Then came a heavy fall.
"Give him admittance, give him admittance," cried Ardaric and Valamir in a breath: "oppose him not, Edicon! Poor youth, he will find himself already avenged;" but, as he spoke, the door burst open, and Theodore, with his naked sword all bloody in his hand, rushed in.
"Stand all without," cried Edicon, putting back those who were following to seize him. "Leave us to deal with him. The king has not yet come forth!" and closing the door upon them, he drew across it the massive wooden bar that hung beside it.
"Oh Ardaric, Ardaric!" cried Theodore, "hast thou betrayed me too?"
"No, on my life, dear youth," cried the King of the Gepidæ, catching him in his powerful arms--"we thought thee dead--thou earnest not at the time!"
"How could I come?" cried Theodore--"waylaid on every shore, tossed by the tempest, turned back, delayed--how could I come? But unhand me, Ardaric, I am mad with injury and revenge; and I will in to yonder false, faithless tyrant, and die for my revenge!"
"Theodore," said Ardaric, holding him still with his left hand, but pointing with the other to the stream of blood which flowed from beneath the door of Attila's chamber, "either the hand of some god, or her own, has avenged thee and thy poor Ildica already!"
Theodore gazed on it for a moment, and an awful glow of satisfaction rose in his countenance. Then darting forward from the grasp of Ardaric, he laid his hand upon the door and attempted to open it. It resisted, and, setting his powerful shoulder against it, he shook it with all his strength. Again he shook it to and fro! The fastenings within gave way, and it burst open with a loud and sudden crash. Theodore took a step forward, and then paused, while all the others rushed in.
The light streamed down from windows near the roof, and passing through the silken curtains, which both served for ornament and to exclude the air of night, poured softened into the chamber. It was an awful scene on which that calm, solemn light fell tranquilly.
There, on the floor, scarcely two paces from the door, clothed in the same splendid robes which for the first and last time in his life he had worn; with the jewelled circle on his brow, the blazing diamonds on his broad chest and in his sandals, lay the dark and fearful monarch of the Huns, the victor of a thousand fields, the mighty conqueror of unnumbered nations! Mighty no more! Awful still! but awful in death, and from a small spot on the silken vesture which covered that breast, wherein for so many years had lain the fate of empires and the destiny of a world, proceeded the dark stream of blood, thick and clotted, but not yet dried up, which had once throbbed in that lion heart, and now had left it cold and vacant. The ground around was flooded with the stream of gore; his vesture was soaked and dabbled in it; but it was clear that he had fallen at once, without an effort or a struggle; for there he lay, as calm as if in sleep, with even a smile of joyous triumph on his lip, as he had entered that fatal bridal chamber, which was to be unto him the hall of death.