“Little Satan! …” he said aloud.
It was the last time that the words were ever to cross his lips. He cast the phial out through the open window and heard the faint splintering crash echo from the flags below.
Rockhurst had taken but a few steps down the passage, when some inexplicable impression bade him pause and glance down at his sad burden.
The light from one of the wall sconces fell full on the boy’s face: a subtle change, that was scarcely so much a quiver as a composing of all the features, was passing over it, driving away the terrible pinched look of agony and restoring something of its youthful beauty. Then Enguerrand opened his eyes and stared up into the Lord Constable’s countenance. Rockhurst had never before met those eyes but that he had found hatred in them. At this supreme moment there was no hatred, only a kind of desolate wonder. Then, even as their gaze met, the soul that seemed to seek his was gone; the eyes wondered no more.
Rockhurst stood still, an intolerable pain at his heart. It was almost as if he held his own son’s dead body on his breast. The ring of the yeoman’s halbert, the tramp of his heavy foot, roused him from the revery. He strode forward a few steps more.
“Ho, Ashby,” he called, “I have need of thee!”
“Nay, in God’s mercy,” cried the old man, drawing near, “that is never the French lad!”
He laid the halbert against the wall, and hastened to relieve his captain from the burden. Then, as he felt one of the small hands, cold and limp:—
“Dead, and dead in very surety! Why, ’tis not an hour since he passed me, singing like a swallow on the wing, and hopping for all like a squirrel.”
Very serious was the face of the King’s physician, and pale his cheek, as he lifted himself suddenly from the examination of the corpse that had been laid on my Lord Constable’s bed, in the room by the gateway.