“She was not a virgin?”
Althotas quivered to the eyes at this revelation, as if an electric shock made them oscillate in their orbits. His pupils frightfully dilated; his gums gnashed for want of teeth; his hand let fall the phial of the elixir of long life, and it fell and shivered into a thousand splinters. Stupefied, annihilated, struck at the same time in heart and brain, he dropped back heavily in his armchair.
Balsamo, bending with a sob over the body of his wife, swooned as he was kissing the tresses.
Time passed silently and mournfully in the death-chamber where the blood congealed.
Suddenly in the midst of the night a bell rang in the room itself.
Fritz must have guessed that his master was in the laboratory of Althotas to have sent the warning thither. He repeated it three times and still Balsamo did not lift his head.
In a few minutes the ringing came, still louder, without rousing the mourner from his stupor.
But at another call, the impatient jangle made him look up though not with a start. He questioned the space with the cold solemnity of a corpse coming forth from a grave.
The bell kept on ringing.
Energy, reviving, at last aroused intelligence in the husband of Lorenza Feliciani. He took away his head from hers; it had lost its warmth without warming hers.