Flint: His Faults, His Friendships and His FortunesGoodwin, Maud Wilder
General
Flint: His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes
Goodwin, Maud Wilder
Fiction
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 glass, 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 attitude. 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
space. "Go for a doctor, somebody,--quick!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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