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Then, turning to the workmen, he nodded and, to my horror, the whole gang filed out after him, turning deaf ears to my entreaties and threats. There was a deathly silence, then Sir Peter exploded into a vivid shower of words. The Countess, pale as a ghost, gave me a heart-breaking look. The Crown-Prince wept. "Great Heaven!" I cried; "the thermometers have fallen to 70°!"
"I will tell you how you know, Ruth," I whispered passionately. "It was because I loved you more than anyone else in the world has ever loved you, and you felt my love in your heart and called it sympathy." I stopped short, for she had blushed scarlet and then turned deathly pale. And now she looked at me wildly, almost with terror. "Have I shocked you, Ruth dearest?"
He raised the belt. At that moment Gladwin made a quick, slight signal. Immediately from the passage with out came the sound of grounding arms, and the rat-tat of a drum. Pontiac stood rigid, as one turned to stone. Then after a moment's deathly silence he sat down. In the silence Gladwin sat looking steadily and fearlessly at the Indians.
I peopled the silent rooms opening out of that wherein I sat, with stealthy, murderous figures; my imagination painted hideous yellow faces upon the draperies, twitching yellow hands protruding from this crevice and that. A score of times I started nervously, thinking I heard the pad of bare feet upon the floor behind me, the suppressed breathing of some deathly approach.
Wretched actors, even incapable of a decent makeup, they writhe from morning till night on the boards of the stage, and, dying the most real death, suffering the most real sufferings, they bring into their deathly convulsions the cheap art of the harlequin.
The moan is the same as the night wind, the same soft sigh, only louder and somehow pregnant with superhuman power. To speak of it in broad daylight one seems superstitious, but to hear it in the darkness of this lonely forest, it is fearful! I hope I am not a coward; I certainly know I was deathly frightened. No wonder I was scared! Look at these dead Indians, all killed in a moment.
I struggled against the sudden sense of faintness that seized on me; I tried to tell the people of the inn what to do. It was useless. I dropped to my knees; my head sunk on the bosom of the woman stretched senseless upon the low couch beneath me. The death-in-life that had got her had got me. Lost to the world about us, we lay, with my blood flowing on her, united in our deathly trance.
It was her deathly whiteness that startled him, a pallor emphasized by the dark masses of her hair, and a strange glow in her eyes. It was not a glow brought there by the kiss. It was fear, fading slowly out of them as he looked, until at last it was gone, and her lips trembled with an apologetic smile. "He was very angry," she said. "How easily some men lose their tempers, don't they Jeems?"
For several seconds astonishment held the inmates of the room chained to their places; and for that space of time no sound broke the deathly stillness. Then Percy Darrow spoke, in his natural voice. "Well, Jack," he remarked, "it worked out, to a second, almost. Now I'm certain."
The magician, who remained upon his knees with uplifted hands while the apparitions were visible, declared that the forces he was obliged to employ in exercising his magic power over the spirits had exhausted him. His fine, bearded face was deathly pale, and his tall form trembled and shook. His assistants had silently disappeared.
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