“Come hither, Balvardo. Look from this narrow window: mark you well the dial-plate in the castle yard. In a few moments the shadow will sweep across the path of high noon. When high noon and the shadow meet, thy charge is over. The soothing potion which I gave my brother at daybreak, will have taken its proper effect. Until that moment, keep strict watch: let not a soul enter the Red Chamber on the peril of thy life!”
And with the command, the Signor swept from the ante-chamber, gliding along a corridor opposite the one from which he had just emerged, and his low footsteps in a moment had ceased to echo along the dark old arches.
“He is gone,” the sentinel murmured, slowly pacing the tesselated floor. “He comes like a cat—he glides hence like a ghost. Hark! footsteps from opposite corridors meeting in this ante-chamber. By’r Lady! here comes Adrian, the son of this sick lord, and from the opposite gallery emerges the monk Albertine, the tool and counsellor of my Lord of Florence. ’Tis a moody monk and a shrewd boy. I’faith, there’s a pair o’ ’em.”
And as he spoke, sweeping from the shadows of the northern gallery came a dark-robed monk, walking with hastened step, his arms folded on his breast, and his head drooped low, as if in thought, while the outlines of his face were enveloped in the folds of his priestly cowl. And as he swept onward toward the centre of the ante-chamber, from the southern gallery, with slow and solemn steps, advanced a youth of some twenty summers, attired in the gay dress of a cavalier, with a frank, open visage, marked by the lines of premature thought, and relieved by rich and luxuriant locks of golden hair sweeping along each cheek down to the shoulders.
“Whither speed ye, Lord Adrian?” exclaimed the deep, sonorous voice of the monk, as the twain met breast to breast in the centre of the rich mosaic floor. “Whither speed ye, heir of Albarone, at this hour?”
“Whither do I speed?” cried the cavalier, starting with sudden surprise. “Sir monk, I wend to the sick-chamber of my father.”
The monk grasped the cavalier suddenly by the right hand, and raised it as suddenly in the light of the sunbeams streaming through the solitary window.
“An hour since, this hand was graced by a signet ring: the signet ring which has been an heirloom in thy house for centuries. Dost remember the prophecy spoken of that strange ring? Dost remember the rude lines of the vandal seer:
‘While treasured and holily worn,
An omen of glory and good:
When from the hand the ruby is torn,
An omen of doom and of blood.’”
“Sir monk, the lines are rude; yet I mind me well the words of the prophecy, are an household sound to an heir of Albarone. Yet why this sudden grasp of my hand? Why thus urgent? The fire in thine eye seems not of earth.”