"There goes another," said Montagu. "That is the fifth courier I have sent off this week. Upon my word, Ned, if it had not been for your coming with two lackeys and two blacksmiths I should soon have been without any train at all. But you seem not to love your two blacksmiths, my boy. What has set your face against them? Have they lamed your horse, or found you out in a love-affair with the landlord's daughter, cheated you of two livres Tournois, or eaten the only fish upon a jour maigre?"
"None of all those great offences, my lord," replied Edward. "They are good smiths; I have not been fortunate with mine host's daughters; their charges are compassionate to youths without experience; and no trout that I know of has slipped off my own hook. But one of them I am certain I saw in the court of the chateau at Nantes; and I like not the countenance of either."
"Pshaw!" said Lord Montagu. "Do you give way to the superstition of physiognomy? Why, cut me across the nose with the back-handed blow of a spadroon, and you make a marvellous ill-favored fellow out of a gay gentleman who has not been thought unpersonable. Nonsense, nonsense, Edward! The best nuts have the roughest shells. The diamond itself is but like a pebble-stone till it is cut and polished. And where in the fiend's name should either of these two poor devils get ground down or burnished?"
"Well, my lord, I say not a word against them," answered Edward. "They told a true tale, it seems, as to their journey. To me they were wonderfully kind when I was hurt. Neither do I mind mere ugliness: that is God's doing; and it may be as a warning to others, or it may not: I cannot tell. But there is a sort of look—an expression—which men beget in themselves by their habitual acts or thoughts, which is a great truth-teller, I think. Now, these men look cunning. Each of them squints, too, more or less. One cannot see whom or what they are looking at."
Lord Montagu broke into a gay laugh. "As if every man," he said, "should be condemned who does not square his gaze by line and rule. Out upon it, Ned! If ever you fall in love, you will need an astrolabe to measure the exact angles of your beauty's lustrous orbs. Why, some of the best men in England squint like a green parrot. More lucky they, if they can see both sides of every thing at once. But I will show you a man to-night who shall come up to even your ideas of perfection. He ought to be here about this hour. Oh, he is a marvel of beauty and grace!"
Thus saying, he knocked hard with the hilt of his dagger upon the table, and one of the servants of the inn appeared. "Show in the illustrious Signor Morini whenever he comes," said Lord Montagu: "we must not keep so great and amiable a personage waiting."
"He is here now, monseigneur," answered the servant.
"Well, conduct him hither," answered the English gentleman, "and tell my servant to give you a bottle of that delicious Italian wine which I sent on from Turin. Three Venice glasses, too, must be brought, and a small plate of sugared peaches."
The waiter retired, and, a moment or two after, one of the most singular figures entered the room that Edward had ever seen. It was that of a man, not old, but past the middle age, dressed in the height of the fashion, beribboned and belaced, with a long rapier by his side, which would have touched the ground had it even been borne upon the thigh of a tall man. But Signor Morini was not a tall man: on the contrary, he was certainly not more than four feet two or three inches in height, with a back bent into the shape of the bow of a double-bass. He was thin, too, and his face—with the exception of the eyes, which were large and lustrous—was of that peculiar ugliness which is frequently seen in the deformed, the features all packed together and looking as if they had been pinched to get them into a smaller space.
No consciousness of ugliness appeared in his demeanor, however,—no timidity, no shyness. He entered with the strut of a bantam-cock, while his rich but short cloak, borne out by the round of his back so as to hang far off from his person, afforded no bad image of the tail of the bird. He saluted Lord Montagu with ceremonious respect, and stared at Edward Langdale with an unwinking gaze which was almost insolent, smoothing down the little sharp tuft of sandy-colored hair which adorned his chin in the form of what was then called a royal, with an air of ineffable puppyism.