"Back! back!" he cried warningly. "If you come one inch nearer to me I cannot answer for your safety--back, I say! Good God! you do not know your OWN power!"
Alwyn scarcely heeded him,--some fatal attraction drew him on, and he still advanced, when all suddenly he paused, trembling violently. His nerves began to throb acutely,--the blood in his veins was like fire,--there was a curious strangling tightness in his throat that interrupted and oppressed his breathing,--he stared straight before him with large, luminous, impassioned eyes. What--WHAT was that dazzling something in the air that flashed and whirled and shone like glittering wheels of golden flame? His lips parted ... he stretched out his hands in the uncertain manner of a blind man feeling his way ... "Oh God! ... God!" ... he muttered as though stricken by some sudden amazement,--then, with a smothered, gasping cry, he staggered and fell heavily forward on the floor--insensible!
At the self-same instant the window blew open, with a loud crash-- it swung backward and forward on its hinges, and a torrent of rain poured through it slantwise into the room. A remarkable change had taken place in the aspect and bearing of Heliobas,--he stood as though rooted to the spot, trembling from head to foot,--he had lost all his usual composure,--he was deathly pale, and breathed with difficulty. Presently recovering himself a little he strove to shut the swinging casement, but the wind was so boisterous, that he had to pause a moment to gain strength for the effort, and instinctively he glanced out at the tempestuous night. The clouds were scurrying over the sky like great black vessels on a foaming sea,--the lightning flashed incessantly, and the thunder reverberated Over the mountains in tremendous volleys as of besieging cannon. Stinging drops of icy sleet dashed his face and the front of his white garb as he inhaled the stormy freshness of the strong, upward-sweeping blast for a few seconds--and then, with the air of one gathering together all his scattered forces, he shut to the window firmly and barred it across. Turning now to the unconscious Alwyn, he lifted him from the floor to a low couch near at hand, and there laid him gently down. This done, he stood looking at him with an expression of the deepest anxiety, but made no attempt to rouse him from his death-like swoon. His own habitual serenity was completely broken through,--he had all the appearance of having received some unexpected and overwhelming shock,--his very lips were blanched and quivered nervously.
He waited for several minutes, attentively watching the recumbent figure before him, till gradually,--very gradually,--that figure took upon itself the pale, stern beauty of a corpse from which life has but recently and painlessly departed. The limbs grew stiff and rigid--the features smoothed into that mysteriously wise placidity which is so often seen in the faces of the dead,--the closed eyelids looked purple and livid as though bruised ... there was not a breath, not a tremor, to offer any outward suggestion of returning animation,--and when, after some little time, Heliobas bent down and listened, there was no pulsation of the heart ... it had ceased to beat! To all appearances Alwyn was DEAD--any physician would have certified the fact, though how he had come by his death there was no evidence to show. And in that condition, ... stirless, breathless ... white as marble, cold and inanimate as stone, Heliobas left him. Not in indifference, but in sure knowledge--knowledge far beyond all mere medical science--that the senseless clay would in due time again arise to life and motion; that the casket was but temporarily bereft of its jewel,--and that the jewel itself, the Soul of the Poet, had by a superhuman access of will, managed to break its bonds and escape elsewhere. But whither? ... Into what vast realms of translucent light or drear shadow? ... This was a question to which the mystic monk, gifted as he was with a powerful spiritual insight into "things unseen and eternal," could find no satisfactory answer, and in his anxious perplexity he betook himself to the chapel, and there, by the red glimmer of the crimson star that shone dimly above the altar, he knelt alone and prayed in silence till the heavy night had passed, and the storm had slain itself with the sword of its own fury on the dark slopes of the Pass of Dariel.