CHAPTER XI.

THE BONE OF CONTENTION.

'Poor Marguerite!' ejaculated O'Hara, when he had heard from his visitor an account of the scene in _La Jeune France_. 'So this was her kismet! _Sic transit gloria Aspasiæ._ Well, at all events, she may be more useful in death than ever she was in life. To think of Marguerite becoming a hand-maid of science! The wilful wench! How she would glory in the thought of setting two men by the ears, if she could only learn it in the sphere she now adorns! But do you know, O'Hoolohan, on reflection, I can't help thinking you are in the wrong. How does it harm the woman to have her shin-bone ministering to the needs of literature? Ulric Zuingli bequeathed his skin to be made into a drum-head to rouse his followers; and Byron, if I'm not mistaken, was fond of taking his tipple out of a neatly-scooped skull.'

'Will you act for me? Right or wrong now the thing has gone too far for retreating.'

'I fear that is only too true. Of course I'll act for you. Let me see. You're sure he called you Mr. Insolent first.'

'Certain.'

'That's one point in our favour. As we are the offended party, we have the choice of weapons. Have you any preference?'

'Cavalry pistols. French duellists, as a rule, have a rooted dislike to facing a bullet. As for small swords, that's only child's play. A scratch, and honour is satisfied.'

'Cavalry pistols be it. I shall let you know the time and place of rendezvous, at four this afternoon, at your boarding-house.'

'All right,' said O'Hoolohan; 'meantime I shall go and take a look at the bears in the Jardin des Plantes.'

'There goes a character!' muttered O'Hara to himself, as his visitor descended the stairs. 'Hang me if I can fathom him!'

The young Irishman dressed himself in his best, and was punctual in his call at the rooms of the youth in blue spectacles. The blear-eyed stripling was also present. Business was at once opened in a business-like manner. Explanations were tendered on neither side. The mutual insults were too gross and public to be blotted out except by blows. Apology was not asked or offered. The details of the hostile meeting were gone over with overwhelming affability and owl-like gravity. In negotiations of this kind, to smooth the passage of one or two men to a premature eternity, the extremest forms of politeness are invariably observed. If there was to be a fight, the earlier it came off the more agreeable it must be to all concerned. Eight o'clock the next morning was fixed as the hour of rendezvous, by unanimous consent. As Eugène the Gascon, as his friends took care to remark, was a crack shot, they had no prejudice against the cavalry pistols.

The first discussion was on the question of the distance at which the adversaries should be placed from each other. O'Hara, with a charming readiness to oblige, suggested that shots should be exchanged across a table-napkin.

The Frenchman demurred.

'That would be slaughter,' said Blue Spectacles.

'Undoubtedly it would be very like it,' agreed O'Hara; 'but my man is used to slaughter on a wholesale scale--an old soldier of Africa, the Crimea, and Italy. Does your principal object to being shot?'

'If he does not, most certainly I do, to being arrested as accessory to murder,' chimed in Pale Face.

Finally it was decided that the adversaries should be placed twenty paces apart, with privilege to each to advance five paces before delivering his fire, if he so elected. There was to be no toss-up as to who was to fire first; they were to consult their own judgment as to that from the instant the signal for action, the dropping of a handkerchief, was given. If the first exchange was harmless, the renewal of the combat was to be left to the discretion of the witnesses.

'With your permission, messieurs,' said O'Hara, 'I vote for Clamart as the place of rendezvous. I know a retired garden there, walled round and perfectly secure from observation. It is a most convenient spot; looks as if it were designed by nature for the purpose. Besides, there is a deep disused draw-well there, so that we can get rid of any dangerous evidence of the morning's work in case of a fatal issue.'

The Frenchmen winced, but as they knew of no better site for the encounter, they agreed--provided there was a good restaurant in the vicinity. It was contrary to all the etiquette of the code of honour in Paris to have a duel without a breakfast after. In fact, a duel would not be a duel if it were not followed by a comfortable repast.

O'Hara eased their fears on this score.

'And now, messieurs,' he added in conclusion, 'I have two conditions to impose, in the interests of our own safety. The first is, that no one will seek to publish an account of this meeting in the papers; the next, that each of the principals will sign a paper to the effect that he was tired of a hollow and deceitful world, and meant to make away with himself, so as to exonerate his antagonist from all responsibility in the future.'

There was a twinkle in O'Hara's eyes as he spoke. He suspected the Gascon's witnesses would not relish assisting at the combat unless they were to borrow some reflected renown from it; and he knew that a document such as he mentioned would be valueless, seeing that the quarrel had been public, and the probable result was the common gossip of the quarter. But he plausibly wheedled the Frenchmen into assenting to his propositions by putting the terrible perils that would accrue to them in the event of a death in very strong light.

