She paused with an involuntary thrill of fear, as the vivid details of the picture rose before her mental vision, and then came another thought of horror--_the bride must be widowed ere she weds a second time_.
While dark and fearful imaginings haunted her soul, and well nigh crazed her brain, the fair and gentle Ladye Annabel felt a strange and deadening sleep stealing over her frame, and with a half-muttered prayer to the Virgin, she sank slumbering on the couch, the hangings of sable closing over her form, and concealing her from the sight.
All is silent within the cell. Low, suppressed sounds break from distant parts of the monastery, half-heard shrieks, and deep-muttered groans. For a dreary half hour, the cell is left to silence and solitude; when a distant footstep is heard, then a strange echo runs along the corridors of the Convent, and the small door of the lonely room, grating on its hinges slowly opens, and a Figure, buried in the folds of a sweeping robe of black, and bearing a small lamp of iron in an extended hand, stalks cautiously along the floor of stone.
The Figure paused with a trembling and indecisive movement in the centre of the floor, and then a face flushed by wine, and ruddy with excitement, was thrust from the folds of the robe of black.
“All silent and still,” exclaimed a voice, indistinct with wine. “An half hour of midnight--the sleeping potion has taken effect! It has, by St. Antonia!”
He approached the bedside, and with the trembling hand of a coward, flung back the sable hangings of the couch. The light of his lamp, fell vividly upon the form of the sleeping maiden, as she reclined on the sable furs covering the couch, while her flowing robes, white as the undriven snow, gave a strange contrast to the ebony darkness of the bed.
“I’ faith she is beautiful--_eh, Aldarin?_ Faugh! _I forgot--the man is dead!_ That bloom upon her cheek--’tis like the opening rose. How soft that heave of the bosom as it rises from the folds of the white robe--_torn to pieces by wild horses_--that arm, with the dress falling softly around its outlines, the small hand, the tapering fingers--_a most accursed fate_--and the attitude, the cheek reclining on the arm, the form laid so carelessly along the couch, the feet, small, delicate--_torn into a thousand fragments, an arm here, a leg there, and_--By the Saints I must e’en crave a kiss of this sleeping beauty--”