Agitated, excited, moved out of himself, Bayre stood for an instant where she had left him, feeling the touch of her sensitive fingers still on his hand, the rays shot by her glorious eyes still shining right into his heart.
It was encouragement, real encouragement that he had got at last. The very bundle of her own writing which he held in his hand was a pledge of that: ill-written, futile as it might be, this girlish outpouring, it was dear to her, at any rate; it was a part of her young self that she would not trust to the eyes of the first person she met.
Even as he thought this his fingers closed upon the paper more tightly. He was turning to leave the garden when there rang through the clear air a sound which made him shiver.
It was a hoarse cry, muffled at first, then clearer, louder, the cry of “Help! Help! Murder!”
CHAPTER XIX.
GOOD-BYE
“Murder!”
The cry came from some part of the wood which surrounded the house and grounds on all sides but one. It was impossible to recognise the voice, but it was not Olwen’s.
Bayre shouted in answer, and then he heard the cry again; and plunging in among the bushes which grew thick under the trees of the plantation, he presently heard it for the third time, uttered more faintly than before, and then he came suddenly upon a scene of weird horror.
In a little clearing, not many feet from a small round pond which was swollen by the recent wet weather, two men were struggling in a hand-to-hand tussle, in which one of them was obviously getting the best of it. This one was Pierre Vazon, who, hatless, with a scar across his face and blood in his matted hair, was kneeling on the body of his master and twisting the neck-cloth of the latter more and more tightly round his throat. Bayre uttered a cry of horror: his uncle lay gasping on the ground, his face livid, his eye-balls starting, trying in vain to utter more than a stifled cry.
He was indeed very nearly at the last gasp, and the blood was coming from his nostrils as he made a feeble attempt to clutch the arms of his assailant and to free himself from the fatal pressure under which he felt his very life ebbing away.