Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/76

66 water; followed by a gigantic and terrific peal or thunder which shook and rolled against the heavy masonry and then died away in faint repercussions in the distance. Then all was still except for the battering and tearing of the rain against the walls, as if it sought to gain an entry by force and permeate the very stones. In heavy sullen drops it dripped from knightly helmet and escutcheon with the monotony of a pendulum, or soaked into the soft films of moss and tufts of grass which filled the time-worn hollows of the sculptured granite.

The city was as one of the dead. It was no day for a Christian to be abroad. The beggars even had sought the shelter of a roof and the very dogs — the half-starved curs that haunted the gutters for garbage all day long — lay cowering and silent in the shadow of some deep-mouthed gateway.

And on this unholy day, from one of the frowning palaces, a man emerged, his soul riven by a tempest as deep as that which raged around him. The great gates shut to with a clang that shook the street, and dominated for a moment the strife of the rain and the groaning wind. He might have been himself the spirit of the storm, this black figure, cloaked to the eyes, which brushed furtively against the houses, as if afraid to face the light of day. He turned back once to take a last look at the house he had left. That house which only a few hours before had been his until on the stroke of midnight he had played his last stake and lost. Even now he heard the slow clanging of the bells as they woke the silence of the street, the knell to him of ruin. He lived through every detail of the last hateful hours. One hope had remained to him. His father's box; that box he had sworn never to open until no remedy was left in life but death. The time had come. It could not be otherwise, but that the old man, foreseeing this final crisis, had saved for him the means to repair Rh