"No--nor you!" he retorted hotly, "whoever you may be!"
"Then I will give you another," I answered, with a hiccough. "Perhaps it will be more to your taste. Here is the Duke of Orleans, and may he soon be King!"
CHAPTER III.
[THE HOUSE IN THE WOOD.]
MY words fairly startled the three men out of their anger. For a moment they glared at me as if they had seen a ghost. Then the wine-merchant clapped his hand on the table. "That is enough!" he said, with a look at his companions. "I think there can be no mistake about that. As damnable treason as ever I heard whispered! I congratulate you, Sir, on your boldness. As for you," he continued, turning with an ugly sneer to the landlord, "I shall know now the company you keep! I was not aware that my wine wet whistles to such a tune!"
But if he was startled, the innkeeper was furious, seeing his character thus taken away; and, being at no time a man of many words, he vented his rage exactly in the way I wished. In a twinkling he raised such an uproar as can scarcely be conceived. With a roar like a bull's he ran headlong at the table, and overturned it on the top of me. The woman saved the lamp and fled with it into a corner, whence she and the man from the Château watched the skirmish in silence; but the pewter cups and platters flew spinning across the floor, while the table pinned me to the ground among the ruins of my stool. Having me at this disadvantage--for at first I made no resistance--the landlord began to belabour me with the first thing he snatched up, and when I tried to defend myself cursed me with each blow for a treacherous rogue and a vagrant. Meanwhile, the three merchants, delighted with the turn things had taken, skipped round us laughing; and now hounded him on, now bantered me with "How is that for the Duke of Orleans?" and "How now, traitor?"
When I thought this had lasted long enough--or, to speak more plainly, when I could stand the innkeeper's drubbing no longer--I threw him off by a great effort, and struggled to my feet. But still, though the blood was trickling down my face, I refrained from drawing my sword. I caught up instead a leg of the stool which lay handy, and, watching my opportunity, dealt the landlord a shrewd blow under the ear, which laid him out in a moment on the wreck of his own table.
"Now!" I cried, brandishing my new weapon, which fitted the hand to a nicety, "come on! Come on, if you dare to strike a blow, you peddling, truckling, huckstering knaves! A fig for you and your shaveling Cardinal!"
The red-faced wine-merchant drew his sword in a one-two. "Why, you drunken fool," he said wrathfully, "put that stick down, or I will spit you like a lark!"
"Lark in your teeth!" I cried, staggering as if the wine were in my head. "Another word, and I--"