Читать книгу The Mysteries of Florence - George Lippard - Страница 9

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The door flew suddenly open, and Robin, gazing around, found himself standing in a small room, circular in form, with an arched ceiling, and floor of stone. The walls were lined with shelves, piled with massive books, clasped by fastenings of silver and of gold, thrown among scrolls of parchment, richly illuminated, and emblazoned with strange figures, relieving pictures of dark and hidden meaning.

The apartment having no casement, light was supplied by a small lamp of curious workmanship, depending from the arched ceiling, and diffusing its intense and radiant beams all around the place, making the lonely room as bright as though the noonday sun shone over its shelves and walls.

Around the chamber were scattered strange instruments pertaining to the science of astrology or mysteries of alchemy; here richly emblazoned parchments, inscribed with curious characters, glittered in the light; and yonder, the ghastly skull, with its hideous grin of mockery, was strown along the floor, mingled with the bones of the human skeleton, the last fragments of the tenement of the living soul.

While Robin’s eyes distended in wonder, as he hastily glanced around the room, he stumbled and fell against an object reared in the centre of the floor.

“The foul fiend take thee, slave!” shouted Aldarin, as, with his extended arms, he stayed the soldier in his fall. “Wouldst thou destroy the labor of thrice seven long years? Wouldst thou destroy a Mighty Thought? Stand aside from the altar, and come not near it again, or by the body of * * *, I will brain thee with this dagger! Thou slave!” he shrieked, in tones of wild indignation, as his blazing eye was fixed upon the face of the yeoman, who stood confused and silent, “for what dost thou suppose I have watched yon beechen flame, by day and night, for twenty-one long years? For what have I wasted the youth and the vigor of my days before yon altar? Was it to have my labor, the mighty thought, for which I have dared what mortal never dared before, destroyed by thy clumsy carcass? Dost think so, slave?”

Rough Robin murmured an excuse for his awkwardness, and, while the Signior’s features subsided into their usual deep and solemn expression, he again gazed around the room.

From the centre of the oaken floor arose a small altar, built of snow-white marble, with a light blue flame arising from a vessel of gold on its surface: the fire sweeping along the sides of an alembic, suspended over the altar by four chains, attached to as many rods of gold placed at each corner of the structure.

There was something so strange and solemn in the entire aspect of the place—the light blue flame arising in tongues of fire from the vessel of gold on the snow-white altar, burning for ever beneath the hanging alembic, the chains and rods of gold, the pure and undimmed white of the marble, varied by no sculpturing or ornament, combined with the utter stillness and solitude of the room—that Robin felt awed, he scarce knew why; and dark forebodings crept like shadows over his brain.

The scholar seated himself upon a small stool placed near the other, and pointing to another, in a mild voice, desired Robin to follow his example. The yeoman hesitated.

“It is not meet for a poor yeoman o’ th’ Guard to rest himself in the presence of so great a scholar.”

“Nay, nay, good Robin, rest thyself. I was angered with thee a moment hence, but now it is all past. Seat thyself, brave yeoman.”

The soldier complied, and rested his stout person upon a stool of oak, placed some six feet from the spot where sat the Signior Aldarin. Robin had but time to note a singular circumstance, ere the scholar spoke. The stool upon which the stout yeoman sat, was firmly jointed in a large slab of red stone, which, spreading before him for the space of some six feet, was curiously fixed in the planks of the oaken floor.

With a mild and smiling look, the scholar spoke:—

“Robin, thou hast been a true and faithful vassal to my late brother. Thou didst right carefully attend Lord Julian, when forced by the incurable wound of a poisoned arrow, some three months since, he returned from Palestine, leaving Sir Geoffrey o’ th’ Long-sword, at the head of his men-at-arms. Robin, I have long designed to testify the good opinion in which I hold thee by some substantial gift—thou shall be Seneschal of this mighty castle of Albarone!”

“Marry, good Signior—”

“How, sir!—dost thou address me as Signior? Vassal, I am the Lord of Albarone!”

“But Adrian—”

“What sayest thou of Adrian? A murderer—a parricide—his death is certain. The Duke of Florence hath sworn it.”

“Well, my Lord Count, then, an’ it pleases you better, I was about to say that if I had my choice I would sooner be made an esquire.”

“This thou shalt be:—first promise to serve me faithfully in all that I shall command.”

“Well, as far as an honest man may, so far do I promise.”

