A Lady of Quality | Page 2

thick ivy on the stone. Doing so he saw an old woman draw back the curtain and look down upon him as if searching for him with a purpose.
He uttered an exclamation of anger.
"Damnation! Mother Posset again," he said. "What does she there, old frump?"
The curtain fell and the woman disappeared, but in a few minutes more an unheard-of thing happened--among the servants in the hall, the same old woman appeared making her way with a hurried fretfulness, and she descended haltingly the stone steps and came to his side where he sat on his black horse.
"The Devil!" he exclaimed--"what are you here for? 'Tis not time for another wench upstairs, surely?"
"'Tis not time," answered the old nurse acidly, taking her tone from his own. "But there is one, but an hour old, and my lady--"
"Be damned to her!" quoth Sir Jeoffry savagely. "A ninth one--and 'tis nine too many. 'Tis more than man can bear. She does it but to spite me."
"'Tis ill treatment for a gentleman who wants an heir," the old woman answered, as disrespectful of his spouse as he was, being a time-serving crone, and knowing that it paid but poorly to coddle women who did not as their husbands would have them in the way of offspring. "It should have been a fine boy, but it is not, and my lady--"
"Damn her puling tricks!" said Sir Jeoffry again, pulling at his horse's bit until the beast reared.
"She would not let me rest until I came to you," said the nurse resentfully. "She would have you told that she felt strangely, and before you went forth would have a word with you."
"I cannot come, and am not in the mood for it if I could," was his answer. "What folly does she give way to? This is the ninth time she hath felt strangely, and I have felt as squeamish as she--but nine is more than I have patience for."
"She is light-headed, mayhap," said the nurse. "She lieth huddled in a heap, staring and muttering, and she would leave me no peace till I promised to say to you, 'For the sake of poor little Daphne, whom you will sure remember.' She pinched my hand and said it again and again."
Sir Jeoffry dragged at his horse's mouth and swore again.
"She was fifteen then, and had not given me nine yellow-faced wenches," he said. "Tell her I had gone a-hunting and you were too late;" and he struck his big black beast with the whip, and it bounded away with him, hounds and huntsmen and fellow-roysterers galloping after, his guests, who had caught at the reason of his wrath, grinning as they rode.
* * * * *
In a huge chamber hung with tattered tapestries and barely set forth with cumbersome pieces of furnishing, my lady lay in a gloomy, canopied bed, with her new-born child at her side, but not looking at or touching it, seeming rather to have withdrawn herself from the pillow on which it lay in its swaddling-clothes.
She was but a little lady, and now, as she lay in the large bed, her face and form shrunken and drawn with suffering, she looked scarce bigger than a child. In the brief days of her happiness those who toasted her had called her Titania for her fairy slightness and delicate beauty, but then her fair wavy locks had been of a length that touched the ground when her woman unbound them, and she had had the colour of a wild rose and the eyes of a tender little fawn. Sir Jeoffry for a month or so had paid tempestuous court to her, and had so won her heart with his dashing way of love-making and the daringness of his reputation, that she had thought herself--being child enough to think so--the luckiest young lady in the world that his black eye should have fallen upon her with favour. Each year since, with the bearing of each child, she had lost some of her beauty. With each one her lovely hair fell out still more, her wild-rose colour faded, and her shape was spoiled. She grew thin and yellow, only a scant covering of the fair hair was left her, and her eyes were big and sunken. Her marriage having displeased her family, and Sir Jeoffry having a distaste for the ceremonies of visiting and entertainment, save where his own cronies were concerned, she had no friends, and grew lonelier and lonelier as the sad years went by. She being so without hope and her life so dreary, her children were neither strong nor beautiful, and died quickly, each one bringing her only the anguish of birth and death. This wintry morning her ninth lay slumbering by her side; the noise of baying dogs and boisterous men