In the courtyard a knot
of servants gaped, nudged one another, but openly said nothing. Messire
Heleigh, as they interpreted it, was brazening out an affair of
gallantry before the countryside; and they esteemed his casual
observation that they would find a couple of dead men on the common
exceedingly diverting.
When the Queen asked him the same morning, "And what will you sing, my
Osmund? Shall we begin the practise of our new profession with the
Sestina of Spring?"--old Osmund Heleigh grunted out: "I have forgotten
that rubbish long ago. _Omnis amans, amens_, saith the satirist of Rome
town, and with reason."
Followed silence.
One sees them thus trudging the brown, naked plains under a sky of
steel. In a pageant the woman, full-veined and comely, her russet gown
girded up like a harvester's might not inaptly have prefigured October;
and for less comfortable November you could nowhere have found a symbol
more precise than her lank companion, humorously peevish under his white
thatch of hair, and constantly fretted by the sword tapping at his
ankles.
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