After all, her husband might not have heard that thumping clatter; all unknowing, he might be rushing downward to meet an ambush unsuspected and unknown. And that Armitage would shoot, the woman was convinced. For he would put but one construction upon that headlong descent. Daventry had heard him, knew that he was there, like a thief in the night, a marauder, an outlaw meriting the swift justice of the ballet.
And then, all at once, the steps ceased; a silence grew and held that was like the silence before storm, so that to the woman upon the bed it seemed that she abode in a vacuum of sound and silence, brooding upon the night in a volcanic, breathless calm.
It must be a nightmare that would pass, a waking dream that would presently dissolve in the sanity of peaceful slumber. She strove, as a drowning swimmer fathoms deep in dreams, to scream a warning, a command to the man—her man—silent now upon the threshold of life, or of death. But she could not.
And presently, how she could not have told, she knew that, where before there had been but one dim Presence in that bed-chamber, now there were two.
She had heard nothing, seen nothing, felt nothing; neither the opening nor the closing of the heavy door; no faintest sound of breathing; the silence held, borrowing a tension from the electric air. Remote, as through many thicknesses of walls, there came to her now, as from a world removed, the night noises of the City, muted by distance to a vague shadow of clamor, faint and far.
But that velvet black before her was, as she knew, most terribly endowed with motion, sinister, alive, awaiting merely the spark, the pressure of rigid finger upon trigger, the touch of hand against hand, the faintest whisper of a sound, to dissolve in a chaos of red ruin—and with it the ruin of her world.
Abruptly, again she heard that muffled ticking, this time close at hand, and with it, as she fancied, the faint breathing of a man. But even as she heard it, it receded, died; there came the faint snick of metal upon metal, like the snick and slither of a steel blade; it was followed by a sort of chugging impact, like the sound made by a knife sheathed home, say, at the base of a man’s brain, or between the shoulders—a sound to freeze the blood.
That Armitage could have been capable of this she could not believe, but upon the instant her flesh crawled abruptly at the thought; of the invisible duelists but one remained now, and he was coming toward her; she fancied she could hear the faint, scarce-audible footfall on the thick pile of the rug.
And then—the silence was abruptly broken by a shattering crash. The intruder, unfamiliar with the room’s interior, had swept a great vase from the mantel.
And then, distinct and clear, she heard the sodden impact of fist on flesh, a heaving grunt, the lift and strain of heavy bodies, close-locked.