As far as his knowing anything of the customs of it all, it was like
leading a lamb to slaughter.
Villebon, lovely, vernal, at a later hour the spot for gay breakfasts
and gentle rendezvous, had been designated for the meeting between Dan
and Poniotowsky. There in his motor he gave up his effort to set his
thoughts clear. Nothing settled down. Even the ground they flew over,
the trees with their chestnut plumes, blurred, were indistinct,
nebulous, as if seen through a diving-bell under the sea. Fear--he didn't
know the word. He wasn't afraid--it wasn't that; yet he had a certainty
that it was all up with him. He was young--very young--and he hadn't done
much with the job. His father would have been ashamed of him. Then all
his thoughts went to Her. The two men in the motor floated off and she
sat there as she had sat yesterday in her marvelously pretty clothes--her
little coral shoes.
He had held those bright, little feet in his hand on the Thames day:
they had just filled his great hands. Mechanically he spread out his
firm, broad palms on the soft shoes. Letty Lane--Letty Lane--a shiver
passed through his body; the sense of her, the touch of her, the kisses
he had taken, the way she had blown up against him like a cloud--a cloud
that, as he held her, became the substance of Paradise. This brought him
back to physical life, brutally. He was too young to die.
Those little, red shoes would dance on his grave. Was she asleep now?
How would she know? What would she know?
Then Letty Lane, too, spirited away, and the boy's thoughts turned to
the man he was to meet. "The affairs are purely formal," he had heard
some one say, "an exchange of balls, without serious results."
One of his companions offered Blair a cigar. He refused, the idea
sickened him. Here the gentlemen exchanged glances, and one murmured,
"Is he afraid?"
The other shrugged.
"Not astonishing--he's a child."
At this Dan glanced up and smiled--what Lily, Duchess of Breakwater, had
called his divine young smile. The two secretly were ashamed--he was
charming.
As they got out of the motor Dan said:
"I want to ask a question of Prince Poniotowsky--if it is allowed. I'll
write it on my card."
After a conference between Prince Poniotowsky's seconds and Dan's, the
slip was handed the prince.
"If you get out all right, will you marry Miss Lane? I shall be glad
to know."
The Hungarian, who read it under the tree, half smiled. The naïveté of
it, the touching youth of it, the crude lack of form--was perfect enough
to touch his sense of humor. On the back of Dan's card Poniotowsky
scrawled:
"Yes."
It was a haughty inclination, a salute of honor before the fight.
The meeting place was within sight of the little rustic pavilion of Les
Trois Agneaux, celebrated for its _pré salé_ and _beignets_: the
advertisements had confronted Dan everywhere during his wanderings those
miserable days. Under a group of chestnut trees in bright feathery
flower Prince Poniotowsky and his seconds waited, their frock-coats
buttoned up and their gloves and silk hats in their hands. As Blair and
his companions came up the others stood uncovered, grim and formal,
according to the code.
On the highroad a short distance away ranged the motors which had
fetched the gentlemen from Paris, and the car in which the physician had
come--an ugly and sinister gathering in the peace and beauty of the
serene summer morning.
Finches and thrashes sang in the bushes, over the grass the dew still
hung in crystals, and a peasant walking at his horses' heads on the slow
tramp back from the Paris market, was held up and kept stolidly waiting
at a few hundred yards away.
Twenty-five paces. They were measured off by the four seconds, and at
their signal Dan Blair and the prince took their positions, the
revolvers raised perpendicularly in their right hands.
Still more indistinctly the boy saw the sharp-cut picture of it all ...
the diving-bell was sinking deeper--deeper--into the sea.
"If I aim," he said to himself, "I shall kill sure--sure."
Blair heard the command: "Fire!" and supposed that after that he fired.