The Abbess Of Vlaye

by Stanley John Weyman

She faced about, affrighted, and instinctively seized his arm and hung on it, her eyes on the screen. Her attitude as she listened, and her pallor, were in strange contrast with the gay glitter of the table, the lights, the luxury, the fairness of her dress.

"Yes, listening," he said grimly. "Some one has been listening. The worse for them! For they will never tell what they have heard!"

And bounding forward without warning, he dashed the screen down and aside--and recoiled. Face to face with him, cowering against the doorpost, and pale as ashes, was the very man she had mentioned a minute before--that very man of his whose hidden presence in the camp she had betrayed to the malcontents. Vlaye glared at him. "You!" he cried. "You!"

"My lord!"

"And listening!"

"But----"

"But! But die, fool!" the Captain retorted savagely. "Die!" And, swift as speech, the dagger he had stealthily drawn gleamed above his shoulder and sank in the poor wretch's throat.

The man's hands groped in the air, his eyes opened wide; but he attempted no return-stroke. Choked by the life-stream that gushed from his mouth, he sank back inert like a bundle of clothes, while the Abbess's low shriek of terror mingled with his stifled cry.

And, with a sterner sound, another sound. For as the man collapsed, and fell in on himself, a figure hitherto hidden in the doorway sprang over his falling body, a long blade flashed in the candle-light, and the Captain of Vlaye staggered back, one hand pressed to his breast. He made a futile attempt to ward with his poniard, but it fell from his grasp. And the pitiless steel found his heart again. Silent, grim, with unquenchable hate in his eyes, he reeled against the table. And then from the table, dragging with him all--silver and glass and fruit--in one common crash, he rolled to the floor--dying.

Ay, in five seconds, dead! And she saw it with her eyes! Saw it! And frozen, stiff, clinging to the bare edge of the table, she stood looking at him, her brain numbed by the horror, by the suddenness, the hopelessness of the catastrophe. In a twinkling, in a time measured by seconds, it was done. The olives that fell from the dish had not ceased to roll, the wine still crept upon the floor, the man who had struck the blow still panted, his point delivered--but he was dead whom she had loved. Dead!