Now into his hand Fate had thrust a stouter weapon and a
deadlier: a weapon which not only should make him master of the
wealth that I had pledged, but one whereby he might remove me for
all time, a thousandfold more effectively than the mere encompassing
of my ruin would have done.
I was doomed. I realized it fully and very bitterly.
I was to go out of the ways of men unnoticed and unmourned; as a
rebel, under the obscure name of another and bearing another's sins
upon my shoulders, I was to pass almost unheeded to the gallows.
Bardelys the Magnificent - the Marquis Marcel Saint-Pol de Bardelys,
whose splendour had been a byword in France - was to go out like a
guttering candle.
The thought filled me with the awful frenzy that so often goes with
impotency, such a frenzy as the damned in hell may know. I forgot
in that hour my precept that under no conditions should a gentleman
give way to anger. In a blind access of fury I flung myself across
the table and caught that villainous cheat by the throat, before
any there could put out a hand to stop me.
He was a heavy man, if a short one, and the strength of his thick-set
frame was a thing abnormal. Yet at that moment such nervous power
did I gather from my rage, that I swung him from his feet as though
he had been the puniest weakling. I dragged him down on to the
table, and there I ground his face with a most excellent good-will
and relish.
"You liar, you cheat, you thief!" I snarled like any cross-grained
mongrel.
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