The cowering form rose up; but, seeing who it was, sank down again, with
its face groveling in the dust, and with another prolonged, moaning cry.
"Madame Masque!" he said, wonderingly; "what is this?"
He bent to raise her; but, with a sort of scream she held out her arms
to keep him back.
"No, no, no I Touch me not! Hate me--kill me! I have murdered your
friend!"
Sir Norman recoiled as if from a deadly tent.
"Murdered him! Madame, in Heaven's name, what have you said?"
"Oh, I have not stabbed him, or poisoned him, or shot him; but I am
his murderer, nevertheless!" she wailed, writhing in a sort of gnawing
inward torture.
"Madame, I do not understand you at all! Surely you are raving when you
talk like this."
Still moaning on the edge of the plague-pit, she half rose up, with both
hands clasped tightly over her heart, as if she would have held back
from all human ken the anguish that was destroying her, "NO--no! I am not mad--pray Heaven I were! Oh, that they had strangled
me in the first hour of my birth, as they would a viper, rather than I
should have lived through all this life of misery and guilt, to end it
by this last, worst crime of all!"
Sir Norman stood and looked at her still with a dazed expression. He
knew well enough whose murderer she called herself; but why she did
so, or how she could possibly bring about his death, was a mystery
altogether too deep for him to solve.
"Madame, compose yourself, I beseech you, and tell me what you mean. It
is to my friend, Ormiston, you allude--is it not?"
"Yes--yes! surely you need not ask."
"I know that he is dead, and buried in this horrible place; but why you
should accuse yourself of murdering him, I confess I do not know."
"Then you shall!" she cried, passionately. "And you will wonder at it no
longer! You are the last one to whom the revelation can ever be made on
earth; and, now that my hours are numbered, it matters little whether it
is told or not! Was it not you who first found him dead?"
"It was I--yes. And how he came to his end, I have been puzzling myself
in vain to discover ever since."
She rose up, drew herself to her full majestic height, and looked at him
with a terrible glance, "Shall I tell you?"
"You have had no hand in it," he answered, with a cold chill at the tone
and look, "for he loved you!"
"I have had a hand in it--I alone have been the cause of it. But for me
he would be living still!"
"Madame," exclaimed Sir Norman, in horror.