Now, save a very harmless-looking bear, neither Ann nor I have seen these things, so we know not why they should be held so terrible.”
During this recital the knight’s red face became wider and wider with surprise.
“Marry, Heaven forfend!” he cried, “what goings on there be behind my back! Anna, can you, too, spout verse as glibly?”
“Indeed, father, Nellie and I know whole plays by heart. Yet we would not indulge in this innocent pastime if we thought it angered you.”
Sir Thomas was as wax in his daughter’s hands. Secretly, he feared her greater intellectual powers. He believed that girls’ brains were better suited to housewifely cares than to the study of poetry, yet some twinge of doubt bade him keep the opinion pent in his own portly breast.
“Nay, then, if it pleases you and wiles away dull hours, I will not hinder you. But our sweet Nellie should not betray her gifts in public. Folk hereabouts have rabbits’ ears and magpies’ tongues. I fear me there are neither lions nor horned pigs to hand. They are costly toys, and ’tis whispered that his gracious Majesty obtaineth less credit abroad than among his liege subjects. Further, my bonny girls, I have asked a certain youth, George Beeston by name, to sup with us to-night, and it behooves you—What, Anna, has it come to that? You shrug at the mere mention of him! And he a proper youth—not one of these graceless rascals who yelp at Carr’s heels!”
Again was Sir Thomas becoming choleric and red-faced, and the girls’ excursion promised to end in speedy dudgeon had not a messenger, wearing the Palace livery, approached and doffed his cap, bowing low as he halted.
“Happily one said your worship was in the gardens,” he said. “I am bidden to tell you that the King awaits your honor in his closet. The matter is of utmost urgency.”
Now, this announcement had the precise effect on its recipient calculated by those who sent it. Sir Thomas, inflated with importance, was rendered almost incoherent. Never before had he received such a royal message. All considerations must bow to it. He bustled the girls into a litter in which they could be carried to his brother’s house in the city without soiling their shoes or being exposed to the gaze of the throng in the Fleet or Ludgate. He himself hurried off to Whitehall, there to be kept in a fume of impatience for a good hour or more, while the King disputed with a Scottish divine as to the exact pronunciation of the Latin tongue. Admitted at last to the presence, he found that the urgency of his summons touched no greater matter than the cleansing of the Fleet ditch, a fruitful source of dispute between the monarch and the city in those days.