"Courage, Master Ogilvy," said the Englishman, "thou wilt do well to slit the ears of this Spanish swashbuckler. I warrant me he hides a craven spirit beneath that slashed pourpoint. Thou art in the right, man, to make him eat his words. Be this Crichton what he may, he is at least thy countryman, and in part mine own."
"And as such I will uphold him," said Ogilvy, "against any odds."
"Bravo! my valorous Don Diego Caravaja," said the Sorbonist, slapping the Spaniard on the shoulder, and speaking in his ear. "Shall these scurvy Scots carry all before them?--I warrant me, no. We will make common cause against the whole beggarly nation; and in the meanwhile we intrust thee with this particular quarrel. See thou acquit thyself in it as beseemeth a descendant of the Cid."
"Account him already abased," returned Caravaja. "By Pelayo, I would the other were at his back, that both might be transfixed at a blow--ha!"
"To return to the subject of difference," said the Sorbonist, who was too much delighted with the prospect of a duel to allow the quarrel a chance of subsiding, while it was in his power to fan the flame; "to return to the difference," said he, aloud, glancing at Ogilvy; "it must be conceded that as a wassailer this Crichton is without a peer. None of us may presume to cope with him in the matter of the flask and the flagon, though we number among us some jolly topers. Friar John, with the Priestess of Bacbuc, was a washy bibber compared with him."
"He worships at the shrines of other priestesses besides hers of Bacbuc, if I be not wrongly informed," added Montaigu, who understood the drift of his companion.
"Else, wherefore our rejoinder to his cartels?" returned the Sorbonist. "Do you not call to mind that beneath his arrogant defiance of our learned body, affixed to the walls of the Sorbonne, it was written, 'That he who would behold this miracle of learning must hie to the tavern or bordel?' Was it not so, my hidalgo?"
"I have myself seen him at the temulentive tavern of the Falcon," returned Caravaja, "and at the lupanarian haunts in the Champ Gaillard and the Val-d'Amour. You understand me--ha!"
"Ha! ha! ha!" chorused the scholars. "James Crichton is no stoic. He is a disciple of Epicurus. Vel in puellam impingit, vel in poculum--ha! ha!"
"'Tis said that he hath dealings with the Evil One," observed the man of Harcourt, with a mysterious air; "and that, like Jeanne d'Arc, he hath surrendered his soul for his temporal welfare. Hence his wondrous lore; hence his supernatural beauty and accomplishments; hence his power of fascinating the fair sex; hence his constant run of luck with the dice; hence, also, his invulnerableness to the sword."