Oh, strangely sounded that sacred song arising in the deep silence of the condemned cell. So the night passed there.
But how did it pass in the viscount's cell? Sleeplessly, anxiously, wretchedly, until long after midnight, when he fell asleep. He was awakened by a sound of sawing, dragging, and hammering, that seemed to be in the prison yard beneath his windows. It continued a long time, and effectually banished slumber from his weary eyes.
What could they be doing at that unusual hour? he asked himself. And he crept from his bed and peeped through the grated window. But the night was over-clouded and deeply dark from that darkness that precedes the dawn. He could see nothing, but he could hear the sound of voices amid the noise of work; although the words, at the distance his window was from the ground, were inaudible.
He lay down again no wiser than he had risen up. After an hour or two the noise ceased, and he dropped into that sleep of prostration that more resembles worn-out nature's swooning than healthy slumber.
CHAPTER XLVII.
THE EXECUTION.
What shall he be, ere night?—Perchance a thing
O'er which the raven flaps her funeral wing.
—Byron.
It was broad daylight when the viscount was again awakened, and this time by the solemn tolling of the prison bell. He sprang out of bed and looked out of the window and recoiled in horror. There in the angle of the prison yard stood the gallows, grimly painted black. That was what the carpenters had been at work on all night.
And the tolling of the prison bell warned him that the last hour of the condemned man had come; that he was even now leaving his cell for the gallows. Lord Vincent staggered back and fell upon his bed. In the fate of Frisbie he seemed to feel a forewarning of the certain retribution that was lying in wait for himself.
There came a sound of footsteps along the passage. They paused before his cell. Someone unlocked the door. And, to the viscount's astonishment, the procession that was on its way to the gallows entered his presence. There was Frisbie, still unbound, but guarded by a half a dozen policemen and turnkeys, and attended by the undersheriff of the county, and the warden and the chaplain of the prison.