"No witnesses?" said Archibald; "no witnesses? Nay, look behind you. Look! I say. No other witness is required."
Affrighted at his words--thinking, perhaps, that the terrible spectre that haunted him always now might be standing menacingly behind him--he glanced round, and what he saw struck nearly as much horror to his crime-laden brain as could have done the ghost of his victim.
Advancing from an open door by the side of the cathedral there came a woman, her face white as any ghost's or leper's, her eyes distended, her hand uplifted and pointing at him. Indeed, so appalling was her ghastliness, the whiteness of her face being made doubly so by the rays of the moon falling upon it, that the dazed, stricken creature hid his own face in his hands and recoiled as she advanced.
"It is he," she said. "It is he. Nightly almost he comes when the moon is up. Seize on him, seize him! Let him never escape again," and still she pointed at the man shivering between them.
"Fear not," Archibald said. "Fear not." Then turning to Fordingbridge, while he held the pistol pointed at him, he continued: "Come! Resistance is useless. I have sworn here, upon this spot, to avenge Douglas; I will keep my oath. Till you stand upon the scaffold you are mine."
"He has a weapon to his hand," the woman said, still with her own pointing at him as if it were the hand of Fate. "See!" Then, as though she were one inspired, she said, as she turned to him, "Give me the knife."
Whether his mind was gone at last, or whether fear had so overcome Fordingbridge that he was no longer master of his actions, Sholto was never able to decide. Yet, from whichever cause it was, he obeyed his ghastly denouncer in so far that, as she spoke to him, the dagger dropped to the earth. And she, picking it up, placed it in the priest's hands, saying:
"It is borne in on me that with this he slew that other one. I feel it--know it."
"You will testify that he is the murderer?" Sholto said. "You do not doubt?"
"Doubt!" she exclaimed, turning her wan, white face on him. "Doubt! How should I doubt? He has haunted me since that awful night--haunted me, almost driven me to my death. Oh, you know not! I have risen at night from my bed to see him standing there, muttering, grimacing over that very spot, so that, as I gazed on him from out the darkness of my room, I have swooned again as on that night I swooned. Had I been a man, nay, had I had a man to call on, I would have gone forth and seized him. Yet, when I have told others that nightly, almost, the murderer came and gloated over the space where he slew the other, they derided me, said I was mad, would not even watch themselves. Oh, the horror of it! the horror of it!"