Robin held forth his hand to reach the parchment—his fingers touched it, when Aldarin stamped his foot upon the floor, and the slab of red stone fell quick as lightning beneath the yeoman. A deep and dark well was discovered. In an instant the stool affixed to the stone was empty, and far below, in the depths of the pit the echo of the falling slab, sunk with a sound like the rushing of the winter wind through the corridors of a deserted mansion.
A face, with eyes rolling ghastly, with the lower jaw sunken and the tongue protruding from the mouth, appeared above the side of the cavity, at the very feet of Aldarin, and a muscular hand convulsively clutched the oaken plank, while the body of the stout Yeoman, was seen through the darkness of the pit, as he clung with the grasp of despair, to the floor of the room.
“Devil—” shouted the desperate soldier, as he made a convulsive effort to lighten the grasp of his hand on the smooth plank. “I’ll foil thee yet. ’Tis not the fate of an honest man to die thus! My doom—”
“Is DEATH!” shrieked the scholar, and drawing the glittering dagger from his robe, he smote the fingers of the Yeoman, with its unerring steel. The joints of the hand were severed.
The grasp of the soldier failed, he gave one dying look, and then far, far down in the pit, a whizzing noise like the sound of a falling body was heard, and as it grew fainter and fainter did Aldarin stand in attitude of listening, gazing down into the shadow void, his arms outstretched, his eyes wildly glaring, his lips apart, and every lineament of his face expressive of triumph, mingled with hate and scorn.
A wild, maniac laugh came from the murder’s lips:
“Ha—ha—ha! caitiff and slave! Thou hast met thy fate. The scholar hath enemies, but—ha—ha!—they all disappear!”
Again he cast his eyes into the well. All was still as death. A single look into the dark cavity, and, with his bitter smile, Aldarin pictured the mangled corse of the yeoman, lying in bloody fragments, strewn over the vaults of the castle, amid the corses of the unburied dead.
He stamped his foot on the floor, and the red slab, bearing the empty stool, slowly arose on its hinges, and was again fixed in the oaken planks.
“Silent forever, prying fool! My secret is safe. Thou shalt no more prate of a certain warm embrace. Nay, nay; now for my schemes. I must send on to Florence fresh proofs of Adrian’s guilt: witnesses, and so on, and so on. That matter arranged, then comes the marriage of Annabel and the Duke. Ha—ha! Let me think.”