“At least I shall have him,” Lanfranc cried, his voice almost wheedling, so great was his desire.
“Ask him,” I laughed, then turned to Pasquini. “To-morrow,” I said. “Do you name time and place, and I shall be there.”
“The grass is most excellent,” he teased, “the place is most excellent, and I am minded that Fortini has you for company this night.”
“’Twere better he were accompanied by a friend,” I quipped. “And now your pardon, for I must go.”
But he blocked my path.
“Whoever it be,” he said, “let it be now.”
For the first time, with him, my anger began to rise.
“You serve your master well,” I sneered.
“I serve but my pleasure,” was his answer. “Master I have none.”
“Pardon me if I presume to tell you the truth,” I said.
“Which is?” he queried softly.
“That you are a liar, Pasquini, a liar like all Italians.”
He turned immediately to Lanfranc and Bohemond.
“You heard,” he said. “And after that you cannot deny me him.”
They hesitated and looked to me for counsel of my wishes. But Pasquini did not wait.
“And if you still have any scruples,” he hurried on, “then allow me to remove them . . . thus.”
And he spat in the grass at my feet. Then my anger seized me and was beyond me. The red wrath I call it —an overwhelming, all-mastering desire to kill and destroy. I forgot that Philippa waited for me in the great hall. All I knew was my wrongs—the unpardonable interference in my affairs by the gray old man, the errand of the priest, the insolence of Fortini, the impudence of Villehardouin, and here Pasquini standing in my way and spitting in the grass. I saw red. I thought red. I looked upon all these creatures as rank and noisome growths that must be hewn out of my path, out of the world. As a netted lion may rage against the meshes, so raged I against these creatures. They were all about me. In truth, I was in the trap. The one way out was to cut them down, to crush them into the earth and stamp upon them.
“Very well,” I said, calmly enough, although my passion was such that my frame shook. “You first, Pasquini. And you next, de Goncourt? And at the end, de Villehardouin?”
Each nodded in turn and Pasquini and I prepared to step aside.
“Since you are in haste,” Henry Bohemond proposed to me, “and since there are three of them and three of us, why not settle it at the one time?”
“Yes, yes,” was Lanfranc’s eager cry. “Do you take de Goncourt. De Villehardouin for mine.”
But I waved my good friends back.
“They are here by command,” I explained. “It is I they desire so strongly that by my faith I have caught the contagion of their desire, so that now I want them and will have them for myself.”
I had observed that Pasquini fretted at my delay of speech-making, and I resolved to fret him further.
“You, Pasquini,” I announced, “I shall settle with in short account. I would not that you tarried while Fortini waits your companionship. You, Raoul de Goncourt, I shall punish as you deserve for being in such bad company. You are getting fat and wheezy. I shall take my time with you until your fat melts and your lungs pant and wheeze like leaky bellows. You, de Villehardouin, I have not decided in what manner I shall kill.”
And then I saluted Pasquini, and we were at it. Oh, I was minded to be rarely devilish this night. Quick and brilliant—that was the thing. Nor was I unmindful of that deceptive moonlight. As with Fortini would I settle with him if he dared the time attack. If he did not, and quickly, then I would dare it.
Despite the fret I had put him in, he was cautious. Nevertheless I compelled the play to be rapid, and in the dim light, depending less than usual on sight and more than usual on feel, our blades were in continual touch.
Barely was the first minute of play past when I did the trick. I feigned a slight slip of the foot, and, in the recovery, feigned loss of touch with Pasquini’s blade. He thrust tentatively, and again I feigned, this time making a needlessly wide parry. The consequent exposure of myself was the bait I had purposely dangled to draw him on. And draw him on I did. Like a flash he took advantage of what he deemed an involuntary exposure. Straight and true was his thrust, and all his will and body were heartily in the weight of the lunge he made. And all had been feigned on my part and I was ready for him. Just lightly did my steel meet his as our blades slithered. And just firmly enough and no more did my wrist twist and deflect his blade on my basket hilt. Oh, such a slight deflection, a matter of inches, just barely sufficient to send his point past me so that it pierced a fold of my satin doublet in passing. Of course, his body followed his rapier in the lunge, while, heart-high, right side, my rapier point met his body. And my outstretched arm was stiff and straight as the steel into which it elongated, and behind the arm and the steel my body was braced and solid.
Heart-high, I say, my rapier entered Pasquini’s side on the right, but it did not emerge, on the left, for, well- nigh through him, it met a rib (oh, man-killing is butcher’s work!) with such a will that the forcing overbalanced him, so that he fell part backward and part sidewise to the ground. And even as he fell, and ere he struck, with jerk and wrench I cleared my weapon of him.
De Goncourt was to him, but he waved de Goncourt to attend on me. Not so swiftly as Fortini did Pasquini pass. He coughed and spat, and, helped by de Villehardouin, propped his elbow under him, rested his head on hand, and coughed and spat again.
“A pleasant journey, Pasquini,” I laughed to him in my red anger. “Pray hasten, for the grass where you lie is become suddenly wet and if you linger you will catch your death of cold.”
When I made immediately to begin with de Goncourt, Bohemond protested that I should rest a space.
“Nay,” I said. “I have not properly warmed up.” And to de Goncourt, “Now will we have you dance and wheeze—Salute!”
De Goncourt’s heart was not in the work. It was patent that he fought under the compulsion of command. His play was old-fashioned, as any middle-aged man’s is apt to be, but he was not an indifferent swordsman. He was cool, determined, dogged. But he was not brilliant, and he was oppressed with foreknowledge of defeat. A score of times, by quick and brilliant, he was mine. But I refrained. I have said that I was devilish-minded. Indeed I was. I wore him down. I backed him away from the moon so that he could see little of me because I fought in my own shadow. And while I wore him down until he began to wheeze as I had predicted, Pasquini, head on hand and watching, coughed and spat out his life.
“Now, de Goncourt,” I announced finally. “You see I have you quite helpless. You are mine in any of a dozen ways. Be ready, brace yourself, for this is the way I will.”
And, so saying, I merely went from carte to tierce, and as he recovered wildly and parried widely I returned to carte, took the opening, and drove home heart-high and through and through. And at sight of the conclusion Pasquini let go his hold on life, buried his face in the grass, quivered a moment, and lay still.
“Your master will be four servants short this night,” I assured de Villehardouin, in the moment just ere we engaged.
And such an engagement! The boy was ridiculous. In what bucolic school of fence he had been taught was beyond imagining. He was downright clownish. “Short work and simple” was my judgment, while his red hair seemed a-bristle with very rage and while he pressed me like a madman.
Alas! It was his clownishness that undid me. When I had played with him and laughed at him for a handful of seconds for the clumsy boor he was, he became so angered that he forgot the worse than little fence he knew. With an arm-wide sweep of his rapier, as though it bore heft and a cutting edge, he whistled it through the air and rapped it down on my crown. I was in amaze. Never had so absurd a thing happened to me. He was wide open, and I could have run him through forthright. But, as I said, I was in amaze, and the next I knew was the pang of the entering steel as this clumsy provincial ran me through and charged forward, bull-like, till his hilt bruised my side and I was borne backward.
As I fell I could see the concern on the faces of Lanfranc and Bohemond and the glut of satisfaction in the face of de Villehardouin as he pressed me.
I was falling, but I never reached the grass. Came a blurr of flashing lights, a thunder in my ears, a darkness, a glimmering of dim light slowly dawning, a wrenching, racking pain beyond all describing, and then I heard the voice of one who said:
“I can’t feel anything.”
I knew the voice. It was Warden Atherton’s. And I knew myself for Darrell Standing, just returned across
