"Prudentia!" cried the drinker, flung down the vessel and ran forward, "a stranger among us!"
With a bellow the bearded one lurched for his weapon.
"A stranger? ... Pix intrantibus!"
The weeper profited of the excitement to seize, in his turn, upon the abandoned vessel.
"Nay," said Geiger-Hans, arresting the double onslaught with outstretched arms. "Pax intrantibus be it: we are friends!"
Steven stood in the doorway, sneering. He would have found a pungent satisfaction in laying flat the drunken couple—and no doubt, with the science cultivated in Jackson's London rooms, would, despite his wound, easily have put the thought into execution. He made a movement forward. But the fiddler held him at arm's length.
"Peace, brother Peter—peace, most learned doctor in herbâ. I bring a friend, I say, a new brother, my comrade, a noble Austrian who, by the way, is half an Englishman, and as bitter a foe to the tyrant as your most Germanic selves. I introduce:—Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg—Herr Paul Oster, 'Mossy-Head,' emeritus swordsman, Senior of the Great Westphalic conspiracy. Behold, count, the true German garb, the type of manly beauty! Behold this Barbarossa head! Behold the sword, in short (if I may so express myself), of a great patriotic movement. And here," turning with a fresh gesture of ceremony, "we have the brain, the tongue, the acute eye: in other words, Herr Theophilus Schmeling, legal doctor, jurist, fresh from all his honours at Goettingen—and the third...?" He looked interrogation at the black-haired student.
The jurist, surprisingly alive to the situation, answered briskly for his melancholy comrade, who was still absorbed and absorbing:
"Johannis Stempel, Sanctæ Theologiæ Studiosus. An 'Ancient House,' also a faithful heart—a good labourer in the vineyard—but," he added chuckling, "apt to be weinerisch im Wein, whiny over the wine."
He perpetrated his atrocious quip with a wink of little red eyes.