It were superfluous to set down in detail all the humiliations endured by Maitland. Do not the newspapers continually ring with the laments of the British citizen who has fallen into the hands of Continental Justice? Are not our countrymen the common butts of German, French, Spanish, and even Greek and Portuguese Jacks in office? When an Englishman appears, do not the foreign police usually arrest him at a venture, and inquire afterward?
Maitland had, with the best intentions, done a good deal more than most of these innocents to deserve incarceration. His conduct, as the Juge d’Instruction told him, without mincing matters, was undeniably louche.
In the first place, the suspicions of M. Dupin, of the Hôtel Alsace et Lorraine, had been very naturally excited by seeing the advertisement about the great-coat in the Times, for he made a study of “the journal of the City.”
Here was a notice purporting to be signed by himself, and referring to a bearskin coat, said (quite untruly) to have been left in his own hotel. A bearskin coat! The very words breathe of Nihilism, dynamite, stratagems, and spoils. Then the advertisement was in English, which is, at present and till further notice, the language spoken by the brave Irish. M. Dupin, as a Liberal, had every sympathy with the brave Irish in their noble struggle for whatever they are struggling for; but he did not wish his hostelry to become, so to speak, the mountain-cave of Freedom, and the great secret storehouse of nitro-glycerine. With a view to elucidating the mystery of the advertisement, he had introduced the police on his premises, and the police had hardly settled down in its affût, when, lo! a stranger had been captured, in most suspicious circumstances. M. Dupin felt very clever indeed, and his friends envied him the distinction and advertisement which were soon to be his.
When Maitland appeared, as he did in due course, before the Juge d’Instruction, he attempted to fall back on the obsolete Civis Romanus sum! He was an English citizen. He had written to the English ambassador, or rather to an old St. Gatien’s man, an attaché of the embassy, whom he luckily happened to know. But this great ally chanced to be out of town, and his name availed Maitland nothing in his interview with the Juge d’Instruction. That magistrate, sitting with his back to the light, gazed at Maitland with steady, small gray eyes, while the scribble of the pen of the greffier, as he took down the Englishman’s deposition, sounded shrill in the bleak torture-chamber of the law.
“Your name?” asked the Juge d’Instruction.
“Maitland,” replied the Fellow of St. Gatien’s.
“You lie!” said the Juge d’Instruction. “You entered the name of Buchanan in the book of the hotel.”
“My name is on my cards, and on that letter,” said Maitland, keeping his temper wonderfully.
The documents in question lay on a table, as pièces justificatives.