"Domine, percutimus in gladio?" rang through his mind. "Lord, shall we smite with the sword?"
Hamilton seemed to make answer to this with a dazzling display of skill. The rapiers sang a strange song above the sleeping girl, a lullaby with coruscations of death in every keen note.
Father Beret was thinking of Alice. His brain, playing double, calculated with lightning swiftness the chances and movements of that whirlwind rush of fight, while at the same time it swept through a retrospect of all the years since Alice came into his life. How he had watched her grow and bloom; how he had taught her, trained her mind and soul and body to high things, loved her with a fatherly passion unbounded, guarded her from the coarse and lawless influences of her surroundings. Like the tolling of an infinitely melancholy bell, all this went through his breast and brain, and, blending with a furious current of whatever passions were deadly dangerous in his nature, swept as a storm bearing its awful force into his sword-arm.
The Englishman was a lion, the priest a gladiator. The stars aloft in the vague, dark, yet splendid, amphitheater were the audience. It was a question. Would the thumbs go down or up? Life and death held the chances even; but it was at the will of Heaven, not of the stars. "Hoc habet" must follow the stroke ordered from beyond the astral clusters and the dusky blue.
Hamilton pressed, nay rushed, the fight with a weight and at a pace which could not last. But Father Beret withstood him so firmly that he made no farther headway; he even lost some ground a moment later.
"You damned Jesuit hypocrite!" he snarled; "you lowest of a vile brotherhood of liars!"
Then he rushed again, making a magnificent show of strength, quickness and accuracy. The sparks hissed and crackled from the rasping and ringing blades.
Father Beret was, in truth, a Jesuit, and as such a zealot; but he was not a liar or a hypocrite. Being human, he resented an insult. The saintly spirit in him was strong, yet not strong enough to breast the indignation which now dashed against it. For a moment it went down.
"Liar and scoundrel yourself!" he retorted, hoarsely forcing the words out of his throat. "Spawn of a beastly breed!"
Hamilton saw and felt a change pass over the spirit of the old priest's movements. Instantly the sword leaping against his own seemed endowed with subtle cunning and malignant treachery. Before this it had been difficult enough to meet the fine play and hold fairly even; now he was startled and confused; but he rose to the emergency with admirable will power and cleverness.