“Yes, sir,” replied the voice; “all the world calls me so, and Colonel Everard himself. But my name is Spittal for all that.”
“Colonel Everard? arrive you from him?” demanded young Lee.
“No, sir; I come, sir, from Roger Wildrake, esquire, of Squattlesea-mere, if it like you,” said the boy; “and I have brought a token to Mistress Lee, which I am to give into her own hands, if you would but open the door, sir, and let me in—but I can do nothing with a three-inch board between us.”
“It is some freak of that drunken rakehell,” said Albert, in a low voice, to his sister, who had crept out after him on tiptoe.
“Yet, let us not be hasty in concluding so,” said the young lady; “at this moment the least trifle may be of consequence.—What tokens has Master Wildrake sent me, my little boy?”
“Nay, nothing very valuable neither,” replied the boy; “but he was so anxious you should get it, that he put me out of window as one would chuck out a kitten, that I might not be stopped by the soldiers.”
“Hear you?” said Alice to her brother; “undo the gate, for God’s sake.” Her brother, to whom her feelings of suspicion were now sufficiently communicated, opened the gate in haste, and admitted the boy, whose appearance, not much dissimilar to that of a skinned rabbit in a livery, or a monkey at a fair, would at another time have furnished them with amusement. The urchin messenger entered the hall, making several odd bows, and delivered the woodcock’s feather with much ceremony to the young lady, assuring her it was the prize she had won upon a wager about hawking.
“I prithee, my little man,” said Albert, “was your master drunk or sober, when he sent thee all this way with a feather at this time of night?”
“With reverence, sir,” said the boy, “he was what he calls sober, and what I would call concerned in liquor for any other person.”
“Curse on the drunken coxcomb!” said Albert,—“There is a tester for thee, boy, and tell thy master to break his jests on suitable persons, and at fitting times.”