As he was leaving, Blue Spectacles bethought him that they might have some trouble in finding cavalry pistols. Eugène had none, he thought, and it might lead to unpleasant consequences if they were to purchase the weapons at a gunsmith's; they would be sure to be identified by the prying _mouchards_.

'I can oblige, messieurs, if you will trust me,' said O'Hara. 'My friend has a brace in capital order. You can make your choice of them on the ground.'

This satisfied all requirements. O'Hara was thanked for his courtesy, and was ushered to the landing with an exquisite urbanity that was touching in its kindly, well-bred thoughtfulness; it positively recalled the manner in vogue when the Roi Soleil shed the lustre of his countenance on Versailles. As he briskly descended the stairs, the students shut the door and looked at each other with faces overshadowed with anxiety.

'_Pardi!_' said Blue Spectacles, 'this is serious.'

'Serious!--'tis awful!' said Pale Face. 'I feel as if I must have an _absinthe pure_ at the Mère Moreau's. I would not be in Eugène's boots for a milliard. Come on.'

* * * * *

The morning of the duel broke with all the freshness and warmth and brilliancy of the genial spring in the latitude of Paris. In the picturesque Clamart suburb, with its market-gardens and white villas, its plantations, its windmills, and its vine-clad slopes, the aspect was one of ripe loveliness. It was a rosy, odorous, appetizing morn; a morn for a pleasant woodland walk under the branches where small birds chavished; a morn to drop gently down the river and ply the indolent rod; a morn for a canter on a brisk cob across the sweet-scented meadows; a morn for plucking flowers, smoking choice cigars, love-dreaming, or poetic musing--for anything, in fact, but thoughts of sudden and violent death. It has been remarked by some moralists that sunny, innocent, enjoyable morns, when the blood seems to bound joyously in the veins, and the very act of breathing is a vivid pleasure, have an ugly habit of intruding themselves unbidden when armies are about to join in strife or criminals are about to tread the scaffold.

The Gascon never before realized how very comfortable a world it is, and how very disagreeable it would be to leave it while he was yet young and healthy, with a sound stomach and a liver unconscious of derangement. But his pride was greater than his fears, and coating his doubts and apprehensions under a veneer of indifference, he was the first to warn his friends of the necessity of being punctilious at the trysting-place. As punctuality is the courtesy of kings, so also is it of duellists.

The Gascon and his party were first on the ground--four of them, the principal, Blue Spectacles, Pale Face, and a young medical practitioner with an ominous set of surgical instruments cunningly hidden in a fiddle-case to disarm suspicion.

Hardly had they alighted from their _voiture_, and walked towards the village where O'Hara had arranged to meet them, when a singular approaching whir of wheels was heard, blent with the noisy ululation of a dog. Turning the corner, there came into view O'Hara and the O'Hoolohan riding to the rendezvous on bicycles! They had adopted this original method of evading the prying gendarmes of the locality. Pat had followed them--followed them perforce; for the now lazy animal had been tied by a rope to the tool-box of a machine, and was forced to keep pace with the 'steel steed.'

'Pardon, gentlemen,' said O'Hara, jumping from his tiny saddle, 'but if we are a little late it is my fault I did not think the gradients on the road were so trying.'

The Gascon's friends advanced, accepted the excuse with excessive show of politeness, and Blue Spectacles, as the senior, presented the doctor in form.

'Very thoughtful of you, indeed!' said O'Hara, in an undertone. 'My man never hires a surgeon--never needs one, for the matter of that. Have you that letter I spoke of ready?' at the same time handing the young Frenchman a document to the following effect:

'This is to certify that the bearer, O'Hoolohan, 35, Irish of origin, and annuitant by station, unmarried, committed suicide on the 5th day of April, 1866, at Clamart, in the Department of the Seine, and that nobody is blamable for the despair which led him to the act.'

As Blue Spectacles read this curt, legally-framed document, he quaked and whitened, and a quiver of his eyes might be detected under their ultramarine protectors. But he nerved himself for the worst; after all, it is much easier to be brave when your bosom friend's fate is in the balance than when your own precious carcass is in peril. The Frenchman, in return, handed O'Hara a perfumed, gilt-edged billet, with an arrow-pierced heart in chromo-lithography at the top of it. As it was characteristic of the Gascon, it may be interesting to give its contents:

'Away, thou hollow world, with all thy vain pomps and glittering gauds! Farewell the friendship that is false, the love that is venal, the happiness that deceives like the desert mirage! Dash down the cup of revelry that brings but the fitful doze; welcome the bullet of relief that summons repose eternal! With my own hands I sign my doom; by my own hands I die! Not for me the roses of hope or the laurels of ambition, but the cypress of despair and disappointment. Cut off a tress of my hair and send it to my mother; a locket with a portrait will be discovered over my heart--bury it in my grave.

