The solitary word broke from her lips, and her look of wild gaze was again fixed upon his face. He trembled before her glance—he quailed like a whipped hound—he unloosed his hold.
“I am not,” he muttered, springing backward from the couch. “It was not me. He is not dead; he lives—”
“Murderer!” she again murmured, in that low, deep-toned voice, while her face of calm and dreamy beauty was stamped with a weird expression that awed the ravisher to the very soul.
“Even now thy evil angel writes thee liar, in the book of thy misdeeds. Even now thy victim writhes in the throes of death within the vaults below; ay, ay, beneath thy very feet he dies. Why stand ye over the corse? Doth not the pale face and the cold brow fright ye? On whom is fixed the glare of those stony eyes—on whom? On thee, murderer, on thee; on thee they glare with the accusing glance of death!”
“She is crazed! Save me, all good saints—she is crazed! She sweeps toward me with a measured stride! Great God! she walks not—she glides slowly on; she moves like a spirit—a thing of air!”
He shrunk back, cringing before the glance of those eyes from which all reason had fled; he shrunk back step by step as she advanced, awed by the upraised arms, with the robes of white waving slowly to and fro; awed by the supernatural look visible in every line of the face of the Ladye Annabel, and in a moment found himself leaning for support against a dark stone pillar of the cell.
“Murderer!” she murmured, looking him full in the face. “I hear thy victim groan, I hear him writhe. Look ye, good angels, he denies it, and look, look how the red blood drops from his trembling hands!”
With that look which filled him with involuntary horror, she glided backward step by step, she reached the small door of the cell, and flung it open with her outspread hands.
“He denies it, he denies it; and the blood—ha, ha, ha!—hark how it patters on the floor!”
With that low, muttered laugh which chilled his very blood, for it was the laugh of madness, the Ladye Annabel again awed the Duke of Florence—the ravisher in heart—with her gaze, and then springing through the cell door, her form, with its waving robes of snow, was lost to his sight.