Page:The fortunes of Perkin Warbeck.djvu/46

38 "you will have less fear in trusting yourself with me: your noble friend has confided your grace to my care, if, indeed, you will condescend to live with me, and be as a son to me. I have just lost a little nephew whom I fonely loved; will you supply his place, and take his name?"

"Fair cousin," said the prince, caressing his kind friend as he spoke, "I will wait on you, and serve you as no nephew ever served. What name did your lost kinsman bear? Quickly tell me, that I may know my own, and hereafter call myself by it."

"Perkin Warbeck," said Madeline.

"Now you mock me," cried Richard: "that has long been my name; but I knew not that it gave me a claim to so pretty a relation."

"This courtly language," replied the lady, "betrays your grace's princeliness. What will our Flemish boors say, when I present the nursling of royalty as mine? You will shame our homely breeding, Duke Richard."

"I beseech you, fair mistress," said Lovel, who now joined them, "to forget, even in private, such high-sounding titles. It is dangerous to play at majesty, unaided by ten thousand armed asserters of our right. Remember this noble child only as your loving nephew, Perkin Warbeck: he, who well knows the misery of regal claims unallied to regal authority, will shelter himself gladly and gratefully under the shadow of your lowly bower."

And now, as the wintry sun rose higher, the travellers prepared for their departure. Warbeck first left them to find and to dismiss his domestics, who would have been aware of the deception practised in the person of Richard. He returned in a few hours for his sister. The duke and Lord Lovel then separated. The intervening time had been employed by the noble in schooling the boy as to his future behaviour, in recounting to him his plans and hopes, and in instructing him how to conduct himself with his mother, if indeed he saw her; for Lovel was ignorant how Lady Brampton had succeeded at Winchester, and how far it would be possible to bring about an interview between the queen and her son. At length Warbeck returned; the travellers mounted, and Lord Lovel, watching from the cottage door, beheld with melancholy regret the prince depart: the long habit of intercourse, the uncertain future, his high pretensions, and his present state, had filled the cavalier with moody thoughts, unlike his usual sanguine anticipations, and energetic resolves. "This is womanly," at last he thought, as the reflection that he was alone, and had, perhaps, seen his beloved charge for the last time, filled his eyes with unwonted tears. "To horse! To my friends!—There to plan, scheme, devise—and then again to the field!"