To the woman pinned to the wall by shock--the shimmering frivolity of
her evening gown, a flimsy, fluttery affair of silver tissue, lilac and
blue, lending form and colour to the illusion of a bright butterfly
impaled--the moments immediately following that murderous fusillade were
a raving welter of horrors.
Between two heartbeats she saw Lynn, with a face as blank as paper,
spinning, toppling, beating the air with aimless arms, pitching to the
floor like something blasted, resting there in a sickening, inert
crumple; and was keenly aware of the acrid reek of smokeless powder
cutting, as acid cuts oil, the sensuous scent of the roses that dressed
the room in her honour; and all the while was conscious of the pistol
nosing in between the draperies like an animate thing of infinite
malice, and the pallid oval of the face behind it, that seemed to float
in the dark as might the mask of some mad ghost.
As the din of those three shots, beating from wall to wall, lost weight
and volume, a thin shouting became audible from some point outside the
house, and Nelly Marquis with the sweep of a fury broke through the
hangings at the window, and pulled up with pistol levelled point-blank
at Lucinda's breast.
Through the least of pauses, the merest fragment of a second, a time
measureless in its lapse to one whose every function was frozen in
paralysis of fear, a single thought persisted: _Another instant and I
shall be as Lynn_.... Nelly's eyes were burning like black malignant
opals in a countenance at once luminous and wan. Death's icy grin
glimpsed in the play of light along that blunt blue barrel. Lucinda
felt as one caught fast in the pitiless jaws of some tremendous vice
whose pinch stilled the beating of her heart and arrested her labouring
lungs.
Then abruptly through the window a dark body hurled and fastening upon
the woman's back, swinging her aside, the pistol detonated with a
bellow, the bullet plumped into the wall close by Lucinda's head.