I thought the attorney looked put out; I little knew the man!
“But he is French,” said he, “for all that?”
“Ay, to be sure!” said I. “A Frenchman of the emigration! None of your Buonaparte lot. I will warrant his views of politics to be as sound as your own.”
“What is a little strange,” said the clerk quietly, “is that Mr. Dubois should deny it.”
I got it fair in the face, and took it smiling; but the shock was rude, and in the course of the next words I contrived to do what I have rarely done, and make a slip in my English. I kept my liberty and life by my proficiency all these months, and for once that I failed, it is not to be supposed that I would make a public exhibition of the details. Enough that it was a very little error, and one that might have passed ninety-nine times in a hundred. But my limb of the law was as swift to pick it up as though he had been by trade a master of languages.
“Aha!” cries he; “and you are French too! Your tongue bewrays you. Two Frenchmen coming into an alehouse, severally and accidentally, not knowing each other, at ten of the clock at night, in the middle of Bedfordshire? No, sir, that shall not pass! You are all prisoners escaping, if you are nothing worse. Consider yourselves under arrest. I have to trouble you for your papers.”
“Where is your warrant, if you come to that?” said I. “My papers! A likely thing that I would show my papers on the ipse dixit of an unknown fellow in a hedge alehouse!”
“Would you resist the law?” says he.
“Not the law, sir!” said I. “I hope I am too good a subject for that. But for a nameless fellow with a bald head and a pair of gingham small-clothes, why certainly! ’Tis my birthright as an Englishman. Where’s Magna Charta else?”
“We will see about that,” says he; and then, addressing the assistants, “Where does the constable live?”