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The soldiers took up the body and laid it on the bed where ten minutes before he had been sitting, and the captain put a guard at the door. In the evening a man presented himself, asking to go into the death-chamber: the sentinel refused to let him in, and he demanded an interview with the governor of the prison. Led before him, he produced an order.
To be sure there was, and Annie knew, moreover, what it was; but then it was to be got only by a sacrifice, and that sacrifice she also knew, though it must of necessity be kept in the meantime as secret as the wonderful doings in the death-chamber of the palace of a certain Bluebeard.
Miss Silence answered, with her chief mourner expression, and her death-chamber tone: "Yes, she has left us for a season. I trust it may not be her destruction. I had hoped in former years that she would become a missionary, but I have given up all expectation of that now.
"Promise me! Please promise me!" For a second the rancher did not stir; then, very gently, he freed himself and moved a step backward. "Florence," he said slowly, "you do not know me even yet." He drew out his big old-fashioned silver watch, once Rankin's. "You still have four minutes to get ready no more, no less." Silence like that of a death-chamber fell over the bright little dining-room.
Stuart drew the curtains of scarlet and gold, touched a spring and raised the massive broad window. The death-chamber was flooded with fresh balmy air and dazzling sunlight. All that was left of him who boasted his mastery of the world lay on the magnificent bed, a lump of white cold flesh and projecting bones. The little body looked stark and hideous in the sunlight.
He had no recollection of the interval that elapsed before the nearest could arrive, nor distinct notion of any part of that long sunny afternoon while he sat by his Nina in the death-chamber. Once he got up to stop the ticking of a clock on the chimney-piece, moving mechanically with stealthy footfall across the room lest she should be disturbed.
In the death-chamber Schmucke was lying with his arms about the body of his friend, holding him in a tight clasp; nothing but the authority of religion availed to separate him from his dead.
It was two hours after this singular scene, and exactly in the third hour of morning, that Vernon woke from a short and troubled sleep. A raw and comfortless chill crept over the earth, and saddened the air in the death-chamber. Constance sat by her father's bed, her eyes fixed upon him, and her cheek more wan than ever by the pale light of that crude and cheerless dawn.
Poulain's remarks. He had, moreover, a certain belief in the doctor of the quarter. So on the threshold of the death-chamber he stopped and beckoned to Schmucke, but Schmucke could not bring himself to loosen the grasp of the hand that grew tighter and tighter. Pons seemed to think that he was slipping over the edge of a precipice and must catch at something to save himself.
The lamps were already lighted in the hall, and the rays from the central one fell upon Herr Casper's colourless face, which wore an expression of despair. But just as her lips parted to ask the question the odour of musk reached her from the death-chamber, whose door Eva had opened.
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