The handsome creature balanced against the table took the tankard from her lips and laughed.
“Having heard thy daughter rides to field in breeches, and is an unseemly-behaving wench,” she cried, “his lordship sends his chaplain to deliver a discourse thereon—not choosing to come himself. Is not that thy errand, reverend sir?”
The chaplain, poor man, turned pale, having caught, as she spoke, a glimpse of Sir Jeoffry’s reddening visage.
“Madam,” he faltered, bowing—“Madam, I ask pardon of you most humbly! If it were your pleasure to deign to—to—allow me—”
She set the tankard on the table with a rollicking smack, and thrust her hands in her breeches-pockets, swaying with laughter; and, indeed, ’twas ringing music, her rich great laugh, which, when she grew of riper years, was much lauded and written verses on by her numerous swains.
“If ’twere my pleasure to go away and allow you to speak, free from the awkwardness of a young lady’s presence,” she said. “But ’tis not, as it happens, and if I stay here, I shall be a protection.”
In truth, he required one. Sir Jeoffry broke into a torrent of blasphemy. He damned both kinsman and chaplain, and raged at the impudence of both in daring to approach him, swearing to horsewhip my lord if they ever met, and to have the chaplain kicked out of the house, and beyond the park gates themselves. But Mistress Clorinda chose to make it her whim to take it in better humour, and as a joke with a fine point to it. She laughed at her father’s storming, and while the chaplain quailed before it with pallid countenance and fairly hang-dog look, she seemed to find it but a cause for outbursts of merriment.
“Hold thy tongue a bit, Dad,” she cried, when he had reached his loudest, “and let his reverence tell us what his message is. We have not even heard it.”
“Want not to hear it!” shouted Sir Jeoffry. “Dost think I’ll stand his impudence? Not I!”
“What was your message?” demanded the young lady of the chaplain. “You cannot return without delivering it. Tell it to me. I choose it shall be told.”