She shrank from me as though I had struck her. "I do not know, I do not know," she moaned.
Then a thing happened that seemed strange and awful in the gloomy, dark hall. For the stricken man opened his eyes, his lips moved, and he groaned: "Constantine! You, Constantine!" and the old woman's eyes met mine for a moment, and fell to the ground again.
"Why—why, Constantine?" moaned the wounded man. "I had yielded—I had yielded, Constantine. I would have sent them—" His words ceased, his eyes closed, his lips met again, but met only to part. A moment later his jaw dropped. The old lord of Neopalia was dead.
Then I, carried away by anger and by hatred of the man who, for a reason I did not yet understand, had struck so foul a blow against his kinsman and an old man, did a thing so rash that it seems to me now, when I consider it in the cold light of the past, a mad deed. Yet then I could do nothing else; and Denny's face, aye, and the eyes of the others, too, told me that they were with me.
"Compose this old man's body," I said, "and we will watch it. And do you go and tell this Constantine Stefanopoulos that I know his crime, that I know who struck that blow, and that what I know all men shall know, and that I will not rest day nor night until he has paid the penalty of this murder. And tell him I swore this on the honor of an English gentleman."
"And say I swore it, too!" cried Denny; and Hogvardt and Watkins, not making bold to speak, ranged up close to me; and I knew that they also meant what I meant.
The old woman looked at me with searching eyes.
"You are a bold man, my lord," said she.
"I see nothing to be afraid of up to now," said I. "Such courage as is needed to tell a scoundrel what I think of him, I believe I can claim."
"But he will never let you go now. You would go to Rhodes, and tell his—tell what you say of him."