The rumour that the Duke was hurt brought a chill
reaction of dismay, and the rioters were already scattering when the
cavalry came in sight. Their approach turned the slow dispersal to a
stampede. A few arrests were made, the remaining groups were charged by
the soldiers, and presently the square lay bare as a storm-swept plain,
though the people still hung on its outskirts, ready to disband at the
first threat of the troops.
It was on this solitude that the Duke looked out as he regained a sense
of his surroundings. Fulvia had been carried into the audience-chamber
and laid on the dais, her head resting on the velvet cushions of the
ducal chair. She had died instantly, shot through the heart, and the
surgeons summoned in haste had soon ceased from their ineffectual
efforts. For a long time Odo knelt beside her, unconscious of all but
that one wild moment when life at its highest had been dashed into the
gulf of death. Thought had ceased, and neither rage nor grief moved as
yet across the chaos of his being. All his life was in his eyes, as they
drew up, drop by drop, the precious essence of her loveliness. For she
had grown, beneath the simplifying hand of death, strangely yet most
humanly beautiful. Life had fallen from her like the husk from the
flower, and she wore the face of her first hopes. The transition had
been too swift for any backward look, any anguished rending of the
fibres, and he felt himself, not detached by the stroke, but caught up
with her into some great calm within the heart of change.
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