She led the way, holding her head jauntily and high, while he cast down his eyes lest his gaze should be led to wander in a way unseemly in one of his cloth. Such a foot and such—! He felt it more becoming and safer to lift his eyes to the ceiling and keep them there, which gave him somewhat the aspect of one praying.
Sir Jeoffry stood at the buffet with a flagon of ale in his hand, taking his stirrup cup. At the sight of a stranger and one attired in the garb of a chaplain, he scowled surprisedly.
“What’s this?” quoth he. “What dost want, Clo? I have no leisure for a sermon.”
Mistress Clorinda went to the buffet and filled a tankard for herself and carried it back to the table, on the edge of which she half sat, with one leg bent, one foot resting on the floor.
“Time thou wilt have to take, Dad,” she said, with an arch grin, showing two rows of gleaming pearls. “This gentleman is my Lord Twemlow’s chaplain, whom he sends to exhort you, requesting you to have the civility to hear him.”
“Exhort be damned, and Twemlow be damned too!” cried Sir Jeoffry, who had a great quarrel with his lordship and hated him bitterly. “What does the canting fool mean?”
“Sir,” faltered the poor message-bearer, “his lordship hath—hath been concerned—having heard—”
The handsome creature balanced against the table took the tankard from her lips and laughed.
“Having heard thy daughter rides to field in breeches, and is an unseemly-behaving wench,” she cried, “his lordship sends his chaplain to deliver a discourse thereon—not choosing to come himself. Is not that thy errand, reverend sir?”
The chaplain, poor man, turned pale, having caught, as she spoke, a glimpse of Sir Jeoffry’s reddening visage.
“Madam,” he faltered, bowing—“Madam, I ask pardon of you most humbly! If it were your pleasure to deign to—to—allow me—”
She set the tankard on the table with a rollicking smack, and thrust her hands in her breeches-pockets, swaying with laughter; and, indeed,’twas ringing music, her rich great laugh, which, when she grew of riper years, was much lauded and written verses on by her numerous swains.
“If ’twere my pleasure to go away and allow you to speak, free from the awkwardness of a young lady’s presence,” she said. “But ’tis not, as it happens, and if I stay here, I shall be a protection.”
In truth, he required one. Sir Jeoffry broke into a torrent of blasphemy. He damned both kinsman and chaplain, and raged at the impudence of both in daring to approach him, swearing to horsewhip my lord if they ever met, and to have the chaplain kicked out of the house, and beyond the park gates themselves. But Mistress Clorinda chose to make it her whim to take it in better humour, and as a joke with a fine point to it. She laughed at her father’s storming, and while the chaplain quailed before it with pallid countenance and fairly hang-dog look, she seemed to find it but a cause for outbursts of merriment.
“Hold thy tongue a bit, Dad,” she cried, when he had reached his loudest, “and let his reverence tell us what his message is. We have not even heard it.”
“Want not to hear it!” shouted Sir Jeoffry. “Dost think I’ll stand his impudence? Not I!”
“What was your message?” demanded the young lady of the chaplain. “You cannot return without delivering it. Tell it to me. I choose it shall be told.”
The chaplain clutched and fumbled with his hat, pale, and dropping his eyes upon the floor, for very fear.
“Pluck up thy courage, man,” said Clorinda. “I will uphold thee. The message?”
“Your pardon, Madam—’twas this,” the chaplain faltered. “My lord commanded me to warn your honoured father—that if he did not beg you to leave off wearing—wearing—”
“Breeches,” said Mistress Clorinda, slapping her knee.
The chaplain blushed with modesty, though he was a man of sallow countenance.
“No gentleman,” he went on, going more lamely at each word—“notwithstanding your great beauty—no gentleman—”
“Would marry me?” the young lady ended for him, with merciful good-humour.
“For if you—if a young lady be permitted to bear herself in such a manner as will cause her to be held lightly, she can make no match that will not be a dishonour to her family—and—and—”
“And may do worse!” quoth Mistress Clo, and laughed until the room rang.
Sir Jeoffry’s rage was such as made him like to burst; but she restrained him when he would have flung his tankard at the chaplain’s head, and amid his storm of curses bundled the poor man out of the room, picking up his hat which in his hurry and fright he let fall, and thrusting it into his hand.
“Tell his lordship,” she said, laughing still as she spoke the final words, “that I say he is right—and I will see to it that no disgrace befalls him.”
“Forsooth, Dad,” she said, returning, “perhaps the old son of a—”—something unmannerly—“is not so great a fool. As for me, I mean to make a fine marriage and be a great lady, and I know of none hereabouts to suit me but the old Earl of Dunstanwolde, and ’tis said he rates at all but modest women, and, in faith, he might not find breeches mannerly. I will not hunt in them again.”
She did not, though once or twice when she was in a wild mood, and her father entertained at dinner those of his companions whom she was the most inclined to, she swaggered in among them in her daintiest suits of male attire, and caused their wine-shot eyes to gloat over her boyish-maiden charms and jaunty airs and graces.
On the night of her fifteenth birthday Sir Jeoffry gave a great dinner to his boon companions and hers. She had herself commanded that there should be no ladies at the feast; for she chose to announce that she should appear at no more such, having the wit to see that she was too tall a young lady for childish follies, and that she had now arrived at an age when her market must be made.
“I shall have women enough henceforth to be dull with,” she said. “Thou art but a poor match-maker, Dad, or wouldst have thought of it for me. But not once has it come into thy pate that I have no mother to angle in my cause and teach me how to cast sheep’s eyes at bachelors. Long-tailed petticoats from this time for me, and hoops and patches, and ogling over fans—until at last, if I play my cards well, some great lord will look my way and be taken by my shape and my manners.”
“With thy shape, Clo, God knows every man will,” laughed Sir Jeoffry, “but I fear me not with thy manners. Thou hast the manners of a baggage, and they are second nature to thee.”
“They are what I was born with,” answered Mistress Clorinda. “They came from him that begot me, and he has not since improved them. But now”—making a great sweeping curtsey, her impudent bright beauty almost dazzling his eyes—“now, after my birth-night, they will be bettered; but this one night I will have my last fling.”
When the men trooped into the black oak wainscotted dining-hall on the eventful night, they found their audacious young hostess awaiting them in greater and more daring beauty than they had ever before beheld. She wore knee-breeches
