“Avaunt, fiend!” cried Henry. “I will hold no converse with thee. Back to thy native hell!”
“You have no power over me, Harry,” rejoined the demon, his words mingling with the rolling of the thunder, “for your thoughts are evil, and you are about to do an accursed deed. You cannot dismiss me. Before the commission of every great crime—and many great crimes you will commit—I will always appear to you. And my last appearance shall he three days before your end—ha! ha!”
“Darest thou say this to me!” cried Henry furiously.
“I laugh at thy menaces,” rejoined Herne, amid another peal of thunder—“but I have not yet done. Harry of England! your career shall be stained in blood. Your wrath shall descend upon the heads of those who love you, and your love shall be fatal. Better Anne Boleyn fled this castle, and sought shelter in the lowliest hovel in the land, than become your spouse. For you will slay her—and not her alone. Another shall fall by your hand; and so, if you had your own will, would all!”
“What meanest thou by all?” demanded the king.
“You will learn in due season,” laughed the fiend. “But now mark me, Harry of England, thou fierce and bloody kin—thou shalt be drunken with the blood of thy wives; and thy end shall be a fearful one. Thou shalt linger out a living death—a mass of breathing corruption shalt thou become—and when dead the very hounds with which thou huntedst me shall lick thy blood!”
These awful words, involving a fearful prophecy, which was afterwards, as will be shown, strangely fulfilled, were so mixed up with the rolling of the thunder that Henry could scarcely distinguish one sound from the other. At the close of the latter speech a flash of lightning of such dazzling brilliancy shot down past him, that he remained for some moments almost blinded; and when he recovered his powers of vision the demon had vanished.
III.
How Mabel Lyndwood was taken to the Castle by Nicholas
Clamp—And how they encountered Morgan Fenwolf by the way.