If it should be as you say, madam, interrupted Glanville, what reason have you to fear? Do you not think I am able to defend you?
Ah! without doubt, you are able to defend me, answered she; and though, if you offer to resist the violence he comes to use against me, he will, haply, call two or three dozen armed men to his assistance, who are, I suppose, concealed hereabouts, yet I am not apprehensive, that you will be worsted by them. But as it happened to the brave Juba, and Cleomedon, while they were fighting with some hundred men, who wanted to carry away their princesses before their faces; and were giving death at every blow, in order to preserve them; the commander of these ravishers, seeing the two princesses sitting, as I was, under a tree, ordered them to be seized by two of his men, and carried away, while the two princes were losing best part of their blood in their defence: therefore, to prevent such an accident happening, while you are fighting for my rescue, I think it will be the safest way for me to get on horseback, that I may be in a condition to escape; and that you may not employ your valour to no purpose.
Saying this, having, with Mr. Glanville's assistance, loosed her horse from the tree, he helped her to mount, and then remounted his own.
Your antagonist, said Arabella, is on foot; and therefore, though I prize your life extremely, yet I cannot dispense with myself from telling you, that it is against the laws of knighthood to take any advantage of that kind over your enemy; nor will I permit your concern for my safety to make you forget what you owe to your own reputation.
Mr. Glanville, fretting excessively at her folly, begged her not to make herself uneasy about things that were never likely to happen.
The gentleman yonder, added he, seems to have no designs to make any attempt against you: if he should, I shall know how to deal with him; but, since he neither offers to assault me nor affront you, I think we ought not to give him any reason to imagine we suspect him, by gazing on him thus; and letting him understand by your manner, that he is the subject of our conversation. If you please, madam, we will endeavour to join our company.
Arabella, while he was speaking, kept her eyes fixed upon his face, with looks which expressed her thoughts were labouring upon some very important point; and, after a pause of some moments, Is it possible, said she, with a tone of extreme surprise, that I should be so mistaken in you? Do you really want courage enough to defend me against that ravisher?
Oh heavens! madam, interrupted Glanville, try not my temper thus: courage enough to defend you! 'Sdeath! you will make me mad! Who, in the name of wonder, is going to molest you?
He whom you see there, replied Arabella, pointing to him with her finger: for know, cold and insensible as thou art to the danger which threatens me, yonder knight is thy rival, and a rival, haply, who deserves my esteem better than thou dost; since, if he has courage enough to get me by violence into his power, that same courage would make him defend me against any injuries I might be offered from another. And since nothing is so contemptible in the eyes of a woman, as a lover who wants spirit to die in her defence; know, I can sooner pardon him, whom thou would cowardly fly from, for the violence which he meditates against me, than thyself for the pusillanimity thou hast betrayed in my sight.
With these words she galloped away from her astonished lover; who, not daring to follow her, for fear of increasing her suspicions of his cowardice, flung himself off his horse in a violent rage; and, forgetting that the stranger was observing, and now within hearing, he fell a-cursing and exclaiming against the books that had turned his cousin's brain; and railing at his own ill fate that condemned him to the punishment of loving her. Mr. Hervey (for it really was he, whom an affair of consequence had brought again into the country) hearing some of Mr. Glanville's last words, and observing the gestures he used, concluded he had been treated like himself by Arabella, whom he knew again at a distance: therefore coming up to Mr. Glanville, laughing—