From where Steerpike stood he could see over Barquentine’s shoulder the honey-coloured flames of the three candles. They were the shapes of bamboo leaves, attenuate and slender and they trembled against the darkness. Barquentine himself was silhouetted against the glow of the candlelight, and suddenly, as his body shifted, and Steerpike obtained an even clearer view of the candleflame an idea occurred to the young man which made all his carefully prepared plans for the death and disposal of the ancient’s body appear amateurish: amateurish through lack of that deceptive simplicity which is the hallmark of all great art; amateurish, for all their ingenuity, and for the very reason of it.
But here – here before him, ready made was a candlestick with three gold flames that licked at the sullen air. And, here within his reach was the old man he wished to kill, but not too quickly; an old man whose rags and skin and beard were as dry and inflammable as the most exacting of fire-raisers could wish. What would be easier than for a man as ancient as Barquentine to lean forward accidentally at his work and for his beard to catch light from the candles? What would be more diverting than to watch the irritable and filthy tyrant caught among flames, his rags blazing, his skin smoking, his beard leaping like a crimson fish. It would only remain, at a later date, for Steerpike to discover the charred corpse and arouse the castle.
The young man glanced about him. The door through which he had entered the room was closed. It was an hour when there was small chance of their being disturbed. The silence in the room was only intensified by the thin grating of Barquentine’s breathing.
No sooner had Steerpike realized the advantages of setting fire to the ragged silhouette which squatted like a black gnome immediately before him, than he drew the blade from his swordstick and raised it so that the steel point hovered within an inch of Barquentine’s neck, and immediately below his left ear.
Now that Steerpike was so close upon the heels of the gross and bloody deed, a kind of cold and poisonous rage filled him. Perhaps the dry root of some long deadened conscience stirred for a moment in his breast. Perhaps, for that sharp second, he remembered in spite of himself that to kill a man involved a sense of guilt: and perhaps it was because of the momentary distraction of purpose that hatred swept his face, as though a frozen sea were whipped of a sudden into a living riot of tameless water. But the waves subsided as quickly as they had risen. Once again his face was white with a deadly equipoise. The point of his blade had trembled beneath the age-bitten ear. But now it was motionless.
It was then that there was a knock at the door. The old head twisted to the sound, but
‘To black hell with you whoever you are! I will see no son of a bitch today!’
‘Very well, sir,’ said a door-blocked voice, and then the faint sound of footsteps could be heard, and then silence again.
Barquentine turned his head back, and then scratched himself across the belly.
‘Saucy bullprong,’ he muttered aloud. ‘I’ll have his face off him. I’ll have his white face off! I’ll have the shine off it! By the gall of the great mule he’s over-shiny. “Very well, sir” he says, does he? What’s well about it? What’s
Again Barquentine began to scratch, loins, buttocks, belly and ribs.
‘O sucking fire!’ he cried, ‘it gripes my heart! No earl but a brat. The Countess, cat-mad. And for me, no tyro but this upstart of a Steerpike bastard.’
The young man, his swordstick beautifully poised, its cold tip sharp as a needle, pursed his thin lips and clicked his tongue. This time Barquentine turned his head over his left shoulder so that he received half an inch of steel beneath his ear. His body stiffened horribly while his throat swelled into the semblance of a scream, but no scream came. When Steerpike withdrew the blade, and while a trickle of dark blood made its way over the wrinkled terrain of his turtle-neck, the whole frame became all of a sudden convulsively active, each part of him seeming to contort itself without relation to what was happening to the rest of the body. It was a miracle that he remained balanced on the high chair. But these convulsions suddenly ended and Steerpike, standing back with his chin cupped in his hands, was chilled, in spite of the half-smile on his face, by the direst expression of mortal hatred that had ever turned an old man’s face into a nest of snakes. The eyes grew, of a sudden, congested, their vile waters taking on, it seemed, the flush of a dangerous sunrise. The mouth and the lines about it appeared to seethe. The dirty brow and neck were wet with venom.
