"You dare not!" cried Kophetua, as he threw back his cloak and hat. "Stand back! See! It is I, Kophetua the King."
There was a murmur of "Trecenito" through the throng, and the men who were come to obey the Emperor's orders fell back.
"We know no king in the liberties but the Emperor," droned the old man, quite undisturbed. "Seize him, and prepare him for the grave!"
"Stand back!" cried poor Kophetua, "you dare not lay hands on me. Think what your fates will be when my people hear of it."
"They will never hear of it," chanted the Emperor. "No one saw you come hither."
"Yes, Turbo, my Chancellor, saw me," cried the King, growing alarmed.
"And he wishes your death, that he may reign in your stead," the voice droned on without a change of note. "Seize them, and put them together in Limbo for a foretaste of the narrower chamber that is to come, while the grave-clothes are prepared and another grave is dug; for now the dead shall lie alone. Away with them now, and fear not. The Emperor is greater than the King, and Sultan Death than both."
He ended in a shrill scream of mocking laughter, while Kophetua was seized and hurried along, powerless to resist. While the devilish merriment still rang out they thrust him in at the door whence the beggar-maid had been brought. Her they pushed in after him, and the door closed with a hollow clang.
As soon as Kophetua could collect his thoughts sufficiently to look about him, he found himself shut in a narrow chamber, in every way adapted for a prison. One small window, about his own height from the ground, was the only outlet to the open air, and it was heavily barred. The moonlight streamed through it and poured a flood of silvery light about a stone bench in a recess on the opposite side. There his eyes rested at last immovably; for there sat the beggar-maid swathed in her shroud, and shining so white and ghostly in the moonbeams that she seemed no living thing. She sat upright, gazing before her with her wondering eyes as though she only half understood what had happened.