Prosper waited in silence, in a crowd equally silent.
The seneschal shortly returned.
"Her ladyship will see Messire at once. I beg Messire to follow me."
He entered the Countess's chamber, and, lifting his head, looked at a
white lady on a throne. He had never seen her so before. She was
dressed in pure white, with a face near as dead as her clothes. All
that was dark about it haunted her masked eyes. She sat with her chin
in her hand, looking and waiting for him; when he came, and the
seneschal was dismissed with a curt nod, she still sat in the same
dead fashion, watchful of her guest, unwinking, pondering. Prosper,
for his part, bided the time. He guessed what was coming, but a word
from him might have put him in the wrong.
In the end the Countess broke the long silence. He thought he had
never heard her voice; it sounded like that of a tired old woman.
"I had thought to find in you, my lord, the son of an old friend, like
in spirit as in blood to him whom at first I sought to honour in you.
I find I have been mistaken, but for your father's sake I will not
tell you how much nor by what degrees. Rather I will beg you go at
once from my house."
Said Prosper-"Madam, for my father's sake, if not for mine, you will tell much more
than this to his son. Have your words any hint of reference to the
Lady Isoult? Speak of her, madam, as you would speak of my mother, for
she is my wife."
The Countess shrank back in her throne as if to avoid a whip. She
cowered there. Her eyes dilated, though she seemed incapable of seeing
anything at all; her mouth opened gradually--Prosper expected her to
scream--till it formed a round O, a pale ring circling black. Prosper,
having delivered his blow, waited in his turn; though his breath
whistled through his nostrils his lips were shut, his head still very
high. The blow was a shrewd one for the lady. You might have counted
twenty before she began to talk to herself in a whisper. Prosper
thought she was mad.
"I should have known--I should have known--I should have known," she
whispered, very fast, as people whisper on a death-bed.
"Madam," he broke in, "certainly you should have known had it seemed
possible to tell you. Even now I can tell you no more than the bare
fact, which is as I have stated it. And so it must be for the moment,
until I have completed an adventure begun. But so much as I tell you
now I might have told you before. It is shame to me that I did not.
Marriage to me is a new thing, love still a strange thing. Had I
thought then as I now do, be sure you would never have seen me here
without my wife, whom now, madam, I will pray leave to present to you,
the Lady Isoult le Gai."