Chapter 17 - Page 2

the Constable's spearmen guarded the gate of the
nunnery, admitting within the hallowed precinct the few only who
were to be present at the solemnity, with their principal
attendants, and while the former were ushered with all due
ceremony into the apartments dressed out for the occasion, the
attendants, although detained in the outer court, were liberally
supplied with refreshments of the most substantial kind; and had
the amusement, so dear to the menial classes, of examining and
criticising their masters and mistresses, as they passed into the
interior apartments prepared for their reception.

Amongst the domestics who were thus employed were old Raoul the
huntsman and his jolly dame--he gay and glorious, in a new cassock
of green velvet, she gracious and comely, in a kirtle of yellow
silk, fringed with minivair, and that at no mean cost, were
equally busied in beholding the gay spectacle. The most inveterate
wars have their occasional terms of truce; the most bitter and
boisterous weather its hours of warmth and of calmness; and so was
it with the matrimonial horizon of this amiable pair, which,
usually cloudy, had now for brief space cleared up. The splendour
of their new apparel, the mirth of the spectacle around them, with
the aid, perhaps, of a bowl of muscadine quaffed by Raoul, and a
cup of hippocras sipped by his wife, had rendered them rather more
agreeable in each other's eyes than was their wont; good cheer
being in such cases, as oil is to a rusty lock, the means of
making those valves move smoothly and glibly, which otherwise work
not together at all, or by shrieks and groans express their
reluctance to move in union. The pair had stuck themselves into a
kind of niche, three or four steps from the ground, which
contained a small stone bench, whence their curious eyes could
scrutinize with advantage every guest who entered the court.

Thus placed, and in their present state of temporary concord,
Raoul with his frosty visage formed no unapt representative of
January, the bitter father of the year; and though Gillian was
past the delicate bloom of youthful May, yet the melting fire of a
full black eye, and the genial glow of a ripe and crimson cheek,
made her a lively type of the fruitful and jovial August. Dame
Gillian used to make it her boast, that she could please every
body with her gossip, when she chose it, from Raymond Berenger
down to Robin the horse-boy; and like a good housewife, who, to
keep her hand in use, will sometimes even condescend to dress a
dish for her husband's sole eating, she now thought proper to
practise her powers of pleasing on old Raoul, fairly conquering,
in her successful sallies of mirth and satire, not only his
cynical temperament towards