“Harry, Harry, save the old man!”
Harry turned, saw, and fired his pistol point-blank in the rioter’s face. In the same instant, with a horror that stifled the cry of warning in her throat, Diana saw Lionel, with livid countenance of fury, advancing upon the young man, his broken sword drawn back like a dagger for the thrust. But even as she found voice, all was over: one whose love had been swifter than hers had flung himself between the steel and its aim. Then all was a swirl of confusion. She saw Harry draw his sword from Lionel’s fallen body, fling it from him, and rush with a deep cry of anguish to the tall, white-headed man who yet stood erect, smiling, but with a face of terrible pallor.
She looked again; and, as if the blast of a mighty wind had torn the mists from her eyes, she knew him. The old man she had called him: it was Lord Rockhurst himself.
And now it became clear to her that he was wounded, and grievously. Though he still stood, he was supported on one side by his son; on the other by a grey-bearded yeoman who, seeing his leader struck, had worked his way to him with great strides, through the mob of soldiers and rioters struggling at the door.
“Sir,” he was saying, “this is the weight of a dead man.”
“Ah, no!” cried the son. “For God’s sake, look to the wound! O God!—the sword, to the very hilt!”
Rockhurst came back from his far-smiling contemplation to forbid the hand that would have plucked the broken sword from his side.
“Touch it not yet, Sergeant Bracy. When you draw it, you draw my life with it.”
“He’s sped, Master Harry,” whispered Bracy, and his face began to work.
Then Rockhurst failed in their arms and they gently laid him down on the flags, but a few paces away from Lionel Ratcliffe’s dead body. As in a dream, Diana came and knelt by his side. Madam Anastasia was praying under her voice the prayer for the dying: “… Remember not, O Lord, the offences of thy servant, and take not revenge of his sins.…”