However, as the game continued, the animal, who was just beginning to feel his teeth, showed them several times in silence, and, considering that he was attacked, felt for the first time in his life the instinct of hatred of man.
With his eye on fire, muscles tense, hair erect and quivering, he was concealed from D'Alvimar by the colossal trunk of the yew, where he watched for a favorable moment, and suddenly sprang out and tried to seize him by the throat.
He would have wounded him at least, if he had not strangled him, had he not been thrown back by a vigorous kick from Lucilio, which sent him rolling over and over along the ground.
The sudden interruption of the music, and the plaintive sound made by the bagpipe as the artist dropped it, caused Lauriane to turn hastily. Entirely ignorant of what was taking place, she ran up in time to see D'Alvimar, frantic with rage, disemboweling the beast with his knife.
He performed that act of reprisal with all the heat of revenge. It was easy to read on his pale face and in his bloodshot eye the profound and incomprehensible joy that he felt in having something to murder.
Thrice he buried the blade in the throbbing entrails, and at the sight of blood his lips contracted with an expression of voluptuous pleasure, while Lauriane, trembling from head to foot, pressed Lucilio's arms with both hands, saying in a low voice:
"Look! look! Cæsar Borgia! it is he in person!"
Lucilio, who had often seen at Rome the portrait painted by Raphael, was even better able to appreciate the resemblance, and nodded his head to indicate that he was deeply impressed by it.
"How now, monsieur?" said the young woman, deeply moved, to the triumphant Spaniard; "do you think that you are in the heart of the forest, and do you expect to make yourself agreeable to me by presenting me with the head or the claws of a creature that I have fed with my own hands, and that I was caressing before you a moment ago? For shame! you are not civil; and with that bloody knife in your hand, you look more like a butcher than a gentleman!"
Lauriane was angry; she had no other feeling now for the stranger than one of aversion.