'EUGÈNE SIRAUDIN.'

'That will do very nicely,' remarked O'Hara as he read this valentine from beyond the tomb; 'it is tenderly written--Lamartine with a flavour of De Musset. I should like to have a copy to send to the Manuscript Room of the British Museum. I suppose we're all here?'

'Where's your other witness?' asked Pale Face.

'In England we consider one enough; but if you insist upon it, we shall look upon my dog as discharging the duty.'

Pale Face grew white as a Pierrot. As for Blue Spectacles, the devil-may-care ease of the Irishman had put him into a blue funk.

All this time the principals stood apart, acting the _rôle_ of unconcerned spectators. That is the correct deportment in duels. Eugène Siraudin puffed away at a cigarette; the O'Hoolohan, who was hot and ruddy after his exertions on the bicycle, stretched himself on his back on the turf by the trunk of a roadside poplar.

'Gentlemen, it's getting late,' cried O'Hara. 'We had better to business,' and he led the way, thrusting his bicycle by his side, through a gap in the field across to a postern in the wall of a villa garden, which was all he had described it--perfectly secure from the notice of passers-by. The doctor laid his fiddle-case on the grass, opened it, and displayed the shining instruments. The ground was stepped by the young Irishman. Traces were made with chalk at the extremities, twenty paces asunder, and at the further five paces, in front of each adversary's position, beyond which they were not to advance. O'Hara loaded the pistols and gave them to the Gascon's witnesses to examine. This they did in a very perfunctory way. The truth is, both were ignorant of the manner of loading a pistol, and, if they had the task to accomplish themselves, were as likely as not to put in the wad before the powder. The pistols were of the percussion and ramrod type, and the charges of powder and ball were supposed to be put in separately and driven home.

'Take your choice,' said O'Hara to Blue Spectacles.

Blue Spectacles took the first to his hand, adding that with such an honourable man there was no room for choice.

'Let your principal take what position he pleases,' said O'Hara, bowing; 'it's immaterial to us.'

They got into their places, each in that nearest to where he was standing at the moment.

'Ready?' asked O'Hara.

Both nodded acquiescence.

'Who shall drop the handkerchief?'

'Will you oblige?' prayed Blue Spectacles, with a tremor in his voice.

'All right!'

The handkerchief was dropped.

Almost instantaneously the Gascon fired. The smoke lifted. O'Hoolohan stood erect, unhurt, a placid self-possessed expression on his set features.

O'Hoolohan slowly moved five paces, halted; gradually raised his weapon, and deliberately aimed first at the Gascon's heart, then at his brain. It was a cruel experiment, but the Gascon bore it with splendid courage. His complexion paled, it is true, and his mouth was restive, but his gaze was bold and almost disdainful. O'Hoolohan raised the pistol still higher, turned its muzzle perpendicularly, and discharged it into the air, quietly saying, 'You are no coward; I am sorry for the expression!'

After such a scene it was impossible to renew the combat. The Gascon, in his turn, retracted the hasty language he had used, and the entire party betook them to the hostelry where breakfast had been ordered by O'Hara's care, all satisfied--except the surgeon, who had theories about gunshot wounds, and was not averse to having practice in their treatment.

The breakfast put them all--even the surgeon--into good humour. O'Hara knew how to draw up a bill of fare, and O'Hoolohan had given him _carte blanche_ as to the outlay. There was everything at the repast, in season and out of season, that could be had for money--truffles of Perigord, melons of Cavaillon, oysters of Cancale, Montmorency cherries, and Montreuil peaches, beside vintage and viands generous of quality and copious in quantity.

When the repast was finished, and the customary _demi-tasses_ of black Mocha, with the small glasses of liqueur beside, were laid upon the table, O'Hara gravely stood up in his place at the head, which had been tacitly conceded to him, and demanded the word--the French parliamentary equivalent for asking permission to make a speech.

The permission was cordially granted by word of mouth from those whose mouths were empty, by token of assent from those who were still cracking nuts or coaxing tobacco into vaporous circulation.

