“Sim! Sim!” cried out the woman in a voice full of horror and entreaty, panting towards the combatants. Her call confused her lover: in a mingling of anger and impatience he lunged wildly, and Count Victor's weapon took him in the chest.
“Zut!” cried the Frenchman, withdrawing the sword and flicking the blood from the point with a ludicrous movement.
The Chamberlain writhed at his feet, muttered something fierce in Gaelic, and a great repugnance took possession of the other. He looked at his work; he quite forgot the hurrying woman until she ran past him and threw herself beside the wounded man.
“Oh, Sim! Sim!” she wailed, in an utterance the most distressing. Her lover turned upon his back and smiled sardonically at her out of a face of paper. “I wish ye had been a little later, Kate,” he said, “or that I had begun with a hale arm. Good God! I've swallowed a hot cinder. I love you, my dear; I love you, my dear. Oh, where the de'il's my flageolet?” And then his head fell back.
With frantic hands she unloosed his cravat, sought and staunched the wound with her handkerchief, and wept the while with no sound, though her bosom, white like the spray of seas, seemed bound to burst above her corsage.
Count Victor sheathed his weapon, and “Madame,” said he with preposterous inadequacy, “this—this—is distressing; this—this—” he desired to offer some assistance, but baulked at the fury of the eyes she turned on him.
“Oh, you!—you!—you!” she gasped, choking to say even so little. “It is enough, is it not, that you have murdered him, without staying to see me tortured?”
To this he could, of course, make no reply. His quandary was immense. Two hundred yards away was that white phantom town shining in the morning sun that rose enormous over the eastern hills beyond the little lapping silver waves. A phantom town, with phantom citizens doubtless prying through the staring eyes of those closed shutters. A phantom town—town of fairy tale, with grotesque roofs, odd corbeau-stepped gables, smokeless chimneys, all white with snow, and wild birds on its terrace, preening in the blessed light of the sun. He stood with his back to the pair upon the sand. “My God! 'tis a dream,” said he. “I shall laugh in a moment.” He seemed to himself to stand thus an age, and yet in truth it was only a pause of minutes when the Chamberlain spoke with the tone of sleep and insensibility as from another world.
“I love you, my dear; I love you, my dear—Olivia.”
Mrs. Petullo gave a cry of pain and staggered to her feet. She turned upon Count Victor a face distraught and eyes that were wild with the wretchedness of the disillusioned. Her fingers were playing nervously at her lips; her shoulders were roughened and discoloured by the cold; her hair falling round her neck gave her the aspect of a slattern. She, too, looked at the façade of the town and saw her husband's windows shuttered and indifferent to her grief.