“Your performance? It was excellent, M. Goefle.”
“I was stupid, crazy! It is inconceivable that a man accustomed to speak in public on the most delicate subjects, and about the most involved and doubtful cases, should have been overtaken by such an accident! Can you understand it?”
“But what accident, for heaven’s sake, Monsieur Goefle?”
“What, are you deaf? Did you not hear me make three most frightful blunders?”
“Pshaw! I probably made a hundred; it happens every day. Nobody notices them.”
“You think so? Nobody notices them? I’ll wager something that the baron left the room before we were through.”
“He did, that’s the fact! Is he so very critical that a careless connective or an ill-chosen word—”
“What! A thousand devils! That is not the matter at all! I would rather have had my tongue cut out than to have said what I did. While you were stooping down to bring the boat under the rocks, and I was making the men on guard talk, only imagine that I said three times, ‘the baron,’ instead of ‘Don Sancho’! I did, three times! Once by mere oversight, again when I had noticed it, and meant to correct myself; and a third time—I never heard of such a thing, Christian—to say exactly the very word that one intends not to say! There was some fatality about it; I am almost ready to believe, as our peasants do, that evil spirits intermeddle with our doings!”
“It is very curious, really,” said Christian, “but it might have happened to any one. Why are you so much annoyed about it, M. Goefle? The baron can never suspect that it was done on purpose. And besides, is he the only baron in the world? Are there not a dozen of them, perhaps, in the very audience before us? Come, let us attend to the second act; time is passing, and they may call for us at any moment.”
“If they don’t send to countermand the performance. There, some one is knocking!”