“Sleep,” she bitterly echoed; “and when do you think I have slept. Look at these sunken eyes, this ghastly face, this haggard form, and ask when I have slept. Think of the mighty wrong I have suffered, and ask when I shall sleep again.”
“My poor, unhappy mother!”
“He can sleep,” she broke out, with a low, wild laugh. “Oh, yes! in his bed of down, with his princely son under the same roof, with menials to come at his beck, he can sleep. Yes, he sleeps now! but the hour comes when that sleep shall last forever! Then my eyes may close, but never before!”
“You are delirious, mother; this blow has turned your brain.”
She rose to her feet, her tall, gaunt form looming up in the shadowy darkness; her wild black hair streaming disheveled down her back; her fierce eyes blazing with demoniacal light, one long, bony arm raised and pointing to heaven. Dark, fierce and stern, she looked like some dread priestess of doom, invoking the wrath of Heaven on the world.
“Delirious, am I?” she said, in her deep, bell-like tones, that echoed strangely in the silent cell. “If undying hate, if unresting vengeance, if revenge that will never be satiated but by his misery, be delirium, then I am mad. I leave you now, Reginald, such is your command; and remember, when far away, you leave one behind you who will wreak fearful vengeance for all we have both suffered.”
“Mother, Lord De Courcy is not so much to blame after all, since he believes me guilty. I am not alarmed by your wild threats; for I know, in the course of time, this mad hate will grow less.”
“Never—never!” she fiercely hissed through her clenched teeth. “May God forget me if I ever forget my vow! Reginald, if I thought that man could go to heaven, and I by some impossibility could be saved, too, I would take a dagger and send my soul to perdition, sooner than go there with him.”
Upturned in the red light of the lamp, her face, as she spoke, was the face of a demon.
“Strong hate, stronger than death!” he said, half to himself, as he gazed on that fiendish face. “Farewell, then, mother. Will you fulfill my last request?”