She stumbled and fell, shrieking frenziedly for help. Another woman—a woman whose extended right hand clutched a long, thin knife such as is used to carve game—appeared from the gloom of the orchard. Her wan face was raised to the sky, and a baleful light shone in her eyes.
“Ay, I’ll swing for him,” she cried in a voice shrill with hysteria. “May the Lord deal wi’ him as he dealt wi’ me! And my own sister, too! Out on ye, ye strumpet! ’Twould sarve ye right if I stuck ye wi’ t’ same knife.”
With a clatter of ironshod boots, most of the frightened children stampeded out of the stable yard. Martin, to whom Angèle clung in speechless fear, and the two Beckett-Smythes alone were left.
The din of steam organ and drums, the ceaseless turmoil of the fair, the constant fusillade at the shooting gallery, and the bawling of men in charge of the various sideshows, had kept the women’s shrieks from other ears thus far. But Kitty Thwaites, though almost shocked out of her senses, gained strength from the imminence of peril. Springing up from the path just in time to avoid the vengeful oncoming of her sister, she staggered toward the hotel and created instant alarm by her cries of “Murder! Help! George Pickering has been stabbed!”
A crowd of men poured out from bar and smoking-room. One, who took thought, rushed through the front door and snatched a naphtha lamp from a stall. Meanwhile, the three boys and the girl on the other side of the hedge, seeing and hearing everything, but unseen and unheard themselves, took counsel in some sort.
“I say,” Ernest Beckett-Smythe urged his brother, “let’s get out of this. Father will thrash us to death if we’re mixed up in this business.”
The advice was good. Frank forgot his dizziness for the moment, and the two raced to secure their bicycles from a stall-holder’s care. They rode away to the Hall unnoticed.
Martin remained curiously quiet. All the excitement had left him. If Elmsdale were rent by an earthquake just then, he would have watched the toppling houses with equanimity.
“I suppose you don’t wish to stop here now?” he said to Angèle.
The girl was sobbing bitterly. Her small body shook as though each gulp were a racking cough. She could not answer. He placed his arm around her and led her to the gate. While they were crossing the yard the people from the hotel crowded into the garden. The man with the lamp had reached the back of the house across the bowling green, and a stalwart farmer had caught Betsy Thwaites by the wrist. The blood-stained knife fell from her fingers. She moaned helplessly in disjointed phrases.