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"Had you not better send for this lady?" he questioned. On Lagardere's face now some anxiety was depicted, and he answered, anxiously: "She will be here; she must be here. Ah!"
Hatred and despair struggled there for mastery hatred and despair, and the hideous sense of hopeless, ignominious, public failure after a lifetime of triumphant crime. "Louis!" cried the king again. "Louis! Assassin!" In a moment Gonzague's sword was unsheathed, and he leaped across the space that divided him from Lagardere, striking furiously for Lagardere's heart.
As he seemed absorbed by its contents, Staupitz on the one side and Æsop on the other came cautiously towards him with the intention of reading the letter over his shoulder, but Lagardere's seeming forgetfulness of their presence instantly changed.
Gonzague was a fine swordsman, and Gonzague fought for his life, but he did not fight long. Suddenly Lagardere's arm and Lagardere's sword seemed to extend, the blade gleamed in the flare of the flambeaux, and Gonzague reeled and dropped. "Nine," said Cocardasse, thoughtfully. Passepoil placed his forefinger between his brows. "The thrust of Nevers," he murmured.
He moved noiselessly from the bridge to the high-road, and came cautiously upon the swashbucklers at the very moment when Passepoil was saying, with a shiver: "I'm always afraid to hear Lagardere's voice cry out Nevers's motto." Even on the instant the man in the gypsy habit pushed his way between the two bandits, laying a hand on each of their shoulders and saying three words: "I am here!"
To thrust Æsop from his path was one thing, and a thing that must be done if Lagardere's life-purposes were to be accomplished.
But, and Lagardere smiled as he remembered this, Æsop had forgotten or overlooked the possibility that Lagardere's own sword-play would improve with time that Lagardere's own sword-play was little likely to rust for lack of usage. The few minutes that followed upon the encounter of the hostile steels were minutes of sheer enjoyment to Lagardere.
Cocardasse took off his hat and swung it. "Hurrah for the sword!" he shouted. Lagardere's glance applauded his enthusiasm. "Iron was God's best gift to man, and he God's good servant who hammered it into shape and gave it point and edge. I shall never be happy until I am master of it." Æsop joined the conversation mockingly. "I thought you were master of it," he said, with an obvious sneer.
He turned to the picture of Louis de Gonzague, and he thought of his speech in the moat of Caylus with the masked shadow, and of the sudden murder of Nevers, and of his own assault upon the murderer, and how he set his mark upon his wrist. The expression on Lagardere's face was cold and grave and fatal as he studied this picture.
The thrust of Nevers he did not attempt, for of that he knew Lagardere commanded the parry, but there were other thrusts on which he relied to gain the victory, and each of these he tried in succession, only to be baffled by Lagardere's instinctive steel. Lagardere, watching him while they fought, hated his adversary for his own sake apart from his complicity in the crime of Caylus.
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