“It’s definitely not father-son,” said Ralph Arza, one of Rubio’s best friends. “I never saw or witnessed this mentor-mentee relationship.”

“These guys weren’t social buddies,” another Bush supporter said. “These guys were political friends.”

“I don’t doubt that Marco Rubio respected Jeb Bush as a leader, but I don’t suspect that he viewed that relationship nearly as personally as Bush and Bush people did,” said Steve Schale, a Florida Democratic strategist who directed Barack Obama’s campaign in the state in 2008. “Marco got out of the relationship what he needed.”

Less Shakespearean psychodrama, more a blind spot or a basic error in political math: There, back in 2005, it turns out, was Bush’s first mistake in the failure of his White House bid of 2016. Recast, the sword ceremony that fall no longer looks like a gift exchange or a symbolic gesture. It looks like a transfer of power. It looks like the beginning of the end for Bush, and the end of the beginning for Rubio. There were people seated that day in the house chamber in Tallahassee who detected a whiff of noblesse oblige on the part of Bush and wondered, too, if he quite knew what he was doing by giving Rubio a sword. They worried that Rubio would one day use it—even against Bush.