"It comes. It fills me. I am strong. O Barran, give me yet more strength. My limbs revive. My pulse beats. I am young as when I rode with Dunois. Barran, thou art indeed mightier than God. I will give thee yet more and more. I swear it. I have kept the best wine till the last—the death vintage of a great house. The wine of beauty and brightness—I have kept it for thee. Halt not to make me stronger! Help me—Barran, help—I fail—!"
His voice had risen higher and higher till it was well nigh a scream of agony. Strangely too, in spite of the fictitious youth that glowed in his veins and coloured his cheek, it sounded like a senile shriek.
But all suddenly, at the very height of his exaltation, the cup from which he had drunk slipped from his hand and rolled upon the tesselated pavement of the temple, staining it in gouts and vivid blotches of crimson.
"Hasten, ere I lose the power—I feel it checked. Poitou, De Sillé, Henriet, go bring hither from the White Tower the Scottish maids. Run, dogs—or you die! Quick, Henriet! Good De Sillé, quick! Fail not your master now! It ebbs, it weakens—and it was so near completion. Stay, O Barran, till I finish the sacrifice, and here at thy feet offer up to thee the richest, and the fairest, and the noblest! Bring hither the maidens! I tell you, bring them quickly!"
And the terrible Lord of Retz, exhausted with his own fury, cast himself at the feet of the gigantic image, which, bending over him, seemed with the same grimace sardonically to mock alike his exaltation and his downfall.
But Laurence heard no more. For sense and feeling had wholly departed from him, and he lay as one dead behind the door of the temple of Barran-Sathanas, Lord of Evil, in the thrice-abhorrent Castle of Machecoul.