The sable hangings of the couch standing in one corner, the floor of stone, wearing the same dead and leaden hue, the massive furniture of the room, and the grotesque carvings ornamenting the heavy pillars, all were in unison with the grave-like silence of the air, which seemed heavy with doom and burdened with death.
In the centre of the apartment, her white robes loosely flowing around her peerless form, her fair and rounded arms upraised, her head slightly inclined to one side, her cheek, now warm with hope, now pale with fear, stood the Ladye Annabel. Her hair of sunshine luxuriance was swept back over her neck and shoulders, while her bosom rose in the light, and her breath came thick and fast, the convulsive gasps, breaking the death-like silence of the apartment, with an echo of strange emphasis.
Sleep had fled from her eyelids. She arose and watched, she knew not why, but still she watched and trembled as she listened to the slightest sound.
“I listen, I tremble, and my heart is chilled with a nameless fear,” murmured the Ladye Annabel, pacing the dark floor of the apartment with indecisive and hurried steps. “The hour wears slowly on, the fatal hour after midnight, when this unrelenting Duke will claim my hand, this hand already given to another, by the minister of Heaven! Holy Mary! behold the bridal—a lonely cell, hidden in the depths of this fearful monastery, the altar of black, the dark-robed monk, the tyrant-Duke and the victim; the time, the hour after the bell has tolled midnight, no hope, no aid, afar from human consolation, or the voice of human friend—such will be the second bridal of Annabel, wife of Adrian Di Albarone!”
She paused with an involuntary thrill of fear, as the vivid details of the picture rose before her mental vision, and then came another thought of horror—the bride must be widowed ere she weds a second time.
While dark and fearful imaginings haunted her soul, and well nigh crazed her brain, the fair and gentle Ladye Annabel felt a strange and deadening sleep stealing over her frame, and with a half-muttered prayer to the Virgin, she sank slumbering on the couch, the hangings of sable closing over her form, and concealing her from the sight.
All is silent within the cell. Low, suppressed sounds break from distant parts of the monastery, half-heard shrieks, and deep-muttered groans. For a dreary half hour, the cell is left to silence and solitude; when a distant footstep is heard, then a strange echo runs along the corridors of the Convent, and the small door of the lonely room, grating on its hinges slowly opens, and a Figure, buried in the folds of a sweeping robe of black, and bearing a small lamp of iron in an extended hand, stalks cautiously along the floor of stone.
The Figure paused with a trembling and indecisive movement in the centre of the floor, and then a face flushed by wine, and ruddy with excitement, was thrust from the folds of the robe of black.
“All silent and still,” exclaimed a voice, indistinct with wine. “An half hour of midnight—the sleeping potion has taken effect! It has, by St. Antonia!”
He approached the bedside, and with the trembling hand of a coward, flung back the sable hangings of the couch. The light of his lamp, fell vividly upon the form of the sleeping maiden, as she reclined on the sable furs covering the couch, while her flowing robes, white as the undriven snow, gave a strange contrast to the ebony darkness of the bed.