‘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
Words so reckless fairly shook 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 that 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, raising in a twinkling 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. Fortunately the woman saved the lamp, and fled with it into a corner, whence she and the man from the Chateau 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 that this had lasted long enough—or, to speak more plainly, when I could stand the innkeeper’s drubbing no longer—I threw him off, 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.