V. THE PEACEMAKER

When the combatants, with crossed swords, became suddenly conscious of a third party, they each made the same movement.  It was as quick as the snap of a pistol, and they altered it instantaneously and recovered their original pose, but they had both made it, they had both seen it, and they both knew what it was.  It was not a movement of anger at being interrupted.  Say or think what they would, it was a movement of relief.  A force within them, and yet quite beyond them, seemed slowly and pitilessly washing away the adamant of their oath.  As mistaken lovers might watch the inevitable sunset of first love, these men watched the sunset of their first hatred.

Their hearts were growing weaker and weaker against each other.  When their weapons rang and riposted in the little London garden, they could have been very certain that if a third party had interrupted them something at least would have happened.  They would have killed each other or they would have killed him.  But now nothing could undo or deny that flash of fact, that for a second they had been glad to be interrupted.  Some new and strange thing was rising higher and higher in their hearts like a high sea at night.  It was something that seemed all the more merciless, because it might turn out an enormous mercy.  Was there, perhaps, some such fatalism in friendship as all lovers talk about in love?  Did God make men love each other against their will?

“I’m sure you’ll excuse my speaking to you,” said the stranger, in a voice at once eager and deprecating.

The voice was too polite for good manners.  It was incongruous with the eccentric spectacle of the duellists which ought to have startled a sane and free man.  It was also incongruous with the full and healthy, though rather loose physique of the man who spoke.  At the first glance he looked a fine animal, with curling gold beard and hair, and blue eyes, unusually bright.  It was only at the second glance that the mind felt a sudden and perhaps unmeaning irritation at the way in which the gold beard retreated backwards into the waistcoat, and the way in which the finely shaped nose went forward as if smelling its way.  And it was only, perhaps, at the hundredth glance that the bright blue eyes, which normally before and after the instant seemed brilliant with intelligence, seemed as it were to be brilliant with idiocy.  He was a heavy, healthy-looking man, who looked all the larger because of the loose, light coloured clothes that he wore, and that had in their extreme lightness and looseness, almost a touch of the tropics.  But a closer examination of his attire would have shown that even in the tropics it would have been unique; but it was all woven according to some hygienic texture which no human being had ever heard of before, and which was absolutely necessary even for a day’s health.  He wore a huge broad-brimmed hat, equally hygienic, very much at the back of his head, and his voice coming out of so heavy and hearty a type of man was, as I have said, startlingly shrill and deferential.