“Ah!” replied Northumberland, regarding his old foster-father with a suppliant expression.” Tell me, Henry, have you never known what it was to grieve for one whom you loved?”
“Ay, in sooth,” replied Henry, “unfortunately I have known it;
but we are not able to live, like you, in idleness, and have hardly time to be unhappy. When I lost my poor Alice, your foster-mother, what anguish did I not feel in the depths of my soul! Well, if I had stopped to think of her, I should have heard immediately my name resounding through all the turrets of the castle: ‘Henry! my lord—my lord goes hunting; hurry! make haste! my lord gives a ball this evening to all the ladies of the country.’ And away I had to go, to come, to run; otherwise my lord your father would fly into a passion. How would you find time to weep if somebody was always calling after you? Besides, I—poor Henry—if they had seen me sitting, like you, all the day in silence, with tears in my eyes and my arms folded, they would have laughed at me, and the pages would have called me a fool.”
“That is true; you are right,” replied Northumberland in an abstracted manner. “You say, then they gave balls here?”
“And superb ones, too!” replied Henry, who liked, above all things, to talk about the old times. “In those days you were not here; they educated you with Monseigneur the Cardinal, our good archbishop at present.”
On hearing these words Northumberland became violently agitated, and his old servant, perceiving his countenance change and his features contract, stopped suddenly in great alarm.
“You are ill, my lord?” he exclaimed.
“No, no,” replied Northumberland; “be calm. Leave me, Henry; I want to be alone. Go to your bed—I command you.”
Henry, forced to leave his master, as he went reproached himself
for having spoken of the fêtes the Countess of Northumberland had given in the castle; he imagined it was the recollection of his mother that had so affected Lord Percy.