“Score, you knave!” Sir Richard rolled his eyes horribly. “Why, if I were not so gentle as a woman I would cut your throat. Score, you dog! Then have you no true sense of delicacy? Now I would ask you, you undershot ruffian with your bleared eyes and your soft chaps, are gentlemen when they sit honouring their mistresses in their own private tavern, are they to be crossed in their sentiments by the lowest order of man? Produce me two pots of sack this minute, or by this hand I will cut a gash in your neck.”
The unlucky wight had fled ere his guest had got half through this speech, which even in my ears was frightful, with such roars of fury was it given. When he returned with two more cups filled with wine, Sir Richard looked towards me and laid his finger to the side of his nose, as though to suggest that he yielded to no man in the handling of an innkeeper.
By the time he had drunk this excellent liquor there came a sensible change in the Englishman’s mien. The poetry of his mood, which had led him to speak of Fortune in terms to kindle the soul, yielded to one more fit for common affairs.
“Having lain in my castle,” said he, “and being well nourished with sack, to-morrow I start on my travels again. Upon pressure I would not mind taking a young squire.”
He favoured me with a look of a very searching character.
“I say,” he repeated solemnly, stretching out his enormous legs, “I am minded to take a young squire.”
“In what, sir, would his duties consist?”
“They would be mild, good Don. Assuming that this young squire—if he were a man of birth so much the better—paid me a hundred crowns a year, cleaned my horse of a morning and conversed with me pleasantly in the afternoon, I would undertake to teach him the world.”
“Why, sir,” said I, “surely it would be more fitting if your squire received one hundred crowns from you annually, which might stand as his emolument.”
“Emolument!” said the Englishman, stroking his beard. “One hundred crowns! These be very quaint ideas.”