Then the whole precincts of the garden, it seemed, were filled with the thunder of his voice:—
“Malapert…!” The Lord Constable’s brows were now drawn over his keen eyes in a withering frown. “This cane of mine should teach your youthship better manners were it not for this same strangerhood of yours, on which you thus presume! Aye, and you should have remembered this day, even with stripes, but that some freak of your Maker’s hath given you, graceless lad as you are, Vidame, a singular look of my own gracious son. For his so sweet sake … thou varlet … I spare thee. Yet will this hour have taught thee that his Majesty’s officers are not to be molested with impunity—that the Page of the Wine Flagon can have no satisfaction to demand of the King’s Lord Constable, what though his petty vanity may be a-smarting from some imagined slights.—Slights, quotha! Young master,—there can be no slights from me to you…! And for this insolence of yours to me, take you home this memento.”
With another of his startlingly sudden movements, Rockhurst stooped for the hilt of the sword that lay bent under his foot; and snapped the blade in twain, with as much ease as one may snap a twig. Tossing the hilt back at the Vidame’s feet, he went on—and it seemed that his anger had but gathered in intensity with the action:—
“Hang yonder stump of steel in your bedchamber: it may serve to remind you of a fruitful lesson learned in the Temple Gardens—how the satisfaction fit for a pert page’s receiving is a sound whipping, and how you, of my mercy, escaped receiving it!”
He stepped from the broken blade, passed the boy’s rigid figure so closely and indifferently as to brush him with his cloak, and set his deliberate way again toward the Temple Hall.
The Vidame stood stricken with impotent passion, sick well-nigh to swooning with the violence of his fury in conflict with his complete helplessness; white as wax, his boyish face distorted, his eyes blood-injected, swimming in tears; a white foam at the corners of his mouth, his lips drawn back in voiceless execration. The nails of his clenched hands drove themselves into the flesh. It was not until Paul Farrant rose and laid his hand on his shoulder that the palsy was broken.
The Vidame shook the touch furiously from him. His bloodshot eyes rolled from the broken weapon on the path to the other’s face, on which a malicious pleasure in his successful friend’s mortification was but ill concealed by a scarcely more tolerable air of sympathy. Had it not been for the mutilation of his weapon, Paul Farrant’s life’s blood might well have assuaged the Frenchman’s ecstasy of hatred at that moment.
Then the floodgates were loosed. Foaming, the tide of passion leaped from Enguerrand’s mouth with an eloquence that betrayed his race. Usually silent, the Vidame de Joncelles, encompassed with an almost northern reserve, yet was through his mother a child of the south; and at this hour all the exuberance of the warm land, all the acrid passion that only its children can feel and which, felt, must find word expression, broke from him in torrents of imprecations and curses, half French, half English:—
“Go thy way, then, my merry Rockhurst—go, Rakehell Rockhurst! Ha, Rakehell thou mayst be, but forget not then that I am Little Satan, and you but the servant of my Great Father!… Go thy way, sanctimonious hypocrite, you of the grave face and grey-sprinkled hair, hoary in corruption! You, put me out of your path…! My hour will come, my hour will come, my hour will come! Faugh! I spit at thee; my clean blade was too fair for thee, thou coward, thou bully, hiding behind thy state and thy years…! And that prate of paternity! I, like thy son?… Had I within my veins a drop of thy coward, hateful blood, I’d drain them and die laughing that I was rid of thee! Look at the great man…! Look! Watch the reverend seigneur! See how yonder wretches make way for my Lord Constable!—My Lord Coward!… Look you, Sir Paul, is it not an admirable spectacle? The King’s friend, the mighty in council, the example to the Court! Hi, my Lord Rockhurst—Hi, thou pattern of nobility—what of my sister, what of Jeanne de Mantes?… And afraid to fight the brother! Look, look, friends! Ha, he’s old enough to be my father, and my sister—’tis his boast! I, like his son, forsooth? And my sister has but a year of life more than mine! O, que l’âge a ses privilèges! Oh, how that paternal heart beats to high thoughts! Curse thee, burn thee, drown thee … coward!”
Stragglers in the garden, attracted by the wild clamours, had now begun to gather. Up the slimy steps, from the ’Friars, like obscene beasts venturing furtively from their lairs, the frowzy, arrogant heads of thieving bullies,—“Knights of the Posts” and “Copper Captains,”—scenting a profitable quarrel, began to emerge. And these were shadowed by dismal shapes of womanhood, such as in those haunts were never far from the scenes of strife, like to the hovering carrion bird.