“I suppose you don’t wish to preserve this?” he remarked, and, ripping up the drenched shirt-sleeve, examined the injury. In the outer side of the Marquis de Kersaint’s forearm, midway between wrist and elbow, was a small round aperture, from which the blood was welling in a stream so steady as to suggest that it would never cease.
“The ball is still there, of course,” observed its sender, absorbed in his examination. “Otherwise——” He came to an abrupt pause, suddenly realising by how very little his messenger of death had fallen short of its goal.
“Otherwise it would be in my heart, you were going to say,” finished the Marquis with composure.
“Perhaps it was stopped by one of the bones,” muttered de Brencourt, avoiding his eye. “I expect there is a breakage, as you say. . . . However, I had best tie it up as quickly as possible. I shall need your handkerchief as well as mine—perhaps your scarf too. It is bleeding like a fountain.”
Carefully as a surgeon, and with something of a surgeon’s dispassionate interest, he staunched and bandaged the injury which he himself had made—no bad exemplar, at that moment, of what there was gallant and chivalrous in a practice which had little enough to commend it.
“So there was only one shot after all,” observed M. de Kersaint presently. “Did you mean to kill me, Comte?”
M. de Brencourt, tightening the last knot, looked at him with an odd expression. “Yes,” he replied.
“I thought so,” returned the Marquis coolly. “I am afraid, then, that this must have been somewhat of a disappointment. You take it very well. It was the moonlight, I suppose? In many ways I should have been glad of your success.”
A dark flush ran over his opponent’s face. He made no reply, and laying down the bandaged arm gently on its possessor’s knee, began to scrub at his own bloody hands with a frond of bracken. When he had got them comparatively clean he threw it away, got up from his knees, took a turn or two and came back.
“Marquis,” he said, rather stiffly, “I aimed as well as I could. Evidently it was not to be. . . . And now, if you will allow me, I should like to take back the term I applied to you this evening. It is not applicable—and I do not think that I ever believed it was. But I meant you to fight me. You can guess why . . . and we need not go into what is done with. . . . And now that we have met, and blood has flowed—and I sincerely regret, as I said, that it should be yours alone——” He stopped.