Part 14

The girl, her face white and tense, her eyes fixed in the courage of timidity brought to despair, moved along the houses. Suddenly she stopped, looking upward to a portal surmounted by a trophy of tri-coloured flags and a shield on which the three words “_Liberté--Egalité--Fraternité_” were crudely emblazoned. A couple of ruffianly men in quasi-military uniform, exaggeratedly large cocked hats coming down over their ears, short pipes in the mouths hidden by untrimmed, pendent moustaches, enormously long muskets with bayonets fixed leaning against the bandoliers across their chests, guarded the doorway. The girl spoke to them, with vehement gestures, evidently imploring entrance. They barred her path, callously untouched by her agonized entreaty. She pointed up to an inscription below the trophy “_RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE--Réprésentant en Mission_,” smiled at them in a heart-breaking assumption of coquetry, candid innocence never more purely virginal. One of them shrugged his shoulders and spat upon the cobbled pavement without removing his pipe. The other winked broadly, and, still retaining his musket, reached out with his disengaged hand. The girl shrank back, horror in her eyes--and then, as if bethinking herself of an unfailing resource, felt feverishly in the neckerchief which covered her bosom. She drew out a packet of notes, offered them. With a broad grin on their faces, the two ruffians parted to allow her passage.

She climbed an uncarpeted, dreary staircase and hesitated for a moment outside a door inscribed “_le citoyen réprésentant du peuple Desnouettes_.” She knocked timidly, opened, and entered.

Across a large bare room a young man was seated, writing, at a table. A broad tri-coloured sash barred his blue, wide-collared coat and white waistcoat. He had divested himself of the cocked hat with three absurdly large plumes of blue, white, and red which lay upon the table and the long hair of his uncovered head reached almost to his shoulders. He looked up, as if startled, at his visitor, looked up with a young face whose intellectual keenness, whose vivid, passionate eyes above the long nose and almost ascetic mouth were strangely, disconcertingly reminiscent of--of----

“_Jim!_” gasped the young woman in the chair, feeling herself in that curious state of split identity where the unaffected, remote Ego registers without controlling the adventures of a dream.

“Shh!” he murmured in his turn, bewildered to find himself as it were looking at his own personality and, though as at the other side of a partition in his soul, experiencing the feelings of the man at whom he gazed. An echo of a surprise, of a mysterious surprise that disturbed him to the depths--of something that had come, startlingly new and powerful though not yet fully manifest, into his life--reverberated in the recesses of his being as he contemplated the girl. And then a counter-impulse flooded him, the impulse that made him set his mouth, rejecting with an assertion of his own personality wedded to some vague ideal, the vulgar influence of a human emotion. He felt as though the girl approached _him_, as she moved toward that young man who regarded her with a stern frigidity.

“_Citoyenne?_” he was surprised to find himself murmuring the coldly polite query, as though repeating it after that insultingly superior young man.

He heard the gasp of the young woman at his side as of someone infinitely remote from him. His real being was in that large bare room where the superb young republican scrutinized the young girl with a cold glance that put her out of countenance. Yet how beautiful she was as she blushed up to her eyes, youthful modesty in confusion! He felt something flush warm within his breast, a vague emotion that dissipated the assurance underneath his sternly maintained aspect. Before she had spoken, an alarm to the threatened supremacy of his cold reason rang through the depths of him. He reacted with a severity that he obscurely felt to be excessive, reiterated almost with menace “_Citoyenne?_” Was the word really uttered from his lips? He did not know.

She came close, poured out her trouble in a flood of nervous, anguished speech that he comprehended perfectly without being able to arrest a single definite word in his memory--it was as though that part of him which understood was something deep down, lying beyond the necessity for spoken language. Of course! he comprehended with a kind of awakening memory--that old _émigré_ who had stolen back disguised, in defiance of the laws, whom he had arrested for plotting against the safety of that Republic One and Indivisible of which he was the incorruptible servant, whose name he had but just put on the fatal list of the next batch for the guillotine! He chilled, mercilessly; wondered for a moment at his own inexorability, and then, as his identification with the scene completed itself, understood it.

