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Having laid aside the shroud-like veils which Moorish ladies wear when exposed to the slightest chance of meeting the gaze of man, they now stood confessed in all the magnificence of Oriental taste. It is impossible to describe the dazzling splendour of the jewels with which their costumes absolutely blazed; especially those in the little golden caps, or salmas, which some of them wore.
For her, at any rate, the comedy had had a happy ending. Comus made his way slowly and lingeringly from the stalls, so slowly that the lights were already being turned down and great shroud-like dust-cloths were being swaythed over the ornamental gilt-work.
I began to think that they were actually carrying a corpse, with the intention of giving it burial in that very pit beside which I was standing; and, although it looked most unlike a funeral, for no person in the procession wore black, the thought strengthened to a conviction when I became able to distinguish a recumbent, human-like form in a shroud-like covering on the platform.
"The old man made a good fight," he said, "while, like drunken brutes, we slept." They were there, and before them, beneath the white, shroud-like cloak, lay Sir Andrew, the steel helm on his head, and his face beneath it even whiter than the cloak. At the sound of their footsteps he opened his eyes. "At length, at length," he muttered. "Oh, how many years have I waited for you?
How I got into my own room I can remember not, I know not; I have a vague reminiscence of some intervening wandering, of giant trees, of shroud-like moonlight, of the Shining Shadow and its angry aspect, of the blind walls and the iron door of the House of the Dead, of spectral images, a confused and dreary phantasmagoria.
A steel-grey sky, with slowly-trailing clouds, looked down on her, and the keen, chilly wind wafted a fine snow-powder in her face as she pressed against it. The trees were bare, and the sere grass grew hoary as the first snow-flakes of the season came down softly and shroud-like.
How I got into my own room I can remember not, I know not; I have a vague reminiscence of some intervening wandering, of giant trees, of shroud-like moonlight, of the Shining Shadow and its angry aspect, of the blind walls and the iron door of the House of the Dead, of spectral images, a confused and dreary phantasmagoria.
Their masks, the carefully constructed and upheld mystery of their identity, the trappings of death about them it was skillfully done. Not that she was thinking consecutively just then. It was a mental flash, even as her eyes, growing accustomed to the darkness made out the white numeral, from one to ten, on the front of each shroud-like cloak. Still no one spoke. The Countess faced them.
Here she sat, upright and still, body and soul wrapped in a leaden, shroud-like darkness, until gradually a stupor possessed her brain. "I am so tired," she murmured, "I must go to sleep. He will not leave till to-morrow. But it does not signify. Nothing signifies. I must go to sleep." She unlocked the door and drew in the candle, flaring in its socket.
A figure inexpressibly thin and pathetic, of a dusty leaden colour, enveloped in a shroud-like garment, the thin lips crooked into a faint and dreadful smile, the hands pressed tightly over the region of the heart. As he looked upon it, a distant, almost inaudible moan seemed to issue from its lips, and the arms began to stir.
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