“What wouldst thou have?”
“Bread, bread! Water—I’d sell my soul for water!”
“Wherefore didst thou strike me?”
“I thought ye a spirit—and—and—I wanted to test your quality. Kill me, an’ thou art a man of flesh and blood—kill me, kill me!”
“Thy voice is strange and hollow, yet methinks I remember your tones. Thy name is—Balvardo!”
“’Twas I that swore thy life away, ’twas I that brought thee to these vaults to bury thy corse beneath the earth—kill me, kill me!”
“Is there no opening to this vault?”
“A secret door—a passage—the spring, that opens on the other side—the spring that shuts—on this side. I—ha, ha, may hell seize my soul, I buried myself alive—and kill me!”
Adrian shuddered—and grew cold. He could hear the gasping of the poor wretch as he struggled for breath, he could hear the groans of his unseen assassin; well he knew that long absence from nourishment from food alone could lay the sworder helpless as an infant along the floor.
And as his mind struggled with the mighty horrors that gathered round him, his attention was arrested by a singular circumstance.