Rosa gave a loud scream, and swooned away.
Staines laid his wife flat on the floor, got the women about her, and at last she began to give the usual signs of returning life.
Staines said to the oldest woman there, “If she sees me, she will go off again. Carry her to her room; and tell her, by degrees, that I am alive.”
All this time Papa Lusignan had sat trembling and whimpering in a chair, moaning, “This is a painful scene—very painful.” But at last an idea struck him—“WHY, YOU HAVE ROBBED THE OFFICE!”
Scarcely was Mrs. Staines out of the room, when a fly drove up, and this was immediately followed by violent and continuous screaming close under the window.
“Oh, dear!” sighed Papa Lusignan.
They ran down, and found Falcon impaled at full length on the spikes of the villa, and Phoebe screaming over him, and trying in vain to lift him off them. He had struggled a little, in silent terror, but had then fainted from fear and loss of blood, and lying rather inside the rails, which were high, he could not be extricated from the outside.
As soon as his miserable condition was discovered, the servants ran down into the kitchen, and so up to the rails by the area steps. These rails had caught him; one had gone clean through his arm, the other had penetrated the fleshy part of the thigh, and a third pierced his ear.
They got him off; but he was insensible, and the place drenched with his blood.
Phoebe clutched Staines by the arm. “Let me know the worst,” said she. “Is he dead?”