'Messieurs,' he began, 'having satisfied honour and our appetites, I claim a few words on behalf of common-sense and conservatism. Firstly, I am a Conservative--that is to say, I am tenacious of traditions among other things; and it is a tradition of my country never to loose a chance of making a speech. Several of my relatives carried the habit to such an extent that they made public discourses on their dying day--discourses which were discourteously interrupted by vile public functionaries. (Emotion.) Messieurs, you who are not vile, and who are not public functionaries, and, indeed, who are never likely to be public functionaries--you, I trust, will not interrupt me. (Cries of 'No, no.') I was sure of it. You yourselves are disciples of this great art of oratory. You cultivate it at the risk of coryza over the newly-filled graves of dead friends. (Here Blue Spectacles and Pale Face winced.) Much as I admire eloquence, I am sincerely glad that there was no occasion for rhetorical display of that kind this morning, and this it is which brings me to the common-sense side of my subject. Messieurs, in the light of pure common-sense, I have a proposition to lay before you. It is this:--We are all asses. (Astonishment and attention.) Asses, if not worse, I repeat. If either of the principals in this morning's work were to have killed the other, he would be now a homicidal ass, and that other would be that very rare animal--a dead ass. (Sensation.) As I should be one of the accessories, I refrain from dwelling on what their position would be. Messieurs, the duello is a folly--nay, more, it is a crime. What does it prove? Not that the survivor is truer or better than the slaughtered, but that he is luckier, or more skilful, or has less command of the nerves that are in him, not of himself so much as of nature. Both of you, gentlemen (addressing the Gascon and O'Hoolohan), have good command of nerves. Let me hope in the future you will have better command of temper. To resume my thesis, the merits of a quarrel are not affected by the issue. They remain as they were before. Dismissing the artificial accretions to the quarrel we so pleasantly settled an hour ago, to what does it reduce itself? Two grown men, with friends, with duties in life, with ambitions and affections, deliberately seek to slay each other for the sake of the shin-bone of a woman that neither would have dared to introduce to his mother. (Sensation.) Both knew her equally well, perhaps; both liked her, admired her beauty, pitied her misfortunes; but could either respect her character? No! I will answer for all, no. Messieurs, I perceive you agree with me; and as I understand from my friend in the blue spectacles that he has the bone of contention in his possession, may I crave it from him, and do with it as I like?'

The Gascon said he might.

The O'Hoolohan cried 'All right!'

Blue Spectacles handed him the paper-knife.

'Then, messieurs,' exclaimed O'Hara, opening the window, 'away with it. Thus out of sight with aught that might cause malice between honest men.' And he flung it spinning through the air, amid shouts of 'Bravo! Good, good!' from all except O'Hoolohan, whose face was twisted into a queer look of deprecation.

But it had not gone out of sight. Pat the dog was watching it, and, as it fell, sprang through the open casement and bounded after it in the grass. O'Hara was about to whistle him back, but he sniffed a moment at the spot where the blade had dropped, and then turned and trotted back with an air of pitiful contempt.

'That is singular!' soliloquized O'Hara aloud. 'I never knew a dog to refuse a bone before.'

He tapped on the table with a knife-handle, and on the waiter answering to the call he requested him to fetch the paper-knife he would find in the grass outside.

The waiter brought it back after a short search, and O'Hara carefully examined it.

'This, you are sure,' he asked of Blue Spectacles, 'was the original bone of contention?'

'Certainly,' was the ready answer.

'Then there is some mistake here. Surely, monsieur,' turning to Eugène Siraudin, 'you cannot have confounded an elephant with a human being? _This knife is of ivory!_'

O'Hoolohan jumped to his feet and snatched it. The Gascon reddened and stammered, 'I knew it all along; I said what I did about it through mere brag, to cap my friend's boast about the watch-guard of her hair, and I was ashamed to explain afterwards, lest it should look like cowardice.'

O'Hara sat down, ordered drinks all round, and then threw himself back in his chair, cocked his feet upon the table, and laughed a Homeric laugh. That laugh was contagious. Everybody laughed in a perfect gamut of laughter, from the shrill treble of Pale Face to the morose baritone of the surgeon, and the deep watch-dog basso-profondo of the O'Hoolohan. And then everybody, save the surgeon, embraced everybody else; and then everybody, the surgeon inclusive, drank their drinks.

'How lucky it was, gentlemen, you did not both kill each other!' exclaimed O'Hara, and he burst into a franker, more joyous guffaw than ever.

The sly rascal! They little knew that he had provided himself with pistols from a conjuring friend, and had withdrawn the bullets before their eyes by the aid of a ramrod ending in a screw. The duel had been fought, like that of Jeffreys and Tom Moore, with leadless weapons.

And thus ended the hostile meeting at Clamart, and thus was Marguerite, like a soldier, committed to oblivion with a discharge of harmless gunpowder.