No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than—­as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver—­I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation.  Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed.  I rushed to the chair on which he sat.  His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity.  But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence.  Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words.

“Not hear it?—­yes, I hear it, and have heard it.  Long—­long—­long—­many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it—­yet I dared not—–­oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—­I dared not—­I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute?  I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin.  I heard them—­many, many days ago—­yet I dared not—­I dared not speak! And now—­to-night—­Ethelred—­ha! ha!—­the breaking of the hermit’s door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangour of the shield!—­say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault!  Oh whither shall I fly?  Will she not be here anon?  Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste?  Have I not heard her footstep on the stair?  Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart?  MADMAN!” here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—­“MADMAN!  I TELL YOU THAT SHE NOW STANDS WITHOUT THE DOOR!”

As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell—­the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed, threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws.  It was the work of the rushing gust—­but then without those doors there DID stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher.  There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame.  For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold, then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.