“May I ask you, madam,” said the Count of Nullepart, with a smile lurking at the corners of his mouth, “will it alleviate your father’s peril, which I do not doubt is great, that you run away from your convent on the horse of the Mother Superior?”
“Why, sir, indeed it will,” said she. “All his days, my father, his lordship’s grace, hath been but as a child in statecraft; and being, as he conceives, insufficiently able to mismanage his own policy, he must needs in matters of great pith and delicacy call in the aid of an old fat man to embroil them further.”
“And so, madam,” said the Count of Nullepart gravely, “you must needs run away on the Mother Superior’s horse—the only horse, by the way, I believe she possesses, which itself is slightly lame of the spavin—in order that you may bear your infinite wisdom and your ripe experience to the councils of your august male parent, his lordship’s grace, the Duke of Where-is-it?”
“For what reason, sir, do you adjudge my father to be of that degree?”
“I adjudge it, madam, from the demeanour of his daughter. I called you highness at a venture, and you corrected me. But unless these five wits of mine, whose sharpness is forever disgracing me, have fallen into disuse, there is not less than ducal blood in your veins, although ‘highness’ be not the nature of your title.”
“Your wits are shrewd, sir,” said the lady, “and your mind is subtle. You have unmasked me, sir, you have torn away my cloak; and although I do not thank you for it, after all, I don’t grieve much. My father is the Duke of Montesina, dwelling at five leagues’ distance, and he is in unhappy case.”
You may conceive, reader, with what concern I heard these words. Fortune had indeed reserved for me a precious trick. I was to journey back to the house of my rejection in the suite of one upon whose service I had staked every hope. Overwhelmed by as great a conflict of feeling as I had ever known, I could not forbear from disclosing my ill adventure of the previous day. I am by no means clear that such an act was becoming in a gentleman thus to unbosom himself to this daughter of a high grandee, who on her account had used him without civility. But as I laid bare my misfortunes to this imperious lady I seemed to fail altogether in mastery of myself, being unable to command my unlucky tongue.
However, the consequences of such an indiscretion were in nowise unhappy. This noble lady listened to my words; and when I had spoken to her of my dismissal, merely because I had hoped to serve her, such a flame darkened her cheek, her eyes flashed so finely, her lips grew so tremulous with anger, and she gave me her hand with a gesture so pitiful and yet so superb that I found myself to be trembling with joy.
“Oh, that old man!” she cried. “Oh, that old man, he will be my death! But I see the hand of that fat man in this. If that fat man walk not warily, I will have him thrown into a dungeon with his bulk and everything else.”
Such a resolute anger as possessed her at this recital of my tale I never saw. I could not help recalling that of her father at the moment he supplied the present occasion for it. And it so chanced that the innkeeper, who was still standing by and paying his service to her, was himself a fat man with a goodly paunch. Therefore she caused him to supply the room of the offender, whoever he might be, and he was doubtless Don Luiz, the Duke’s gentleman-usher; for in a true manner of femininity, which filled the Count of Nullepart with joy, she addressed the whole of her dislike to grossness to this unfortunate fellow.