The Countess Isabelle read the letter, in which her aunt seemed determined to make the best of a bad bargain, and to console herself for the haste and indecorum of her nuptials, by the happiness of being wedded to one of the bravest men of the age, who had just acquired a princedom by his valour. She implored her niece not to judge of her William (as she called him) by the report of others, but to wait till she knew him personally. He had his faults, perhaps, but they were such as belonged to characters whom she had ever venerated. William was rather addicted to wine, but so was the gallant Sir Godfrey, her grandsire—he was something hasty and sanguinary in his temper, such had been her brother Reinold of blessed memory; he was blunt in speech, few Germans were otherwise; and a little wilful and peremptory, but she believed all men loved to rule. More there was to the same purpose; and the whole concluded with the hope and request that Isabelle would, by means of the bearer, endeavour her escape from the tyrant of Burgundy, and come to her loving kinswoman's Court of Liege, where any little differences concerning their mutual rights of succession to the Earldom might be adjusted by Isabelle's marrying Earl Eberson—a bridegroom younger indeed than his bride, but that, as she (the Lady Hameline) might perhaps say from experience, was an inequality more easy to be endured than Isabelle could be aware of.
[The marriage of William de la Marck with the Lady Hameline is as apocryphal as the lady herself.—S.]
Here the Countess Isabelle stopped, the Abbess observing, with a prim aspect, that she had read quite enough concerning such worldly vanities, and the Count of Crevecoeur, breaking out, “Aroint thee, deceitful witch!—Why, this device smells rank as the toasted cheese in a rat trap.—Now fie, and double fie, upon the old decoy duck!”
The Countess of Crevecoeur gravely rebuked her husband for his violence.
“The Lady,” she said, “must have been deceived by De la Marck with a show of courtesy.”
“He show courtesy!” said the Count. “I acquit him of all such dissimulation. You may as well expect courtesy from a literal wild boar, you may as well try to lay leaf gold on old rusty gibbet irons. No—idiot as she is, she is not quite goose enough to fall in love with the fox who has snapped her, and that in his very den. But you women are all alike—fair words carry it—and, I dare say, here is my pretty cousin impatient to join her aunt in this fool's paradise, and marry the Bear Pig.”
“So far from being capable of such folly,” said Isabelle, “I am doubly desirous of vengeance on the murderers of the excellent Bishop, because it will, at the same time, free my aunt from the villain's power.”
“Ah! there indeed spoke the voice of Croye!” exclaimed the Count, and no more was said concerning the letter.
But while Isabelle read her aunt's epistle to her friends, it must be observed that she did not think it necessary to recite a certain postscript, in which the Countess Hameline, lady-like, gave an account of her occupations, and informed her niece that she had laid aside for the present a surcoat which she was working for her husband, bearing the arms of Croye and La Marck in conjugal fashion, parted per pale, because her William had determined, for purposes of policy, in the first action to have others dressed in his coat armour and himself to assume the arms of Orleans, with a bar sinister—in other words, those of Dunois. There was also a slip of paper in another hand, the contents of which the Countess did not think it necessary to mention, being simply these words: “If you hear not of me soon, and that by the trumpet of Fame, conclude me dead, but not unworthy.”
A thought, hitherto repelled as wildly incredible, now glanced with double keenness through Isabelle's soul. As female wit seldom fails in the contrivance of means, she so ordered it that ere the troops were fully on march, Quentin Durward received from an unknown hand the billet of Lady Hameline, marked with three crosses opposite to the postscript, and having these words subjoined: “He who feared not the arms of Orleans when on the breast of their gallant owner, cannot dread them when displayed on that of a tyrant and murderer.”