Have you any message that I can deliver for you? If
so, out with it, for time is short and that hold must be cleared by
daybreak.'
'I have no message to give you from myself, though I have a message for
you, de Garcia,' I answered. 'But before I tell it, let me say a word.
You seem to have won, wicked murderer as you are, but perhaps the game
is not yet played. Your fears may still come true. I am dead, but my
vengeance may yet live on, for I leave it to the Hand in which I should
have left it at first. You may live some years longer, but do you think
that you shall escape? One day you will die as surely as I must die
to-night, and what then, de Garcia?'
'A truce, I pray you,' he said with a sneer. 'Surely you have not
been consecrated priest. You had a message, you said. Pray deliver it
quickly. Time presses, Cousin Wingfield. Who sends messages to an exile
like myself?'
'Isabella de Siguenza, whom you cheated with a false marriage and
abandoned,' I said.
He started from his chair and stood over me.
'What of her?' he whispered fiercely.
'Only this, the monks walled her up alive with her babe.'
'Walled her up alive! Mother of God! how do you know that?'
'I chanced to see it done, that is all. She prayed me to tell you of
her end and the child's, and that she died hiding your name, loving and
forgiving.
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