"You are mistaken, my good sir," said Lord Gowrie; "the person you are in search of apparently, has taken refuge at the house of the English ambassador, being a subject of that crown. At present, I am but scantily informed of what has occurred. Is the person he fought with dead, and who is he?"
"He is not dead, but he will die certainly," said the officer; and the Frenchman, who had dismounted, as I have stated, finished the reply by saying, "He is a Scotch lord, who has been brought up with us at this university, the Seigneur de Ramsay."
"I know no Scottish lord of that name," said the earl.
"We must have the homicide out, however," observed the officer of the guard; and approaching the gate of the embassy, he knocked hard for admission.
It was common, in all large Parisian houses at that period, to have a small iron grating inserted in the great gates, at the height of a man's head, through which, in times of danger, letters or messages might be received by those within, without opening the doors. This, at the English embassy, was covered in the inside with a thick shutter of wood, which, on the loud knocking of the officer of the guard, was withdrawn, showing the face of a burly porter behind the grate.
"What do you want?" demanded the porter.
"I want the body of a man who has taken refuge here after committing homicide," replied the officer.
"You can't have him, either body or soul, unless his excellency gives him up," answered the porter, gruffly.
There is in every man's mind, I believe, a store of the comic, which, though often battened down under strange and little-penetrable hatches, is sometimes arrived at, even in a very obdurate bosom, by the simplest of all possible processes. The Earl of Gowrie was in no very jesting mood. He was vexed at the scrape his servant had got into; and he was vexed to think that the life of a human being had been endangered, if not lost. He was vexed, moreover, then, that Julia--his Julia, should have been insulted by any one on her first entrance into the French capital. But yet the braggadocio tone of the French cavalier had somewhat amused him; and the reply of the sturdy English porter, delivered in very indifferent French, almost made him laugh, notwithstanding the seriousness of the subject. He had approached close to the gate with the officer, who, for the moment, seemed completely rebuffed by the reply; and knowing well that the matter could not end there, Gowrie interposed, to procure a more just and reasonable arrangement. He did not choose to use the English language, lest any suspicion should be excited in the minds of the Frenchmen around; but speaking French almost as well as he did his native language, he said, "Be kind enough, my good friend, to tell Sir Henry Neville that the Earl of Gowrie is at his gate, and would fain speak with him; but as French gentlemen are very apt to take their own prepossessions for realities, and to suspect, whenever they are in the wrong themselves, that others are in fault, it will be better, if he does me the honour of admitting me, that he should admit this officer of the prevot, and also this gentleman, who styles himself the friend of the wounded man."
"I demand that the culprit should be delivered up," said the cavalier, fiercely. "The privileges of no ambassador can shelter a murderer; and as to prepossessions, we all know that you Englishmen are the natural enemies of France, and that you have never aided any party in this country but for the purpose of promoting dissensions, and thereby nullify the efforts of Frenchmen for the honour and glory of their native land."