"Queer, isn't it—on Thanksgiving Day too?" said another.
"Who is he?—a countryman by his looks," said a third. "Fine-looking chap, too, with that crop of curly hair and these broad shoulders."
"Faith!" murmured an old woman, "it's some mother's heart 'ull bleed this day." And pulling out her beads, she knelt on the sidewalk to say a prayer over the parting soul.
The prostrate form lying along the pavement had a certain tragic dignity, almost majesty, in its attitude. One arm was pressed to the heart, the other thrown out in a gesture of abandonment to despair. The revolver, which had dropped from the nerveless hand, lay still smoking beside the still figure. From a wound in the left temple under the dark curls the blood trickled in a red stream. Death was in his look. The lips were turning blue, and the eyes glazing rapidly.
Flint came close to the dying man, and then shrank back with an involuntary start of horror. "Leonard Davitt!" he murmured below his breath. In an instant the whole situation was clear to him. By one of those flashlights which the mind sometimes sheds on a scene before it, making the hidden places clear and turning darkness to daylight, he grasped the truth. He knew that by some unlucky chance Leonard had come to New York, had seen him and Tilly Marsden in conversation, had seen them come here together, had fancied that he was wronged. Then this morning again he must have seen him with Winifred at the window,—Winifred mistaken for the girl he loved,—and then jealousy quite mastered the brooding brain, and the end was this.
As Flint stood over the boy's body, a great [Pg 354] weight of sadness fell upon him. He felt like one of the figures in a Greek tragedy, innocent in intent, but drawn into a fatal entanglement of evil, and made an instrument of woe to others as innocent as himself. The blue sky above in its azure clearness seemed a type of the indifference of Heaven, the chill of the pavement a symbol of the coldness of earth. These thoughts, chasing each other through his brain with lightning rapidity, still left it clear for action.
"Stand away there, and give the man air!" he cried, clearing a little space. "Go for a doctor, somebody,—quick!"
"Oh, can it be Leonard Davitt!" whispered Winifred under her breath, as pale and trembling with emotion she drew near the edge of the crowd. "Poor boy! What shall we say to his mother?"
"Hush!" Flint answered. "May we carry him into the house?"