I cowered in the corner with naught but death and fear and
darkness to keep me company.

CHAPTER XII

FLORINE TO THE RESCUE

A shroud of consuming terror now possessed me. I crouched in the dank
corner clutching my sword, listening, vainly listening, for some sound
out of which to conjure up an assassin. A rat ran across my foot.
Screaming out I bounded erect and beat about me with blind desperation.
One hand touched the other and shrank from its mate. They were as ice.

Oh, God, the horrid silence! How weightily it bore upon me, stripping
me of voice, of courage and of hope. How many, many times I braced
myself against the wall, cold with fear at the apprehension of an
attack by some demon of the night. How many, many times I sank again
into the same dumb misery when no enemy appeared to do me hurt.

So long it had been since the tones of human speech blessed my ears, I
almost hoped the marshal's men might come, that I might hear his stern
command, "Hang him to yonder window ledge." A rasping thirst roasted
my throat until my tongue gritted and ground as a rusted clapper in a
bell. I touched it with my hand. It was as dry as Broussard's.

Broussard! A quiver in the musty air set me all a shudder; in every
rustle I felt again the last convulsions of the dead. Dull lights
gathered when I closed my eyes, and rested upon his swollen features,
their white eyes following me in hate.

Coolly and logically as if it concerned someone else, the reason of it
all crept into my morbid brain. I was mad; mad from hunger, thirst and
terror. Yes, mad, and felt not one whit sorry of it; nay, rejoiced
rather, for it meant a freedom of the spirit. So insidiously this
knowledge forced itself upon me, it brought no shock, I even dimly
wondered that any other condition ever existed. Verily, men are
happier for a gentle frenzy. Then, indeed, are all things leveled, all
barriers removed. Gone were all my pigmy troubles, vanished into
nothingness. Engulfed in a common ruin lay all fragments of desire;
the search for reward, the dread of punishment--all petty figments of
the imagination were powerful now no more. The fall of reason crushed
every human hope and dulled the edge of every human fear. What cared I
now for food, for water; for honor or for shame? My mind, imperial and
free from artificial restraints, plunged riotously into forbidden
realms, I reveled in the exaltation of chainless thought, and drank