I played with him a little while, watching the sweat gather on his brow and the shadow of the church tower fall deeper and darker, like the shadow of doom, on his face. Not out of cruelty—God knows I have never erred in that direction!—but because, for the first time in my life, I felt a strange reluctance to strike the blow. The curls clung to his forehead; his breath came and went in gasps; I heard the men behind me and one or two of them drop an oath; and then I slipped—slipped, and was down in a moment on my right side, my elbow striking the pavement so sharply that the arm grew numb to the wrist.
He held off. I heard a dozen voices cry, ‘Now! now you have him!’ But he held off. He stood back and waited with his breast heaving and his point lowered, until I had risen and stood again on my guard.
‘Enough! enough!’ a rough voice behind me cried. ‘Don’t hurt the man after that.’
‘On guard, sir!’ I answered coldly—for he seemed to waver, and be in doubt. ‘It was an accident. It shall not avail you again.’
Several voices cried ‘Shame!’ and one, ‘You coward!’ But the Englishman stepped forward, a fixed look in his blue eyes. He took his place without a word. I read in his drawn white face that he had made up his mind to the worst, and his courage so won my admiration that I would gladly and thankfully have set one of the lookers-on—any of the lookers-on—in his place; but that could not be. So I thought of Zaton’s closed to me, of Pombal’s insult, of the sneers and slights I had long kept at the sword’s point; and, pressing him suddenly in a heat of affected anger, I thrust strongly over his guard, which had grown feeble, and ran him through the chest.
When I saw him lying, laid out on the stones with his eyes half shut, and his face glimmering white in the dusk—not that I saw him thus long, for there were a dozen kneeling round him in a twinkling—I felt an unwonted pang. It passed, however, in a moment. For I found myself confronted by a ring of angry faces—of men who, keeping at a distance, hissed and cursed and threatened me, calling me Black Death and the like.
They were mostly canaille, who had gathered during the fight, and had viewed all that passed from the farther side of the railings. While some snarled and raged at me like wolves, calling me ‘Butcher!’ and ‘Cut-throat!’ or cried out that Berault was at his trade again, others threatened me with the vengeance of the Cardinal, flung the edict in my teeth, and said with glee that the guard were coming—they would see me hanged yet.
‘His blood is on your head!’ one cried furiously. ‘He will be dead in an hour. And you will swing for him! Hurrah!’
‘Begone,’ I said.
‘Ay, to Montfaucon,’ he answered, mocking me.