BOURBON.

True it is;

And he shall answer for so answering not,

If

any voice of potency is mine

Touching this war. But he may yet take thought
And make amends; I'll send him once again
A message, and I know not who's so fit

To take it as thyself.

SIR FLEUREANT.

My Lord, my tongue

Can utter nought with so much grace by half

As what you bid it speak; I'll bear your message.

BOURBON.

Not that for foolishness and woman's love

I would do this or that, but you shall note
My honour is impawned. Some half hour hence
Come to my chamber, where in privacy

We'll further speak of this; and bring thou there
The yeoman of Tournesis; he must learn

How to demean himself before the Council.

He has been tampered with, I nothing doubt,

And what he's tutored to must we unteach.
Things run too fast to seed.

[Exit.

SIR FLEUREANT.

What soldier's heart

By dotage such as his was e'er possessed
Upon a paramour! To win her back
Peace, war, or any thing to him were good,
Nought evil but what works contrariwise.
And still his love goes muffled up for shame,
And masks itself with show of careless slights,
And giving her ill names of slut and jade,
Gipsy and whore.-The world's a masquerade,
And he whose wisdom is to pay it court
Should mask his own unpopular penetration,

And seem to think its several seemings real.

ARTEVELDE.

Look to that horse; he coughs-I think I am;

The sun was hot for such a long day's ride.

What is the hour?

VAN RYK.

The moon has not yet risen,

It cannot yet be nine.

ARTEVELDE.

Not nine? well, well;

'Be the day never so long,

At length cometh even-song.'

So saith the ancient rhyme. At eight o'clock
Or thereabouts, we crossed the bridge of Rosebecque.

I never knew myself to sleep o'horseback,

And yet I must have slept. The evening's heat
Had much oppressed me; then the tedious tract
Of naked moorland, and the long flat road

And slow straight stream, for ever side by side,
Like poverty and crime—I'm sure I slept.

Aye, and dreamed too. 'Twas an unwholesome

dream,

If dream it was a nightmare rather: first
A stifling pressure compassed in my heart,
On my dull ears, with thick and muffled peal,
Came many a sound of battle and of flight,
Of tumult and distracted cries; my own,
That would have been the loudest, was unheard,
And seem'd to swell the chambers of my brain
With volume vast of sound I could not utter.
The screams of wounded horses, and the crash
Of broken planks, and then the heavy plunge
Of bodies in the water-they were loud,
But yet the sound that was confined in me,

Had it got utterance, would have drowned them all!
But still it grew and swelled, and therewithal
The burthen thickened on my heart; my blood,
That had been flowing freshly from my wounds,
Trickled, then clotted, and then flowed no more:
My horse upon the barrier of the bridge
Stumbled; I started; and was wide awake.
'Twas an unpleasant dream.

VAN RYK.

It was, my lord.

I wonder how I marked not that you slept.

ARTEVELDE.

I must be wakeful now. Who waits? who's there?

(To an ATTENDANT who enters.)

The man I sent to Ypres with a letter—

Has he returned?

ATTENDANT.

But now, my lord, arrived;

And with him Father John.

ARTEVELDE.

He come already!

With more alacrity he meets my wish

Than I deserve. Prithee, conduct him hither.