“No,” returned honest Don Pedro decidedly, “the constable is a man of worth, and would pry into no one’s affairs systematically. But his chief defect is a tendency to say or do whatever comes into his head, and that he falls into difficulty less often is perhaps owing more to luck than consideration on his part. Don’t you remember hearing the answer he made his Holiness, while a mere lad?”
“No,” absently.
“Why,” persisted the knight, regardless of the doubtful attention of his auditor, and moved by a good-natured wish to lead away from the painful topic, “the brusquerie of the whole affair made it the talk at court; where were you that you failed to hear it? The constable was sent to congratulate his Holiness on his accession to St. Peter’s chair, but the Pope taking umbrage at the youth of the ambassador, exclaimed aloud—‘What! has the King of Spain no men in his dominions, that he sends us a face without a beard?’ Whereupon the fiery boy, stretching himself up and stroking with forefinger and thumb his upper lip, where a mustache should have been but was not, said with a frown—‘Sir, had my royal master known your Holiness measured wisdom by a beard, he would doubtless have sent a he-goat to honor you!’”
After a pause Inique said—(the capernian episode was evidently lost upon him)—
“I have no need of any mortal’s sympathy, Padilh, and the man that pities me openly must answer to my sword for it. You have done neither to my knowledge, yet you were not far off when I struck the boy,” (he dropped his voice here, as a weight on the conscience will make people do.) “If you choose to listen, the secret motives of a man who for fifteen years has had no thought for his second child, until moved to avenge her, because the first, an idiot, intervened, may startle your ears, Pedro Padilh.”
“The recital may ease your breast,” said our knight in some surprise.
“There is no likelihood of what you say,” answered Don Augustino, a shade of scorn crossing his moody face, “and I wish it otherwise. Why I choose you, a companion in arms, for confessor, you will learn in time; perhaps your long friendship and yesterday’s prompt action have their influence. These things you witnessed or know; the mad blows, their result, the measures I have taken to be constantly within reach of his voice? Why? have you, has any one, hesitated to give some cloak, some color, to so singular a course?”
Each of these interrogatories, rapidly put, Sir Pedro answered in turn by a slight token of assent; he was about to reply more fully to the last, when the other stopped him with a gesture.
“Never mind. I know what is said. That I hide away the living reminder of my crime from the world; that I am remorseful, or doing penance, or else crazed. Let them prate. Sir Pedro, by all the saints, the boy I struck is not my son!”
“Poor fellow!” thought the knight, compassionately; “his last plea is the right one.”