Part 11 (1/2)
At the curtained doorway she turned and looked me in the eyes.
”If you were as other young men it would be easy for you to misjudge me. This is mine own work-chamber, and I bid you come into it, having seen you but an hour ago. Yet never a man save my father only hath set his foot in it before. Inquire carefully of your companions in the city of Thorn, and if any make pretension to acquaintance with the Lady Ysolinde of the White Gate strike him in the face and call him liar, for the sake of the favor I have shown you and the vision I saw concerning you in the crystal.”
I stooped and kissed her hand, which was burning hot--a thin little hand, with long, supple fingers which bent in one's grasp.
”The man who would pretend to such a thing is dead even as he speaks,”
said I; and I meant it fully.
”I thank you--it is well,” she answered, leading me in. ”I only desired that you should not misjudge me.”
”That could I never do if I would,” I made her answer. ”Here my every thought is reverence as in the oratory of a saint.”
She smiled a strange smile.
”Mayhap that is rather more than I desire,” she said. ”Say rather in the maiden bower of a woman who knows well whom she may trust.”
Again I kissed her hand for the correction. And, as I remembered afterwards, it was at that hour that the little Princess Playmate was used to look within my chamber to see that all was ready for me.
And, had I known it, even that night she stooped over and kissed the pillow where my head was to lie.
”Dear love!” she was used to say.
Alas that I heard it not then!
CHAPTER XII
EYES OF EMERALD
It was a strange little room into which the Lady Ysolinde brought me, full of quaint, changeful scents, and all ablaze with colors the like of which I had never seen. For not only were rugs and mats of outlandish Eastern design scattered over the floor, but there was vividly colored gla.s.s in the small, deeply set windows. Yet that which affected me most powerfully was a curious, clinging, evanescent odor, which came and went like a breeze through an open window. I liked it at first, but after a little it went to my head like a perfumed wine of Greece, such as the men of Venice sometimes send to our northern lands with their emba.s.sies of merchandise.
Altogether, it was a strange enough apartment for the daughter of a lawyer in the city of Thorn, within a mile of the bare feudal strengths of the Red Tower and the Wolfsberg.
All this while Ysolinde had kept my hand, a thing which at once thrilled and shamed me. For though I had never been what is called ”in love” with the Little Playmate, nor till that day had spoken a word to her my father might not have heard, yet hitherto she had always been first and sole in my heart whenever I thought on the things which were to be.
The Lady Ysolinde having brought me to her chamber, bade me sit upon an oaken folding-stool beside a table on which lay weapons of curious design--crooked knives and poisoned arrows. Then she went to an ivory cupboard of the Orient (or, as they are called in Holy Writ, ”an ivory palace”), and opening the beautifully fitting door, she took from it a small square bottle of red gla.s.s which she held between her and the light.
”It is well,” she said, looking long and carefully at it; ”it will flow.”
And coming to the table and pouring some of a s.h.i.+ning black liquid into the palm of her left hand, she sat down beside me on the stool and gazed steadily into the little pool of ink.
It was strange to me to sit thus motionless beside a beautiful woman (for such I then thought her)--so near that I could feel the warmth of her body strike like suns.h.i.+ne through the silken fineness of her sea-green gown. I glanced up at her eyes. They were fixed, and, as it seemed, glazed also. But the emerald in them, usually dark as the sea-depths, had opal lights in it, and her lips moved like those of a devotee kneeling in church.
Presently she began to speak.
”Hugo--Hugo Gottfried, son of the Red Axe,” she said, in the same hushed voice as before, most like running water heard murmuring in a deep runnel underground, ”you will live to be a man fortunate, well-beloved. You will know love--yes, more than one shall love you. But you will love one only.
I see the woman on whom your fate depends, yet not clearly--it may be, because my desire is so great to see her face. But she is tall and moves like a queen. She goes clad in white like a bride and her arms are held out to you.