rendered it every care; then still
talking to himself, and calling upon all saints and angels, he ran to
the Geoffroy whom the Count had demanded.

The youth who bore this name dwelt in a lonely ivy-grown turret close
to the moat, and as the dawn had hardly broken, he still lay in the
sound sleep beseeming his health and early years. He was only twenty, a
nephew of the Count's, the offspring of the unfortunate love between
the high-born Countess Beatrix and a wandering minstrel, who knowing
the proud spirit and the customs of the house of Malaspina, had no way
of winning, except persuading her to elope with him. Count Rambaut her
father, when he discovered the disgrace that had befallen his family,
took no one into his counsels but his son Hugo; and father and brother
rode forth by night to follow the track of the offenders. In seven days
time they returned, walking their horses, a closed litter between them,
in which the young Countess lay with snow-white face, more like a waxen
form than a living woman. Her brother had killed her lover, her father
had cursed the dying man. From that time she never spoke another word
to either of them, but lived a widow in a detached turret, where she
brought her boy into the world. She made no complaint, but resisted all
attempts at reconciliation, though on their father's death, her
brother, who had always been deeply attached to her, endeavoured by all
the means in his power, to conciliate her. He himself bore her son to
the font, and when he married, he imposed upon his wife the duty of
daily visiting the lonely one, who never of her own accord left her
self-elected prison. Both ladies had now departed this life; the young
man Geoffroy--he was named after his father--was brought up almost as
the Count's own son, and truly the proudest might have gloried in such
a son. He was a beautiful youth, broad-shouldered, dark-complexioned,
with great earnest eyes, and a sweet sad mouth almost feminine in form,
which seldom smiled. For although he had in abundance all that a young
heart could desire, gay garments, finely-tempered weapons, horse,
falcon, and leisure enough for every knightly practice, and though,
too, from his earliest infancy no one had ever spoken an unkind word to
him, or reproached him with his birth, yet for all that a shadow hung
over him. Unless he were wandering in the forest--which bordered on the
moat, and was reached by a narrow bridge in ten paces or so--he would