Although the King of Castile seemed all broken by the disaster that had overtaken his arms, upon hearing the voice of Sir Richard Pendragon he looked up and received his mockery with an unflinching glance.
“Foreign robber,” he said simply, “you have borne yourself as a true captain. I make you my service. And as the life of myself and the lives of my honourable friends are forfeit to your cunning I hope that they may profit you.”
These words, spoken only as a King could deliver them, brought a sort of whimsical pity to the mocking face of the English barbarian.
“Dost thou remember, John Castilian,” he said, with that softness which the Count of Nullepart and I knew was wont to accompany his most ferocious designs, “that summer’s morning a twelvemonth since, when thou flungest one of a gentle and kindly nurture, a good mother’s son, into the deepest dungeon of your Spanish palace, and chained him by the leg, with foul straws for his pillow, and with lean rats and large beetles for his only familiar company?”
“Yes, foreign robber, I remember it to my sorrow,” said the King of Castile coldly. “And had I broke you upon the wheel and thrown your corpse to the dogs a day before my reckoning, I should not now be mourning for not having done so.”
“John Castilian,” said the Englishman, “you speak in the wise of an unfortunate famous ancestor of mine own. He was called Sir Procrastinatus, owing to the unlucky habit of his mind that he continually put off till the morrow that which he should have done the day; a habit that in the process of nature grew upon the unlucky wight in such a measure that upon the last day of his life he failed to die until after his friends had buried him. Can it be, John Castilian, that yourself is a victim to a like preoccupancy? For I understand from madam’s gracious ladyship that your trench hath been dug the last three days in the kitchen midden.”
“No, no, Sirrah Red Dragon, that is not so,” said madam ruthlessly. “The spawn of darkness is entitled to no burial. We will hang it upon a fork on the outer barbican to poison the crows and the vultures and the unclean fowls of the air.”
“A thousand pardons, ladyship,” said Sir Richard Pendragon. “It appears I am the victim of a misinformation.”
“Do you avise us, Sirrah Red Dragon, so that the bloody-minded prince shall begin his dying immediately. But we would have him take not less than one-and-twenty days to the consummation of it, for we would have him drain the dregs of the cup he hath prepared for others.”
It was here, however, that Sir Richard Pendragon began to stroke his beard. Mad he was, and whimsical, yet beyond all things he had a mind for affairs. Therefore he was fain to speak aside with the Count of Nullepart and myself.