The duke obeyed him in this particular, for certes he paused and thought upon it much. And while this he did with a deal of gravity, the wheel rose up before my eyes and I could feel my bones being broken on it. For was ever such audacity since the beginning of the world!
CHAPTER XI
OF A GRIEVOUS HAP
Though an old little man, wizened like a pea, and peevish in his manners, the duke was wonderfully impressive in his look. He stood up as straight as a tree, and kept peering at the Englishman with a grave eye, as if in meditation upon the drastic form of his punishment. Yet all of a sudden, and quite strangely and oddly, a sharp kind of crackling and barking came out of him; as near, I suppose, to a chuckle of mirth as one of such dignity could allow himself to emit.
“Ha! ha!” he cackled. “Ods myself! good fellow, this is a roguish jest of yours. But daring, don’t you think, but daring? Yet a roguish jest.”
So great was my concern for the exceeding delicacy of the issue that at first the words of the duke seemed of no account. My mind could not address itself to their meaning, but could only marvel that so great a man should repeat his phrases.
“And why, sirrah,” asked the duke, “am I to be so especially of good courage at this season? My situation hath taken no kinder turn of late, so far as I can tell. Why must I be so cheerful then?”
“Because,” was the reply of this audacious foreigner, “Richard Pendragon, knight of England, hero of an hundred fields, is here to make you an offer of his service. This two and a quarter yards by a yard and a half of brawn and valiancy hath left a monstrous quantity of the kingly blood that flows beneath his doublet on the battle meads of Europe. How many a pretty daisy hath fed its damask on the azure blood of a Pendragon! This gentle knight in question is also pretty well at fighting, duke, for you shall search the three continents to match this modest swaggerer at sword, broadsword, sword and buckler, sword and target, and above all, and more particularly in a private brawl, with that peerless weapon, the Italian rapier of Ferrara steel. And mark you also, duke, there is a genius in his handling of the sweet Toledo blade. As for the mind of this incomparable character, it shines as brightly as his steel, for you will notice that his forehead rises perpendicular in the true Pendragon manner, and therefore he is a child of stratagem.”
You will suppose that I watched the passaging of the duke and this singular Sir Richard Pendragon with the gravest solicitude. There never was such a whimsically assorted pair: the small old man, the duke, one of the first gentlemen of his age, so well appointed in his dress, so fortunate in his person, so sedate in his mien for all his querulousness, which in one of less consideration might have incurred another name; the Englishman monstrous in his growth, gross and irregular in form and countenance, his clothes patched and pieced into the quaintest contexture. But beyond all this they were so opposed in address; the duke ever majestical in spite of his peevishness, with a highly musical civility in his speech, every word of which was simple, clear, and urbane, the ideal for a gentleman; while this Englishman’s, when it was not braggadocio and ruffling, with many uncomely foreign accents in it, ran into conceits and picturesqueness of every sort, and betraying a reverence for no man save the one who had all his worship.
Still the world is an incongruous place, as Don Ygnacio hath it, and reconcilable to none of the laws that we know. Therefore this grandee fell in with the whims of the mad Englishman, and kept turning the tail of an eye upon him, which yet seemed to have too much dignity to laugh outright at a cause so trivial; whilst to me, a gentleman of his own race and nation, who knew the consideration that belonged to him, and was careful to render it, he was as cold and unresponsive as one of the walls of his castle.
Presently Sir Richard Pendragon so delighted the old gentleman with one or two wonderfully cunning tricks of fence and manual dexterity, such as spinning his sword in the air and catching the naked point in his palm, and flicking buttons off the jerkin of the dwarf, that the duke clapped his hands for pleasure with the glee of a child, although he was one of the gravest rulers in Spain, and cried out heartily,—