‘A fair good morrow to you, Master Merrycourt! You come right early to look after your ode?’
‘Sir,’ said Mericour, gravely saluting him, ‘I come to make you my confession. I find that I did not deal truly with you last night, but it was all unwittingly.’
‘How?’ exclaimed Sir Marmaduke, recollecting Lucy’s tears and looking much startled. ‘You have not—-’ and there he broke off, seeing Mericour eager to speak.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I was bred as one set apart from love. I had never learnt to think it possible to me,—I thought so even when I replied to you last evening; but, sir, the words you then spoke, the question you asked me set my heart burning, and my senses whirling—-’ And between agitation and confusion he stammered and clasped his hands passionately, trying to continue what he was saying, but muttering nothing intelligible.
Sir Marmaduke filled up the interval with a long whistle of perplexity; but, too kind not to pity the youth’s distress, he laid his hand on his shoulder, saying, ‘You found out you were but a hot-blooded youth after all, but an honest one. For, as I well trust, my lass knows nought of this.’
‘How should she know, sir, what I knew not myself?’
‘Ha! ha!’ chuckled Sir Duke to himself, ‘so ‘twas all Dame Nan’s doing that the flame has been lighted! Ho! ho! But what is to come next is the question?’ and he eyed the French youth from head to foot with the same considering look with which he was wont to study a bullock.
‘Sir, sir,’ cried Mericour, absolutely flinging himself on his knee before him with national vehemence, ‘do give me hope! Oh! I will bless you, I will—-’
‘Get up, man,’ said the knight, hastily; ‘no fooling of this sort. The milkmaids will be coming. Hope—why, what sort of hope can be given you in the matter?’ he continued; ‘you are a very good lad, and I like you well enough, but you are not the sort of stuff one gives one’s daughter to. Ay, ay, I know you are a great man in your own country, but what are you here?’
‘A miserable fugitive and beggar, I know that,’ said Mericour, vehemently, ‘but let me have but hope, and there is nothing I will not be!’