“How white you are. Don’t be afraid.”
Then, and then only, I perceived that terror possessed her, and that with frightened eyes, and bloodless lips, her poor dead face was signing to me to be silent, and announcing the imminence of a great danger, close at hand, too close for her to be able to warn me of it with a gesture or a sound, without the watchful enemy taking revenge upon her.
And yet, nothing happened. I took in the whole peaceful chamber at a glance. Everything in it seemed to me mysterious. The air itself was a hostile fluid—an unbreathable ocean in which I was sinking.
I felt a terror of what might happen behind me. I waited some legendary apparition.
And it was more terrible, this apparition, than the sudden appearance of Mephistopheles. For it was Lerne calmly coming out of a wardrobe!
“You have kept us waiting, Nicolas,” he said. I was thunder-struck. Emma sank on the ground foaming at the mouth, and twisting about under the furniture.
“Jetzt!” cried the professor.
A rustle of dresses in the next room—I heard the lay-figures fall. Wilhelm and Johann flung themselves on me.
Bound! Caught! Lost! And the terror of torture made me a coward.
“Uncle,” I entreated, “kill me at once, I beg you. No torture! A revolver; the dagger—poison! Anything you like, uncle, but no torture!”