Yes, she slept. The Indian sleeps at the stake in the intervals between
his tortures; and mental torments, in like manner, exhaust by long
continuance the sensibility of the sufferer, so that an interval of
lethargic repose must necessarily ensue, ere the pangs which they
inflict can again be renewed.
The Countess slept, then, for several hours, and dreamed that she was
in the ancient house at Cumnor Place, listening for the low whistle with
which Leicester often used to announce his presence in the courtyard
when arriving suddenly on one of his stolen visits. But on this
occasion, instead of a whistle, she heard the peculiar blast of a
bugle-horn, such as her father used to wind on the fall of the stag, and
which huntsmen then called a MORT. She ran, as she thought, to a
window that looked into the courtyard, which she saw filled with men
in mourning garments. The old Curate seemed about to read the funeral
service. Mumblazen, tricked out in an antique dress, like an ancient
herald, held aloft a scutcheon, with its usual decorations of skulls,
cross-bones, and hour-glasses, surrounding a coat-of-arms, of which she
could only distinguish that it was surmounted with an Earl's coronet.
The old man looked at her with a ghastly smile, and said, "Amy, are they
not rightly quartered?" Just as he spoke, the horns again poured on her
ear the melancholy yet wild strain of the MORT, or death-note, and she
awoke.
The Countess awoke to hear a real bugle-note, or rather the combined
breath of many bugles, sounding not the MORT. but the jolly REVEILLE, to
remind the inmates of the Castle of Kenilworth that the pleasures of the
day were to commence with a magnificent stag-hunting in the neighbouring
Chase. Amy started up from her couch, listened to the sound, saw the
first beams of the summer morning already twinkle through the lattice
of her window, and recollected, with feelings of giddy agony, where she
was, and how circumstanced.
"He thinks not of me," she said; "he will not come nigh me! A Queen is
his guest, and what cares he in what corner of his huge Castle a wretch
like me pines in doubt, which is fast fading into despair?" At once a
sound at the door, as of some one attempting to open it softly, filled
her with an ineffable mixture of joy and fear; and hastening to remove
the obstacle she had placed against the door, and to unlock it, she had
the precaution to ask! "Is it thou, my love?"
"Yes, my Countess," murmured a whisper in reply.