“My friends,” said our mistress, who in her anger, her defiance, and her turbulence had never looked so adorable, “come to the high ground behind the table near the window. Draw your swords and play them well if you are pressed. But, as I am a person, they shall not dare to touch you. For mark it, and, your lordship’s grace, do you mark it too, if one of these knaves so much as lays a finger against the doublet of my friends, I will slay him with mine own poniard.”
To make good her speech she turned to the dwarf and said in a voice of the highest courage, “Give me your dagger, sirrah.”
Instead of obeying, the dwarf, with a vacuous grin, looked towards the duke for a direction. Before he could withdraw his gaze the countess had struck him on the cheek with the butt of the riding-whip she still bore in her hand.
“Give me your dagger, sirrah,” she repeated in a voice that was full of passion.
The dwarf, a wretched, misshapen hunchback, obeyed her with a scowl and a whimper. At the same moment there arose the measured clank of arms. The Count of Nullepart and myself, acting upon the natural instinct that directed our minds rather than upon the wisdom of our mistress which had yet bade us do so, drew our swords and climbed to the daïs.
Almost as we reached this eminence, Don Luiz came into the room with some half a dozen soldiers, whose swords were also drawn and who wore corslets of steel. At this sight a kind of haze fell across my eyes. Yet such an exaltation came upon my blood as never before had quickened it; and I gripped my weapon as though it had been the waist of a mistress, and awaited the onfall with joy.
“Behind the table, close to the wall,” said the Count of Nullepart in a soft whispering voice which yet was perfectly calm. “Farther by the left a little, that we may play better. Straight at their faces. We shall get nothing out of these plaguy breastplates.”
The Count of Nullepart also, if I am not mistaken, was fallen into my condition. I could hear the ring of joy in his voice. It would seem that here was his moment also. He too seemed to hold his blade like a lover.
As a prologue to the fray, no sooner had the soldiers entered the room and had fallen to attend the duke’s instructions than the Countess Sylvia walked on to the daïs, and in the next moment had come to stand on the table itself, with her whip in one hand, her dagger in the other, and a good sword on either side of her.
From this singular eminence she gazed with an insolent contumely upon the forces that were being marshalled against us.