For a few moments, there they stood in the dark, no word passing between them; the only sound was her quick panting, as she struggled in his grasp, battling to get free.
"Isabel," he said, at last, gravely, "come in; I must speak to you."
No answer still, but the same desperate struggle to get loose. There was a savage, supernatural power in her writhings that taxed even his gigantic strength to hold her; as it was, he yielded unconsciously to her impulse so as to recede some paces till they issued out into the moonlight. He could scarcely recognize her features; they were all working and contorted, the lips especially horribly drawn back and tense. She bent her head down at last, and made her teeth meet in the arm that detained her.
Guy never flinched nor stirred, but spoke again in the same slow, deliberate tone.
"Isabel, come in. I swear that you shall see him when it is safe. They are bringing him back now."
She ceased struggling and stood straight up, shaking all over, straining her eyes forward to the turning in the path where the torches began to gleam.
"Is he not dead, then?" she said, in a strange, harsh voice, utterly unlike her own. Her cousin did not try to delude her; all the stern outline of his face softening in an intense pity told her enough.
Such a scream—weird, long drawn out, and unearthly, such as we fancy the Banchee's—as that which pierced through my very marrow (though I stood three hundred yards away, as if it had been uttered close at my ear), I trust I shall never hear again.
Then followed the contrast of a great stillness; for, as the last accents died away on her lips, Isabel sank down, without a struggle, into a dead swoon.
A sad satisfaction came into Guy's face. "It is best so," he muttered; "I hope she won't wake for an hour," and he carried her into the house. They were trying to revive her, unsuccessfully, when I reached it with those who bore the corpse on a litter of pine branches. By Guy's directions, it was laid on his own bed; and there the Italian women rendered the last offices to the dead man, weeping and wailing over him as though he had been a brother or dear friend—only for his rare beauty—even as the Moorish girls mourned over that fair-faced Christian knight whom they found lying, rolled in blood, by the rock of Alpujarro.