“It is pleasing to know that, sir. But this innkeeper—unhappy man—does not appear to have partaken of it.”
The occupant of the stool took my remonstrance in fairer part than there was reason to expect. Indeed he even abated his manners into some appearance of politeness.
“You appear to judge shrewdly for one of your years, my young companion,” he said, in a voice that fell quite soft. “But if I must speak the truth, this innkeeper is a notorious villain; and if I am ever civil to a notorious villain, I hope Heaven will correct me.”
“Even upon such a matter as that, sir,” I said gravely, “there may be two sorts of opinion. Even if this poor innkeeper is not so virtuous as he might be, it will not help him on the true path to be mulcted in his substance.”
“By cock!” said the occupant of the stool, “it is an old head you wear on your shoulders, my young companion. You speak to a point. I can tell you have been to college.”
“Sir, you are mistaken in this, although I come of a good family upon the side of both my parents. My uncle Nicolas is magister in the university of Salamanca; and as for my father, lately deceased, he was one of the wisest men that ever lived.”
“Yes, I can see that,” said the occupant of the stool, whose voice had fallen softer than ever. “It is as plain as my hand.”
Somewhat curiously, and perhaps with a little of the vanity of youth, I sought a reason for this estimate.
“It is as plain as the gown of a woman of virtue,” he said, with a stealthy down-looking glance. “I have a wonderful eye for merit. You can never disguise birth and condition from one like myself. I am a former clerk of Oxford, and my lineage is such that modesty forbids me to name it before supper.”
“Oxford,” said I, taking this quaint, barbarous name upon my tongue with pain. “Saving your presence, sir, what part of our great peninsula is that? It sounds not unlike the province of Galicia, where I know the dialect and the people are allowed to be a little uncivil.”