And that night, in the castle of Baron Ivo, the hall was lighted and the tables were spread for a great feast. The lights flashed from the castle steep, from many windows, over the forest and the city.
And a feast in Baron Ivo's castle meant a revel; cowed slaves hurrying about at the master's bidding; guests, many of them scarcely less cowed, making forced mirth at his pleasure.
To ears that could hear there was always heaviness in the laughter at Ivo's feasts. The moans from the dungeons below rose across it all.
But on this night the mirth jarred like a cracked bell; and ere they rose, the seneschal ventured timidly to ask the Baron if he might accept the ransom offered by the young wife of the latest captive. "Otherwise," he said, "death might be beforehand. And if—if, indeed, the Great Day was so near, and the reckoning was to come so soon!"
Baron Ivo rose with a curse, and strode off to his chamber in the tower which looked over the forest, with the dungeons at its base.
But no sleep came to him that night. He seemed to hear a long procession of heavy steps slowly tramping up the turret-stair from the dungeons to his chamber. Too often, indeed, had the wails of tortured captives come up that way.
But as he lay tossing on his bed, all the rest seemed to grow faint and far-off in comparison with one face which had haunted him often before;—a kinsman's face, with sightless eyes, which riveted his own on them, and with groping, imploring hands, which he had once ruthlessly bound. He would have given the world for one glance of those eyes, and one forgiving clasp of those blindly groping hands.
"So long ago!" he moaned; "so long ago! And never further off! And now perhaps I shall soon see him close, too late to atone. There to face the horror which has stung me to crime after crime! For, having committed this, I had to do the rest, to ward off vengeance, to secure what had been so hardly won. That first was crime; the rest were self-defence, the fruit of mortal fear—of fear, and yet also of love, all so terribly entangled, love to the child my wife left to my care when she died. She knew nothing of that terrible past, and loved and trusted me. But the child for whom I would shed my blood, for whom belike I have given my soul, does she know? Does she love or trust me? Pure and soft as a white dove, yet those tender eyes search and scorch me through and through. Is there no repentance, no reparation possible? And that Day they say coming so soon! Reparation! how can such a wrong be repaired? Probably they are all long since under the ground, he and the young wife who stood so unflinchingly by him, and the babe. For if it were possible to restore him the castle, what of the sight, and the ruined life? It is not possible; no, it is not possible! That blind beggar in the forest-hut could not have been Bruno! And if he were to instal that beggar's family in the castle, what reparation were that?"
He had risen, and was looking down on the forest, and a little gleaming light caught his eye, and strangely smote his heart. It seemed to come from where that beggar's hut was. Even yet, after all, might it be possible to atone?