“When Adam delved and Eve span,
Where was then the gentleman?”
“Hinds!” she thought. “Where was all your insolent, sweating dust! I could half wish you at the mercy of a hundred galloping spears!”
Moreover, some of them crowded about her, and hot faces were smeary with a gloating thought of her comeliness. She saw the dull lust in their eyes, and her pride became ice. They were like cattle jostling, leaping, bellowing. Now and again the shrill and screaming laughter of a woman eddied up. There was one huge fellow with a purple birth-mark covering half his face, who strode along carrying a small cask as a drum, and beating it with a hammer. He shouted perpetually with the voice of a cow that has been separated from its calf, “Death to all the lords and gentles!” and when he shouted his mouth looked like a red sore.
Late in the day they were crossing a lonely valley, where a stream ran between willows and aspens. A mill-house, built of timber and white plaster and thatched with straw, stood in the thick of an orchard about a hundred paces above the ford, and Isoult saw a dozen men break away and make for the mill-house. The fore-hoofs of her horse were, in the water when she heard a woman’s scream, a scream that was smothered instantly as though a big hand had been clapped over the screamer’s mouth.
The men near Isoult laughed.
“Old Bill o’ Mead Barrel will be first in, I wager you.”
She turned her horse sharply, scattered the men, and rode through the grassland along the edge of the stream, and leaving her horse at the gate by the footbridge, crossed over by the planking that passed close to the mill-wheel. There was a little garden of flowers and herbs in front of the house, and from within came the cries of a woman.
Isoult’s voice was merciless.
“Back, you dogs!”