Sir John, after a moment’s stupefaction, started to his feet. He pressed his hand over his burning eyeballs. A convulsive shudder passed through his entire system; and one brief sob escaped him. It was over. Sir John relieved his oppressed lungs of a long-pent-up breath; wiped his smoking forehead, and looked composedly at Justice Shallow. Justice Shallow looked at Sir John Falstaff. Not composedly though, by any means.
“Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pounds,” said Sir John Falstaff. It was a fact at all events, and, therefore, worthy of mention.
“Ay, marry Sir John,” the justice faltered, “which I beseech you to let me have home with me.”
“That can hardly be, Master Shallow,” was the reply. “Do not you grieve at this; I shall be sent for in private to him! Look you, he must seem thus to the world. Fear not your advancement; I will be the man yet that shall make you great.”
“I cannot well perceive how, unless”—imminent pecuniary danger had lent the worthy justice unwonted smartness,—“you should give me your doublet and stuff me out with straw. I beseech you, good Sir John, let me have five hundred of my thousand.”
“Sir, I will be as good as my word: this that you heard was but a colour.”
“A colour, I fear, that you will die in, Sir John.”
“Fear no colours; go with me to dinner. Come, Lieutenant Pistol *; come, Bardolph; I shall be sent for to-night.”
* A spontaneous promotion of the worthy Ancient, as it would
seem, upon the brevet principle.
Sir John Falstaff had not to wait until nightfall ere he was sent for. Scarcely had he spoken when the Lord Chief Justice Gascoigne, accompanied by Prince John of Lancaster (whose grudge against our knight, for the Gualtree affair, was, if possible, stronger than that of the justice himself), reappeared on the scene with a posse of constables. These men had even quitted a royal dinner table for the gratification of private vengeance. Could the force of malignity go further?