A few moments later the double fight began with infinite fury. Swords flashed and clattered; lunge and parry, parry and lunge followed in lightning succession; the laboured breaths went up in gusts of steam on the morning air. There was murder in two pairs of eyes, a resolve as grim as death itself in the stern set faces of their opponents. Soon the blood began to spurt and ooze from a dozen wounds; the Duke was wounded in both legs; his adversary in the groin and arm. Faces, swords, the very ground, became crimson. Colonel Hamilton had at last disarmed his opponent, but the others fought on—gasping, reeling, lunging, feinting, the strength ebbing with each thrust.
At last each made a desperate lunge at the other; the Duke's sword passed clean through his adversary up to the very hilt; Mohun, reeling forward, with a last effort shortened his sword and plunged it deep into the Duke's breast. Colonel Hamilton rushed to his friend and raised him in his arms, when Macartney, snatching up his fallen sword, drove it into the dying man's heart, then took to his heels and made his way as fast as horse and boat could carry him to Holland.
Before the Duke could be raised from the ground to which he had fallen, he had drawn his last breath. A few moments later Mohun, too, succumbed to his wounds—the "Dog Mohun," as Swift called him, lying in death but a few yards from his victim.
"I am infinitely concerned," Swift wrote the same day, "for the poor Duke, who was an honest, good-natured man. I loved him very well, and I think he loved me better."
Thus, steeped in innocent blood, perished Charles Lord Mohun, who well earned his unenviable title, "The wicked Baron."
CHAPTER XIV
A FAIR INTRIGANTE
The face of a baby, the heart of a courtesan, and the brain of a diplomatist. Such was Louise de Querouaille who, two centuries and a half ago, came to England to barter her charms for a King's dishonour, and, incidentally, to found a ducal house as a memorial to her allurements and her shame.
If she had been taken at her own estimate Louise was at least the equal in lineage of any of the proud beauties whose claim she thus challenged to Charles II.'s favour. She had behind her, she said, centuries of noble ancestors, among the greatest in France; and she was kin, near or remote, to every great name in the land of her birth. All, however, that is known of this Queen of intrigantes is that she had for father a worthy, unassuming Breton merchant, who had made a sufficient fortune in the wool-trade to take his ease, as a country gentleman, for the latter part of his days, and whose only ambition was to bring up his son and two daughters respectably, and to dispense a modest hospitality among his neighbours. It was at Brest that Evelyn enjoyed this hospitality for a brief period; and the diarist has nothing but what is good to say of the retired tradesman.