XXXVIII
For the moment the figure in the black armor had ceased to be the centre about which the human interest of the scene revolved. All heads were turned towards that more imperious shape sweeping in its cloak of gray from the quiet shadows of the orchard trees.
Queenliness in a woman is the counterpart of courage in a man, and with Tiphaïne the very carriage of her head conveyed more magnetism than the choicest smiles of a woman of meaner presence and address. She walked as though these gentlemen of the sword would fall back before her, and fall back they did, leaving her a pathway through the trampled grass. Dubois, standing beside the pile of fagots, had his expectancy ignored as though his knightliness had no standing in the lady’s eyes. Tall as many of the men who watched her, fearless, and forgetful of all feebler issues, she swept on like one who walks towards God’s altar amid the blurred figures of an unseen crowd.
The fifty odd bassinets turned with the unanimity of so many weather-cocks veering with the wind. Their incontinent curiosity trailed at her heels as though she were St. Ursula with eleven thousand virgins following in her wake. Carro de Bodegat alone had the presence to obstruct the path she chose to tread, and to attempt a parley with this imperious perfection of a queen.
“Madame—”
She looked straight into De Bodegat’s sallow face like a red dawn refusing to be smothered by a cloud.
“Room, messire.”
And Bertrand, into whose heart the blood of life seemed bubbling up, saw Carro de Bodegat step back, hunch up his bony shoulders, and venture a side-thrust as she passed.
“I would ask madame her authority—”
“Have patience, messire, and I promise you you shall hear it,” and she left him grimacing in perplexity at Dubois.