For a crime against himself, against another individual, he might have had compassion. The conspirator against that fanaticized ideal of his soul, the young Republic fighting in rags for its life, for the ultimate freedom of all humanity, was guilty of the unforgiveable sin. He steeled himself, in a pride of approximation to that Brutus, to those other sternly incorruptible Roman republicans with whom his imagination was filled. No human tears, no human despair however poignant, should move him from his path of duty. He felt his teeth set hard over the absurd feebleness in his breast as his eyes rested, coldly he hoped, upon that beautiful girl who stood, strangely disturbing in her closeness, and stretched out her arms to him in agonized appeal. As if telepathically, his soul was filled with her passionate, eloquent entreaty--he had to fight down the tears which threatened his eyes in sympathy with those which suffused the beautiful orbs which looked into his, in despair of softening them.

And she--the woman in the chair, remote spheres away, trembled at a trouble in her soul, at an awakening of something else in her--something that was wrong, unpardonably at variance with every standard of her life, as she looked into those stern but fascinating eyes in the ascetic face and pleaded her cause. She despised herself for the blush she felt creep over her. Her father’s life--her father’s life!--what else dared she think of? This superb young man was an enemy, an implacable enemy, the incarnation of all the crimes wreaked upon her class! Yet her dignity imposed upon her, and she dared not practice that false coquetry upon him that, in a sublime abnegation of her own pride, she had promised herself to use as a supreme resource. She could only plead, plead passionately, in utter sincerity, the best in her appealing to the best in him--and she scorned herself for admitting that there was that best to evoke.

A devil stirred in him, subtly malicious, tempting him with an intellectual bait that was the disguise of passions of whose reality he was but vaguely cognizant. These proud _aristos_! The bitterness of a youth of humiliations surged up in him, avid for vengeance. He encouraged it as a protection against himself. He would show them--these oppressors of the people, these enemies of the republic--who sent their womenfolk to corrupt the virtuous representatives of the nation! Two could play at that game! He smiled in the thought of the insult he prepared.

With a quick movement he rose from his seat and, on an impulse that was almost blind in its swift fulfilment, put his arm round the girl’s waist and kissed her full on the mouth. The act was done before her instinct of self-protection could assert itself--and then she pushed him away in sudden revolt, stood facing him with panting bosom and a countenance where emotions chased each other in alternations of white and red. For a moment she contemplated him, breathing tumultuously, and then, with a gesture of disgust, she wiped her lips. Her eyes looked straight into his with angry dignity, withered him with their fierce disdain. A bitter smile wreathed her lips.

“_Er, bien, citoyen_--you have had your pay. My father’s life!”

Did he actually hear the words? The low, scornfully vengeful laugh which came involuntarily from him was like an echo, far off, of that mocking laugh, inaudible now, in the bare room where the young commissary, arrogant with the outrage he had inflicted upon this representative of a superior race, drew himself up in his conscious incorruptibility.

“Your father dies to-morrow, _citoyenne_!” The marble coldness of his voice was a triumph of which he was not sure until it rang in his ears. He exulted in its echo, like a saint self-consciously a victor over temptation.

Their eyes met, looked into each other with a sudden furious, unappeasable hatred--a hatred which flooded them with a passion that was bigger than themselves--that soul-devouring hatred, clutching instinctively at death for its expression, which is the other face of violent love. Between these souls, in commotion far beyond their consciousness, indifference was not possible. They had met, and the world was in upheaval.

He heard the hiss of a long breath drawn in through clenched teeth--he distinguished no longer between the girl like a brooding invisibility in the chair beside him and the panting girl confronting that suddenly pale young patriot whom he watched with inexpressible fascination. He saw the insult, like livid lightning, in her face before she hurled it at him.

“_Canaille!_”

The word rang close in his ear, and yet infinitely far away, on an accent of vindictive emphasis that struck to his soul.

