ibunal. Beside the
Neapolitan a woman sat veiled and shrouded in masses of sable drapery.
"A queen?" I thought, "or a slave?" But I had no further room for fancy;
the same interrogatories as before were given me to answer, and then I
felt why I had been nursed back to life. In the months that had elapsed,
I could not know if Italy were saved or lost, if Naples tottered or
remained impregnable. I stood only on my personal basis of right or
wrong. I refused to open my lips. They wheeled forward a low bed that I
knew well. Oh, the slow starting of the socket! Oh, the long wrench of
tendon and nerve! A bed of steel and cords, rollers and levers, bound me
there, and bent to their creaking toil. I was strong to endure; I had
set my teeth and sworn myself to silence; no woman should hear me moan.
Even in this misery I saw that she who sat there, shaking, fell.

The tyrant was lily-livered; seldom he witnessed what others died under;
he intended nothing further then;--many men who faint at sight of blood
can probe a soul to its utmost gasp. Now he motioned, and they paused.
Then others lifted the woman and held her beside him, yet a little in
advance.

"Keep your silence," said he, in a voice unrecognizable, and as if a
wild beast, half-glutted, should speak, "and I keep her! She is in my
power. Mine, and you know what that means. Mine," and he bent toward me,
"_body and--soul_. To use, to blast, to destroy, to tear piecemeal,--as
I will do, so help me God! unless you meet my condition." And extending
his hand, he drew aside the black veil, and my eye lay on the face of
Lenore, thin and white as the familiar faces of corpses, and utterly
insensible in swoon.

All, that mortal horror stops my pulse! Was I wrong? Why not have borne
that, too? Had she loved me, she had chosen it, chosen it rather. And
death would have made all right!--God! why not have seized some poignard
lying there? why not have sprung upon her, have slain her? Then silence
had been simply secure. Then I could have smiled in their frustrated
faces, one keen, deep smile, and died. I was dissolved in pain, writhed
with prolonged strokes that thrilled me from head to foot, pierced as
with acute stabs, my heart seemed to forge thunderbolts to break upon my
brain,--but this agony had been spared me. They unbound me, fed me with
some stimulating cordial, gave me cold air, and I rose on my elbow a
little.

"Swear!" I said, hoarsely. "But you do not keep oaths. God