'Nothing can be better,' exclaimed his mother. 'How I have longed
to free him from that little shrew, whose tricks were the plague of
my life! Now there is nothing between him and a worthy match!'
'We can make an Englishman of him now to the backbone,' added Sir
Marmaduke, 'and it is well that it should be the lady herself who
wants first to be off with it, so that none can say he has played
her a scurvy trick.'
'What say you, Berenger?' said Lord Walwyn. 'Listen to me, fair
nephew. You know that all my remnant of hope is fixed upon you,
and that I have looked to setting you in the room of the son of my
own; and I think that under our good Queen you will find it easier
to lead a quiet God-fearing life than in your father's vexed
country, where the Reformed religion lies under persecution.
Natheless, being a born liegeman of the King of France, and heir to
estates in his kingdom, meseemeth that before you are come to years
of discretion it were well that you should visit them, and become
better able to judge for yourself how to deal in this matter when
you shall have attained full age, and may be able to dispose of
them by sale, thus freeing yourself from allegiance to a foreign
prince. And at the same time you can take measures, in concert
with this young lady, for loosing the wedlock so unhappily
contracted.'
'O sir, sir!' cried Lady Thistlewood, 'send him not to France to be
burnt by the Papists!'
'Peace, daughter,' returned her mother. 'Know you not that there
is friendship between the court party and the Huguenots, and that
the peace is to be sealed by the marriage of the King's sister with
the King of Navarre? This is the most suitable time at which he
could go.'
'Then, madam,' proceeded the lady, 'he will be running about to all
the preachings on every bleak moor and wet morass he can find,
catching his death with rheums, like his poor father.'
There was a general smile, and Sir Marmaduke laughed outright.
'Nay, dame,' he said, 'have you marked such a greed of sermons in
our Berry that you should fear his so untowardly running after
them?'
'Tilly-vally, Sir Duke,' quoth Dame Annora, with a flirt of her
fan, learnt at the French court. 'Men will run after a preacher in
a marshy bog out of pure forwardness, when they will nod at a godly
homily on a well-stuffed bench between four walls.'