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"I suppose, then," she remarked, looking at him in such a manner that Miss Brown had to cover her mouth with her hands to prevent her screaming out "I suppose you are one of those who think it a crime for a woman who is married even to want to see, for a few moments, an old sweetheart?" "On the contrary," Peter Ruff answered, "as a bachelor, I have no convictions of any sort upon the subject."
She was standing at the dark walnut table, fresh starching and crimping Berenger's solitary ruff, while under her merry superintendence those constant playfellows, Philip and Rayonette, were washing, or pretending to wash, radishes in a large wooden bowl, and Berenger was endeavouring to write his letter of good tidings, to be sent by special messenger to his grand-father.
The man who had been browbeaten into crime by an overbearing and ferocious brother, who had quailed before the angry waves of the North Sea, which would have borne him to a place of entire security, now faced his fate with a smile upon his lips. He took off his hat, cloak, and sword, and handed them to his valet. He calmly undid his ruff and wristbands of pointlace, and tossed them on the ground.
The black stranger was much too crafty for that. At the last moment he swerved nimbly aside, wheeled with an agility that was marvelous for a creature of his bulk, and thrust at the shoulders of the colossus with a fierce, rooting movement like the stroke of the wild boar. But he struck the rim of that impenetrable defense, the spreading ruff of horn.
Miss Brown arrived early the following morning, and was disposed to be inquisitive. "I should like to know," she said, "exactly what has become of Mr. Vincent Cawdor." Peter Ruff took her upstairs. There was a little mound of ashes in the grate. She nodded. "I imagined that," she said. "But why did you send me out to watch yourself?"
He then proceeds to give him some advice, by which he is likely to find favour in the King's eyes. He tells him to wear a bushy ruff, well starched; and after various other directions as to his dress, he concludes, 'but above all things fail not to praise the roan jennet whereon the King doth daily ride. In this picture King James is represented on the identical roan jennet.
"Your visit, Masters," Sir Richard said, with a curious smile at the corners of his lips, "is, in some respects, a little opportune. About that little matter we were speaking of," he continued, turning towards the detective. "We have only to offer you our apologies, Sir Richard," Dory answered. Then he crossed the room and confronted Peter Ruff.
The Advocate, with long grey beard and stern blue eye, haggard with illness and anxiety, tall but bent with age, leaning on his staff and wrapped in black velvet cloak an imposing magisterial figure; the florid, plethoric Prince in brown doublet, big russet boots, narrow ruff, and shabby felt hat with its string of diamonds, with hand clutched on swordhilt, and eyes full of angry menace, the very type of the high-born, imperious soldier thus they surveyed each other as men, once friends, between whom a gulf had opened.
Elizabeth rose up and readjusted her ruff, which in the excitement of the moment had been forced to assume a position about her forehead which gave one the impression that its royal wearer had suddenly donned a sombrero. "Very well," she said. "Let us below; but oh, for the axe!" "Bring the lady an axe," cried Xanthippe, sarcastically. "She wants to cut somebody."
We gave you four years, and looking into your face, I think that it has been enough. I think that the weariness is there already. In any case, the charge which I lay upon you in these my last moments, is one which you can escape by death only." A low murmur of voices from those others repeated her words. "By death only!" Peter Ruff opened his lips, but closed them again without speech.
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