She was girding up her long robe while they spoke, and the jewels on her shapely feet flashed forth. With a gesture of disdain she waved the old men back, but a score of wild warriors followed her, as she strode towards the dungeon, to see her brother's corpse. Instead of that, she stood before the body of her son, and a loud shriek proved that she was still a woman. From the gloom of my shelter, I saw her proud eyes aghast, and her arms thrown up, and her tall form quivering. Then she controlled herself, and looked around.
"To weep by-and-by,—to avenge him first," she shouted (as they told me afterwards), and such is the power of another's passion that I felt like a murderer, and went forth with an impulse of shame to surrender myself. For I had never slain a man till now.
"Idiot, get back!" cried a voice from the cliff, the voice no doubt of Jack Nickols.
"Slay him,—shoot all of you, shoot, shoot, slay him!" the lady called out, and herself seized a gun; "shoot him, though it be through my own body!"
This order was beyond my understanding; but I saw at least a score of muzzles looking at me, and I had not even the wit to move.
"Which will first reach me, the sound or the bullets?" That I should thus ponder shows clearly enough that fear had overcome all sense of terror.
"Now then; cut it short," I said, according to Jack Nickols,—though I cannot remember a word of it,—and the fellows were surprised, and drew their clumsy fingers back, and went down on their knees with superstition. But the Princess Marva drew near to me, and the butt of a gun was against her hip. She saw that I stood unarmed and nerveless, and she could not help playing with the joy of her revenge. To be shot by a woman! I had no power left. I could only stare, and wait for it.
"But I know him, I recognise my dear friend," she exclaimed in French, while she fingered the trigger, with the muzzle not two yards from my breast; "it is the gentleman desirous of my emeralds. Ah, thou shalt have them! How many? Ten?"
To prolong my agony, she began to count, with glittering eyes and a courteous smile, tapping my time on the trigger; and would you believe that I could not stir, and could only keep my gaze fixed on her? Then as she cried Seven, a white spot leaped—as it seemed to me—from the palpitant surge of her bosom. Her dark robe opened, and her musket dropped, as the roar of a gun rang overhead, and the Princess sank, with her lips still smiling, as dead as a stone, into low-born arms.
"Usi, the Svân, hath his revenge!" a shrill cry from the crags proclaimed; "Wolf's meat hath choked the Queen of Wolves."