Presently there appeared a number of half-naked men, carrying short axes stained with blood,--coarse, savage, cruel-looking brutes all, whose lowering faces bore the marks of a thousand unrepented crimes,--these were followed by four tall personages clad in flowing white robes and closely masked,--and finally there came a band of black slaves clothed in vivid scarlet, dragging between them two writhing, bleeding creatures,--one a man, the other a girl in her earliest youth, both convulsed by the evident last agonies of death.
Arrived at the centre of that part of the vault where the skeleton crowd was thickest, this horrible cortege halted, while one of the masked personages undid from his girdle a large bunch of keys. And now Theos, watching everything with dreadful interest from the obscure corner where he was, thanks to his unknown friend, successfully concealed, perceived for the first time a low, iron door, heavily barred, and surmounted by sharp spikes as long as drawn daggers. When this dreary portal was, with many a jarring groan and clang, slowly opened, such an awful cry broke from the lips of the tortured man as might have wrung compassion from the most hardened tyrant. Wresting himself fiercely out of the grasp of the slaves who held him, he struggled to his feet, while the blood poured from the cruel wounds that were inflicted all over his body, and raising his manacled hands aloft he cried..
"Mercy! ... mercy! ... not for me, but for her! ... for her, my love, my life, my tenderest little one! ... What is her crime, ye fiends? ... why do ye deem love a sin and passion a dishonor? ... Shall there be no more heart-longings because ye are cold? ... Spare her! ... she is so young, so fond, so innocent of all reproach save one, the shame of loving me! Spare her! ... or, if ye will not spare, slay her at once! ... now!--now, with swift compassionate sword, . . but cast her not alive into yon hideous serpent's den! ... not alive! ... ah no, no,--ye gods have pity! ..."
Here his voice broke and a sudden light passed over his agonized countenance. Gazing steadfastly at the girl, whose beautiful, white body now lay motionless on the cold stone, with a cloud of fair hair falling veil-like over it, his eyes seemed to strain themselves out of their sockets in the intensity of his eager regard, when all at once he gave vent to a wild peal of delirious laughter and exclaimed..
"Dead.. dead! ... Thanks be to the merciless gods for this one gift of grace at the last! Dead.. dead! ... O the blessed favor and freedom of death! ... Sweetheart, they can torture thee no more.. no more! ... Ah, devils that ye are!" and his voice grown frantically loud, pierced the gloomy arches with terrible resonance, as he saw the red-garmented slaves vainly endeavoring to rouse, with ferocious blows and thrusts, new life in the fair, stiffening corpse before them.. "This time ye are baffled! ... Baffled!--and I live to see your vanquishment! Give her to me!" and he stretched out his trembling arms ... "Give her...she is dead--and ye cannot offer to Nagaya any lifeless thing! I will weave her a shroud of her own gold hair--I will bury her softly away in the darkness--I will sing to her as I used to sing in the silent summer evenings, when we fancied our secret of forbidden love unknown,--and with my lips on hers, I will pray.. pray for the pardon of passion grown stronger...than...life! ..."