“How Sir?” cried the Count, speaking in a deep-toned voice that thrilled to the very heart of the Duke, “what mean’st thou?” The dark gray eyes of the Scholar flashed like living coals of fire, as he spoke.
“O, nothing,” responded the Duke, “nothing—only I thought the murderer Adrian might—dost understand? A truce to all this. My Lord Count, what didst thou with those men-at-arms who raised their swords in the cause of the murderer?”
Right glad was the Count Aldarin to recover his usual calm demeanour as he answered this inquiry.
“Of the fifty treacherous caitiffs who raised their swords against the person of your grace, forty lie bleeding and dead upon the cavern floor.
“As for the others—” he finished the sentence by pointing to the arched window of the Red-Chamber.
The Duke looked over his shoulder and beheld through the opened window the black and gloomy timbers of a gibbet towering like an evil omen high over the walls of the castle, and backed by the soft azure of a cloudless summer night.
The beams of the moon fell upon ten ghastly and death-writhen faces and ten figures swung to and fro, while the groaning cords as they grated against the creaking timbers over their heads, seemed shaking their death wail.
“Curse the traitors—they have their deserts!” The Duke exclaimed with a meaning smile.
The Count said nothing, but bending over the form of the Prince proceeded to dress his wounded shoulder, after the manner prescribed by his scholarly studies.
And as the Scholar bent over the form of the Duke, the hangings of the couch, sweeping beside the Prince, waved to and fro, with a slight motion, as though the summer breeze disturbed their folds, and a dark form, robed in garments of sable, with a monkish cowl dropping over its face, glided noiselessly along the floor, and in a moment stood at the back of his Grace of Florence, holding aloft, above his very head, a slender-bladed and glittering dagger.