Part 37 (2/2)
This was too much for even Flint's sense of humor, which had suffered somewhat, as every one's does, from the process of falling in love.
His lips twitched.
”Then I am not more obtuse than any one you ever saw, when the sufferings of others are involved?”
”Don't, pray, don't bring up the things I said that night!” cried Winifred, blus.h.i.+ng rosy red.
”This is no time for jesting, dear, I know,” Flint answered, coming close to her as she stood against the filmy lace curtain. ”No time either for jesting or hoping; only your words did give me a gleam of encouragement to think that perhaps a girl who changed her mind so much in a few weeks might have wavered a little in a few days. Is it possible--Winifred, before I go away, as I must at once--could you find it in your heart to say 'I love you'?”
Winifred made him no answer, at least in words; but she came close to him, and laid both hands on his arm with a touching gesture of trustful affection.
So absorbed were they in one another that they did not notice how near they stood to the window, or that the curtain was too diaphanous quite to conceal them from view. Suddenly into their world of ecstatic oblivion came a crash, a sound of falling gla.s.s, a dull thud against the wall opposite to the window.
”Great Heavens!” cried Flint, looking anxiously at Winifred. ”What was that? Are you sure you're not hurt, my darling?”
Even as he spoke, another report was heard outside, and, throwing open the curtains, they saw a man on the other side of the street stagger and fall. Flint rushed to the door, down the steps and across the sidewalk. A crowd had already collected.
”He is dead,--stone dead,” said one, kneeling with his hand over his heart.
”Queer, isn't it--on Thanksgiving Day too?” said another.
”Who is he?--a countryman by his looks,” said a third. ”Fine-looking chap, too, with that crop of curly hair and these broad shoulders.”
”Faith!” murmured an old woman, ”it's some mother's heart 'ull bleed this day.” And pulling out her beads, she knelt on the sidewalk to say a prayer over the parting soul.
The prostrate form lying along the pavement had a certain tragic dignity, almost majesty, in its att.i.tude. One arm was pressed to the heart, the other thrown out in a gesture of abandonment to despair.
The revolver, which had dropped from the nerveless hand, lay still smoking beside the still figure. From a wound in the left temple under the dark curls the blood trickled in a red stream. Death was in his look. The lips were turning blue, and the eyes glazing rapidly.
Flint came close to the dying man, and then shrank back with an involuntary start of horror. ”Leonard Davitt!” he murmured below his breath. In an instant the whole situation was clear to him. By one of those flashlights which the mind sometimes sheds on a scene before it, making the hidden places clear and turning darkness to daylight, he grasped the truth. He knew that by some unlucky chance Leonard had come to New York, had seen him and Tilly Marsden in conversation, had seen them come here together, had fancied that he was wronged. Then this morning again he must have seen him with Winifred at the window,--Winifred mistaken for the girl he loved,--and then jealousy quite mastered the brooding brain, and the end was _this_.
As Flint stood over the boy's body, a great weight of sadness fell upon him. He felt like one of the figures in a Greek tragedy, innocent in intent, but drawn into a fatal entanglement of evil, and made an instrument of woe to others as innocent as himself. The blue sky above in its azure clearness seemed a type of the indifference of Heaven, the chill of the pavement a symbol of the coldness of earth. These thoughts, chasing each other through his brain with lightning rapidity, still left it clear for action.
”Stand away there, and give the man air!” he cried, clearing a little s.p.a.ce. ”Go for a doctor, somebody,--quick!”
”Oh, can it be Leonard Davitt!” whispered Winifred under her breath, as pale and trembling with emotion she drew near the edge of the crowd. ”Poor boy! What shall we say to his mother?”
”Hus.h.!.+” Flint answered. ”May we carry him into the house?”
”Of course--of course. Oh, do hurry with the doctor. Perhaps he is not dead, after all.”
With that ready adaptiveness which in Americans so often supplies the place of training, four of the men stepped forward, and lifting the body gently bore it up the steps and through the open door into the drawing-room, and laid it on the lounge just under the bullet-hole in the wall.
A doctor bustled in, box in hand. He made no effort to open his case, however. One look was sufficient.
”Death must have been instantaneous,” he said. ”What a queer thing,--a suicide on Thanksgiving Day!”
CHAPTER XXII
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