“Suit me! Why, sir, nothing could suit me better,” rejoined Blakeney with his pleasant laugh. “Zounds! but I call it marvellous... demmed marvellous... I wonder now,” he added blandly, “what made you think of the Angelus?”
Everyone laughed at this, a little irrelevantly perhaps.
“Ah!” continued Blakeney gaily, “I remember now.... Faith! to think that I was nigh forgetting that when last you and I met, sir, you had just taken or were about to take Holy Orders.... Ah! how well the thought of the Angelus fits in with your clerical garb.... I recollect that the latter was mightily becoming to you, sir...”
“Shall we proceed to settle the conditions of the fight, Sir Percy?” said Chauvelin, interrupting the flow of his antagonist's gibes, and trying to disguise his irritation beneath a mask of impassive reserve.
“The choice of weapons you mean,” here interposed His Royal Highness, “but I thought that swords had already been decided on.”
“Quite so, your Highness,” assented Blakeney, “but there are various little matters in connection with this momentous encounter which are of vast importance.... Am I not right, Monsieur?... Gentlemen, I appeal to you.... Faith! one never knows... my engaging opponent here might desire that I should fight him in green socks, and I that he should wear a scarlet flower in his coat.”
“The Scarlet Pimpernel, Sir Percy?”
“Why not, Monsieur? It would look so well in your buttonhole, against the black of the clerical coat, which I understand you sometime affect in France... and when it is withered and quite dead you would find that it would leave an overpowering odour in your nostrils, far stronger than that of incense.”
There was general laughter after this. The hatred which every member of the French revolutionary government—including, of course, ex-Ambassador Chauvelin—bore to the national hero was well known.
“The conditions then, Sir Percy,” said Chauvelin, without seeming to notice the taunt conveyed in Blakeney's last words. “Shall we throw again?”