"You have, indeed!" said Sir Norman, gravely, having listened, much
shocked and displeased, at this open confession; "and to one of them it
is beyond our power to atone. Do you know the life of misery to which
she has been assigned?"
"I know it all, and have repented for it in my own heart, in dust
and ashes! Even I--unlike all other earthly creatures as I am--have a
conscience, and it has given me no rest night or day since. From that
hour I have never lost sight of them; every sorrow they have undergone
has been known to me, and added to my own; and yet I could not, or would
not, undo what I had done. Leoline knows all now; and she will tell
Hubert, since destiny has brought them together; and whether they will
forgive me I know not. But yet they might; for they have long and happy
lives before them, and we can forgive everything to the dead."
"But you are not dead," said Sir Norman; "and there is repentance and
pardon for all. Much as you have wronged them, they will forgive you;
and Heaven is not less merciful than they!"
"They may; for I have striven to atone. In my house there are proofs and
papers that will put them in possession of all, and more than all, they
have lost. But life is a burden of torture I will bear no longer. The
death of him who died for me this night is the crowning tragedy of my
miserable life; and if my hour were not at hand, I should not have told
you this."
"But you have not told me the fearful cause of no much guilt and
suffering. What is behind that mask?"
"Would you, too, see?" she asked, in a terrible voice, "and die?"
"I have told you it is not in my nature to die easily, and it is
something far stronger than mere curiosity makes me ask."
"Be it so! The sky is growing red with day-dawn, and I shall never see
the sun rise more, for I am already plague-struck!"
That sweetest of all voices ceased. The white hands removed the
mask, and the floating coils of hair, and revealed, to Sir Norman's
horror-struck gaze, the grisly face and head, and the hollow
eye-sockets, the grinning mouth, and fleshless cheeks of a skeleton!
He saw it but for one fearful instant--the next, she had thrown up both
arms, and leaped headlong into the loathly plague-pit. He saw her for
a second or two, heaving and writhing in the putrid heap; and then the
strong man reeled and fell with his face on the ground, not feigning,
but sick unto death. Of all the dreadful things he had witnessed that
night, there was nothing so dreadful as this; of all the horror he had
felt before, there was none to equal what he felt now. In his momentary
delirium, it seemed to him she was reaching her arms of bone up to drag
him in, and that the skeleton-face was grinning at him on the edge of
the awful pit. And, covering his eyes with his hands, he sprang up, and
fled away.