“Well met … Little Satan!”
Enguerrand had been holding his passion upon a frail leash. With a bound it now leaped. This man, by whom, at their first meeting in Whitehall, he had conceived himself, in his hypersensitive French punctilio of vanity, to have been slighted, and who had treated him from the height of his crushing superiority, who had thwarted and humiliated him, robbed him (as he held) of his sister and his preferment at one swoop—how dare he now address him in this tone of contemptuous familiarity? It was well met at last, indeed! The moment he had dreamed of, sleeping or waking, these two months was within his grasp!
“My lord,” he cried still more shrilly, “his Majesty’s familiar name for me, on any other lips becomes a liberty, an insolence! An insolence, sir, a liberty I will not permit!”
To his mortification he found himself trembling from head to foot. For an appreciable moment Rockhurst ran his glance up and down the slight figure. Then he made answer; and the indifference, the placidity, of his manner was inconceivably galling:—
“True—I should not usurp his Majesty’s great privileges. But, pray, let me pass, Vidame—I have business with Master Sergeant Stafford, and I am already late, I fear, for my tryst.”
“Nay, milord, you shall not pass!—My lord, this is my tryst. It has been your pleasure to heap injuries on me, and on more than one score you owe me redress. We meet, at last, oh, at last! upon ground where the royal ordinance no longer stands between us. My Lord Viscount Rockhurst—” He was feverishly stripping his glove from his left hand as he spoke; but the Lord Constable, with a single gesture, swept him and his argument from the path with no more emotion than that of a man who rids himself of an importunate fly. With the same measured step he then resumed his course up the garden alley.
For a second the Vidame stood, staring after him, paralysed with rage. A faint snigger—of mingled relief and amusement—from the watcher on the bench started him to fresh action, as the prick of the spur starts the mettled horse. In a couple of leaps he had overtaken the stately figure, and Sir Paul Farrant wheeled round to gaze after the pair, astonishment as much as prudence keeping him rooted to his place. Enguerrand dashed the glove at Lord Rockhurst’s feet. The first impulse had aimed it at the face; but something stronger than himself, which the while only increased his fury, prevented the youth from offering this supreme insult to one whom years and honours and personal dignity placed apart even in the King’s presence.
“My lord, you—because I am a stranger, because I am, forsooth, young enough to be your son (à Dieu ne plaise!), you imagine you can treat me at your will and pleasure; insult me at your mood.… I stand, however, a man before you, my Lord Constable—with a name as good as yours. I demand my satisfaction.… My lord, I charge you, defend yourself!”
The young heart beat so fast, rose so high in his throat, that the words pulsed from his lips in jerks, broken with quick breaths. He drew his rapier with an almost frenzied gesture as he spoke; dashing baldrick and scabbard on one side; falling back to swing the blade with dire menace and then springing forward again, high-poised, tiptoe, only the elementary rules of honour keeping him from assault until his enemy should have likewise unsheathed.
A second or two, marked by the lad’s panting, Lord Rockhurst fixed him through half-closed eyelids. Then, without a word, with a dexterous, irresistible, upstroke of his cane, he knocked the weapon from the fierce hand. The springy steel fell and bounded like a live thing on the flagged path, to drop again, quivering, close to Rockhurst, who, with a lightning swiftness unexpected from one of such majestic bearing, instantly clapped his foot upon it.