And, at that, Lord Jura seemed to start from the stupor into which he had gradually lapsed. His haggard face grew dark with insane and uncontrollable passion as he began to realise the fiendish ingenuity of the revenge exacted by the man whom he had, in the first place, wronged so cruelly. No other torture, bodily or mental, could have caused him such anguish as the thought of all his sister must have suffered ere she died. He lifted two twitching hands and suddenly leaped, as a tiger might, at Farish M'Kissock's throat.
So swift and unforeseen was the movement that no one could interfere. But he overshot his mark and slipped and fell on the polished oaken floor as Farish M'Kissock stumbled aside, just in time to escape his clutch. He came down with a crash, and his eye-glass dropped and splashed about him in fragments as his forehead struck. But, stunned as he was, he turned on one shoulder and thrust an arm out, and was trying to rise when something seemed to snap in the coat-pocket underneath him, and he uttered a scream of agony as his arm collapsed at the elbow, so that he fell face forward again, struggling like a swimmer with cramp.
"Keep back!" shouted Slyne. And Justin Carthew, in the act of stooping to try to help the ex-engineer, sprang to one side in time and no more to escape the touch of a wriggling thing, black and slimy, like a live shoe-string, which had come slithering out from under the hand with which the fallen man was clawing at the floor. It was almost at Carthew's ankles. He leaped convulsively again, and came down on it with both feet. Its little venomous head writhed round and struck more than once at the patent leather of his low shoes, and then fell limply back and lay still. He set his heel on it, to make sure that it would work no more harm, and turned hastily toward Lord Jura again.
Herries was before him, however, and had already lifted the stricken man's head and shoulders a little. Carthew would have helped to raise him to a sitting posture, but all his limbs curled in a dreadful convulsion and straightened rigidly and curled again in a last awful spasm, and so relaxed, lifeless, while his rolling eyeballs also grew fixed and still. He had ceased to breathe.
"He's dead," said Captain Dove, and started, as if alarmed by the sound of his own voice. And for a space no one else spoke, and no one moved at all. The only undertones that broke the silence were the subdued, helpless weeping of the three women, the muted moaning of the wind on the terrace without. Carthew and Herries were still on their knees, one on either side of the dead man, from one of whose pockets protruded a broken, empty cigar-box. The others stood staring down at him as if they could scarcely yet understand what it was that had made such an instant difference in him.
Carthew got stiffly to his feet. "We must get the women away out of this at once," he whispered to Herries, and held out a hand to help the old factor up.
Herries gazed at him, out of lack-lustre eyes into which a slow return of intelligence crept as he too rose.
"Yes,—my lord," he answered in a low voice, that yet was audible to all but the unhearing ears of him who had been the ninth Earl of Jura, whose heritage was now no more than a quiet niche in the lonely graveyard on the most seaward of the Small Isles, and a young girl's ignorant prayers that he might there find rest and peace.