Part 60 (1/2)
The little party pa.s.sed up the great staircase of the keep and presently halted before the inscribed wooden door by which Laurence had entered the Temple of Evil.
As Gilles de Sille opened it for the maids to precede him, the skirt of Maud Lindesay's robe, blown back by the draught of the chamber, fluttered against the cheek of Laurence MacKim as he lay on his face in the niche of the wall. At the light touch he came to himself, and looked about with a strange and instant change in all the affections and movements of his heart.
With the coming in of the maidens, fear seemed utterly to forsake him.
A clarity of purpose, an alertness of brain, a strength of heart unknown before, took the place of the trembling bath of horror in which he had swooned away.
It was like the sudden appearance of two white angels walking fearless and unscathed through the grim dominions of the Lords of h.e.l.l.
Incarnate Good had somehow entered the house of the Demon, though it was in the slender periphery of two maidens' bodies, and evil, strong and resistless before, seemed in the moment to lose half its power.
[Ill.u.s.tration: IT WAS LIKE THE SUDDEN APPEARANCE OF TWO WHITE ANGELS WALKING FEARLESS AND UNSCATHED THROUGH THE GRIM DOMINIONS OF THE LORDS OF h.e.l.l.]
CHAPTER LIX
THE LAST SACRIFICE TO BARRAN-SATHANAS
And as Laurence MacKim, crouched in the dim obscurity of the curtained doorway, looked forth, this is what he saw.
Maud Lindesay and Margaret Douglas advanced into the centre of the temple where was a slab of white marble let into the floor. As if by instinct the two maids stopped upon it, standing hand in hand before the iron altar and the vast shadowy image which gloomed above and appeared to reach forward in act to clutch them. After the first check in his hideous incantations, Gilles de Retz had returned to his own chamber, in which, after his entrance, the light gleamed brighter and more fiercely red than ever. As the maidens stood on the marble square La Meffraye went to the door and called certain words within, conveying some message which Laurence could not hear.
Then with an a.s.sured carriage and haughty stride came forth the marshal, his grey hair and blue-black beard in strong contrast with his haggard corpse-pale face, from which the momentary glow of youth half-restored had already faded, as fades a footprint upon wet sand.
Gilles de Sille and Poitou bowed silently before him as men who have done their commission, and who retire to await further orders. But La Meffraye, once more apparent, stood her ground.
”Here are the dainty maids from the far land; no beggars' brats are they. No strays and pickings from the streets. No, nor yet silly village innocents who follow La Meffraye from the play-fields through the woodlands to the Paradise of our Lord Gilles! Hasten not the joy!
Let these pearls of youth and beauteousness die indeed, but let them die slowly and deliciously. And in the last blood of an ancient race let our master bathe and find the new life he seeks. Hear us, O Barran-Sathanas, and grant our prayer!”
Then La Meffraye approached the maids and would have touched the dress of the little Margaret, as if to order it more daintily for the pleasing of her master's eye. But Maud Lindesay thrust her aside like an unclean thing.
Whereat La Meffraye laughed till her rusty black cloak quivered and rustled from hood to hem.
”Ah, my proud lady,” she croaked, ”in a little, in a very little, you too will be calling upon La Meffraye to save you, to pity you. But I, La Meffraye, will gloat over each drop of blood that distils from your fair neck. Aha, you shall change your tone when at the white throat-apple which your sweetheart would have loved to kiss, you feel the bite of the sharp slow knife. Then you will not thrust aside La Meffraye. Then you shall cry and none shall pity. Then she will spurn you from her knees.”
”Out!” said Gilles de Retz, briefly, and like some inferior imping devilkin before the great Master of Evil, La Meffraye retreated hobbling to the doorway of the marshal's chamber, where she crouched nodding and chuckling, mumbling inaudible words, and mingling them ever with her dry cackling laughter.
Gilles de Retz stopped at the corner of the platform and looked long at Maud and Margaret where they stood on the great central square of marble. It was the Maid who spoke first.
”Dear Messire,” she said sweetly and almost confidently, ”you have a little girl of your own. I know, for I have played with her. I love her. Therefore you will not hurt us. I am sure you will not hurt us.
You are going to send us back in a s.h.i.+p to our own country, because it is lonely here where Maud and I know no one!”
The marshal smiled upon her his inhuman inscrutable smile. He leaned against a pillar of strangely twisted design, and contemplated the two victims at his ease.
”Life is sweet to you, is it not?” he said at last; ”you are truly happy, being young, and so have no need to be made young again.”
”Oh, but I am very old,” cried the Maid, gaining some confidence from the quiet of his voice, ”I am nearly eight years old. And our Maudie here, she is--oh, a dreadful age! She is very, very old!”
”You would not like to die?” suggested Gilles de Retz, with a certain soft insinuation.