"Speak for thyself," said the Duke – "In a word, art thou herald or not?"
"Only for this occasion!" acknowledged the detected official.
"Now, by St George!" said the Duke, eyeing Louis askance, "we know no king – no gentleman – save one, who would have so prostituted the noble science on which royalty and gentry rest! save that King, who sent to Edward of England a serving man disguised as a herald[57]."
"Such a stratagem," said Louis, laughing or affecting to laugh, "could only be justified at a Court where no heralds were at the time, and when the emergency was urgent. But, though it might have passed on the blunt and thick-witted islander, no one with brains a whit better than those of a wild boar would have thought of passing such a trick upon the accomplished Court of Burgundy."
"Send him who will," said the Duke, fiercely, "he shall return on their hands in poor case. – Here! – drag him to the market-place! – slash him with bridle-reins and dog-whips until the tabard hang about him in tatters! – Upon the Rouge Sanglier! – ça, ça! – Haloo, haloo!"
Four or five large hounds, such as are painted in the hunting-pieces upon which Rubens and Schneiders laboured in conjunction, caught the well-known notes with which the Duke concluded, and began to yell and bay as if the boar were just roused from his lair.
"By the rood!" said King Louis, observant to catch the vein of his dangerous cousin, "since the ass has put on the boar's hide, I would set the dogs on him to bait him out of it!"
"Right! right!" exclaimed Duke Charles, the fancy exactly chiming in with his humour at the moment – "it shall be done! – uncouple the hounds! – Hyke a Talbot! hyke a Beaumont! – We will course him from the door of the Castle to the east gate."
"I trust your Grace will treat me as a beast of chase," said the fellow, putting the best face he could upon the matter, "and allow me fair law?"
"Thou art but vermin," said the Duke, "and entitled to no law, by the letter of the book of hunting; nevertheless thou shalt have sixty yards in advance, were it but for the sake of thy unparalleled impudence. – Away, away, sirs! – we will see this sport." – And the council breaking up tumultuously, all hurried, none faster than the two Princes, to enjoy the humane pastime which King Louis had suggested.