“Nine!”
The trigger had been pulled. There was a fresh detonation. D’Arcy handed his pistol to the fat man, bent over, took up his hat, put it on, took it off, raised it straight upward, and for a moment, before replacing it, held it high in the air.
Leilah, without noticing the salute which was intended for her, saw Barouffski turn completely around, sink on his knees, press his hands to his side, and pitch forward.
It was a feint, she thought, histrionics for the gallery, perhaps for her. But now the old man and his colleague were bending over him. Behind them, Palencia, Tyszkiewicz and the man with the umbrella leaned. Barouffski’s coat and waistcoat were opened, his shirt was torn apart.
Leilah heard what to her was the meaninglessness of technical terms. She saw the men who had been bending arise. She saw the others remove their hats. At the significant action she saw that the garden had been again invaded, this time by Death.
She turned, clutching for support at the velvet of a curtain, overwhelmed at the knowledge that her prison had crumbled, that the jailer was gone.
It had been her destiny to have sorrow spring into her life, fell her, make her its own, and to what end? Tearfully she had put that query to walls as callous as fate. Tearfully she had come to believe that she was damned in this existence for sins committed in another. It is this life that is hell she had told herself. But now, abruptly, the malediction was lifted. Still in hell, she was at the portals, the gates were open, she was free!
Yet was she? At the moment it seemed to her that it was all a hallucination; that, if she looked again into the accursed garden, she would see Barouffski tapping his breast with one hand, pointing to some prostrate form with the other, and, with his ambiguous smile, calling to her:
“See, my dear, I, I am unharmed.”