"Sir . . . you dare . . ."
"Nay! we'll not quarrel. I don't want to do you any hurt. You know from experience that I could kill you or wring your neck as easily as you could kill a child; but Mlle. Crystal's love is like a protecting shield all round you, so I'll not touch you again. But don't ask me to measure my words, for that is beyond my power. Take the money, M. de St. Genis, and earn not only the King's gratitude but also Mlle. Crystal's, which is far better worth having. And now, I pray you, leave me to rest. You must be tired too. And our mutual company hath become irksome to us both."
He turned his back on St. Genis and sat down at the table, drawing paper, pen and inkhorn toward him, and with clumsy, left hand began laboriously to form written characters, as if St. Genis' presence or departure no longer concerned him.
An importunate beggar could not have been more humiliatingly dismissed. St. Genis had flushed to the very roots of his hair. He would have given much to be able to chastise the insolent Englishman then and there. But the latter had not boasted when he said that he could wring Maurice's neck as easily with his left hand as with his right, and Maurice within his heart was bound to own that the boast was no idle one. He knew that in a hand-to-hand fight he was no match for that heavy-framed, hard-fisted product of a fog-ridden land.
He would not trust himself to speak any more, lest another word cause prudence to yield to exasperation. Another moment of hesitation, a shrug of the shoulders—perhaps a muttered curse or two—and St. Genis picked up one by one the wallets from the table.
Clyffurde never looked up while he did so: he continued to form awkward, illegible characters upon the paper before him, as if his very life depended on being able to write with his left hand.
The next moment St. Genis had walked rapidly out of the room. Bobby left off writing, threw down his pen, and resting his elbow upon the table and his head in his hand, he remained silent and motionless while St. Genis' quick and firm footsteps echoed first along the corridor, then down the creaking stairs and finally on the floor below. After which there came the sound of the opening and shutting of a door, the dragging of a chair across a wooden floor, and nothing more.
All was still in the house at last. The old-fashioned clock downstairs struck half-past two.
With a smothered cry of angry contempt Clyffurde seized on the papers that lay scattered on the table and crushed them up in his hand with a gesture of passionate wrath.
Then he strode up to the window, threw open the rickety casement and let the pure cold air of night pour into the room and dissipate the atmosphere of cowardice, of falsehood and of unworthy love that still seemed to hang there where M. le Marquis de St. Genis had basely bargained for his own ends, and outraged the very name of Love by planning base deeds in its name.