And all amazed, almost appalled, Andrew muttered: "When the time comes. I have said it."
An instant later she was gone, had passed through the door into the darkness of the house, gliding out as some dark spectre might have glided from light to shadow, and those two were alone.
"In five minutes, she said," Andrew whispered in Marion's ear. "In five minutes. Yet, what means it? Is she in truth mad? I thought she loved him; had loved his father. Was his faithful slave and worshipped him. Yet, now, she inclines to us."
From the white lips of the woman by his side there came the answer, the words falling quick and rapid from those lips; she knowing how few were the moments in which to tell the meaning of Clemence's manner.
"It was so," she answered, "once. She loved him, worshipped him, until--until--her madness growing on her, she began to hate him. For he, in his turn, loved and worshipped the memory of his mother--it is the one pure thing remaining to him--his love for me was never pure, was engendered in desire; is turned now to hate and fear of my escape. And his love for that mother and that memory for her whom Clemence hates, even though she has long lain in her grave, explains all. Because she hates the woman who was his mother, also she now hates him. Hopes, prays, you will kill him. Said to me to-night that, when he lies dead below from your thrust, she will stamp upon the features that are so like what hers were."
As she told him thus rapidly the meaning of the woman's frenzy, and as she concluded her story, she saw Andrew's face change. Saw, too, a stare come into his eyes; his attitude denoting that of one who listened intently.
"You hear?" he asked.
"What?"
Yet, even as she spoke, she heard, too. Heard a distant hum--a something indefinite on the night air--a murmur that, all intangible as it was at present, resolved itself in another moment into something else that she understood. It was the hum of human voices--the voices of a great crowd somewhere in the vicinity--of a crowd that drew nearer and nearer every moment.
"You hear--you understand?" he asked, grasping her arm.