Jealous for the honour of his Lord, Juden, who had worked himself into a very becoming fit of passion, had watched with kindling eyes and half-drawn sword, the various turns of the combat, and now, on beholding the master whom he loved as though he had been his own and only son, driven backward, breathless and exhausted, and in danger of being compelled to yield or die, he could no longer restrain himself, but rushed upon Walter, and pinioned his arms, exclaiming,—
"Now, my Lord, now! put your bilbo through his brisket. Devil's murrain on you, Randal, strike for Clermont, or never strike again!"
Surprise, for an instant, kept mute the shout of shame which rose to every lip; and Walter struggled furiously with the stout old butler. The eyes of Clermistonlee glared malignantly, and twice he raised his long sharp rapier for a deadly thrust, and twice he lowered its point. Walter's life seemed to hang by a hair, and how the fray might have ended, it is impossible to say; but just when Jack Holster, by a blow of his hunting whip, levelled Juden on the pavement, Lord Mersington came running with a remarkably unsteady gait, out of Blair's coffee-house, with his senatorial robes gathered about his waist, his wig awry, in one hand a roll of interlocutors, in the other a wine-flagon, which, in the hurry, he had forgotten to leave behind him.
"Haud, ye loons! haud, in the sacred name of the King!" he exclaimed, throwing him self boldly between them. "This is breaking the peace o' the burgh—clean contrary to the act saxteenth James Sext, whilk ordains that nae man shall fight, or provoke another to the combat, under pain of death, and escheat o' moveable gudes and gear. What, is it you, Clermistonlee—hee, hee, hee! ye born gomeral, to be brawling like a wild Redshank on the plainstanes in open day? Come, come, gossip, this will never do. Stand back, I charge ye baith in the sacred name of his Majesty the King!"
"My lord of Mersington, I am the best judge of my own conduct," replied his friend, fiercely.
"But one far owre lenient—hee, hee! I am legally constituted judge and justiciar baith o' the haill country; or up wi' your rapiers, gallants, or I shall commit you, Randal, to the iron room of the Tolbooth, and this braw spark o' Dunbarton's to the water-hole, whilk being fifteen feet below the causeway, is a fine place for cooling hot spirits."
Mersington's efforts were unavailing, for he was a man whom few respected. Jack Holster and Craigdarroch pulled him back very unceremoniously by his scarlet robes; for which he thrust his roll of papers into the face of one, and hurled the wine-pot at the head of the other.
Again the rapiers clashed together; but at that juncture Baillie Jaffroy, a portly magistrate, the curve of whose round paunch was finely delineated by his braided coat of purple broadcloth, and its front row of vast horn buttons, displaying his gold chain (the badge of civic power), rushed with a party of the Lord High Constable's guard from the lobby of the Parliament House, and bearing back the crowd with levelled partisans, separated the combatants.
Neither of them were arrested.
Clermistonlee, followed by Juden (who had acquired a black eye and broken head), retired suddenly into the lower council chamber, where the baillie, in dread of such a formidable personage, could not follow, and therefore turned the whole torrent of his magisterial wrath and indignation upon Walter Fenton, as being, he well knew, less able to withstand them. But Douglas of Finland, Gavin of Gavin, Holsterlee, and other military gallants, with drawn swords, carried him off triumphantly to Hugh Blair's famous establishment at the pillars, from whence, on the dispersion of the crowd, he rejoined Lilian: and so ended the last single combat witnessed in the high-street of Edinburgh.