The sailors in whose grasp were Antonia and her guest had drawn their knives, and were prepared for an affray à l’outrance. The two seamen in the boat carried sheath-knives at least. He could not but admit to himself, grinding his teeth the while, that he had the hazard of beholding his love torn from her home by the rude hands of lawless men, or of dying vainly in her defence.
To this latter alternative, could it but avert her peril, he was willing, nay anxious, to yield himself. But if—if only a short respite could be gained—even now—the issue was uncertain. His resolution was taken.
‘Stop your men, Count, while we parley,’ he said, ‘or, by the God above us, you shall shoot me down the next second, and I tear the false heart out of your breast, if you miss. Choose!’ And he stepped forward in the face of the levelled weapon.
‘You are mat, like every dummer Englander, I pelief,’ said the nineteenth-century buccaneer. ‘Why should I not kill you for your insults to my honour? But I revrain. I would not meddle with the Fräulein Frankstein—she dell you herselve, but she try to rop me of my shpirit-star—my schatz—bromised prite—I presend her to you. I know your sendimend for her. I make you my complimend. Her dempers is angelig.’
Here the Count wreathed his face into such a smile as the companion of Faust may have worn when Marguerite implores the Mater Dolorosa, and spoke rapidly with commanding gesture to his myrmidons, who released their hold upon Miss Frankston. But Antonia still clung with desperate tenacity to the cold hands, the corpse-like form of Harriet Folleton.
‘You see she is obstinade—to the death,’ said the Count, whose moustache seemed to curl with wrath. ‘It is not her affair, or yours; go in beace, gross not my path more furder.’
‘I cannot abandon Miss Folleton, nor will Antonia,’ said Mr. Neuchamp, raising his voice so as to drown a peculiar crackling noise in the shrubbery which his ear had caught. ‘Do you go in peace, Von Schätterheims? Wrong not further the kind hearts that have trusted you; betray not hospitality free and open as ever man received. I will return with both, or not at all.’
‘Then die, fool!’ hissed the Count, as he raised his weapon and fired full at the head of Ernest Neuchamp, who at the same moment rushed in and closed, while his blood flowed freely from a wound in the forehead, and ensanguined his adversary as they grappled in deadly conflict.
The accuracy of the Count’s aim, faultless and unerring in gallery practice, or at the poupée, of which he could drill heart, head, or limb, five times out of six, may or may not have been shaken by the sudden apparition of Jack Windsor, or by the portentous yell which that gentleman emitted, worthy of Piambook or Boinmaroo, as he observed the Count in the act of firing at the sacred head of his benefactor.
Too late to interpose with effect as he stood on a block of sandstone overlooking the scene of conflict, he raised his voice in one of the half-Indian cries with which the horsemen of the Central Desert are wont to intimidate the unwilling herd at the stockyard-gates. The sailors started and gazed with astonishment as Mr. Windsor sprang recklessly from his elevated post, and cleared the rough declivity with a succession of bounds, emulating, not unworthily, the hard-pressed ‘flyer’ of his country’s forests when the grim gazehounds are close on haunch and flank.