The scholar Aldarin mused a moment and then said carelessly—“Was it not an exceeding wicked deed, this murder of my good brother?”

“Aye, marry was it,” replied Robin, looking fixedly at Aldarin—“and the fiend of hell, himself, could not have done a more damned, or a more accursed thing.”

“True good Robin,—’twas a horrid murder. What could have prompted Adrian to raise his hand against his father, eh? good Robin?”

The Yeoman did not reply. He cast his eyes to the floor and confusedly fingered his cap.

The Count Aldarin—so must I style him—reached a folded parchment from a writing desk and then asked—

“Why dost thou not speak, good Robin? What art thinking of?”

“Why, heaven save your lordship,” said Robin, speaking in a whisper, and gazing full in Aldarin’s face, “I was just wondering whether the murderer embraced the Count ere he strangled him?”

Aldarin started aside—his features were writhen into a fearful contortion, and his whole frame shook like a leaf of the aspen tree. Again he turned his visage, it was calm, as the face of innocence, and a smile was on his pinched lip.

“Receive thy warrant as Seneschal of the Castle of Albarone,” said Aldarin, as he held forth the parchment—“nay, kneel not, good Robin; keep thy seat.”

Robin held forth his hand to reach the parchment—his fingers touched it, when Aldarin stamped his foot upon the floor, and the slab of red stone fell quick as lightning beneath the yeoman. A deep and dark well was discovered. In an instant the stool affixed to the stone was empty, and far below, in the depths of the pit the echo of the falling slab, sunk with a sound like the rushing of the winter wind through the corridors of a deserted mansion.

A face, with eyes rolling ghastly, with the lower jaw sunken and the tongue protruding from the mouth, appeared above the side of the cavity, at the very feet of Aldarin, and a muscular hand convulsively clutched the oaken plank, while the body of the stout Yeoman, was seen through the darkness of the pit, as he clung with the grasp of despair, to the floor of the room.

“Devil—” shouted the desperate soldier, as he made a convulsive effort to lighten the grasp of his hand on the smooth plank. “I’ll foil thee yet. ’Tis not the fate of an honest man to die thus! My doom—”

“Is DEATH!” shrieked the scholar, and drawing the glittering dagger from his robe, he smote the fingers of the Yeoman, with its unerring steel. The joints of the hand were severed.

The grasp of the soldier failed, he gave one dying look, and then far, far down in the pit, a whizzing noise like the sound of a falling body was heard, and as it grew fainter and fainter did Aldarin stand in attitude of listening, gazing down into the shadow void, his arms outstretched, his eyes wildly glaring, his lips apart, and every lineament of his face expressive of triumph, mingled with hate and scorn.

A wild, maniac laugh came from the murder’s lips:

“Ha—ha—ha! caitiff and slave! Thou hast met thy fate. The scholar hath enemies, but—ha—ha!—they all disappear!”

Again he cast his eyes into the well. All was still as death. A single look into the dark cavity, and, with his bitter smile, Aldarin pictured the mangled corse of the yeoman, lying in bloody fragments, strewn over the vaults of the castle, amid the corses of the unburied dead.

He stamped his foot on the floor, and the red slab, bearing the empty stool, slowly arose on its hinges, and was again fixed in the oaken planks.

“Silent forever, prying fool! My secret is safe. Thou shalt no more prate of a certain warm embrace. Nay, nay; now for my schemes. I must send on to Florence fresh proofs of Adrian’s guilt: witnesses, and so on, and so on. That matter arranged, then comes the marriage of Annabel and the Duke. Ha—ha! Let me think.”

Here he fell into a musing fit, and having newly fed the beechen flame upon the altar of marble, he approached a point of the Round Room, where a small knob of iron projected from the oaken floor.

Stamping upon the knob, a division of the shelving receded, and a portion of the wall, leaving an open space, while a passage was disclosed into a secret chamber, beyond the Round Room.

A door of dark and solid wood, painted in imitation of the walls of the Round Room, had been made in an aperture of the wall, with shelving placed on its panels, and every sign or mark of the existence of such a door, carefully and effectually erased. It bore a complete resemblance to the other parts of the walls, and no one, save Aldarin, could have dreamed of its existence. The small knob in the oaken floor, communicated with a spring, and the secret door rolled into the adjoining room on grooves fixed in the floor.

Aldarin stepped through the secret passage, the door rolled back, and the Round Room was left to the silent flame and the grinning skull.