But Miss Farquharson was none so disposed, it seemed, to the devout thanksgiving he advised.
“Is your grace often east of Temple Bar?” was her next rallying question.
“Are you?” quoth he, possibly for lack of better answer.
“So seldom that the coincidence transcends all that yourself or Mr. Dryden could have invented for one of your plays.”
“Life is marvellously coincident,” the Duke reflected, conceiving obtuseness to be the proper wear for the innocence he pretended. “Coincidence is the salt that rescues existence from insipidity.”
“So? And it was to rescue this that you rescued me; and so that you might have opportunity for rescuing me, no doubt yourself you contrived the danger.”
“I contrived the danger?” He was aghast. He did not at first understand. “I contrived the danger! Child!” It was a cry of mingled pain and indignation, and the indignation at least was not pretended. The contempt of her tone had cut him like a whip. It made him see that he was ridiculous in her eyes, and His Grace of Buckingham liked to be ridiculous as little as another, perhaps less than most. “How can you think it of me?”
“Think it of you?” She was laughing. “Lord! I knew it, sir, the moment I saw you take the stage at the proper cue—at what you would call the dramatic moment. Enter hero, very gallant. Oh, sir, I am none so easily cozened. I was a fool to allow myself to be deceived into fear by those other silly mummers, the first murderer and his myrmidons. It was poorly contrived. Yet it carried the groundlings in Paul’s Yard quite off their feet, and they’ll talk of your brave carriage and mighty mien for a whole day, at least. But you could scarce expect that it should move me as well; since I am in the play, as it were.”
It was said of him, and with truth, that he was the most impudent fellow in England, this lovely, accomplished, foolish son of a man whose face had made his fortune. Yet her raillery now put him out of countenance, and it was only with difficulty that he could master the fury it awoke in him. Yet master it he did, lest he should cut a still sorrier figure.
“I vow ... I vow you’re monstrously unjust,” he contrived at last to stammer. “You ever have thought the worst of me. It all comes of that cursed supper party and the behaviour of those drunken fools. Yet I have sworn to you that it was through no fault of mine, that my only satisfaction lay in your prompt departure from a scene with which I would not for all the world have offended you. Yet, though I have sworn it, I doubt if you believe me.”