"Neither man on earth nor demon from h—ll shall stop me!" broke forth the man, in a voice of thunder, striding off.
In an instant Mr. Waring had intercepted him, holding up a light cane, and exclaiming:
"Stand back, you villain!"
Valentine came on with the evident intention of attempting to pass.
Mr. Waring met him with a sudden, sharp blow with his cane across the face.
And as Valentine, giddy and blinded for an instant with the blood that streamed from the cut, staggered backward, Mr. Waring, by another heavy stroke with the loaded end of the cane, felled him to the floor, and proceeded to follow up his victory with several other severe blows.
But Valentine was struggling to his feet, and at last sprang up—reeled, righted himself, cleared the blood from his eyes, glared around; and just as Mr. Waring had broken his cane with a final stroke over his shoulder, Valentine saw and seized a heavy oaken stool, and, aiming one fatal blow with all his force, struck his master in the face! The heavy leg of the oaken stool, aimed with all the strength of madness, crushed the eye—entered the brain, and Oswald Waring fell, never to rise again!
But Valentine was maddened! frenzied! and showered blows upon the dying man like one unconscious of his acts, until the agonized screams of women brought him slightly to his senses, when he found himself seized between Mrs. Waring, who was, amid her frantic shrieks, trying to pull him away, and Phædra, who was crying, distractedly: "Oh! Valentine, you've murdered him!"
He glared from one to the other, in the amazed, bewildered manner of one half wakened from a horrible dream; looked at the mutilated form before him; looked at the strange weapon in his hand—the foot-stool, with its legs clotted with blood and hair; and then, with a violent start, and an awful change of aspect, as if, for the first time the reality, the horror and the magnitude of his crime had burst upon his consciousness, he stood an instant, and casting the weapon from him, broke from the hands of the women, cleared the porch at a bound, rushed across the yard, leaped the fence, crossed the road and plunged into the shadows of the cypress swamp beyond.