“Look ye, sir page,” exclaimed Robin, as he showed his wan and wasted features through the opened door, “an’ ye stir not yourself right quickly, your master will be dead; and, fair damsel, the same may be said of your mistress, the Ladye Annabel.”
Rosalind shrieked with affright at the hollow voice and shrunken figure of the bold yeoman, and Guiseppo sprang with one bound from the couch half way across the apartment.
“Fear not, Rosalind,” he cried, drawing his dagger. “If it be a devil, I defy it in God’s name; and if it be a man why I will try what this good steel can do.”
“Tut, tut,” exclaimed Robin, “put up your cheese-knife boy. Come hither. Know you me not?”
“No more than I do the devil.”
“Mayhap then, fair Sir, you have heard of a certain youth, who on the night before he departed from the castle—the castle where his infancy had been passed—to be a page at court, took occasion to pour a sleeping potion into the wine of a certain yeoman; and then shaving one side of the yeoman’s face; concluded by tying a dead cat around his neck, thus making an honest soldier a mock of laughter for all the castle. Did’st ever hear of such a page? Eh? Guiseppo?”
“Why the Virgin bless me,” exclaimed Rosalind, “It’s Rough Robin!”
“Eh?” cried the page with a stare of astonishment.
“If you value your life, Guiseppo,” continued the yeoman; “Hie away, and bring me a dozen flasks of wine or so, and a round of beef. Speak not a word, but haste away. I am nigh starved to death, and the devil may tempt me to cut a slice from the trim figure of a certain page; away!”
As Guiseppo left the apartment, Rosalind asked the bold yeoman where he had been for the last three days, and wherefore he looked so much like a ghost risen from the dead merely for its own amusement.