'You are wasting time,' the Duke admonished him. 'In a moment I shall loose the dogs. Be off while you may, and if you are fleet enough, your heels may save your throat.' But he laughed slobberingly over the words, which were merely intended to befool the wretched victim with a false hope that should stimulate him to afford amusement.
Bellarion, white-faced, with such a terror in his soul as he had never known and should never know again in whatever guise he should find death confronting him, turned at last, and broke wildly, instinctively, into a run towards the wood. The Duke's bestial laughter went after him, before he had covered twenty yards and before the dogs had been loosed. His manhood, his human dignity, rose in revolt, conquering momentarily even his blind terror. He checked and swung round. Not another yard would he run to give sport to that pink-and-silver monster.
The Duke, seeing himself thus in danger of being cheated, swore at him foully.
'He'll run fast enough, highness, when I loose the dogs,' growled Squarcia.
'Let go, then.'
As Bellarion stood there, the breeze ruffling the hair about his neck, the hounds bounded forward. His senses swam, a physical nausea possessed him. Yet, through swooning reason, he resolved to offer no resistance so that this horror might be the sooner ended. They would leap for his throat, he knew, and so that he let them have their way, it would speedily be done.
He closed his eyes. He groaned. 'Jesus!' And then his lips began to shape a prayer, the first that occurred to him, mechanically almost: 'In manus tuas, Domine ...'
The dogs had reached him. But there was no impact. The eager, furious leaps with which they started had fallen to a sedate and hesitating approach. They sniffed the air, and, at close quarters now, they crouched down, nosing him, their bellies trailing in the grass, their heavy tails thumping the ground, in an attitude of fawning submission.
There were cries of amazement from the ducal party. Amazement filled the soul of Bellarion as he looked down upon those submissive dogs, and he sought to read the riddle of their behaviour, thought, indeed, of divine intervention, such as that by which the saints of God had at times been spared from the inhumanities of men.
And this, too, was the thought of more than one of the spectators. It was the thought of the brutal Squarcia, who, rising from the half-kneeling attitude in which he had remained, now crossed himself mechanically.