"A devil, a fiend, who first outraged, then cast her forth blinded, to die like a reptile," he shrieked in his mastering grief. "Surely God must have slept, while this was done!"
There was a breathless hush in the death-chamber.
Hezilo was bending over the still face of his child. The dead girl lay with her hands crossed over her bosom, still as if cut out of marble and on her face was fixed a sad little smile.
At last the harper arose.
Staggering to the door he gave some whispered instructions to the individual who seemed to fill the office of warden, then beckoned silently to Eckhardt to follow him and together they descended the narrow winding stairs.
"I will return late—have everything prepared," the harper at parting turned to the warden, who had preceded them with his lantern. The latter nodded gloomily, then he retraced his steps within, locking the door behind him.
Under the nocturnal starlit sky, Eckhardt breathed more freely. For a time they proceeded in silence, which the Margrave was loth to break. He had long recognized in the harper the mysterious messenger who in that never-to-be-forgotten night had conducted him to the groves of Theodora, and who he instinctively felt had been instrumental in saving his life. Something told him that the harper possessed the key to the terrible mystery he had in vain endeavoured to fathom, yet his thoughts reverted ever and ever to the scene in the tower and to the dead girl Angiola, and he dreaded to break into the harper's grief.
They had arrived at the place of the Capitol. It was deserted. Not a human being was to be seen among the ruins, which the seven-hilled city still cloaked with her ancient mantle of glory. Dark and foreboding the colossal monument of the Egyptian lion rose out of the nocturnal gloom. The air was clear but chill, the starlight investing the gray and towering form of basalt with a more ghostly whiteness. At the sight of the dread memory from the mystic banks of the Nile, Eckhardt could not suppress a shudder; a strange oppression laid its benumbing hand upon him.
Involuntarily he paused, plunged in gloomy and foreboding thoughts, when the touch of the harper's hand upon his shoulder caused him to start from his sombre reverie.
Drawing the Margrave into the shadow of the pedestal, which supported the grim relic of antiquity, Hezilo at last broke the silence. He spoke slowly and with strained accents.