Relieved as to what he had thought his worst fear, and yet with an uncommon bitterness about his heart, he turns to withdraw, and his hand is already on the lock of the door which leads into the corridor, when suddenly, without any warning, there reaches his ear the noise of a loud, crashing fall, followed—accompanied, rather—by a piercing scream.
In infinitely less than a second he finds himself on his knees beside the prostrate body of Byng, who, with blood pouring from his forehead, is stretched upon the floor of the salon. Even at this second there flashes upon him, ludicrous and dreadful, the memory of the Police News. This scene has a grotesque likeness to the final one of the groom and kitchenmaid series, only that in the present case the heroine, instead of staggering backward with the top of her head flying up to the ceiling, is hanging unharmed over her fallen lover.
"Are you hurt?" cries Jim in frantic anxiety, looking at her across the prostrate figure, and unable to eradicate from his mind the revolver idea. "Did he hit you? I did not hear a shot."
"Oh no, no! but he," fetching her breath in terrible gasps, and hanging over the bleeding man with that utter abandonment of all disguise, in which a great naked grief sweeps away our sophistications—"he is dead!"
"Oh no, he is not," answers Jim hastily, tearing open Byng's waistcoat and laying his hand upon his heart. "He has only fainted. Get some water! Have you got any salts? No; do not lift his head"—seeing that she is agonizedly trying to raise his prone head and rest it upon her knees—"he had better be as flat as he can. Quick, some water!"
She does not need to be twice told. In an instant she has sprung to the table, and brought thence the china jug out of which she is wont to water her flowers, and also the big cut-glass bottle of smelling-salts with which Jim has often seen poor Mrs. Le Marchant solacing herself when racked with that neuralgic headache which means worry. He splashes water out of the one upon Byng's ashy face, and holds the other to his pale nostrils; while Elizabeth, once more flinging herself upon her knees, wipes the blood from his temples with her little useless gossamer inch of handkerchief.
"How did it happen?" asks Jim rapidly. "What did he do to himself?"
The heads of the two ministrants are very close to each other as they bend together over the swooned youth. Jim can see a little smear of Byng's blood upon one of her white cheeks. The sight gives him a shudder. Byng seems to have made her more his own by that gory baptism than by all his frenzied vows and tears.
"Oh, I do not know," she answers, still fetching both breath and words with difficulty. "He was standing up, and he seemed quite right; and then, all of a sudden, in a minute, he went down like a log, and hit his forehead against the sharp corner of the table"—with a convulsive shiver at the recollection. "I ought to have saved him! I ought; but I was not quick enough. I stood stock-still, and now he is dead! You say that he is not; but I am sure he is dead!"
"Oh no, nonsense! he is not," replies Jim brusquely, thinking a certain harshness of manner the best recipe for her. "He is alive, sure enough; and as for the cut on his forehead, now that you have wiped the blood away, you can see for yourself that it is not at all a deep one. It is merely a big scratch. I have often had a worse out hunting from a bramble, in jumping through a hedge. Oh, Mrs. Le Marchant, here you are! That is all right. We have had an accident, you see. He has fallen down in a faint, and given himself a bit of a knock. That is all; do not be frightened. It looks worse than it is—Oh, M. Cipriani, vous voilà! Envoyez chercher un médecin tout de suite! Il y a un M. Crump"—catching in his destitution at the thought of even Sybilla's objectionable friend.