A fury surged up in him, a blind fury that annihilates with one ruthless blow of its insulted strength.

He stamped a signal on the floor.

“You also, _citoyenne_, will die to-morrow!” The decree, cold as the bloodless lips which uttered it, echoed in him to a savage satisfaction.

The girl remained motionless, head high, in superb indifference to his threat. The door behind her was flung open. The two ruffianly guards ran in, sprang to grip her arms in obedience to his imperious gesture. She smiled at him, splendid in unshakable disdain.

“_We prefer to die!_”

He motioned them out, livid with a rage beyond words. She went, proudly, unresistingly between her brutal captors. At the door she turned her head and smiled at him again, a smile full of significance.

“_Canaille!_”

He sat down to his table and, in a furious scrawl, added a name to his list.

... The vision dissolved in blackness, in an obliteration, for timeless moments, of all thought....

They found themselves looking into a long dark hall, its gloom inadequately relieved by high barred windows. Straw littered the floor and was collected into little heaps along the walls. Dimly discerned in the shadows was a throng of people, men and women--some promenading up and down in solitary dejection, some in groups seated upon the straw at a game of cards, some leaning propped against the wall in listless despair. He gazed into that Hades-like abode of misery with a curious anxiety at his heart, an anxiety whose cause for the moment eluded him. He watched, waiting in a vague expectation of some event that approached and was yet unseen.

A door in the foreground opened and, with a little intimate shock, he saw enter that mysterious duplication of his personality that was he and yet was not he--the sternly ascetic young _répreséntant en mission_ whose plumed hat and sash of office proclaimed his authority in this dreadful place. A subservient turnkey followed at his heels, called a name.

A young girl--_she_--she of the bare room overlooking the square, she of--of--he failed to identify another appearance he knew ought to be familiar--started up from a bed of straw where she had been sitting in company with an old man. She approached, in quiet command of herself, neither hastily nor reluctantly. Obviously, she was indifferent to whatever might be required of her. Only when she perceived the identity of her visitor did she start back in a sudden little hesitation, vanquished as soon as felt. She came coolly up to him, regarded him with contemptuously hostile eyes, awaited his business with her.

He was trembling with emotions that almost overpowered him--the soul that watched felt itself gripped in an agony of remorse, of fear, of--something else that he would not acknowledge. He stammered evidently as he spoke.

“_Citoyenne_, come with me--you are free!”

She looked at him in blank surprise.

“Free?”

The inaudible words were plain to those two watching souls who had long ago forgotten the crystal that they held. Both thrilled with a sense of crisis in which they were intimately involved.

The young man reiterated his assertion eagerly.

“And my father?” The girl turned her head toward the melancholy figure bowed in dejection on its heap of straw.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Your father is guilty of a crime against the Republic. I can do nothing for him. But you have committed no crime, _citoyenne_”

Her eyes looked into his, probed him.

“Nor have many here. Why do you release me?”

He lost control of himself in his eagerness to withdraw her from the danger into which he had himself wantonly plunged her.

“Because--because I love you! Because I cannot let you die!--Because--I cannot help it--you are all of life to me, _citoyenne_!”

She looked at him, her face like a carven sphinx, her eyes inscrutable.

“I go--wherever my father goes!”

He stood, deathly pale, wrestling with a terrible temptation. She watched his agony, without malice, without sympathy, cold like a slave in the market who may be bought--for a price. All of him that was human yearned for her, yearned for her unutterably in a surge of desire that all but overcame him--and yet an austere inner self, that self which had vowed itself to the idealized service of the Republic in youthful fanaticism, stood firm although it agonized. He felt himself a worthy spiritual successor of that Scaevola who stood with his hand in the fire, as he answered, cold sweat upon his brow.

“_Citoyenne_, it is impossible. I cannot buy even your love with my dishonour. Your father has committed a crime against the Republic--but you have committed none.”

She shrugged her shoulders in calm indifference. An insulting smile came into her face.

