To Lemprière the morning carried no impression save that life was well worth living. No agitation passed across his nerves, no apprehension reached his mind. He had no imagination; he loved the things that his eyes saw because they filled him with enjoyment; but why they were, or whence they came, or what they meant or boded, never gave him meditation. A vast epicurean, a consummate egotist, ripe with feeling and rich with energy, he could not believe that when he spoke the heavens would not fall. The stinging sweetness of the morning was a tonic to all his energies, an elation to his mind; he swaggered through the lush grasses and boskage as though marching to a marriage.
Leicester, on his part, no more caught at the meaning of the morning, at the long whisper of enlivened nature, than did his foe. The day gave to him no more than was his right. If the day was not fine, then Leicester was injured; but if the day was fine, then Leicester had his due. Moral blindness made him blind for the million deep teachings trembling round him. He felt only the garish and the splendid. So it was that at Kenilworth, where his Queen had visited him, the fêtes that he had held would far outshine the fête which would take place in Greenwich Park on this May Day. The fête of this May Day would take place, but would he see it? The thought flashed through his mind that he might not; but he trod it underfoot; not through an inborn, primitive egotism like that of Lemprière, but through an innate arrogance, an unalterable belief that fate was ever on his side. He had played so many tricks with fate, had mocked while taking its gifts so often, that, like the son who has flouted his indulgent father through innumerable times, he conceived that he should never be disinherited. It irked him that he should be fighting with a farmer, as he termed the seigneur of the Jersey isle; but there was in the event, too, a sense of relief, for he had a will for murder. Yesterday’s events were still fresh in his mind; and he had a feeling that the letting of Lemprière’s blood would cool his own and be some cure for the choler which the presence of these strangers at the court had wrought in him.
There were better swordsmen in England than he, but his skill was various, and he knew tricks of the trade which this primitive Norman could never have learned. He had some touch of wit, some biting observation, and, as he neared the place of the encounter, he played upon the coming event with a mordant frivolity. Not by nature a brave man, he was so much a fatalist, such a worshipper of his star, that he had acquired an artificial courage which had served him well. The unschooled gentlemen with him roared with laughter at his sallies, and they came to the place of meeting as though to a summer feast.
“Good-morrow, nobility,” said Leicester, with courtesy overdone, and bowing much too low.
“Good-morrow, valentine,” answered Lemprière, flushing slightly at the disguised insult and rising to the moment.
“I hear the crop of fools is short this year in Jersey, and through no fault of yours—you’ve done your best most loyally,” jeered Leicester, as he doffed his doublet, his gentlemen laughing in derision.
“’Tis true enough, my lord, and I have come to find new seed in England, where are fools to spare; as I trust in Heaven one shall be spared on this very day for planting yonder.”
He was eaten with rage, but he was cool and steady. He was now in his linen and small-clothes, and looked like some untrained Hercules.
“Well said, nobility,” laughed Leicester, with an ugly look. “’Tis seed-time—let us measure out the seed. On guard!”
Never were two men such opposites, never two so seemingly ill-matched. Leicester’s dark face and its sardonic look, his lithe figure, the nervous strength of his bearing, were in strong contrast to the bulking breadth, the perspiring robustness of Lemprière of Rozel. It was not easy of belief that Lemprière should be set to fight this matadore of a fighting court. But there they stood, Lemprière’s face with a great-eyed gravity looming above his rotund figure like a moon above a purple cloud. But huge and loose though the seigneur’s motions seemed, he was as intent as though there were but two beings in the universe, Leicester and himself. A strange alertness seemed to be upon him, and, as Leicester found when the swords crossed, he was quicker than his bulk gave warrant. His perfect health made his vision sure; and, though not a fine swordsman, he had done much fighting in his time, had been ever ready for the touch of steel, and had served some warlike days in fighting France, where fate had well befriended him. That which Leicester meant should be by-play of a moment became a full half-hour’s desperate game. Leicester found that the thrust—the fatal thrust learned from an Italian master—he meant to give was met by a swift precision, responding to quick vision. Again and again he would have brought the end, but Lemprière heavily foiled him. The wound which the seigneur got at last, meant to be mortal, was saved from that by the facility of a quick apprehension.