The lady repeated them, with tender deliberation, and a languorous gleam in her blue eyes began to answer his burning gaze. 'I have held the fierce beast at arm's length,' she said, 'because he is also a fool. I would give a year of my life to be able to laugh in his face, and slap these beads across it. I have told him—the blessed thought came to me even while we knelt at the altar together—that I am bound by a vow. His big empty head is open to all the fancies that fly. He believes that an enchanted woman drives up her horses from the bottom of the lake, down at the foot of the small tower here, every night for food; and he spreads corn for them which the thieves about him fatten on. He believes in witches rising from the sea, and leprechauns, and changelings, like any ignorant herdsman out in the bog, but he is a frightened Churchman, too. He believes that I am a saint!'
'As I swear by the grave of my mother, you are!' panted Don Tello. 'But speak now to him.'
'The King of Spain will do very great things in your behalf,' she recited, in Murtogh's tongue. 'He will make you of the rank of a commander in his armies, and he will ennoble you.'
'I am noble now,' Murtogh made comment, 'as noble as the King of Spain himself. I am not a MacCarthy or an O'Driscoll, that I would be craving titles to my name.'
'Then he will send large rich ships here,' she began again, with weariness in her tone, 'to bring you costly presents. And the Pope, he will grant you ten years' indulgence,—or it may be twenty.'
'Ask him,' broke in Murtogh, sitting up with a brightened face, his hand outstretched to secure silence for the thought that stirred within him,—'ask if the Holy Father would be granting just the one spiritual favour I would beg. Will this gentleman bind the King of Spain to that?'
'And may I wholly trust,' she asked the Spaniard, with half-closed eyes, through which shone the invitation of her mood, 'may I trust in your knightly proffer of help? Do not answer till I have finished. You are the first who has come to me—here in this awful dungeon—and I have opened my heart to you as perhaps I should not. But you have the blood of youth in your veins, like me; you are gallant and of high lineage; you are from the land where chivalry is the law of gentle life,—is it true that you will be my champion?'
The Spaniard rose with solemn dignity, though his great eyes flashed devouringly upon her, and his breast heaved under its cuirass. He half lifted his sword from the sheath, and kissed the cross of its hilt. 'Oh, my beloved, I swear!' he said, in sombre earnestness.
She translated the action and utterance to Murtogh. 'Whatever of a spiritual nature you would crave of his Holiness he would grant.'
'But it would be a cruel time of waiting, to send all the long way to Rome and back,' he objected, 'and this matter lies like lead upon my soul.'