“Then I will do so!” She turned toward the prisonful of victims with the exultant gesture of a martyr who demands the stake, and cried, evidently with full lungs: “_Vive le Roi! À bas la République!_”

“_Vive le Roi!--À bas la République!_” came like a murmured echo from somewhere beyond defined space, in defiant mockery of all that he craved.

He watched her turn away from him, an immense despair submerging him, and went slowly, head down, toward the door as though himself condemned.

She turned for one last look at him as he disappeared, a strange wild ecstasy in her face--and then flung herself face downward upon the straw in a paroxysm of hysteric sobs.

Whence came those murmured words, charged with unutterable passion, with the intensity of a soul that gathers its essence for its leap into the infinite dark?

“Now--now I can love him! Death, death! come quickly!--now I have the right to love!”

There was a glimpse of a face suddenly radiant through its tears--and then again blackness, a suspense of thought.

He stood with his back to the room, looking out upon the square filled with a surging mob. In the middle, upon a raised scaffold, stood the terrible red-painted uprights with the gleaming knife under the linking beam, poised ready for the swift fall of its diagonal edge. The mob swirled in a sudden turbulence under the windows. He knew what it meant.

There, forcing its slow passage through the maddened crowd, came the fatal cart--a rough vehicle filled with hatless men and women whose necks were bare and whose hands were bound, men and women who seemed deaf to the vociferations of the bloodthirsty mob that raved about them. He shuddered--slipped his right hand into his pocket, held it there, his gaze fastened in horrible fascination upon that slowly moving cartload of already almost lifeless human beings. He saw, clearly, only one figure, a girl in white, and he waited--in an agony which held him rigid.

The cart lurched its slow way to the scaffold, stopped. The victims began to descend. He saw the figure in white mount the steps to the machine, saw it turn its head at the last moment toward his window--and, as though it were the signal expected, he whipped the pistol from his pocket, glimpsed the dark hole of its barrel, and fired.

The man and woman in the chair stared into a crystal ball whose depths were suffused with a milky cloud.

“Oh, Jim!” she murmured. “_The last time----!_”

“Shh!” he said, with a squeeze of her hand. “Look! It’s coming again!”

Once more the cloud parted--they peered, breath held for further revelations, into a crude contrast of bright light and intense shadow, upon a striped awning at an angle from a wall glaring in the sun, upon a narrow street where dust rose yellow like an illumined cloud above a dark throng of Asiatics, their white robes almost blue in the shadow, who gesticulated and pushed each other as they packed themselves into a semicircle of eager faces. Their vision adjusting itself to the violent juxtaposition of high light and deep shadow, they stared into the comparative sombreness under the awning, to the object which held the interest of the crowd.

In a cleared space, in front of a trio of barbaric musicians who squatted cross-legged upon the ground in serious management of pipe and tom-toms, a dancing-girl postured in fluidic attitudes of her lithe, slim body. Arms and legs covered with bracelets, she turned, stretched, and twisted herself in accompaniment to a rhythm which escaped them. Indefatigably she danced, heedless of the eager, appreciative eyes upon her, her face expressionless in a rapt absorption where consciousness of her environment seemed lost. The crowd shouted inaudible encouragements in flashes of gleaming teeth, flung flowers and small coins on to the mat whereon she danced, swayed with contagious waves of enthusiasm. The girl danced on, indifferent to the applause, ecstatically absorbed in the perfection of her art. Only one or other of the serious musicians lifted an occasional bright, sharp glance to the increasing spread of coins upon the mat.

Suddenly there was a commotion in the rear of the crowd, a jostling and elbowing which propagated itself to the front rank. The throng parted, with alarmed turns of the head to some disturbance behind them. A huge elephant appeared, gliding forward with slow and stately motion to the rhythmic wave of its sensitive trunk. Upon the gorgeous cloth of its back was poised a richly carved and gilt _howdah_ surmounted by a gigantic umbrella in scarlet and gold. Beneath that umbrella reposed a languid young man, handsome with aquiline nose and splendid eyes under the magnificent turban which crowned his dark head. He lifted his hand in a gesture to the mahout perched on the neck of the elephant, and the great animal stopped, left in a clear space by the crowd which fell back reverently from its neighbourhood.

