But the gap was filled; there were two on the top-most step, and La Follette, not only wounded in the thigh but slashed across the ribs, was giving ground.
"Be ready, La Mothe," he said. His teeth were clenched and his chest laboured heavily. "Be ready, Blaise."
"Ready," answered La Mothe, saving his breath. His heart was very bitter. The twelve minutes were seventeen, succour could not be far off, but the end had come. "Do you hear, Blaise?"
But Blaise was past hearing. While he fought with his right his maimed left hand, cut to the bones, had torn his smock open from the throat, and the hairy chest, smeared with his blood, glistened in broad drops from the sweat of his labours. In such a hilt-to-hilt struggle his ignorance was almost an advantage. He had nothing to unlearn, no rules of fence to disregard, and his peasant's strength of arm whirled aside an attack with a paralyzing power impossible to any skill. Right, left, downward swept the blade, his knees and hips half bent as he leaned forward, crouching, his left arm swinging as he swayed. Right, left, downward, his blood-drunkenness growing in savage abandonment with every minute. Yes, he was ready—ready in his own way—but past hearing.
"Damn the English," was his answer to La Mothe, his mind back in the fifty-year-old tragedy. The play was no make-believe, and he was Michel Calvet, son to Jean the sixth, the Michel whose elder brother had been coursed like a hare and killed in the open. Then his song rose afresh, but gaspingly, raucously, as if the notes tore his chest.
"'Rosalie, I love you true;
Kiss me, sweet, kiss me, sweet.
Lov'st thou me as I love you?
Kiss me, sweet, kiss me, sweet.'
"Rats," said he! "Come up, y' cur dogs, come up."
"La Mothe," breathed La Follette, "when I say Now!"
Yes, the end had come.
"Damn the English," cried Blaise hoarsely. With a mighty stroke he swept aside the opposing points, drew a choking breath, crouched lower, and, with the Dauphin's sword at the charge, he flung himself into the gap breast-forward, missed his thrust, splintered the blade against the wall, and with a wild clutch drew all within reach into his grip. For an instant they hung upon a stair-edge, then, in a writhing, floundering mass, breast to breast, breathless, half dead or dying, they rolled to the floor. From behind La Mothe heard Ursula de Vesc cry, "Oh God! pity him!" in a sob. But he dared not turn, his own blood-drunkenness fired him to the finger-tips and he lunged furiously, getting home a stroke above a point lowered in the surprise. Again there was a rush of iron-shod feet upon the stones, but a rush downward, a moment's pause below, a crossing babel of passionate, clamouring voices, insistence, denial, and yet more denial, then a silence—or what seemed a silence—a few hoarse whispers and a cry or two of pain. Yes, the end had come. In the corner stood the Dauphin and, half in front, Ursula de Vesc, her arm stretched out across his breast in the old attitude of protection. Marcel lay beside them in a faint.