“I tell you that it is true!” cried the latter, his voice breaking on a high note of rage. “I denounce them—I spit on them—enemies of the nation—aristocrats——”
“Prove it!” said Gilbert sternly, grasping the back of his chair as a possible weapon. “You cannot!”
A positive yell of triumph and malice escaped the little man, and plucking something white from his breast he turned it about for a second feverishly, and then held out to his allies a fine lawn handkerchief with a tiny coronet in the corner.
“It is his!” he cried, pointing to Louis. “He cannot deny it. It was under the table by his foot . . . and look at it, my friends!”
The taller man snatched it from him. “It is true!” he cried with an oath. “No one but a ci-devant carries a handkerchief like that!”
Louis got leisurely up, his eyes dancing. “Ah, my friend,” he said softly, “there are so many ci-devants nowadays. You no doubt are a ci-devant scavenger or something of the sort, and the gentleman at the end of the table——”
His voice was drowned in the hubbub that ensued, as the individual in question, screaming “Arrest them!” flung himself towards Louis. There was the table between them, but the young man’s fist, shooting out like lightning, caught him between the eyes, and he staggered back, to subside upon the hearthstone. Ere he reached it the shorter of the two card-players was wrestling bodily with the Marquis, who had not space to use his chair. The other was crouching in the dusky corner near the window with the evident intention of taking Gilbert in the rear. Suddenly Château-Foix forced his vociferating foe downwards and backwards over the table, and at this the man in the corner sprang forward.
“Take care! he’s coming on you from behind!” shouted Louis, and he leapt from his own entrenched position between the table and the wall and rushed between them. In a second he was sent spinning out of the way, to be brought up by the centre table, over which he fell with a crash. But he had defeated the enemy’s design. Hurling his beaten opponent on to the ground the Marquis snatched up the scarcely-tasted bottle of wine by his plate and broke it fair and full across the head of his new assailant. The man collapsed groaning at his feet, and with his fall the coast was clear. The woman had fled long ago.
“Come on, Louis!” shouted Gilbert to his cousin, who was rather dizzily picking himself up from the debris of cards and shattered plates. “No—not by the door—the window!”
He had the casement open in an instant; the drop was barely five feet. Louis scrambled after him, and the Marquis, guided by instinct rather than by sight, hurried through a little orchard, a paddock, over a brook, through a meagre hedge, and, bearing always to the left, and away from Sillé-le-Guillaume, was forced at last to emerge into the high-road.