Still the girl danced on, heedless, unperceiving perhaps, of the prince who watched her from his lofty seat. The musicians, after one quick glance upward of apprehension, risked boldly and played on with undisturbed solemnity. She danced with a sinuous grace that held the eye in fascination, with an intensity of restrained movement, daringly provocative though were her postures, which thrilled the watcher with a sense of suppressed and concentrated passion whose potentialities might not be measured. She danced, the incarnation of the fierce pulse of life that beats beneath the fallacious languor of the East, her body charged with vitality as it bent and straightened with lithe precision to another curve, her face carven, expressionless, as though her soul were withdrawn to its mysterious centre. The prince clapped his hands in irrepressible enthusiasm. She stopped dead, stood rigidly upright facing him, arms close to her sides, arabesqued breastlets thrust forward, a slim statue that quivered with magically arrested life, in a motionless effrontery that challenged his regard, his very power. Their eyes met, looked into each other while the musicians ceased to play. What was that of intense communion which sped between them? With a sudden gesture the prince flung a handful of golden coins into the mat, made a grave inclination of his head.

The elephant moved onward. With a smile of triumph, with a breath long-drawn through her nostrils, and eyes that closed ecstatically for a moment as in a dream realized, the girl followed in the train of his gorgeously attired retinue....

_They knew_--those watchers who gazed as through the rent veils of eternity, apprehending with minds that had ceased to be corporeal--recognizing themselves once more, though in an incarnation immeasurably remote, an incarnation whose transient language was long ago forgotten.

The vision changed abruptly. They gazed into the hall of an Oriental palace, arabesqued arches in a colonnade on either side, tessellated marble in cool colours patterning the floor, ebony-black slaves waving peacock fans above a cushioned divan on which the prince reclined. An indulgent smile played over his handsome features as he toyed with the unbraided hair of the beautiful girl who sat at his feet, in confident lassitude against his knee, and turned her head back to gaze up into his face with eyes voluptuously fond. She sighed with happiness--her face no longer expressionless as in the public dance, but charged with a yearning intensity of love. He, too, yearned over her with his grave smile, bent his head down for the kiss her lips put up to him....

Again the scene changed. It was night in the colonnaded hall, moonbeams patching the tessellated floor, flickering points of yellow flame swinging slightly with the hanging lamps in the gloom under the intricacy of the arches. A shadow moved out of the darkness, stood in the moonlight, waited for a moment, then dropped a veil from its face. It was the dancing-girl. She turned questing eyes about her as though, at risk to herself, she was fulfilling an appointment that was not yet met.

Another shadow slid out of the gloom under the arches, approached her--another woman, young also and also beautiful, but with a beauty--its character was startlingly vivid to those watchers--that was insinuatingly treacherous, the beauty that smiles as it betrays. She stood now with the erstwhile dancing-girl in the moonlight, spoke to her with an assumption of gravely concerned and pitying friendship, shook her head dolefully as though in distress at her own message. The dancing-girl revolted with a vehement gesture of denial, of impossibility--but her dark eyes flashed and her nostrils quivered. The other persisted, in emphatic asseveration, her face a study in subtle malice. She pointed to the heavy curtains which draped the just-seen extremity of the hall, a fiercely assertive significance in her gesture.

The girl shrank back, shuddered. Then, with a slow turn of her body from the tempter, she relapsed into herself, into a fierce meditation where her eyes swept the shadows about her, where her lips uncovered her teeth in a quick-caught breath and her clenched fist went slowly, tensely, up to the side of her head in an agony that was beyond words. The other woman contemplated her, just restraining a smile, diabolically malicious--appealed once more to those hanging curtains for proof of her sincerity. The girl, forlorn, gripped in some immense unhappiness, nodded sombrely, with set teeth. With one last unobserved smile of evil triumph, the other woman vanished.