"This bantling mayoral," muttered the landlord, "keeps his mask up. Very well—so much the better, so long as he pays. None gives himself airs in the house of Don Sileno Lorent y Valvidia, hosteller of Rosas, without paying for it! That is the barest justice. But, methinks this young boaster of many campaigns and the long sword, might have a new suit of clothes to go and see the Governor withal. Yet I am not sure—fighting is a curious trade. A good cook is not always known by the cleanliness of his apron."
At this moment the Abbé John roared down the stairs for the hot water.
"Coming, your Excellency!" answered the host, making a wry face; "all that you desire shall be in your chamber as fast as my scullions' legs can bring it."
Shaved, reorganised as to his inner man, daintied as to his outer, the Abbé John looked out of the window of the Golden Chevelure upon the sleeping sea. The Parador was a little house with a trellised flower-garden running down to the beach, and sheltered from the heat of the sun by vine-leaves and trembling acacias.
"That is a strange name you have given your inn," said the Abbé John, taking some oil from the salad-bowl and burnishing the hilt of his sword with a rag, as became a good cavalier. He had the sign of the Golden Tresses held by Sileno Lorent y Valvidia under his eyes as he spoke.
"You think so, sir?" said the landlord, his former brusquerie returning as soon as it was a question of property; "that shows you are unacquainted with the history of the country in which you desire to practise your trade of war!"
"I am none so entirely ignorant of it as you suppose," said John d'Albret.
"Yes, as ignorant as my carving-fork," said the landlord, pointing with that useful and newly-invented piece of cutlery to the sign below. "Now if you are a man of the pen as well as of the sword, what would you draw from that sign?"
"Why," said the Abbé John, smiling, "that you are named, curiously enough, Sileno—that your father's name was Lorent and your mother's Valvidia—that you are tenant of a well-provisioned inn called with equal curiosity the Golden Chevelure, and that you lodge (as you put it) both 'on horseback or on foot.' That is a good deal of printing to pay for at a penny a letter!"
"As I foretold, your Excellency knows nothing of the matter—and indeed, how should you? For by your tongue I would wager that you are from the Navarrese provinces—therefore a speaker of two languages and a wanderer over the face of the earth—your sword your bedfellow, a sack of fodder for your beast your best couch, and the loot of the last town taken by assault the only provender for your purse——"