Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 2 (1925-02).djvu/156



AIN, gentle, relentless, soul-soaking. It seeped through the elms sadly, whimpered around gray stone cornices; and from a distance the wind brought tales of how it pattered upon the sea below the ragged cliffs. Only soft April rain, but Ermengarde grew cold, watching, and shut the window. Then she pulled close the somber velvet curtains, though they could not shut out the sound. That whimpering! As she went toward the broad hearth where a small fire burned, she drew her dark shawl tightly around her.

The room with its high, beamed ceiling, the carved table and the tapestries which a light draft ruffled eerily—how its familiar things stood out like so many impotent, disregarded selves: the white parchment-covered volume he had read, the candelabra that had lighted the reading, the slim, pointed dagger with the emerald-studded hilt, flung carelessly on the table, a lute with a broken string. They were eloquent of death. She sat down wearily in a tall chair before the fire and rested her elbows on the arms, her hands touching each other, the long white fingers pointed upward. She lifted one arched black eyebrow so that deep lines ran across her white forehead up to the roots of lusterless black hair.

Now she would go over it again, as if for the first time, go over it in the quaint, half-mad question and answer with which she tortured herself.

"Dead."

"Dead?"

"Yes."

"Who is dead?"

"Fayrian, whom you love—golden-haired Fayrian."

"Yes, yes, I remember!"

"Fayrian was killed."

"Who killed him?"

"You—you who loved him."

"I remember."

With an oblique glance of her heavy-lashed eyes she saw the long table. It had been set so: there had been Polevay; at the far end, herself; and here, Fayrian with the poison in his cup. She it was who had put the poison there, but they had hanged Polevay because he had once threatened to kill Fayrian. It did not matter that Polevay was hanged, for he was a bad man, already scarlet with other murders. She had not wanted to die, because hanging would mean that her white neck would be broken, her face turned purple. To die—it would hurt: and Fayrian would not