The clock struck the quarter. Benvenuto glanced at Ascanio, and saw that he was paler than ever, and almost ready to faint.
"Ah ça!" he cried, throwing his self-restraint to the winds, "so this is done designedly! I chose to believe what I was told, and wait good-naturedly: but if an insult is intended—and I am so little wonted to them, that the thought did not occur to me—if an insult is intended, I am not the man to allow myself to be insulted, even by a woman, and I go. Come, Ascanio."
As he spoke, Benvenuto, raising in his powerful hand the unhospitable stool, on which the duchess in her wrath had humiliated him for two mortal hours without his knowledge, let it fall to the floor and shattered it. The valets made a movement toward him, but he half drew his dagger and they stopped. Ascanio, terrified for his master, essayed to rise, but his excitement had exhausted what remained of his strength, and he fell to the floor unconscious. Benvenuto at first did not see him.
At that moment the duchess appeared in the doorway, pale and trembling with wrath.
"Yes, I go," Benvenuto repeated in a voice of thunder, perfectly well aware of her presence, but addressing the valets: "do you tell the woman that I take my present with me to give to somebody, I know not whom, who'll be more worthy of it than herself. Tell her that, if she took me for one of her valets, like yourselves, she made a sad mistake, and that we artists do not sell our loyalty and homage as she sells her love! And now make way for me! Follow me, Ascanio!"
As he spoke, he turned toward his beloved pupil, and saw that his eyes were closed, and that his head had fallen back against the wall.
"Ascanio!" he cried, "Ascanio, my child, fainting, perhaps dying! O Ascanio, my beloved! and 't is this woman again—" And Benvenuto turned with a threatening gesture to Madame d'Etampes, at the same time starting to carry Ascanio away in his arms.
The duchess meanwhile, transfixed with rage and terror, had not moved or spoken. But when she saw Ascanio with his head thrown back, and his long hair dishevelled, as white as marble, and so beautiful in his pallor, she rushed to him in obedience to an irresistible impulse, and fell on her knees opposite Benvenuto, seizing one of Ascanio's hands in her own.
"Why, the child is dying! If you take him away, monsieur, you will kill him. He may need immediate attention. Jerome, run and fetch Master André. I do not mean that he shall go from here in this condition, do you understand? You may go or stay, as you please, but leave him."
Benvenuto cast a penetrating glance at the duchess, and one of deep anxiety at Ascanio. He realized that there could be no danger in leaving his cherished pupil in the care of Madame d'Etampes, while there might be very serious danger in removing him without proper precaution. His mind was soon made up, as always, for swift and inexorable decision was one of Cellini's most striking good or had qualities.