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 help you?  Never!  There must be a Hell to help you!  Imprecate this, then, on yourself!  May you in your smooth white body know the torture I have known, be racked till each bone in your skin changes place, hang festering in chains from the wall of a living grave, make fellowship with putridity, and lie in the pitiless dark to see all the dead who died under your hand rise, rise and accuse you before God!  And may your little son know the deeds you have done, live the life those deeds merit, and die the death that I shall die,—­if you do not keep your word!”

“What word?” he said.

“Promise, if I reveal all, and my revelations shall be true and thorough therefore,—­promise that you will leave her in safe security and freedom to-day, untouched, unscathed, unharmed, and that so ever shall she remain.  And false to this oath, may no priest shrive you, no land own you, God blight you and curse you and wither you from the face of the earth!”