“Holy Mary, preserve us!” shrieked Annabel. “Father, whence came that fearful voice?”
The Count Aldarin replied not. The convulsive motion that heaved his breast, and strained the lineaments of his countenance, showed that he was making a desperate attempt to command his soul.
“’Tis naught, my daughter,” he began; “’tis fancy—’tis—”
He finished the sentence by a howl of horror, that might have been uttered by a lost soul. Annabel beheld him gazing fixedly at some object behind her. She turned her head and saw a vision that drove the life current back from her heart.
A figure arrayed in the snow-white attire of the grave, looked with a pale and ghastly countenance, and hollow eyes, from among the folds of the crimson tapestry on the opposite side of the apartment.
With freezing blood, Annabel beheld the figure advance with a slow and measured step towards her. Her consciousness failed, and she fell insensible on the floor, at the same instant that Aldarin sank down with a yell of despair, while his mouth frothed, and his eyes glared like those of a maniac.
On toward the light advanced the figure in white.
In a moment it stood beside the prostrate forms of the father and child, and having gazed at them for an instant, it threw back the robe from its head, and the beams of the lamp flashed over the wan and ghastly face of the strange figure.
“Ha—ha—ha!” he laughed, in tones sepulchral with famine, “methinks I’ve frightened the old caitiff enow! O, St. Withold! but I do feel this fiend, Hunger, gnawing with its serpent teeth at my very heart! Nothing to eat for three days and as many nights! And this hand—half-severed at the finger joints—throbbing with pain all the while! Thanks to the hard lessons of a soldier’s life, that taught me to wrap this rough bandage round the wound! Had it been my good right hand—St. Withold!—Robin had been a dead man three days ago! True, I did make out to crawl toward one of the dead soldiers in the cavern. How sweetly the wine in his flask gurgled down my parched throat! I am faint with lack of food. By a soldier’s faith, I could eat a whole ox! St. Withold, an’ I do not get some nourishment in the shortest time possible, I may as well wrap me up in this pall, so as to be ready for burial! Ugh! the priest shall not say his prayers over thee yet, my friend Robin; courage.”
Having first divested himself of the funeral pall of the late lord, the famished soldier strode across the apartment, and opening the door that led into the ante chamber, he discovered Guiseppo and Rosalind seated upon one of the couches, apparently in the most amiable humor with each other.