Herriard felt a sharp prick at his breast and struggled desperately to keep the deadly hand away. He could not have believed that Gastineau was so strong: his arms, wrists, fingers were like joints of steel; while the spirit that governed their movement, their efforts, with deadly purpose, seemed ten times stronger than his own incentive to self-preservation.
It was that fierce vigour of mind that made the struggle equal; the body that for years had lain half dead a match now for a younger man who had never known ill-health. And to Herriard the wrestle was complicated by reason of the sharp weapon that each man was trying to force in an opposite direction; all Gastineau’s vicious energy was concentrated towards getting his right hand free to strike. It was a strange encounter, carried on, fierce as it was, almost without noise: indeed there was none, save the heavy breathing of the two adversaries. By sheer weight Gastineau had been forced to the wall, against which he was held struggling quietly with a planned reason for every movement he made. With him was no waste of energy; only against Herriard’s greater strength he could not work his will. But on Herriard’s part the struggle, fierce in its terrible intensity, was but a mechanical effort at self-defence. What was to be the end of it? What did it, must it, portend? If, that was, he got the better of his enemy; if it went the other way, the end was certain enough. In a few minutes he would be a dead man, and no soul on earth the wiser as to whence his death-blow had come. There were but the muscles of his arm between him and extinction. The thought nerved him; he tightened his grip on Gastineau, casting about for an effectual means of wresting from him the weapon, a long, tapering stiletto, used for piercing documents, which had lain on the writing table. It seemed as though, if he tried, he could turn it and drive it into the evil heart, to the world’s advantage. If it came to that——
Suddenly Gastineau seemed to collapse, the tension of his muscles relaxed, his legs gave way, Herriard was supporting rather than restraining him now. There was a strange, fixed, unfathomable expression in Gastineau’s eyes as he hung forwards, helplessly, it seemed: only held up by Herriard’s grip. He could have sent him out of the world then; and just because he realized how easy it would be, he put away the intention. Indeed, as Gastineau’s limp weight lurched forward against him, his head hanging down, Herriard asked himself whether nature were not about to take a desirable, if unpleasant, task, out of human hands.
So he let Gastineau slip to the floor, and, as he lay, tried once more to take the deadly point from him. But the grasp of the fingers round it was as rigid as that of a dead hand. Still holding the wrist, Herriard paused in perplexity. What was he to do? how was this affair to end?
“Gastineau,” he exclaimed, “let go; give up this thing.”
The words were futile; the white face on the floor gave no sign that they were heard; the fist remained clenched tightly as ever round the weapon’s handle. Gastineau was breathing heavily, peculiarly, at considerable intervals, sighing rather than simply breathing: his eyes, half-closed, seemed to see nothing. In a tense, horrible silence, broken only by an occasional deep breath from Gastineau, the moments passed without bringing relief to Herriard’s situation, or suggesting an end to the affair, save one. Was the man dying? It seemed almost like it. His breathing, to Herriard’s untrained ear, seemed stertorous; and now and again there came a catch and a rattle in the throat. The man was dying. His patched-up strength had evidently given way under the strain: the mind had urged on the body beyond its half-recovered powers, and the result was the collapse before him.
“Gastineau!”
For a moment Herriard forgot his enemy’s diabolical nature in the feeling of almost awe-struck sorrow for the man who had led him to success. That the end of it all should have come thus swiftly and awfully filled him with a vague terror.
“Gastineau!”
The body before him quivered; he thought the thin lips, almost set, murmured something. Changing his position, he bent over, and set himself to raise the fallen head. As he did so, a rigor seemed to seize and shake Gastineau; he groaned feebly and caught his breath: it seemed as though the end was near. Near? Herriard, relaxing something of his grasp, bent down to hear what the lips seemed to murmur. Then he found an arm holding his neck like in a vice, his head was pulled down, the wrist which he gripped was jerked free, and, with a convulsive, concentrated muscular effort, Gastineau raised himself and held him down. The relative positions of the two men had in a moment become reversed, and Herriard was looking up into the face set over him full of the triumph of a diabolical cunning.