He went down on his knees and held out the babe, and as he did so she wailed.
The mother, meanwhile, stood, insolent lids half closed, red lips thrust forward, tapping the floor with impatient foot, the embodiment of cruel disdain.
At her child’s cry she stuffed her fingers into her ears with savage gesture, stamped, and flung a raging glance at her lover as one who said, “How long am I to endure this?”
He answered it by the movement of a beckoning finger, which brought her to his side. Then he cast a gold piece on the table, clapped his hat on his head, and together they moved towards the door.
“Ah! By the blessed saints!”
The Spaniard in a bound was before them. He shook the screaming infant in their faces as if it had been a weapon.
“I swear this shall not be. I swear that I shall kill you and your paramour and the child and myself rather than that this shall be.”
It was here that Pamela caught the little one from him. He was perhaps too far gone in passion to notice the action; perhaps he was glad to have his hands free for his fierce purpose—anyhow, he relaxed his hold. And the girl, clasping the baby in her arms, hushing it and soothing it, ran with it to the further end of the room. Sir Everard had also risen and Bellairs had started forward. But it would have been as easy to baulk a wild cat of its leap as to arrest the betrayed husband in his spring upon his betrayer.
No one ever quite knew how it happened. There was the flash of a knife, an oath, and my Lord Sanquhar’s “Damn you, you would have it!” and the explosion of a pistol.
The Spaniard fell without a groan, right across the doorway. Sir Everard and Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs both knew that he was a dead man before he touched the ground.