“To say I had tracked a fox were nearer the mark,” thought Quentin, but gave the reply no utterance.
“Are you well, Seignior Quentin?” said the Countess Isabelle, in a tone of interest at which she herself blushed, while she felt that it was something more than the distance between them warranted.
“He hath sat up carousing with the jolly friars,” said the Lady Hameline, “the Scots are like the Germans, who spend all their mirth over the Rheinwein, and bring only their staggering steps to the dance in the evening, and their aching heads to the ladies' bower in the morning.”
“Nay, gentle ladies,” said Quentin, “I deserve not your reproach. The good friars were at their devotions almost all night, and for myself, my drink was barely a cup of their thinnest and most ordinary wine.”
“It is the badness of his fare that has put him out of humour,” said the Countess Isabelle. “Cheer up, Seignior Quentin, and should we ever visit my ancient Castle of Bracquemont together, if I myself should stand your cup bearer, and hand it to you, you shall have a generous cup of wine, that the like never grew upon the vines of Hochheim or Johannisberg.”
“A glass of water, noble lady, from your hand,”—Thus far did Quentin begin, but his voice trembled, and Isabelle continued, as if she had been insensible of the tenderness of the accentuation upon the personal pronoun.
“The wine was stocked in the deep vaults of Bracquemont, by my great grandfather the Rhinegrave Godfrey,” said the Countess Isabelle.
“Who won the hand of her great grandmother,” interjected the Lady Hameline, interrupting her niece, “by proving himself the best son of chivalry, at the great tournament of Strasbourg—ten knights were slain in the lists. But those days are now over, and no one now thinks of encountering peril for the sake of honour, or to relieve distressed beauty.”
To this speech, which was made in the tone in which a modern beauty, whose charms are rather on the wane, may be heard to condemn the rudeness of the present age, Quentin took upon him to reply that there was no lack of that chivalry which the Lady Hameline seemed to consider as extinct, and that, were it eclipsed everywhere else, it would still glow in the bosoms of the Scottish gentlemen.
“Hear him!” said the Lady Hameline, “he would have us believe that in his cold and bleak country still lives the noble fire which has decayed in France and Germany! The poor youth is like a Swiss mountaineer, mad with partiality to his native land—he will next tell us of the vines and olives of Scotland.”