‘Who struck the blow, woman? Who struck the blow?’
She shrank from me as though I had struck her.
‘I do not know; I do not know,’ she moaned.
But the question she dared not answer was to find an answer.
The stricken man opened his eyes, his lips moved, and he groaned, ‘Constantine! You, Constantine!’ The old woman’s eyes met mine for a moment and fell to the ground again.
‘Why, why, Constantine?’ moaned the wounded man. ‘I had yielded, I had yielded, Constantine. I would have sent them—’
His words ceased, his eyes closed, his lips met again, but met only to part. A moment later his jaw dropped. The old lord of Neopalia was dead.
Then I, carried away by anger and by hatred of the man who, for a reason I did not yet understand, had struck so foul a blow against his kinsman and an old man, did a thing so rash that it seems to me now, when I consider it in the cold light of memory, a mad deed. Yet then I could do nothing else; and Denny’s face, ay, and the eyes of the others too told me that they were with me.
‘Compose this old man’s body,’ I said, ‘and we will watch it. But do you go and tell this Constantine Stefanopoulos that I know his crime, that I know who struck that blow, that what I know all men shall know, and that I will not rest day or night until he has paid the penalty of this murder. Tell him I swore this on the honour of an English gentleman.’
‘And say I swore it too!’ cried Denny; and Hogvardt and Watkins, not making bold to speak, ranged up close to me; I knew that they also meant what I meant.