Ignorant of its introduction into the palace, imagining it, in the revival of their slavish fears, to be the spectral offspring of the magic incantations of the senators above, they turned with one accord and fled down the stairs.

The sound of their cries of fear grew fainter and fainter in the direction of the garden as they hurried through the secret gates at the back of the building.

Then the heavy, regular tamp of the hunchback's footsteps, as he paced the solitary corridors after them, bearing his burden of death, became audible in awful distinctness; then that sound also died away and was lost, and nothing more was heard in the banqueting-room save the sharp clang of the blows still dealt against the steel railings from the street.
But now these grew rare and more rare in their recurrence; the strong metal resisted triumphantly the utmost efforts of the exhausted rabble who assailed it.

As the minutes moved on, the blows grew rapidly fainter and fewer; soon they diminished to three, struck at long intervals; soon to one, followed by deep execrations of despair; and, after that, a great silence sank down over the palace and the street, where such strife and confusion had startled the night-echoes but a few moments before.
In the banqueting-hall this rapid succession of events--the marvels of a few minutes--passed before Vetranio and Marcus as visions beheld by their eyes, but neither contained nor comprehended by their minds.
Stolid in their obstinate recklessness, stupefied by the spectacle of the startling perils--menacing yet harmless, terrifying though transitory--which surrounded them, neither of the senators moved a muscle or uttered a word, from the period when Thascius had fallen beneath the hunchback's attack, to the period when the last blow against the palace railings, and the last sound of voices from the street, had ceased in silence.

Then the wild current of drunken exultation, suspended within them during this brief interval, flowed once more, doubly fierce, in its old course.