Then, and then only, did he sound the last depth of Harley’s perfidy. The false steward was discovered in the countess’ chamber, and she was hanging on his neck, weeping bitterly while Harley rained kisses on her lips!
Here the count stopped, and his paleness became livid, while his voice sunk to a grating whisper.
“I killed Diana. Do you blame me? I would have killed him, but he left again. I could not let both escape.”
There was a dead silence in the room as he paused. A moment later, he said, in a quiet almost indifferent tone:
“That night the Indians burned my house to the ground and scalped me, leaving me for dead, and I recognized Pierce Harley for their leader. He had the better of me at every point.”
Again there was a dead silence, again the count spoke.
“You found me, Philip, and nursed me to life. You do not wonder that when I recovered I vowed vengeance on Pierce Harley and all his crew of red devils. I have kept the vow well. Twenty long years have I hung on the trail of the Mohawks, now in one place, now in another. I found this cave first, and afterwards the one near Oriskany. The idea struck me that by keeping the secret of the caves and working on the superstition of the Indians, I might acquire a double power over them. I hid the entrance to this, and no one knew where the other was. It was your help, Philip, that supplied me with the means to personate the demon and frighten the savages with red fire. That and my own activity and caution, sharpened tenfold by woodcraft, taught me how to make myself dreaded and shunned by every warrior of this nation.
“But in all that time I never could find Pierce Harley, though I sought him everywhere. Diana shared my solitude after her fourteenth year, and no one in the convent-school at Montreal dreamed, when Mademoiselle De Cavannes left them a finished pupil, that she went to the woods to share the trials of a moody, misanthropical outcast, whose bidding she obeyed with fear and trembling, but whose secrets she kept with the true fidelity of a daughter. You little thought, Adrian Schuyler, when you met the simple-seeming girl in rustic tunic, that her innocent air was really a piece of consummate art, and that your cousin Philip knew the whole secret. The bear and the tame deer, the Spanish hounds, the voices in the air, the supernatural figures, they were all very awful to you at first, were they not? But, now that you know all, you do not wonder that I would not trust you before Bennington. I sent you my horse on purpose to test your truth, and you proved a true Schuyler. May you be happy with Diana.”
The count had hardly finished his story when there was a noise without. He started up.
“I thought so,” he exclaimed, “the scouts have tracked him to earth, and are driving him hither.”