The door had been locked again, this time by Ilam.
“She is in love with you,” Ilam shouted fiercely. “You have imposed on her; you have taken advantage of her ignorance of life, and she is in love with you! It is infamous. I am stronger than you, and unless you promise me——”
“Idiot!” Jetsam stopped him. “What are you raving about? You must be mad. You must have forgotten—as your mother forgets. As for this poor girl being in love with me——-” He stopped with a hard laugh. “What has that to do with you?”
“It has everything to do with me,” cried Ilam, and, as if transported by fury, he suddenly sprang on Jetsam, who was all unprepared, and, clasping him in a murderous embrace, threw him to the ground. “I’ve had enough of you,” he ground out the words through his teeth. “And if I finish you, I can easily show that it was in self-defence.”
And he had scarcely spoken when his hands fell lax in astonishment and alarm, for immediately outside the window, or so it seemed, there sounded four notes of a trombone, brazen, clear, and imposing in the night. No one who has heard Beethoven’s greatest symphony will ever forget the four notes—commonly called the notes of fate—with which the most tremendous of musical compositions opens. It was these notes which the trombone had given forth. There was a silence, and the instrument repeated them, and in the next pause that followed, the two men who an instant before had been joined in a dreadful struggle, lay moveless, listening to their own breathing; and a third time the trombone sounded.
CHAPTER XXVIII—The Dead March
When Pauline, standing outside Carpentaria’s bungalow, had communicated to Carpentaria the fateful fact that all Ilam’s servants had disappeared from their rooms, and had given expression to the vague and terrible fear that was beginning to take possession of her, the musician said in reply:
“You have every reason to be afraid, and yet I shall ask you to try to calm your apprehensions. Whether the servants are there or not, nobody can get into your house without our knowing it, and when anybody starts to attempt to get in, there will be plenty of time for you to alarm yourself then.”