Stepping back from it, watching what should happen next--yet, I swear before heaven, with no fear at my heart--why should there be, since I desired to die and join my love? yet still with that heart beating loudly from excitement--I saw the blackness of the doorway blurred with a deeper intensity by a form standing outside it. I saw the moonbeams reach that form, lighting it up for a moment and glistening on the eyes of it. I saw before me the great figure and heavy, stolid face of my dumb, impenetrable jailer. The mute! Also observed that under his arm he carried something long--a sword.
His eyes upon me, he advanced into the cell--I seeing that his feet were bare except for thick, coarse stockings which he wore--yet making no motion as though to attack me, his action not such as would have rendered a more desperate man than myself resolved to defend himself. Then slowly, while I, my back against the farthest wall, stared at him more in wonder than in awe, he raised the arm under which the sword was not borne, and motioned to me with his finger, crooked somewhat, to follow him, pointing a moment afterward down the dark passage.
"So," I whispered to myself, drawing a deep breath as I did so, "the hour has come. He bids me follow him. I understand--it is to be done before daylight. Well, I am ready. God give me strength and pardon me."
Then I made ready to follow him, while he, observing this, prepared to lead the way.
All was profound and dark outside that cell when once we were in the passage--so dark that, ere I had barely reached it, I felt his great hand upon my arm, felt him clutching my sleeves between his fingers. And thus together we went on, he silent as a corpse, except for his breathing, which sometimes I heard--sometimes, too, felt upon my cheek--I going to my death.
One thing I noticed, even in these moments of intensity. We went the opposite way from that by which I had first been brought--the opposite way from which his footsteps, when he had been shod, had invariably sounded; also the opposite way from which my love had come to bid me a last farewell, and had been carried insensible after our parting.
The end of the corridor was reached in the darkness; I knew that by the fact that his grasp tightened perceptibly on my sleeve; also that, by a pressure of his fingers on it, he was turning me somewhat to the left; likewise, that grasp put a degree of curb upon me; a moment later seemed to signify that I was to go on again. And it felt to me that, in a way, I was being supported--held up.