France -- History -- Louis XV, 1715-1774 -- Fiction; Jacobite Rebellion, 1745-1746 -- Fiction
"The west door," the terrified creature muttered as he left the old
man putting out the last remaining lights, and so made his way towards
the exit indicated. "By the west door. It must needs be that. It is
the nearest to the spot, and he will be there waiting for me, the
moonlight shining in his glittering eyes as he beckons me to him, the
glare of reproach in them. I must go. I must go."
Down the long aisle he crept, shaking as with a palsy as he went,
starting and almost crying out again as a bat flew by and brushed his
hair with its wings, going onward to what he dreaded to see, the
phantom of the murdered man which his distracted brain conjured up
nightly.
"He will be there," he muttered again. "He will be there."
He reached the great west door--striking against the bell ropes
hanging in the tower, and gasping at the contact--and then paused at
the wicket let into the door, dreading to go out through it to meet
the ghostly figure that he knew awaited him.
Still, it must be done, and with another gasp, a smothered groan, he
stepped out through the wicket into the shadow thrown by the cathedral
wall, and gazed upon the moon-illuminated spot where Douglas had
fallen dead.
And once more he smothered a shriek that rose to his lips.
Standing above that spot, its back to him, but as he could tell by the
bent head, gazing down upon it, there was the figure of a man--a man
still as death itself; a man bare-headed.
"You have come again," he hissed in terror. "Again! Again! Mercy!
Mercy!"
Swiftly the figure turned and faced him--its eyes glistening in the
moonlight as he had said--and advanced towards him.
"Douglas!" he screamed. "Douglas! Mercy!"
"No," the figure said. "No. Not Douglas. Archibald."
CHAPTER XX.
AVENGED.
He had fallen grovelling to the earth as that figure turned its face
towards him, and now he remained in the same position.
As he did so Archibald Sholto knew for certain that he had found his
brother's murderer. In the moment of witnessing that frenzied terror
there had flashed into his mind the knowledge of who had been the
wearer of the tiara with the one yellow-brown diamond in it; the
recognition of the dark head streaked with grey with which his
thoughts had been filled for weeks, yet without certainty--the head of
the murderer's late mother! He knew all now. She it was who had worn
the diadem in the great ceremonies he had taken part in; the
rejoicings at the peace of '38, the almost equally great rejoicings at
the death of the Emperor Charles, and many others. She, Lady
Fordingbridge, his mother, had worn it often; often had he observed
the strange light emitted by that blemished jewel; and now, from the
tiara in which it still remained, a ruby was missing, and had been
found on the spot where his brother had been done to death. Therefore
he knew that that brother's assassin was before him. God had given him
into his hands.
He bent forward over the crouching creature at his feet; in a low
voice he said:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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