The ice was gone. The lightning flash lit up a man warm with the breath of life. From the gaunt door of the abandoned palace the strip of black cloth, the tragic words above it, dropped down and disappeared.
Suddenly Artois knew why Vere believed in his power, and why Gaspare believed in it—knew how their instincts had guided them, knew to what secret knowledge—perhaps not even consciously now their knowledge—they had travelled. And he remembered the words he had written in the book at Frisio’s on the night of the storm:
“La Conscience, c’est la quantite de science innee que nous avons en nous.”
He had written those words hurriedly, irritably, merely because he had to write something, and they chanced—he knew not why—to come into his mind as he took hold of the pen. And it was on that night, surely, that his conscience—his innate knowledge—began to betray him. Or—no—it was on that night that he began to defy it, to deny it, to endeavor to cast it out.
For surely he must have known, he had known, what Vere and Gaspare innately knew. Surely his conscience had not slept while theirs had been awake.
He did not know. It seemed to him as if he had not time to decide this now. Very rapidly his mind had worked, rushing surely through corridors of knowledge to gain an inner room. He had only stood at the foot of the crumbling staircase two or three minutes before he moved again decisively, called again, decisively:
“Hermione! Hermione! I know you are here. I have come for you!”
He went to the right. On the left was the chamber which had been taken possession of by the sea. She could not have gone that way, unless—he thought of the fattura della morte, and for a moment the superstitious horror returned upon him. But he banished it. That could not be. His heart was flooded by conviction that cruelty has an end, that the most relentless fate fails at last in its pursuing, that the fattura della morte, if it brought death with it, brought a death that was not of the body, brought, perhaps, a beautiful death of something that had lived too long.
He banished fear, and he entered the chamber on the right. It was lit only by an opening looking to the sea. As he came into it he saw a tall thing—like a tall shadow—pass close to him and disappear. He saw that, and he heard the faint sound of material in movement.
There was then still another chamber on this side, and Hermione had passed into it. He followed her in silence, came to the doorway of it, looked, saw black darkness. There was no other opening either to sea or land. In it Hermione had found what she sought—absolute blackness.