I bowed to her, and stood waiting for what might follow, the Captain near me.
The Count, turning toward me for an instant to show it was I he addressed, but fixing his gaze again upon his wife and keeping it there while he continued speaking to me, delivered himself thus, with mocking irony:
"Monsieur, I will not be so trifling or so churlish as to keep you in doubt regarding your fate. In this chateau, where the right of doom lies in me, you have been, by plain evidence and your own confession, guilty of the murder of two men. As to what other and worse crimes you have intended, I say nothing. What you have done is already too much. There is only one sufficient punishment. You may thank me for granting you time of preparation. I will give you two days—a liberal allowance, you will admit—during which you shall be lodged in a secure place, where in solitude and quiet you may put yourself in readiness for death."
The Countess rose with a cry, "No, no!" Her face and voice were charged with something so much more than mere compassion, that I forgot my doom in a wild sweet exultation. At what he perceived, the Count uttered a fierce, dismayed ejaculation. The Captain looked at once triumphant and resentful.
"It is enough!" cried the Count hoarsely. "The truth is clear!"
He motioned me away, and the Captain pushed me back into the little room, quickly fastening the door. But my feeling was still one of ecstasy rather than horror, for still I saw the Countess's tender eyes in grief for me, still saw her arms reaching out toward me, still heard her voice full of wild protest at my sentence. It was to surprise her real feelings that she had been brought to hear, in my presence, my doom pronounced; and my window had been obstructed that our confrontation might be as sudden to me as to her, lest by a prepared look I might put her on her guard. This it was that the Captain had suggested, and excellently it had served. That moment's revelation of her heart, though it brought such sweetness into my soul, could only make her fate worse and my sentence irrevocable.
CHAPTER XI.
THE RAT-HOLE AND THE WATER-JUG
I had not been back in the little room a minute, when it occurred to me to reach through the window and displace the obstruction. I was in time to see the Countess escorted back across the court-yard by her husband. This could mean only that she was again to occupy her prison in the tower. I was glad at least to know where she was, that I might imagine her in her surroundings, of which I had obtained so brief a glimpse.