He turned from the sight with intolerable disgust, and as he turned, he beheld appearing from amid the shrubs, on the other side of the small platform of sand on which he stood, a bared arm laid along the earth grasping a keen and slender-bladed dagger, with a grasp that death and corruption could not unclose.
Adrian sprang forward, he unwound the dagger from the grasp of the hand, he beheld a parchment scroll secured around the haft of the glittering steel. He tore the scroll from the dagger, he flung it open to the light, and beheld these words written in a fair unwavering hand—
“Brothers of the Invisible! When this hand that writes these words is cold in death, the scroll of Albertine the Monk, will tell the story of his vengeance on the Tyrant-Duke.
“The midnight hour is now past—I go to plunge the dagger of the Holy Steel in the Heart of the Doomed. Ask ye for the Heir of Albarone! Three hours ago, ere the Duke arrived in the valley, I bade him farewell forever. Midnight came, and I learned that the Son of Lord Julian was about to meet his death in the vaults of the Convent.
“One way of rescue alone remained. Protected by my supposed love for the Duke, I blinded the eyes of the assassin, and offered to do his work of death. Then mingling a potion, which would minister sleep,—not death,—I gave it to Lord Adrian—even now his bride gathers his slumbering form to her embrace in the vaults of the Convent—even now the assassin waits to bear the body to the grave.
“One hour from this ye will arrive in the valley, and your eyes will behold the slumbering form of your Prince—the lifeless corse of the Tyrant! I go to finish—”
The scroll broke off abruptly, yet there was enough written to fill the heart of Adrian with an emotion of joy he had never felt before.
He sprang among the bushes, he dashed the laurel leaves aside, he turned the blackening face of the mangled corse to the light. He clasped his hands on high in silent prayer, while his burning tears fell streaming over the face of Albertine the Monk.
Meanwhile gathered along the green sward of a level meadow, extending from the Convent gates, to the south of the mountain lake, a band of gallant warriors, reined their war-steeds upon the turf, their upraised spears marking their numbers by long lines of glittering light.
A thousand banners waved in the sunset air, and the peal of bugle, and the stirring notes of the trumpet went echoing upward among the old convent walls wrapt in smoke, lighted by giant-pillars of blood red flame.