“Sneer,” says he, with anger darting from his eyes, “but my determination’s taken. A week ago I swore that a single hair of my Lady Barbara should not suffer for her mercy. And when I make an oath I keep one, whatever others do.”
He rose. A glance assured me that he was in an ugly mood of heroism. He held his hand out for the key. I glanced into his face, saw all the muscles in it tight, and his mouth locked in a silence that seemed to render the gravest word ridiculous.
“Oh come,” I cries, “enough of claptrap! Have I done all this to be thwarted by a child? Do you not see if you persevere in this proud folly that the Captain triumphs? And I, a victorious rebel, should find it easier far to endure the Tower than the humiliations of defeat.”
“Alas! these palpable devices,” he sighed. “But it’s the key I want, not trickeries.”
Again I had a taste of my impotence with him. Hitherto my lightest whim was a law for the greatest or the meanest; this moment, though, a very beggar defied my imperious command. Nor would he budge from his perverseness. Pretty soon his intolerable behaviour made my anger rise. It was increased when I remembered his utter dependence and his low condition. And yet I took a kind of admiration of him too. He was so bold, so contradictory, so brazenly impertinent withal, that I began to feel there was more in his sex than I had suspected.
“Child,” says I, “I am dreadfully enraged with you and with your ways, but,” I added, musingly, while I read the decision in his face, “do you know I have half a mind to love you for them.”
“Pray don’t,” says he, uneasily.
“I have, though. I think you’ll make the prettiest man that ever was. You are not a bit according to the pattern. You appear to even have a will, a very unusual circumstance in anything that’s masculine. Child,” I says, “do you know that I have half a mind to make a husband of you? I like you, my lad. You are headstrong, but I think you are a charming boy.”
I patted him upon the shoulder with an air of high approval. He knit his teeth, and cried in a crimson heat:
“Confound you, woman, I am not your pussy-cat, nor your King Charles’ spaniel.”