“You, in whose breast love never stirred, deny the right to others whom God blessed with it,” he cried. “Envious of mortal happiness that dare exist outside your will or gift, you sunder and destroy. You, in whose hands was power to give joy, gave death. What you have sown you shall reap. Here, on this spot, I charge you with high treason, with treachery to the people over whom you have power as a trust, which trust you have made a scourge.”
With such words as these he had assailed her, and for the first time in her life she had been confounded. In safety he had left the place and taken his way to Italy, from which he had never returned, though she had sent for him in kindness. Since that day Elizabeth had never come hither; and by-and-by none of her court came save the Duke’s Daughter, and her fool, who both made it their resort. Here the fool came upon the Friday before Trinity Day, bringing with him Lemprière and Buonespoir, to whom he had much attached himself.
It was a day of light and warmth, and the place was like a basket of roses. Having seen the two serving-men dispose, in a convenient place, the refreshment which Lemprière’s appetite compelled, the fool took command of the occasion, and made the two sit upon a bank, while he prepared the repast.
It was a notable trio; the dwarfish fool, with his shaggy, black head, twisted mouth, and watchful, wandering eye, whose foolishness was but the flaunting cover of shrewd observation and trenchant vision. Going where he would, and saying what he listed, now in the Queen’s inner chamber, then in the midst of the council, unconsidered, and the butt of all, he paid for his bed and bounty by shooting shafts of foolery, which as often made his listeners shrink as caused their laughter. The Queen he called Delicio, and Leicester, Obligato—as one who piped to another’s dance. He had taken to Buonespoir at the first glance, and had frequented him, and Lemprière had presently been added to his favor. He had again and again been messenger between them, as also of late between Angèle and Michel, whose case he viewed from a stand-point of great cheerfulness, and treated as children playing on the sands—as, indeed, he did the Queen and all near to her. But Buonespoir, the pirate, was to him reality and the actual, and he called him Bono Publico. At first Lemprière, ever jealous of his importance, was inclined to treat him with elephantine condescension; but he could not long hold out against the boon archness of the jester, and had collapsed suddenly into as close a friendship as that between himself and Buonespoir.
A rollicking spirit was his own fullest stock-in-trade, and it won him like a brother.
So it was that here, in the very bosom of the forest, lured by the pipe the fool played, Lemprière burst forth into song, in one hand a bottle of canary, in the other a handful of comfits:
“Duke William was a Norman
(Spread the sail to the breeze!)
That did to England ride;