“So, it is I you would see slain,” he muttered, savagely.
His opponent was showing greater skill than he had anticipated, and his face grew graver in its expression. Clash, clash, clash, rang the blades, and the stamp of feet upon the checkered carpet grew quicker and heavier. Still the actor retreated in curves around the room, and still the Count pressed him.
Suddenly the unforeseen happened. The Count found his foot entangled in the folds of the cloak which Marlowe had let fall upon the floor. He endeavored to kick it aside but lost his equilibrium. The other became the aggressor, and with a desperate lunge, as the Count stumbled, he thrust his rapier blade deep into the eye and brain of the latter. The stricken swordsman gave utterance to a savage but suppressed cry of pain. The temporary check to his fall only increased its impetus when the rapier was wrenched from its lodgment, and with a crash he descended to the floor.
All sounds lay hushed with the fall. The living man looked speechlessly at his antagonist outstretched with face downward on the carpet, and still retaining a dying clutch upon the hilt of his sword. The end had come so unexpectedly that for a moment the survivor did not grasp the full extent of his victory nor the consequences of the deed. He leaned over the unfortunate man and turned him on his back. He saw that he was beyond the aid of earthly power. He heard him breathe in gasps, and then, trembling like an aspen, he dropped his own rapier upon the floor and leaned back against the wall.
THE COVER OF HIS FAME.
Come death and with thy fingers close my eyes,
Or if I live, let me forget myself:
—Edward the Second, v, 1.
Oh God!—Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall leave behind me!
—Hamlet, v, 2.
The termination of the combat awakened feelings in the woman varied in their character and following one another with the speed of successive thoughts. She was stunned with the suddenness of the close; horror-stricken with the violence of the catastrophe; elated with the escape of Marlowe, find tremulous with sympathy for the unfortunate slain. In her silent prayer for the deliverance of Marlowe, she had only thought of it through deliberate truce, or interference from without. No idea of his escape through the death of his antagonist had occurred to her. She could not have prayed for such catastrophe, and even the wish was foreign to her mind. All the confidence that Fraser had displayed had been impressed upon her, and there had been nothing in the prolonged, though skillful, resistance of Marlowe that had raised a doubt over the dreaded outcome.
Faint with her loss of hope for mercy on the part of Frazer, she had crept to the door with the idea of throwing it open and alarming the house. With one hand on the bolt and the other on the knob she had turned her face for a last look at the combatants. It was at this moment that the coup de grace was given. She turned about and started forward with a low cry, partly of relief, partly of anguish, partly of horror.