"Dost thou still dare refuse? Death is on thy lips—hell gapes for thee!—Wretched woman, say but one word—kiss the blessed relic, and thou art saved."
"There is but one God, and Mahomet is his prophet!" said Beatrice, in hollow and broken accents.
"It is done! Cover her quick! Let her perish in eternal fire!" cried the inquisitor.
The executioners heaped the earth still higher—the head was covered in—and only then a smothered scream burst upwards, while the struggles of natural agony shook the mound to and fro.—Still the legal and consecrated murderers went on, with trembling hands and quaking hearts; but as they hastily closed their work, a deep and heavy groan came upon the air from a not distant part of the waste ground; and the group looking round in guilty terror, saw a man close wrapped in a cloak, but struggling with another, of aged and decrepit stature, as if he would break from his hold, and rush upon their unholy labours. A weapon gleamed in his hand; and the whole group of guilt, inquisitor, familiars and guards, struck with panic, and imagining rescue and revenge from a hundred indignant arms, hastily fled from the scene with loud cries for help.
In a moment the grave was torn open, and Beatrice, still panting in the struggle between life and death, snatched from its re-opened jaws, and about to be borne off in the close-locked arms of her brother, when the insatiate inquisitor, his ardent vengeance overcoming his fears, turned from his flight to give one assuring glance upon his victim's grave. By the light of the lantern which streamed on the ground, he saw that, instead of the indignant crowd his apprehensions had imagined, only two men were on the spot, one of them old and diminutive, and the other encumbered with the exhumed body. In the glow of fanatic fury, he forgot all personal fears, and while his dastard creatures held on their terrified course, he sprang back alone to the burial-ground, and seizing the old man with one hand, he stretched forth the other to grasp from the Moriscoe's hold his still insensible burthen.
"Sacrilegious villains!" cried he, "give up your impious purpose, and resign the body of the recreant lost one. Let it rot in its earthy prison, till the last trumpet rouse it in resurged life to burn in eternal fire."
A deep and silent plunge of the Moriscoe's poignard struck the blaspheming bigot in the throat; another blow pierced his heart, as he fell into the imperfectly hollowed grave; and while he lay there, several strokes were dealt on him by the feeble hands of the old man with one of the spades, which he tremblingly seized. And then, in the instinct of terror at the deed, he shovelled the loose earth over the bleeding carcass, while the Moriscoe's pale profile looked stern and rigid in the expiring light. The work was soon complete; and the mound of earth thus hastily thrown up (soon covered with as rank weeds as ever sprang from a polluted soil) were long marked by shuddering superstition as "the grave of the Mahommedan girl." The fate of the inquisitor was quite unsuspected; and he might have been still believed to have disappeared supernaturally, or perished by some less awful visitation, had not unerring records thrown light on his fate.
The tottering steps of the old man quickly led the way across the thickly planted site of the little Sablon, and by many a winding lane and alley towards the hill of Caudenburgh, till the Moriscoe, with his beloved burthen, found a safe refuge in the old man's dwelling, in the narrow street on the side of the hill, not a hundred yards below the house of the Marquess of Assembourg.