to keeping it under your stool.”
Young Fridtjof regarded her with a kind of righteous indignation. “And I think that the next time you will look where you are going, even if it happen that it is Lord Sebert’s ale you are bearing. Silly jades, that cannot come nigh him without biting your lips or sparkling your eyes! I wonder he does not clap masks over your faces.”
“And I wonder he does not clap rods to your back,” the lass retorted with sudden spite. She flounced past him down the step, on her way to the great lead-roofed storehouse that flanked the forest side of the Tower.
The boy looked after her sternly. “It is likely that you will be less pert of tongue after I tell what I found out in the corn-bins yesterday,” he said.
The maid whirled. “What did you find out, you mischief-full brat?”
He continued to stroke the dog’s head in dignified silence. “If you mean the—the brown-cloaked beggar, let me inform you that that is naught.”
Busying himself with pulling burrs from the hound’s ears, the page began to hum softly.