Via Crucis | Page 5

of using her fingers, as a lady should, before forks
were invented. On the following morning the Lady Goda had been

taken away again by her husband, and her experiences of court life had
been brought to an abrupt close. If the great Earl Robert of Gloucester
had deigned to bestow a word upon her, instead of looking through her
with his beautiful calm blue eyes at an imaginary landscape beyond,
her impressions of life at the Empress's court might have been very
different, and she might ever afterwards have approved her husband's
loyalty. But although she had bestowed unusual pains upon the
arrangement of her splendid golden hair, and had boxed the ears of a
clumsy tirewoman with so much vivacity that her own hand ached
perceptibly three hours afterwards, yet the great earl paid no more
attention to her than if she had been a Saxon dairy-maid. These things,
combined with the fact that she unexpectedly found the ladies of the
Empress's court wearing pocket sleeves, shaped like overgrown
mandolins, and almost dragging on the rushes as they walked, whereas
her own were of the old-fashioned open cut, had filled her soul with
bitterness against the legitimate heir to King Henry's throne and had
made the one-sided barrier between herself and her husband--which she
could see so plainly, but which was quite invisible to him--finally and
utterly impassable. He not only bored her himself, but he had given her
over to be bored by others, and from that day no such thing as even the
mildest affection for him was to be thought of on her side.
It was no wonder that she listened with breathless interest to all Sir
Arnold told her, and watched with delight the changing expression of
his smooth face, contrasted at every point with the bold, grave features
of the Lord of Stoke, solemnly asleep beside her. And Curboil, on his
side, was not only flattered, as every man is when a beautiful woman
listens to him long and intently, but he saw also that her beauty was of
an unusual and very striking kind. Too straight, too cold, too much like
marble, yet with hair almost too golden and a mouth like a small red
wound; too much of every quality to be natural, and yet without fault or
flaw, and too vivid not to delight the tired taste of the man of pleasure
of that day, who had seen the world from London to Rome and from
Rome to the imperial court of Henry the Fifth.
And she, on her side, saw in him the type to which she would naturally
have been attracted had she been perfectly free to make her choice of a

husband. Contrasted with the man of action, of few words, of few
feelings and strong ones, she saw the many-sided man of the world,
whose mere versatility was a charm, and the thought of whose manifold
experiences had in it a sort of mysterious fascination. Arnold de
Curboil was above all a man of tact and light touch, accustomed to the
society of women and skilled in the art of appealing to that unsatisfied
vanity which is the basis of most imperfect feminine characters. There
was nothing weak about him, and he was at least as brave as most men,
besides being more skilful than the majority in the use of weapons. His
small, well-shaped, olive-tinted hand could drive a sword with a
quicker thrust than Raymond Warde's, and with as sure an aim, though
there might not be the same massive strength behind it. In the saddle he
had not the terrible grip of the knee which could make a strong horse
shrink and quiver and groan aloud; but few riders of his day were more
profoundly skilled in the art of showing a poor mount to good
advantage, and of teaching a good one to use his own powers to the
utmost. When Warde had ridden a horse six months, the beast was
generally gone in the fore quarters, and broken-winded, if not dead
outright; but in the same time Curboil would have ridden the same
horse twice as far, and would have doubled his value. And so in many
other ways, with equal chances, the one seemed to squander where the
other turned everything to his own advantage. Standing Sir Arnold was
scarcely of medium height, but seated, he was not noticeably small; and,
like many men of short stature, he bestowed a constant and thoughtful
care upon his person and appearance, which resulted in a sort of
permanent compensation. His dark beard was cut to a point, and so
carefully trimmed as to remind one of those smoothly clipped trees
representing peacocks and dragons, which have been the delight of the
Italian gardener ever