After reaching Chas-Chateil, and relating his adventure to Dame Waledger, Sir Anthony saw no reason to repent of the resolution he had expressed to befriend the mysterious entity whom, as he devoutly believed, the saints had sent to his succour in the hour of peril, and when, otherwise, nothing could have intervened between him and certain destruction. The dame encouraged his pious intent, and expressed unbounded curiosity to see the strange child but for whose timely appearance she would have been a weeping widow; and no sooner had the knight dined than he sent for the young stranger to the daïs of the great hall.
Apprehensive, however, that the whole business--the carouse of the previous night, the boar-hunt of the morning, and the danger to which her husband had been exposed, might be a device of Satan, and that the boar and the boy might be agents of his satanic majesty, Dame Waledger suggested the propriety of first handing over the child to be examined by the chaplain of the castle as to his origin and position in life; and Father Peter, though a little nervous, undertook the delicate investigation.
The result was, in the main, satisfactory. Father Peter was no great linguist, but he had been on the continent, and knew enough of continental tongues to comprehend that the boy’s name was Pedro; that he was a native of Burgos, the capital of Castile; that he had left his country as one of a band of musicians bound for London: that they had been shipwrecked on the coast, and that he, having escaped a watery grave, had wandered into the woods, not knowing whither he went; and on the approach of the boar, and the hounds, and the hunter, he had climbed a tree to escape observation; and, with an innocent smile, he confirmed his story by producing an instrument, and accompanying himself, while he sang the ballad of “The Captive Knight and the Merle;” and finally melted all hearts by bursting into tears, and deploring his plight as a helpless orphan in a strange land.
The victory was now complete. Dame Waledger insisted on young Pedro being handed over to her as a page; and in a day or two he was strutting about dressed in crimson, accompanying the ladies of the castle when they ventured into the chase to fly their hawks, singing to them his native ballads, and diverting them with his droll attempts to speak the language of the country in which he found himself, and of the people among whom he had been so strangely cast.