THE HESPERIAN
5
portable, that made my heart ache with a
swooning sickness, a wonder that looked
blankly on to the end of it. How had it
befallen? He might have won, he must have
won. It is always the hero-knight who wins,
and was not he just such as the heroes were,
tall and slender and strong, quick with sword
and spear? Did not all who knew him in
battle call him brave? It would be but
short work for him to overmaster the old
Scotchman, whose rough face I dimly re
membered. Surely, by this time, it was all
over. He would soon be here. It was
long after the noon. In a few minutes, he
would come. Down in the courtyard would
be a clatter of hoofs, and quick voices, then
a noise of hurrying steps on the stairs, one
spring to my side, and all would be right
forever.
Then he would tell me about it all ; how
the grim old earl fought, how he swore when
the sword blade sheared off his hand, and
how the blood in his throat stopped his
curses when the sword-point went through
his neck. He would come soon. Geraldis
said nothing. I thought I heard her sobbing;
but I laughed, for I knew that he would
come. Somehow I felt too strangely weak
to stand, but I sat upright and listened.
At last came a clatter of hoofs, and the
clash of spurredfeet on the stairs, quick steps
and glad, and about me the arms of the
Scotch Sir Rossness. One look in his face,
and that was all; and the darkness leaped
and struck me between the brows, the world
reeled red with sparkles, the earth fell from
under me, and all swooned headlong in a
sick and sinking gulf.
It was not Geraldis who was with me
when I awoke. It was a strange woman,
old and witch-like. She sat by the window
spinning, crooning some Scottish ballad,
with her dark eyes gleaming strangely from
under her shaggy brows, and her thin lips
et fast. I looked out of the window behind
lier. It was not my window. Mine opened
n low hills and broad lields. Here were
rough mountains, crest on crest, half hidden
by the hanging folds of mist. On one side
lay far off the gray sea, all scattered with
I Widening flakes of white. I had never seen
the sea, but I knew what it was, and feared
it more than the great and desolate hills.
The room was also strange. The ceiling
was high, with great, smoky oaken rafters,
draped with shuddering tapestry of spiders'
webs. The floor was carelessly strewn with
unrenewed rushes. There was no sign of
wealth, save in the furniture, whose gloomy
magnificence rebuked the thought of comfort.
The scant tapestry on the walls was dusty
and moth-eaten. In many places shreds of
it had fallen to the floor, where they laT un
gathered. Was this another of the dreams of semi
unconscious delirum, or did they too have
some meaning, the headlong tossing as of
a ship in rough waters, the smell of salt air,
the noise of men marching, all these confused
memories fugitive from a sealed oblivion ?
If this was a dream it was strangely real, so
strange that I laughed, and the laugh sounded
so weak that I laughed to hear it, and then
wept that I should laugh at myself, till at
last the old woman rose, and came and bent
over me. She looked far kinder now, and
I think the glistening in her eyes was of
tears, but she only stroked back my hair, and
said, " Poor child, poor child," and I lay
still, and wondered why she spoke so sadly,
and whether I was dead why else should
her face be so sorrowful, for as yet I might
remember nothing? So I lay and stared at
her, and she sat and spun, with strange bal
lads of love and hate and death, keeping
time to the whirring throb of her wheel.
Nothing more to see bu. the gloomy, great
room, and, far away, the mountains and
barren sea, ever cloudy, ever the same, till
it seemed as if I should go mad.
But in a few days, 1 grew better, and once
had a visit from my husband, for somehow,
in my delirium, he had me married and, as I
was too weak to hate him, or understand, we
agreed well. It was not long before I could
move about the room, and in a couple of
weeks 1 might walk out into the little garden,
