Chapter Twenty Seven.
For Clive’s Sake.
“For Clive’s sake,” she said to herself, as the charge exploded, and the recoil of the loosely held gun rent the bodice of her dress and jerked her violently backward.
There was a savage snarl, mingled with the report of the piece, and followed instantly by the tinkling of falling glass, a crushing sound of a gliding body, and then a dull concussion upon the stones beneath, where there was a panting and struggling, accompanied by a hissing as of breath drawn in agony; and then the rushing of the wind as it tore round the house, while within all was silence, as if of the dead.
Dinah stood in the chamber holding the gun, motionless and with a cold perspiration bedewing her face as she breathed the dank, clinging, hydrogenous fumes of the burnt powder. Every sense was on the strain, and her fingers rested now upon the second trigger as she waited, firm and determined to fire again in her defence should her would-be assailant climb up.
It was for Clive’s sake. She was his now—his very own; and in her excited, nerve-strung state she was ready to defend herself to the last, and die sooner than that man, her horror and despair, should again clasp her in his arms.
But no fresh sound arose as she waited in the black darkness grasping everything now. How that Sturgess must have deeply laid his plans, and in revenge for a savage seizure made by the dog, as she remembered with a shudder, first poisoned the poor brute, and then somehow have contrived to drug the tea of which Martha had partaken that evening.
She shivered again, as she thought of how closely this man must have watched everything that went on at the cottage, and how often he must have been near at hand at times when she knew it not. Then he must, in the knowledge of her father’s absence, have selected the Major’s chamber as a place where he could obtain entrance unheard, little thinking that Fate would inspire his child to select that as a place of safety.
And all the while Dinah stood there motionless, a yard farther from the open window, drawing her breath at intervals, her heart beating, and every sense still upon the strain, as she waited ready to repel the next attack.
Twice over a pang shot through her, and she felt that the time had come, for there was a rustling sound below, and in imagination she saw the dark opening grow more dark. But the sound died away again, and she knew that it was only a sudden gust of wind sweeping the rain-drops before it. And at last a new horror assailed her. That man—Sturgess, she was sure—had been in the act of climbing to the room and she had fired.