I would hate that Death bandaged my eyes and forebore
And bade me creep past——”
Was that a battering-ram against timber that he heard? He fingered the trigger.
“Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!”
But the door did not fall. The rifle cracking became interspersed with alarmed outcries of warning and confusion. He could even hear the brush torn with the hurried tramping of running feet, and then the pandemonium abruptly stopped dead, and after a long period of inheld breath there followed a loud rapping on the door and a voice of agonized anxiety shouted:
“In God’s name open if ye’re still alive. It’s Cappeze—and friends!”
The psychological effect of that recognized voice upon John Spurrier, and of its incredible meaning, was strange to the point of grotesquerie. Its sound carried a complete reversal of everything to which his mind had been focussed with a tensity which had keyed itself to the acceptance of a violent death, and with the reversal came reaction. There was no interim of preparation for the altered aspect of affairs. It was precisely as though a runaway train furiously speeding to the overhang of an unbridged chasm had suddenly begun dashing in the contrary direction with no shade of lessening velocity, and no grinding of breaks to a halt between time.