“Why then dost thou speak in a sense to chafe my blood? Why dost thou name the supposition of thy worthless self having more hands than nature gave thee, while I, a knight and gentleman, am mutilated like a cripple?”
“Sir John,” replied the chirurgeon, “I am no divine, nor a mainly obstinate believer in some things which divines tell us. Yet I may remind you that you have been kindly dealt with; for if the blow which has done you this injury had lighted on your neck, as it was aimed, it would have swept your head from your shoulders, instead of amputating a less considerable member.”
“I wish it had, Dwining—I wish it had lighted as it was addressed. I should not then have seen a policy which had spun a web so fine as mine burst through by the brute force of a drunken churl. I should not have been reserved to see horses which I must not mount, lists which I must no longer enter, splendours which I cannot hope to share, or battles which I must not take part in. I should not, with a man’s passions for power and for strife, be set to keep place among the women, despised by them, too, as a miserable, impotent cripple, unable to aim at obtaining the favour of the sex.”
“Supposing all this to be so, I will yet pray of your knighthood to remark,” replied Dwining, still busying himself with arranging the dressings of the wounds, “that your eyes, which you must have lost with your head, may, being spared to you, present as rich a prospect of pleasure as either ambition, or victory in the list or in the field, or the love of woman itself, could have proposed to you.”
“My sense is too dull to catch thy meaning, leech,” replied Ramorny. “What is this precious spectacle reserved to me in such a shipwreck?”
“The dearest that mankind knows,” replied Dwining; and then, in the accent of a lover who utters the name of his beloved mistress, and expresses his passion for her in the very tone of his voice, he added the word “REVENGE!”
The patient had raised himself on his couch to listen with some anxiety for the solution of the physician’s enigma. He laid himself down again as he heard it explained, and after a short pause asked, “In what Christian college learned you this morality, good Master Dwining?”
“In no Christian college,” answered his physician; “for, though it is privately received in most, it is openly and manfully adopted in none. But I have studied among the sages of Granada, where the fiery souled Moor lifts high his deadly dagger as it drops with his enemy’s blood, and avows the doctrine which the pallid Christian practises, though coward-like he dare not name it.”
“Thou art then a more high souled villain than I deemed thee,” said Ramorny.
“Let that pass,” answered Dwining. “The waters that are the stillest are also the deepest; and the foe is most to be dreaded who never threatens till he strikes. You knights and men at arms go straight to your purpose with sword in hand. We who are clerks win our access with a noiseless step and an indirect approach, but attain our object not less surely.”