Page:Georges Eekhoud - Escal Vigor, a novel.djvu/290

266 drunkenness, guzzling, and violent heat of desire. Would this afternoon of abhorred Saturnalia draw never to a close!

It grew much worse when the sun set, and the erotic tumult of the trumpets resounded from one headland of Smaragdis to another, adding as it were, a leaden mist to the crimson terrors of the agonising sky. Human voices, still more strident and acute, took up the furious signal of the blaring trumpets, and aggravated it enough to inflame the pitch darkness.

Kehlmark could stand it no longer. Availing himself of a moment when Blandine was attending to the preparations for supper, he threw himself out into the park. All at once, a sharp, piercing note, a cry even more heart-rending than those bugle-calls of Guidon in the elm-grove on the evening of their first meeting, rose high above the metallic riot.

Kehlmark caught the voice of his friend.

"Good God! It's he they're murdering!"

Hurried forward by this frightful certainty he ran headlong into the night, in the direction of the clamorous noise and lamentations.

As he reached the boundary of the park,