“'Why, he is a saltimbanque; I saw him the morning I came through Constance, with some others of his troop dragged before the maire for causing a disturbance in a cabaret; one of the most consummate impostors, they told me, in Europe.'”
“An infamous falsehood, and a base liar the man who says it!” cried I, springing to my legs, and standing revealed before the company in an attitude of haughty defiance. “I am the person you have dared to defame. I have never assumed to be a prince, and as little am I a rope-dancer. I am an English gentleman, travelling for his pleasure, and I hurl back every word you have said of me with contempt and defiance.”
Before I had finished this insolent speech, some half-dozen swords were drawn and brandished in the air, very eager, as it seemed, to cut me to pieces, and the Count himself required all the united strength of the party to save me from his hands. At last I was pushed, hustled, and dragged out of the room to another smaller one on the same floor, and, the key being turned on me, left to my very happy reflections.
CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE DUEL WITH PRINCE MAX.
I had no writing-materials, but I had just composed a long letter to the “Times” on “the outrageous treatment and false imprisonment of a British subject in Austria,” when my door was opened by a thin, lank-jawed, fierce-eyed man in uniform, who announced himself as the Rittmeister von Mahony, of the Keyser Hussars.
“A countryman—an Irishman,” said I, eagerly, clasping his hand with warmth.
“That is to say, two generations back,” replied he; “my grandfather Terence was a lieutenant in Trenck's Horse, but since that none of us have ever been out of Austria.”
If these tidings fell coldly on my heart, just beginning to glow with the ardor of home and country, I soon saw that it takes more than two generations to wash out the Irishman from a man's nature. The honest Rittmeister, with scarcely a word of English in his vocabulary, was as hearty a countryman as if he had never journeyed out of the land of Bog.
He had beard “all about it,” he said, by way of arresting the eloquent indignation that filled me; and he added, “And the more fool myself to notice the matter;” asking me, quaintly, if I had never heard of our native maxim that says, “One man ought never to fall upon forty.” “Well,” said he, with a sigh, “what's done can't be undone; and let us see what's to come next? I see you are a gentleman, and the worse luck yours.”