"Ah, you paid ten centimes? Then, if you have the receipt it may be possible to permit you to go on."
"Permit us to go on!" echoed Dalmar-Kalm angrily. "I should think so, indeed."
"I'm sorry, I took no receipt," said Terry. "I thought it an unnecessary formality."
"No formality is unnecessary, monsieur," said the servant of form. "I also am sorry, but in the circumstances you cannot enter French territory without a receipt for the ten centimes. As a man I believe implicitly that you paid the sum, as an official I am compelled to doubt your word."
Who but a Frenchman could have been so exquisitely pompous over a penny? I saw by Terry's face that he was far from considering the incident closed; but he had too much true Irish tact to try and get us through by storming.
"Let us consider," he began, "whether there is not some means of escape from this difficulty."
But Dalmar-Kalm was in no mood to temporize, or keep silent while others temporized. The lights of Breil showed that it was a town of comparative importance; it was past eight o'clock; and no doubt His Highness's temper was sharpened by a keen edge of hunger. That he—he should be stopped by a fussy official figure-head almost within smell of food, broke down the barrier of his self-restraint—never a formidable rampart, as we had cause to know. In a few loud and vigorous sentences he expressed a withering contempt for France, its institutions, its customs, and especially its custom-houses.
"If you'd mix up the Prince's initials, as you do Mr. Barrymore's sometimes, and call him Kalmar-Dalm, there'd be some excuse for it," Beechy Kidder murmured to the Countess.
"Hush, he'll hear!" implored the much-enduring lady, but there was small danger that His Highness would hear any expostulations save his own.
The functionary's eye grew dark, and Terry frowned. Had the douanier been insolent, my peppery Irishman would have been insolent too, perhaps, in the hope of cowering the man by truculence more swashbuckling than his own; but he had been as polite as his countrymen proverbially are, if not goaded out of their suavity. "Look here, Prince," said Terry, hanging onto his temper by a thread (for he also was hungry), "suppose you leave this matter to me. If you'll take the ladies to the best hotel in town, Moray and I will stop and see this thing through. We'll follow when we can."