Part 32 (2/2)

”With your agreement, we shall fix the distance at ten paces, and I shall step it. There is no choice for light, and the wind is at rest.

Therefore, there being no person to count for us, I shall ask you to toss a coin again, this time that I may call it: if I fail to do so, you fire first; if I succeed, I fire first. Permit me to advise you, sir, that, if you are unaccustomed to the hair-trigger, it is as well that you be careful lest you lose your shot.”

Eskurola's manners were apparently never so polished as when he was about to kill or be killed. He measured off the ground and marked the stand for each, always asking Cartaret's opinion. He stood while Cartaret again tossed a glittering gold-piece in the air.

”Tails!” cried Don Ricardo. ”I always prefer,” he explained, ”to see this king with his face in the dust. Let us look at him together, so that there will be no mistake.”

The piece lay with its face to the terrace.

”I win,” said Eskurola. ”I shoot first. It is bad to begin well.”

Cartaret smiled. With such a marksman as this Basque to shoot at one, the speech became the merest pleasantry. There was only the question of the choice of the pistol, and as to that----

”If you will open the box, I shall choose,” Eskurola was saying.

Evidently the choice was also to go to the winner of the toss.

Cartaret was certain this would not have been the case if the toss had gone otherwise. ”I must touch neither until I have chosen, although the additional powder in the blank pistol tends toward making their weight equal.”

Mechanically Cartaret opened the mahogany box. Don Ricardo scarcely glanced at the pair of beautiful and deadly weapons lying on the purple velvet: he took the one farther from him.

”Pray remember the hair-trigger,” he continued: ”you might easily wound yourself. Now, if you please: to our places.”

Each man took off his hat and coat and stood at his post in his white s.h.i.+rt, his feet together, his right side fronting his enemy, his pistol pointing downwards from the hand against his right thigh.

”Are you ready, sir?” asked Eskurola.

For a flas.h.i.+ng instant Cartaret wanted to scream with hysterical laughter: the whole proceeding seemed so archaic, so grotesque, so useless. Then he thought of how little he had to lose and of whom he might serve in losing that little....

”Ready, senor,” he said.

If only she could, for only that last moment, love him! That last moment, for he made no doubt of the end of this adventure. The Basque had been too punctilious in all his arrangements: from the first Cartaret had been sure that Don Ricardo and the French-speaking servant had played this tragic farce before, and that the master so arranged matters as easily to choose the one pistol that held death in its mouth. To convict him was impossible, and, were it possible, would be but to strike a fatal blow at the honor of that family which Vitoria held so dear. How false his vanity had played him! What was he that a G.o.ddess should not cease to love him when she chose? Enough and more that she had loved him once; an ultimate blessing could she love him a moment more. But once again, then: but that one instant! To see her pitiful eyes upon him, to hear her pure lips whisper the last good-by like music in his dying ears!

He saw the arm of his enemy slowly--slowly--rising, without speed and without hesitation, as the paw of a great cat rises to strike, but with a claw of s.h.i.+ning steel.

Cartaret would look his last on the scene that her eyes had known when she was a child, that her eyes would know long after his--so soon now!--were closed forever. It was mid-morning; the golden sun was half-way to the zenith. At Cartaret's left, above the walls, the turrets and towers of the Gothic castle, rose the sheer front of that sheer chalcedonous peak. Its top was crowned with the dazzling and eternal snow; its face was waxen, almost translucent; its outcroppings of crypto-crystalline quartz, multi-toned by the wind and rain of centuries, caught the sunlight and flamed in every gradation of blue and yellow, of onyx, carnelian and sard. To the right lay the wide and peaceful valley, ma.s.s after ma.s.s of foliage, silver-green and emerald, and, above that, the ridges of the vast, scabrous amphitheater: beetling peaks of gray, dark pectinated cones, fusiform apexes, dancing lancets and swords' points, a hundred beetling crags and darting spires under a turquoise sky.

(Eskurola's arm was rising ... rising....)

Her face came before his eyes; not the face of the woman that sent him from the tower-room, but the face of The Girl that had parted from him in his shabby studio: the frame of blue-black hair, the clear cheek touched with healthy pink, the red lips and white teeth, the level brows, the curling lashes and the frank violet eyes.... Into his own eyes came a mist; it blotted out the landscape.

He dragged his glance back to his executioner. He must meet death face forward. A horrid fear beset him that he had been tardy in this--had seemed ever so little to waver.

But Eskurola had observed no faltering, and had not faltered: his arm still crept upward. It must all have happened in the twinkling of an eye, then: that impulse toward mad laughter, that thought of what he had suffered, that realization of the landscape, even the memory of her face--the Lady of the Rose.

Don Ricardo's arm had just risen a trifle above his shoulder and then come back to its level.... It would come now--the flash, the quick pang that would outstrip and shut out the very sound of the explosion--come now and be over.

The man was taking an aim, careful, deadly....

But if everything else had been quick, this was an eternity. Cartaret could feel the Basque's eye, he could see that the leveled pistol-barrel covered his throat directly below the ear. He wanted to shout out to Eskurola to shoot; to say, ”You've got me!” He ground his teeth to enforce his tongue to silence. And still he waited. Good G.o.d, would the man never fire?

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