“That would be a coward’s trick. We should be shamed, even by her dog. God send the Vicomte back, I say, and keep all plundering devils from breaking down the gate.”
Tiphaïne crossed the court, shuddering inwardly as she thought of the dead men lying bloated and stiff under the straw in the hall. It was with an effort that she went in out of the sunlight and climbed the stairway to the lord’s solar. There was still the woman Enid to be looked to; and, refilling the cup from the brass pot on the hook, and ordering Brunet to lie down before the fire, she unlatched a small door in the wall that opened on a short gallery leading to the tower. At the back of the portcullis cell was a room known as the lesser solar, hung with red cloth, its windows opening upon the court. Books were ranged on a shelf beside the chimney and bundles of herbs dangled from the beams of the ceiling. In one corner stood a bed, with a water-pot and a crucifix on a stool beside it.
Tiphaïne set the cup down on the table, and, stealing across the room, drew the hangings back along the bed-rail. On the bed, under a coarse green quilt, lay the woman Enid, her sweet name belying her as she moaned and panted and plucked with her fingers at the clothes. Her face was as hideous as the face of a leper, blotched and swollen, the lips covered with brown scabs. Tiphaïne looked at her and shivered, remembering how she had kissed her as a child. The woman was wandering, thrusting out her dry tongue, blood on the quilt, her black hair in a noisome tangle.
“She will die to-night,” thought Tiphaïne, trying not to shrink from the bed and the tainted air of the room.
She took up the cup from the table, and, holding her breath, she bent over the bed, while the thing on it coughed and whimpered. She tried to pour some of the posset between the cracked lips, but the woman only choked, and the red wine dribbled down her chin. Tiphaïne put the cup back upon the table, and turned to the window-seat as though to wait and watch.
“What is the use,” she said to herself, fingering the rosary that hung about her neck. “I can do nothing, and I have prayed.”
Moved by some such simple thought as this, she left the woman to her moanings, hoping for pity’s sake that she might make a speedy end. It was more terrible to look on life than death, when life boasted so much horror. Lonely, very miserable, and sick at heart, she went to the little chapel beyond the solar and knelt down at the altar steps. Prayer was inarticulate in her, a blind up-rushing of the soul, a passionate desire for deliverance from the end. The sunlight had left the painted window, and everything was dim and indistinct and cold; the breath of the unseen seemed to fill the place and to chill her as she knelt before the cross.
“Ah, I cannot pray.”
She started up, half in petulance, half in despair, and went to her own bower that lay beyond the chapel. A hawk moped on the perch by the window, and even the bright colors on the walls seemed cold. Tiphaïne stood before the window and tried to remember how many days had passed since her father and Robin had ridden out. She strove to count them, taking her rosary and dropping a carved bead for each day. When would they return? And when they came they might find the Aspen Tower filled with the dead. Geoffrey the castellan and fifteen of the garrison lay buried with the three women under the apple-trees in the garden. Who would go next? Only crippled Jehanot, the man Guy, and the dog were left.
Mad with the silence of the place, she picked up a lute from the bed and tried to sing. Anything, even mockery, was better than this accursed stillness—