I could see them clearly. They were now some distance to the left, apparently in the middle of the first home meadow. Thither I bent my course across wet turf in the piercing night, but with heed for nought save those baleful lanterns. For now I was never more convinced of anything than that these foes had come abroad to settle once for all their long account. By the rapidity with which I drew nearer to the lights, I concluded that their bearers had halted, probably to choose their battleground. Instinctively feeling this to be the case, I broke into a run. Clearing the lawn, leaping pell-mell across the grotto at its margin, and skirting the artificial lake, I emerged into the open field. It was so well lit by the bright moon, riding through white cloud, that I could see enough to confirm my coldest fears.
The lanterns were now reposing on the grass, while each man stood beside his own, perhaps at a distance of a dozen paces. They seemed to be fearlessly erect, and absolutely resolute, and this in itself was enough to prove that only death was likely to end their duel. Ere I had time to cry out, or even to overcome the first paralysis of the fear that held me, one of them, who by his breadth of figure I knew to be the Captain, raised his right hand slowly. At that, although the actual time of the whole affair could not have exceeded half a minute, such tricks can terror play upon us that the entire strength appeared to ooze slowly from my body, as though a surgeon had opened one of my vital arteries and was bleeding me to death by slow degrees. And the instant the Captain’s hand went up, I stopped through arrant horror and that dreadful sense of sheer incompetence that afflicts one in a nightmare. I made one attempt to scream out to them, but my throat seemed useless, and my voice resembled the feeble croakings of a frog. Before I could make another, there came a sound like a mastiff’s bay, and in the most cold, convulsive terror I put my hands before my eyes. They must have been still there, I think, and my eyes have turned to stone, for to this day I swear that I never saw the second and the fatal shot, and, still stranger, actually did not hear it. But when my vision cleared I thought I saw one man prone beside his lantern, and the other bending over him.
The die cast, and the deed accomplished, my limbs resumed their proper office and I was able to proceed. Fate had intervened already, the worst had happened, the tragedy was consummated. The actual fact is ever easier to support than the suspense of it. While I ran to the scene of the murder, with my heart grown too big for my body, and apparently bursting through my side, so complete was the illusion played by terror upon my several senses, that I was absolutely sure that it was the prisoner who was hit, that I had lost a lover, and that the world had lost a hero.
When I arrived breathless upon the battleground, the survivor was kneeling still beside his fallen foe, and appeared to be feeling at his breast. But death ever wears an aspect that is wholly unmistakable, and the lad fully extended on his face, hands straight by his side, and his form prone beneath the ghastly moon, told me all too surely that the life had gone out of him for ever. Without a word I also fell upon my knees beside the corpse, and took one of the dead man’s hands within my own. The murderer, still kneeling the other side of the body, appeared to raise his face and look at me, and then he cried in a voice of hoarse astonishment:
“You?”
I did not answer, but still nursed the dead man’s hand, almost without knowing that I did so, such strange things does passion do.
“Lady Barbara,” he said, in a voice quite unendurable to my ears.
“Do not speak,” I whispered, “I cannot bear to hear you speak.”
“Lady Barbara,” he said again.
“God curse you!” I muttered through shut teeth.