While Walter spoke Scarlett stood impatiently tapping the table with the paper, which he had refolded.
"The request, at any rate, is nothing more than a formality," he said. "You are here alone. Your three attendant rascals are, equally with myself, in the pay of the King of France. They wait under arms at that door—"
"Under butchers' knives, say rather!" interrupted Lochinvar, scornfully.
But Scarlett paid no heed to his words.
"If you will deliver up the papers cheerfully, according to the mandate of your king, I have in my pocket a patent of nobility made out for the man who should put them into my hand at the inn of Brederode—besides the promise of pardons and restoration of heritages for all his friends and associates at present lying outside the law in Scotland and elsewhere. Think well, for much more than the present hangs upon your answer. Life and death for many others are in it!"
Wat stood still without making any answer. With his left hand he turned the dainty lace upon the cuff of his coat-sleeve carefully back. He thought vaguely of his love whom he was renouncing to go to certain death, of the friends whose pardon he was refusing. Most clearly of all he bethought him of the old tower in the midst of the Loch of Lochinvar under the heathery fell of lone Knockman. Then he looked straight at the man before him.
"Jack Scarlett," he said, "it was you who taught me how to thrust and parry. Then your hand was like steel, but your heart was not also hard as the millstone. You were not used to be a man untrue, forsworn. God knows then, at least, you were no traitor. You were no spy. You were no murderer, though a soldier of fortune. You called me a friend, and I was not ashamed of the name. I do not judge you even now. You may have one conception of loyalty to the king we both acknowledge. I have another. You are in the service of one great prince, and you are (I believe it) wholly faithful to him. Do me the honor to credit that I can be as faithful to my uniform, as careless of life, and as careful of honor in the service of my master as you would desire to be in yours."
Scarlett turned his eyes away. He felt, though he did not yet acknowledge, the extraordinary force and fervor of the appeal—delivered by Wat with red-hot energy, with a hiss in the swift words of it like that which the smith's iron gives forth when it is thrust into the cooling caldron.
Wat turned full upon him. The two men stood eye to eye, with only the breadth of the table between them.
"Look you, Scarlett," Lochinvar said again, without waiting for his reply. "You are the finest swordsman in the world; I am but your pupil; yet here and now I will fight you to the death for the papers if you will promise to draw off your men and give me free passage from this place should I kill you or have you at my mercy. But I warn you that you will have to kill me without any mercy in order to get the documents from me."