“What is the name of him who sets me free?”
“Fitz-Williams is my name; my first name, Marmaduke.”
Our hero’s followers, still hot, exhausted, and bruised, but not particularly blood-stained, now rose and stole away, and presently another great uproar was heard from them. They had seized the impostor and were carrying it, or him, roughly along.
“Here is the great chief villain and arch-plotter of them all! Here is Bélître Scélérat himself!” they roared.
“Bélître Scélérat? How comes he here? I understood that he was far away,” our hero said, much puzzled.
They paused in doubt and consternation. Then a flash of reason penetrated to their darkened intellect, and dimly conscious that some one had plotted too much, or not enough, they started into action and pressed tumultuously on with their captive.
“Oh, for a sword, that I might pierce the monster’s heart!” our hero sighed, but sighed in vain.
At that instant, Steve, now the priest, passed pompously through the room, and catching our hero’s last words, replied: “No, no! Soil not thy hands with such a perjured wretch, nor soil thy sword. These soldiers here should pierce his ears, not thee,” wilfully mistaking the word heart for ears—or perhaps he did not understand English so well as his pupil. “Brave men, go forth and hang this captured knave from some great height, and leave him there to crumble into dust.”
Our hero’s blood-thirsty followers lugged Bélître Scélérat out of the room and up the stairs with a haste that proved how well and strongly he was made, and remorselessly prepared to consign him to his ignominious fate.
Then our hero and heroine again broke out into their poetry, the latter saying, “And now, my freedom is achieved. Ah me! I almost now regret that we should leave these shores, this land of blessèd liberty, and travel back alone to our loved France! Ah, in my hour of triumph am I sad? Yes, woe is me, I am!—Oh, Marmaduke, there is no need of this! The priest is here, the bridegroom and the bride! Oh Marmaduke, there is no cause why I should go alone. Ah, thou wilt soon be mine, and I shall soon be thine! Thy husband,—wife, I mean. Oh, Marmaduke, dear Marmaduke!”