"You must be mad!" she said, with smothered anger and horror in her tone.
Then seeing me still immovable, she advanced and caught my hand half commandingly, half coaxingly. I did not resist her.
"Come," she implored, "come away at once!" and she glanced about her with a shudder. "Let us leave this horrible place; as for the jewels, if you keep them here, they may stay here; I would not wear them for the world! Come."
I interrupted her, holding her hand in a fierce grasp; I turned her abruptly toward a dark object lying on the ground near us--my own coffin broken asunder. I drew her close to it.
"Look!" I said in a thrilling whisper, "what is this? Examine it well: it is a coffin of flimsiest wood, a cholera coffin! What says this painted inscription? Nay, do not start! It bears your husband's name; he was buried in it. Then how comes it to be open? WHERE IS HE?"
I felt her sway under me; a new and overwhelming terror had taken instant possession of her, her limbs refused to support her, she sunk on her knees. Mechanically and feebly she repeated the words after me-"WHERE IS HE? WHERE IS HE?"
"Ay!" and my voice rang out through the hollow vault, its passion restrained no more. "WHERE IS HE?--the poor fool, the miserable, credulous dupe, whose treacherous wife played the courtesan under his very roof, while he loved and blindly trusted her? WHERE IS HE? Here, here!" and I seized her hands and forced her up from her kneeling posture. "I promised you should see me as I am! I swore to grow young to-night for your sake!--Now I keep my word! Look at me, Nina!--look at me, my twice-wedded wife!--Look at me!--do you not know your HUSBAND?"
And throwing my dark habiliments from me, I stood before her undisguised! As though some defacing disease had swept over her at my words and look, so her beauty suddenly vanished. Her face became drawn and pinched and almost old--her lips turned blue, her eyes grew glazed, and strained themselves from their sockets to stare at me; her very hands looked thin and ghost-like as she raised them upward with a frantic appealing gesture; there was a sort of gasping rattle in her throat as she drew herself away from me with a convulsive gesture of aversion, and crouched on the floor as though she sought to sink through it and thus avoid my gaze.