His eyes were fixed on the door by which she had departed,
as if he expected her to return. Her destiny seemed to be portentously
mingled with his own; his life seemed to move, his death to wait at her
bidding. There was no repentance, no moral purification in the emotions
which now suspended his bodily faculties in inaction; he was struck for
the time with a mental paralysis.
The restless moments moved onward and onward, and still he delayed the
consummation of the ruin which the night's debauch had begun. Slowly
the tender daylight grew and brightened in its beauty, warmed the cold
prostrate bodies in the silent hall, and dimmed the faint glow of the
wasting lamp; no black mist of smoke, no red glare of devouring fire
arose to quench its fair lustre; no roar of flames interrupted the
murmuring morning tranquillity of nature, or startled from their heavy
repose the exhausted outcasts stretched upon the pavement of the street.
Still the noble palace stood unshaken on its firm foundations; still the
adornments of its porticoes and its statues glittered as of old in the
rays of the rising sun; and still the hand of the master who had sworn
to destroy it, as he had sworn to destroy himself, hung idly near the
torch which lay already extinguished in harmless ashes at his feet.
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