Twice it called, so loudly called
With horrid strength beyond the pitch of nature;
And murder! murder! was the dreadful cry.
A third time it returned with feeble strength,
But o' the sudden ceased; as though the words
Were smothered rudely in the grappled throat.
And all was still again, save the wild blast
Which at a distance growled--
Oh, it will never from the heart depart!
That dreadful cry all in the instant stilled.--BAILLIE.
Lyon Berners remained walking up and down the room some time longer. The
lights were all out, and the servants gone to bed. Yet still he
continued to pace up and down the parlor floor, until suddenly piercing
shrieks smote his ear.
In great terror he started forward and instinctively rushed towards
Rosa's room, when the door was suddenly thrown open by Rosa herself,
pale, bleeding from a wound in her breast.
"Great Heaven! What is this?" he cried, as, aghast with amazement and
sorrow, he supported the ghastly and dying form, and laid it on the
sofa, and then sunk on his knees beside it.
"Who, who has done this?" he wildly demanded, as, almost paralyzed with
horror, he knelt beside her, and tried to stanch the gushing wound from
which her life-blood was fast welling.
"Who, who has done this fiendish deed?" he reiterated in anguish, as he
gazed upon her.
She raised her beautiful violet eyes, now fading in death; she opened
her bloodless lips, now paling in death, and she gasped forth the words: "She--Sybil--your wife. I told you she would do it, and she has done it.
Sybil Berners has murdered me," she whispered. Then raising herself
with a last dying effort, she cried aloud, "Hear, all! Sybil Berners has
murdered me." And with this charge upon her lips, she fell back DEAD.
Even in that supreme moment Lyon Berners' first thought, almost his only
thought, was for his wife. He looked up to see who was there--who had
heard this awful, this fatal charge.
All were there! guests and servants, men and women, drawn there by the
dreadful shrieks. All had heard the horrible accusation.
And all stood panic-stricken, as they shrank away from one who stood in
their midst.
It was she, Sybil, the accused, whose very aspect accused her more
loudly than the dying woman had done; for she stood there, still in her
fiery masquerade dress, her face pallid, her eyes blazing, her wild
black hair loose and streaming, her crimsoned hand raised and grasping a
bloodstained dagger.
"Oh, wretched woman! most wretched woman! What is this that you have
done?" groaned Lyon Berners, in unutterable agony--agony not for the
dead beauty before him, but for the living wife, whom he felt that he
had driven to this deed of desperation. "Oh, Sybil! Sybil! what have you
done?" he cried, grinding his hands together.