"Almost I could have sworn," the galérien muttered, "that I heard his sword fall from him. That he was disarmed and therefore run through a moment later. Yet he is not wounded; there is no blood. What does it mean? That man was Walter Clarges--alive! Alive Alive! He whom I have deemed dead for months. Her husband--and alive! He must have slain him. He must. He must. He would be more than human, more than man, to spare him after all that he and she have suffered. He must have run that black treacherous heart through and through. Yet, there is no wound that I can find; no blood!"
Again and again--feeling the body all over, feeling, too, that the heart was beating beneath his hand and that there was no sign of cold or stiffness coming into that form as it lay motionless there--he was forced at last to the conclusion that, for some strange reason, Clarges had spared his bitterest foe.
"Spared him," he hissed. "Spared him. Why, why, why!" and he rose to his feet cursing Clarges for his weakness or folly. Cursing him even as he looked down and meditated on throttling the man lying there before him.
"He may spare him," he said. "I will not. My wrongs are as great, as bitter as theirs. I will have his life. Here--to-night."
He had touched with his foot, some moments before, the sword which Desparre had let fall from his nerveless hand, and the clatter of which had led him to imagine that the duke had been disarmed. Now, he picked up the weapon, tried it once against the stones, then bent over the miserable man with his arm shortened so as to drive the blade a moment later through throat and breast.
"Hellhound!" he muttered, "your hour is truly come. Devil! go to your master. You swore she should go unharmed if I would but assist you in your vengeance on him; that--that knowing I loved her--God, how I had learnt to love her! in spite of my trying to force her to marry such as you so that she might be great and powerful--she should be given back to me. Whereby we could yet have lived happy, prosperous, unmolested, together. Together! Together! And you sent her to exile and death, and me--your tool--to the galleys. Die!"
And now, he drew back his arm so as to drive the blade home. Yet, even as he did so, even before he thrust it through neck and chest, he whispered savagely. "It is too good a death, it is too easy. He is insensible from fear, he will die without pain. If there were any other way--any method----"
He paused with his eyes roaming round the street from side to side--then started. A moment afterwards he went up the steps of the house with the sword still in his hand, and peered at the numbers painted in great white figures on the door. In the dark of the summer night, in the faint light given by the blazing southern stars, he could decipher them.
"Seventy-seven," he muttered, "seventy-seven." Then paused again as though thinking deeply, his empty hand fingering his grisly, unshaven chin. "Seventy-seven. Ay! I do remember. This house was one of them. One of the first. One of the worst. 'Twill serve."
He leant the sword against the side of the porch, muttering: "He would not stab you to the heart--so--neither will I," then went slowly down the steps again, and back to where Desparre lay unmoved. After which he took both of the other's hands in his, drew them above the shoulder, and stretched the arms out to their full length, and thus hoisted the burden on his own gaunt shoulders--while bending--almost staggering at first--under the weight. Yet he kept his feet; at last he was able to straighten his back, and to stagger up the steps into the house. Here, when once in it, he let the body down to the floor of the passage and stood gasping and breathing heavily for some moments, what time he muttered to himself: