Upon Clemence, regarding him with sparkling eyes, and with, on her face, a hideous smile; upon Marion Wyatt a little behind her.
Upon Andrew Vause standing also regarding him, his arms folded, but in his right hand his sword!
He reeled back gasping, astonished, perhaps terrified at the sight of those three figures standing at the top of the stairs.
Staggered back, though as he did so he shifted the sword he carried, so that he no longer held it by the blade in his left hand, but grasped its handle with his right. Yet, even as he thus reeled, and with even, as they observed by the light of the moon now streaming in through an upper window, the look upon his face of a hunted creature at bay doubly intensified, so, too, they saw the bewilderment he experienced at finding them there together.
"You are free!" He hissed; "and you, too!" while, as he spoke, he lifted his left arm and pointed with his forefinger up the few steps that separated him from them. "Free! No need to ask how. By her--the traitress!"
As he spoke he leapt up the remaining stairs, and, in the eyes of all of them there flashed a bright ray as though of phosphorus--a ray that seemed to be met and entwined with another. Then, a hiss of steel grating against steel and a clang, and the sword he had held a moment before in his hand, and had thrust out with murderous intent against the mad woman, slid down the steps hilt first.
"Not yet," said Andrew, lowering now his own point. "This is no time for murder nor--for execution. That comes later. Pick up your blade, Monsieur De Bois-Vallée, and sheathe it. Otherwise I take it away from you. There is something else to be done, ere you use it again--against me."
"Curse you! What?" yet as he spoke he obeyed Andrew, in so far that he reclaimed his fallen weapon. Also, as he did so--as he picked up the sword--he mounted the stairs one step higher.
"This; listen. There is a secret exit known to you from this doomed house--nay, deny it not, I know full well 'tis so--by that exit you are about to escape. So be it. 'Tis no intention of mine to prevent you. Only----"
"Only?" repeated De Bois-Vallée in a whisper. "Only?"