While I sat beside the couch and watched the ebb and flow of life in a frame that I sometimes expected to see utterly give way, a jarring of bolts again struck my ear. I listened with a strange emotion. The old man had heard it, and in a new convulsion grasped both my hands and held me close. The sound returned; it increased; I saw the wall of the tower open and the figure stand before me.
“It is she; it is she!” shudderingly murmured my companion, fixing his eyes on it and holding me with the clasp of agony.
The heart beat loud within me; but I interposed myself between the corpse-like being whom I held in my arms and the unearthly visitant, and demanded “for what purpose it had come.” The figure started as I spoke; then gazing intently on me as I turned to the light, threw the mantle from its forehead and fell at my feet. The lovely Naomi was the specter! Yet perfectly guiltless of the ghostly potency of her presence and the unfilial alarm into which she had thrown her adopted father, whom she was delighted to find, but whom she candidly acknowledged “she never dreamed of finding there.”
“The tower contains a prisoner,” said she tremblingly, “who must be saved this night, for to-morrow at daybreak is his dreadful hour. I knew that he would be condemned, and we agreed on a signal, by which I was to learn when the time was fixed. I have watched all night for it, and almost betrayed myself by a cry of horror that I could not suppress at the sight of that signal just now. I had no resource but to bear my own message, and assist him myself in escaping from this place of sorrow.”
“But, my child, who is the prisoner, or where is he?”
She blushed and said: “One who saved me when the world was against me. He rescued me from the hands of barbarians—and could I leave him to perish?”
Salathiel Finds a Prisoner
“Lead on then, and without delay, for daybreak is not far. But how shall we find our way to his dungeon?”
“I paid high,” said she, “for my knowledge of this tower, and it has no concealments from me. Remove this bar.”