“Ha—ha—ha! He mocks me with the name of water! Tell me, thou fiend, is he not revenged?”
“The heat grows fiercer—the air of this vault is turning to fire! He gasps for breath. Man give me thy hand. Let me drag thee near the well—the freshening air may cool the fire in thy heart and veins.”
And extending his hands through the darkness, with his body inclined to a level with the pavement, he sought the form of the famine stricken sworder.
He grasped the hands of the wretch; the fingers were thin and wasted, resembling the bones of a skeleton rather than the hands of a living man.
Slowly and with a careful motion Adrian dragged the dying man along the pavement, he laid his head on his knee, as he sat on the verge of the well, and passed his hand over the massive brow of his assassin.
He shuddered in the very act. Clear and distinct, the harsh outline of the withered brow, pressed against his hand, and he could feel the eye sunken far in its socket, and the cheeks hollowed by the touch of famine. It was more like a skull than the face of a living man.
“I feel the fresh air on my brow,” gasped Balvardo; “my feet are withering with heat, and mine hands burn! Oh fiend of hell—I see a fountain, a cool and showery fountain—the clear waters are streaming over pebbled stones, and the green moss is wet with the sparkling drops. Hist! I will crawl to the fountain side, I will bury my face in the waters—ha, ha, ha, I will drink, I will drink! Fiend, fiend—curses on thee, thou hast changed the waters to blood!”
He uttered a wild yell of horror, and the vault of the dead gave back the echo—“Blood, blood!” while Adrian passed his hands over the beetle-brow of the murderer, and parting the matted hair aside, held the famine-eaten face in the full current of the subterranean air.
All was dark as chaos ere the fiat of God spoke worlds into being, yet here was a spectacle that the angels of His throne, veiling their awful faces before the Presence, might gaze upon even through the darkness, and gaze with tears of joy. Here was the assassin, the sworder, the false-witness, and the sworn foe, resting in the arms of the man whose body his oath had given to the doomsman and the wheel; whose footsteps he had tracked like the bloodhound snuffing the footprints of his victim, fierce, unrelenting, and hungering after blood; here was the wretch who had borne him to this vault, placed his body in the house of death, consigned him to the famine and the fire, the nameless horror and the agony that the cheek grows livid to name; here was the man who had buried him alive, and yet he held him in his arms, fanned his withered face, and brought the fresh air to his parched lips and burning brow.
It was as the sworder had gaspingly uttered a fierce revenge, and yet such vengeance as the Man of the Cross, the God shrined in flesh, would have taken on his most blood-thirsty foe.