“Can it be,” I cried excitedly, “that Heaven has called me to be this same wise and cunning hand? This looks uncommonly like a providence.”
“Oh, my dear Don Miguel!” exclaimed the Englishman, breaking forth into another of his mighty roars of laughter, “I pray you to take pity on these fluxions of mine. If one of these days you do not lay me stark dead of an apoplexy, there is not an ounce of king’s blood in my nature.”
“I am grievously surprised if my stars have not called me to some high destiny. Don Ygnacio, my father, declared as he lay dying that it was so.”
“I do fear me then, good Don, this high destiny of yours will declare itself late in the day. You are as raw as a green pear. You must be set on the chimney-piece to ripen before you can be considered as a table fruit.”
“You wrong me, good Sir Richard. I am determined to prove myself as soon as another. I may have no mind for stratagem, but I shall not be afeared to draw my sword for this worthy but unfortunate grandee.”
“O Jesu!” said the English giant, laughing into his hands softly, “I can feel this accursed fluxion mounting into my mind. I can see perfectly well, Master Miguel, if we go our ways together about this peninsula of yours, I shall be compelled to travel with a physician. Not afeared to draw your sword! Why, good Don, your sword is a lath, and he who draws it has not a hair to his chin, and cannot bleat so loud as a Barbary sheep.”
“Deride me if you will, Sir Richard, but I will draw my sword for this grandee. Fortune has decreed it. And tell me, in addition to these misfortunes of his, hath he a daughter of a most surpassing fairness?”
“You can certainly count on his having a daughter. Dukes all the world over are notorious getters of wenches.”
I asked the Englishman the reason of this phenomenon.
“It is a singular quality of their blood,” he declared. “It loses its ambition and fills the world with farthingales.”