"Kindly leave the room, Claggett," he went on, in too quiet a voice to be otherwise than poisonous, "until you are more yourself. Your conduct and tone are unbecoming to a gentleman," Osterbridge said, with his head held high in disdainful dignity.
They were an extraordinary sight. The shaven-headed, clay-faced pirate looming so high and so huge in the doorway that he filled it altogether, his clothes torn, filthy and stained from the battle and from careless weeks at sea. His companion was a travesty of his onetime elegance, dirty lace ruffles spotted by forgotten meals, his velvet coat marked by chairbacks and soiled from months of constant wear, his hair unwashed and sleazily caught back, no longer curled with a fine exactitude. Both men had been housed together for too long. Long ago they had exhausted all topics of conversation, their two difficult personalities had for months been festering, each at the sight of the other.
Now Claggett Chew ground out between his clenched teeth: "You are a fool, Osterbridge. Have always been one and will so remain. Do you defy me and do not give up that bird, as hell is my witness I shall snatch it from you with this whip, and nothing shall stop me!"
Osterbridge reached behind him with his right hand, holding the parakeet in an increasingly uncomfortable and tightening grip in his left. On the wall behind him hung his rapier in its scabbard, delicately incised and showing the fine workmanship of its French origin. With a quick, deft movement, Osterbridge's fingers had found the hilt and drawn the rapier out, his face snarling, his eyes expressionless. They were fixed on Claggett Chew who had not moved from where he leaned against the side of the doorway.
Osterbridge Hawsey's voice was almost more frightening when he spoke again than Claggett Chew's, as he slowly brought the rapier to his side with quiet calculated gestures.
"I have had enough of your ordering, Claggett. You may order your scurvy men about as you wish—half-wits, rascals, thieves and murderers who know no better than to do your bidding, knowing they may well die by your hands as by some other. But you have met your match. I, Osterbridge Hawsey, shall not give in to a madman and a murdering pillager. How I ever came to join you or your pirates God alone knows, but you shall not govern me! Nor shall you have one object that is my own! En garde!" he cried, whisking out the rapier.
As he did so—such is the force and training of habit—his left hand automatically came up in the first position of the fencer and the duelist, and as it came up and the fingers slackened about the parakeet, the long whip lashed out and curled around Osterbridge Hawsey's hand. The parakeet ducked into encircling fingers, Osterbridge Hawsey let out a piercing scream, more of rage than of pain, and opened his hand. The parakeet, liberated, flew straight into the face of the man with the whip, pecking at it with its sharp beak, scratching at it with his pin-like claws, and beating its wings in such confusing fury that the pirate bobbed his head. At the same time the big man stepped backward, throwing up his left arm in an attempt either to catch the bird or drive it off.
But the bird's attack lasted for only a moment. Then, as Claggett Chew's fingers grasped at it, the parakeet was off over his shoulder and lost in the din and obscurity of the battle. Behind it it heard the cries of hatred and rage as the pirate and Osterbridge Hawsey faced one another in the cabin to fight with whip and sword amid the crash of overturned tables and chairs and the splintering crack of the lamp and the windowpanes.