Huddled together, motionless, on the stairs, their shouts of vengeance
and fury frozen on their lips, the assassins stood for one moment,
staring mechanically, with fixed, spell-bound eyes, upon the hideous
bulwark opposing their advance on the victims whom they had expected so
easily to surprise. The next instant a superstitious panic seized them;
as the hunchback suddenly moved towards them to descend, the corpse
seemed to their terror-stricken eyes to be on the eve of bursting its
way through their ranks. Ignorant of its introduction into the palace,
imagining it, in the revival of their slavish fears, to be the spectral
offspring of the magic incantations of the senators above, they turned
with one accord and fled down the stairs. The sound of their cries of
fear grew fainter and fainter in the direction of the garden as they
hurried through the secret gates at the back of the building. Then the
heavy, regular tamp of the hunchback's footsteps, as he paced the
solitary corridors after them, bearing his burden of death, became
audible in awful distinctness; then that sound also died away and was
lost, and nothing more was heard in the banqueting-room save the sharp
clang of the blows still dealt against the steel railings from the
street.
Pages:
631
632
633
634
635
636
637
638
639
640
641
642
643
644
645
646
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655