And he covered him with his pistol.
“Fool!” exclaimed Bellward who had stopped on the threshold of the secret door, “do you want to trap the lot of us! Tell him, Minna,” he said to Mrs. Malplaquet, “and for Heaven’s sake, let us be gone!”
Mrs. Malplaquet stood up.
“This is Basil Bellward,” she said, “see, he’s wearing the ring I gave him, a gold snake with emerald eyes! And now,” she cried, raising her voice shrilly, “before we go, kill that man!”
And she pointed at Desmond.
Bellward had seized her by the arm and was dragging her through the opening in the shed when a shrill whistle resounded from the garden. Without any warning Mortimer swung round and fired point-blank at Desmond. But Desmond had stooped to spring at the other and the bullet went over his head. With ears singing from the deafening report of the pistol in the confined space, with the acrid smell of cordite in his nostrils, Desmond leapt at Mortimer’s throat, hoping to bear him to the ground before he could shoot again. As he sprang he heard the crash of glass and a loud report. Someone cried out sharply “Oh!” as though in surprise and fell prone between him and his quarry; then he stumbled and at the same time received a crashing blow on the head. Without a sound he dropped to the ground across a body that twitched a little and then lay still.
Somewhere in the far, far distance Desmond heard a woman crying—long drawn-out wailing lamentations on a high, quavering note. He had a dull, hard pain in his head which felt curiously stiff. Drowsily he listened for a time to the woman’s sobbing, so tired, so curiously faint that he scarcely cared to wonder what it signified. But at last it grated on him by its insistency and he opened his eyes to learn the cause of it.
His bewildered gaze fell upon what seemed to him a gigantic, ogre-like face, as huge, as grotesque, as a pantomime mask. Beside it was a light, a brilliant light, that hurt his eyes.
Then a voice, as faint as a voice on a long distance telephone, said: