He opened the door into darkness and fumbled for the switch. The spacious, beautifully furnished living-room of the flat—long, dark bookcase filled with mellowed leather bindings; large, soft bearskins compensating for the insufficiency of the delicate Persian carpet on the parquet floor; a few precious prints spaced with an exquisite reticence upon the walls; an Oriental bibelot here and there emphasizing the quiet charm of English eighteenth-century furniture with its touch of the cunningly grotesque; two great leather-covered chairs by the fireside—was suffused with soft light.
He stood in the doorway—tall, lean, handsome, forceful with a touch of asceticism—and smiled to the corridor.
“Here we are!” he said, his voice on a note of happiness. “At last!”
He stretched out his arms to the girl upon the threshold. She came into the light—tall almost as he, long fur coat half-open over her tailor-made costume, finely modelled head poised in a graceful, winsome upturn of the face, smiling at him in a radiance of eyes and mouth—and, on the movement of an irresistible impulse, cast herself into his embrace.
“At last!” she echoed. “Oh, Jim, dear!—at last—at long last!”
He held her, and she snuggled into his shoulder, face upturned to his, drawing his kisses down to her with the magnetism of her lips.
The quaint enamel clock on the mantelpiece ticked, just heard, the passing seconds of eternity, the only sound in the silence of their union.
Then, with the long breath of recovery from the timeless swoon of a kiss prolonged to its uttermost limit, she turned her head slowly to gaze about the room.
“Oh, Jim!” she said, in affectionate reproach, “and you told me you were a poor man!”
He shrugged his shoulders, his lips mobile in a little smile.
“Well, dear,” he replied in whimsical apology, “compared with the daughter of a man who owns half a city—compared with what you might have had!” He looked into her eyes. “Helen! You won’t regret? They’ll rub it in to you—the title you’ve thrown away—the position in society—what they’ll be pleased to term your hole and corner marriage——”
She laughed happily.
“Oh, Jim!—I’ve got you and you’ve got me—and nothing else matters—it seems to me that you and I are the only two people in the world!” She assured herself of a tightening of his embrace with a touch of her hand on his as she looked up into his eyes with a slow, smiling shake of the head that affirmed her love. “As if only you and I ever existed—and had always loved! As if all through eternity we had waited for this! As if I was born to be just Jim Dacres’s wife!”
He looked down upon her, eyes into eyes.
“Darling!” His voice was low and earnest in a sincerity beyond doubt. “Jim Dacres’s wife you are—and, please God, I’ll never let you go!”
With one more kiss she disengaged herself, came into the centre of the room, threw her fur coat back from the shoulders with a smile that invited the assistance he was prompt to give.
“Are we all alone?” she asked, glancing round, struck by the quietude of the flat.
“All alone, dear,” he replied, folding her coat over a chair. “I told Mrs. Wilkinson she could go out. I thought it would be good to have it all to ourselves for this first evening—you and I alone in Paradise, darling!”He kissed her, drew her toward the fire. “Warm yourself, my beauty—and pretend it is my heart!” He squeezed her shoulders with broad, strong hands.
She shook her head at him in roguish reproof, as she spread her fingers—the new gold ring upon one of them—before the blaze he stirred.
“Pretty, pretty!” she rebuked him. “Where has Jim Dacres learned to make love, I should like to know!”
“In your eyes, dearest!” he replied, smiling into them. “In your eyes that open right back into a soul that knows immemorial secrets and knows them all as love!”
She felt quietly for his hand and held it, without a word, through moments where speech was profanation.
Then, with a long breath, feminine curiosity awaking in her, she turned her head and glanced once more around the room.
“It’s charming, Jim!” she asserted. “I didn’t know you had so much taste. Where did you get all these beautiful things?” She left the fireside, began to roam about the room, peering into cabinets, picking up one precious object after another, turning over the pages of the books that lay upon the tables.
He watched her lithe, graceful movements with admiration.
“All over the place,” he answered, negligently. “China, Japan—a few in Italy——”
“And this?” she asked, holding up a large crystal ball, supported in a lotus cup upon the back of a carved ivory elephant studded with amber and turquoise and coral, its feet upon an ivory tortoise. “What is this?”
“Oh—that! I got that in India. Some old crystal-gazer’s outfit. It’s a few hundred years old—symbolizes the universe, you know. The world rests upon an elephant and the elephant upon a tortoise. I don’t know what the tortoise stands on——”
Her face was bright with interest.
“And have you ever looked into it?”
“Of course not.” His tone was contemptuous. “I don’t go in for that sort of thing. I didn’t buy that—an old Hindoo priest gave it to me—a nice old chap who was good enough to adopt me more or less, years ago now.”
“Oh, Jim! Do let us look into it!” Her voice was ecstatic in a sudden excitement. “Do let’s look!”
“You won’t see anything,” he emphasized his pessimism in a grudge at the interest she diverted from him to this inanimate object. “It’s all rot, you know—only people with brain-sick imaginations ever see things—or think they see things.”
“Oh, but do let’s try!” She came across to him, the crystal in her hand. “Do, there’s a darling!” The appeal of the kiss-pouted lips in the face turned up to him, eyes bright with ingenuous vivacity, was irresistible.
He shrugged his shoulders with large good-humour.
“All right—but it’s waste of time.”
“Is anything waste of time when we are together, dear?” She nestled up to him, drew the kiss that was inevitable. “It’s all part of the romance. Now, be good and do as I tell you. Switch off the lights—the firelight is enough.”
He obeyed, with a gesture of tolerant complaisance that could refuse no whim. The room relapsed into shadows shifting in the blaze of the fire that he had stirred.
“Now come and sit close by me here,” she dictated, delightfully imperious to this tall strong man, seating herself in one of the big chairs by the fireside. “There is room for two. That’s right.” He squeezed his long body into the seat beside her. She held up the crystal ball. “Now you hold it with one hand and I will hold it with one hand—like this!” With her free hand she clasped the hand that remained on her knee. “That’s all I want to see, dear—our joint fates, linked together.” Her voice was soft and tender, thrillingly sincere. “Just you and I—for ever—past or future, darling, what does it matter?—it’s all one long life that is only real when you and I touch.” She finished with a sigh of happiness.
He responded in a gentle pressure of her hand. Together they stared into the crystal sphere they jointly held. Minute after minute passed in silence, in a pervading sense of intimate communion where their pulse-beats, in the contact of their hands, regulated themselves to an identical rhythm.
“I see nothing,” he murmured, vaguely disappointed, “nothing at all.”
“Patience!” she breathed, intent on the crystal, but sparing him a little squeeze of the fingers in recognition of his presence. “Look!—keep on looking!”
Again there was silence. The ticking of the clock upon the mantelpiece became almost hypnotic in its monotony. The fire dulled down, its light no longer reflected in leaping flashes in the crystal.
“Look!” she whispered. “It’s clouding over—going milky! Do you see?”
He nodded assent, unwilling to break the spell by speech, mysteriously awed as he, too, saw a milky cloud suffuse the depths of the crystal. Holding their breath, they waited, closely linked, for they knew not what of vision.
As they stared into it, almost unconscious now of their own bodies, of the muscular effort that held the crystal globe in unvarying focus from their eyes, they saw the cloud break and clear in a widening rift that seemed to open into infinity.
“Look!” she murmured. “It’s coming!—Look—People!—crowds of them—running and jostling each other! Look, it’s a fête of some sort—a lot of them have cockades! Do you see?”
In fact, the depths of the crystal were suddenly inhabited. A throng of tiny figures, men and women, surged, broke up, flocked together again in high excitement, arms waving in the air. Over their heads other figures leaned out from the upper windows of a row of more distant houses—evidently the scene was a public square—and waved also in diminutive enthusiasm. Theircostumes seemed like fancy dress—men in long, bright-coloured coats with enormous lapels and tight-fitting trousers with broad stripes of some contrasting colour—women in high-waisted dresses and poke bonnets or no bonnets at all—men and women, and these the greater number, the dominant majority of the crowd, in the nondescript vestments of squalid, ugly poverty. The better-dressed men and women wore prominently, all of them, a cockade or rosette of red, white, and blue.
The crowd packed close together in a common impulse, was agitated by a common emotion that set a forest of arms waving above their heads and contorted their faces in cries that were inaudible. Something was happening in that square—something that evoked fierce passion—invisible behind the densely serried mob whose backs alone could be seen.
“Look!” breathed the girl in the chair. “Look!—that poor girl!” There was a curious accent of vivid sympathy in the whispered ejaculation.
A young girl was forcing her way through the throng, her face covered in her hands, her shoulders shaking with sobs, weeping convulsively in a paroxysm of despair. The crowd, intent on the spectacle beyond, parted and made way for her automatically.
“Oh,” murmured the girl in the chair, “I feel so funny—I feel I want to cry, too—as if a terrible calamity had suddenly come upon me—a frightful danger to someone I loved——” She shuddered, “oh, it’s awful!—it numbs me—it’s—it’s as if I felt whatshewas feeling!”
The girl in the vision took her hands from her face, looked about her with eyes of wild misery.
“My God, Helen!” whispered the man in the chair, in a thrill of excitement. “It’s you!”
“Shh!” she breathed, gazing intently into the magic scene. The air about them seemed mysteriously charged with tumultuous passion, with the inaudible vociferations of that surging mob. To both, it seemed as though theywere in contact with a real crowd, beset by the vague, fierce emotions that gather and roll in the collective, primitive soul of humanity in congregation. It set their hearts to a quicker beat, bewildered their brains with unheard clamours.
The girl in the vision—so strikingly like the girl in the chair that she seemed a duplication of her personality—drew herself erect on the edge of the crowd and wiped her eyes. Evidently, with a great effort, she was mastering herself. The girl in the chair drew a hard breath, as though of some supreme determination. Then, taking a few steps, the figure that they watched moved close under the houses of the nearer side of the square and, looking up at the doorways as though seeking an inscription, commenced to walk along the pavement.
The crystal held her still as its centre—like the lens of a cinematograph following always the chief personage upon the screen—and, watching her, the man and woman in the chair forgot the globe that they held with cataleptic rigidity, forgot the diminished scale of the vision. Their perceptions adjusted themselves like those of children who day-dream among their toys, and it seemed to both of them that they gazed into a real scene with full-sized human emotions at clash in the acute earnestness of present life.
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. Theybarred 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 disturbedhim 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 approachedhim, 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 oldémigréwho 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 puton 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 appealingto 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 proudaristos! 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 exultedin 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 youngrépreséntant en missionwhose 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 thathe 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 successorof 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 withhatless 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 whichescaped 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 gilthowdahsurmounted 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 andstraightened 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.
For a long moment the girl hesitated. Then, withstealthy, feline step, her shoulders crouched, she commenced to move along the hall. Her gaze, a gaze of wide-open eyes set in the horror of some torture of the soul, was fixed as though fascinated upon those heavy curtains which she approached. She attained them, stopped, stood with one hand in a final hesitation upon the folds, her bosom heaving with fiercely primitive emotions. Then, in a violent determination, she flung them aside.
Beyond, in a small torch-lit apartment, the prince reclined in company with another woman. His head turned in sudden anger to the intruder. Before he could make a movement of defence or escape, the dancing-girl had sprung upon him, with a bound like a tigress, a long knife flashing in her hand....
Even as they gasped their horror, they found themselves once more staring at the milky cloud suffusing the depths of the crystal globe.
“Oh, Jim!” she breathed, in an awe-stricken recognition, “that wasmycrime—the crime for which you punished me——”
“Look!” he murmured. “Look! It is not finished yet.”
In fact, the cloud was parting once more, parting this time over a scene in ancient Egypt. Once more they recognized themselves, princess and priest of a temple, in a drama that passed vaguely, too quickly in its remoteness to be fully grasped, before their sight.
Scene after scene unfolded itself in the depths of the crystal, in a succession of varying settings, in an ever-briefer duration, an ever more vague drama of relationship, whose blurred outlines were perhaps the effect of their fatigued attention, no longer able to follow in their details visions possibly as minutely exhibited as the first. Always their two personalities, in ever-changing incarnations, met and reacted in wild passions that claimed them fully. In the eternal history of their lives, all was possible, all had happened, every variation of experience—save only indifference to each other. An unseen link heldthem always, tightened into contact from the moment of propinquity. On islands in a blue sea furrowed by long-oared and primitive galleys; in cities of Cyclopean masonry that glittered, as if vitrified, in a burning sun; in dark forests where skin-clad savages went furtively with stone-barbed spears and knelt in worship of the animal that they had just slain; by the side of reedy lakes where hairy, scarce-human creatures crouched and gnawed the bones they plucked from the embers—always they two met and always they were lovers, fortunate sometimes, tragic sometimes, but always lovers.
Beyond humanity, far into the mists of time where strange shapes bodied themselves, unrecognizable, and were dissipated into others yet more strange, the visions continued in ever-increasing recession—leading back into a distance where they lost all sense of personal participation among vague and formless shadows.
They watched, in a breathless fascination.
Still farther back, beyond those shadows, something began to glow in the depths of a night that cleared to transparent blackness, a ball of fire, of living light that pulsed with intense incandescence in an uttermost remoteness. And, as they watched, it divided itself, split into two smaller spheres that circled about each other, throwing out flames that reached like clutching arms in vain endeavour to reëstablish unity. For an incomputable period—it seemed æons to those souls who watched—they circled, held in mutual attraction and yet still apart despite the reaching streamers. And then slowly, slowly, they approached—their light heightening to a yet more vivid brightness as they drew near....
The crystal globe slipped from numbed fingers into the fireplace. As though roused from a dream by the crash of its contact with the brass curb, the girl started and turned to her companion. He picked up the crystal, starred and fissured with its fall—henceforth useless.
“Oh, Jim!” she cried in poignant regret. “We shall not see—— What is going to happenthistime?”
She held his hand between her two, gazed up into his face in fond anxiety, yearned out to him.
He put down the crystal, drew her close, enfolded her.
“Love!” he answered. “Love—once more and for always! And, to us, dear, nothing else matters. It is the one reality.”
In each other’s eyes they saw, with a perception transcending physical vision, the divine light of those sundered spheres that drew together.
Two French officers, wearing the red velvet bands of the medical service upon their caps, followed an old woman down the staircase of a pleasant villa-residence on the outskirts of Mainz.
“The bedrooms will suit perfectly,” said the elder of the two officers, a major, in German. “And now a sitting-room?”
The old woman led them along a passage and, without a word, threw open the door of a room lined with books. The two officers entered, looked about them.
They were startled by a man’s voice behind them.
“Good day, messieurs!”
They turned to see a tall civilian, pince-nez gleaming over exceptionally blue eyes, fair moustache, fair hair cut short and brushed up straight from a square forehead, smiling at them from the doorway.
“I am Doctor Breidenbach—at your service,” he said courteously in accentless French.
The major stepped forward.
“I am Major Chassaigne, monsieur. I—and my assistant, Lieutenant Vincent here—have been allotted quarters in your house. Here is thebillet de logement.” He held out a piece of paper. “It is issued with the authority of the Army of Occupation and countersigned by your municipality. I regret to put you to inconvenience——”
“Not at all! not at all!” interposed the German, affably, taking the billeting order. As his face went serious in a scrutiny of the document, the two officers had an impression of extreme intelligence and ruthlesswill-power. He looked up again with a nod of assent, his smile masking everything behind its gleam of blue eyes and white teeth. “Perfectly correct, monsieur! Please consider my house at your disposition. I am charmed to be of assistance to any of my confrères.” He smiled recognition of their red cap-bands. “Although you wear another uniform than that which I myself have but recently quitted, we serve in a common cause—the cause of humanity,n’est-ce pas? which knows no national animosities.”
“We desired a sitting-room,” said Major Chassaigne, ignoring this somewhat unctuous profession of altruism.
The German waved his hand about the room.
“If this will suit you——?”
“Your library, monsieur?” queried the lieutenant.
“My work-room,” replied the doctor. “Before this deplorable war interrupted my studies, I had some little reputation in my special branch of mental therapeutics. If you are interested in psychology, normal and abnormal, you will find here a very complete collection of works upon the subject. Use them freely, by all means. Well, if you are satisfied, gentlemen, I will leave you, for I am a busy man. I was just about to visit some patients when you arrived.Auf wiedersehen!” He smiled and left them.
Vincent turned to his senior, with a puzzled expression.
“What is it about that man I do not like?”
The older man shrugged his shoulders.
“Too friendly by far. They are all the same, theseboches—they would do anything to make us forget,” he said, divesting himself of his belt. “I am going to have a rest and a cigarette before we walk back into the town.”
The young man wandered around the room, scanning the titles of the books on the shelves, picking up the various bibelots scattered about. Suddenly he uttered a startled cry.
“Mon Dieu!Look at this!”
The major turned to him. In his hand he held a small snapshot photograph. He stared at it, trembling violently.
“What is the matter?”
“Look!—It is she!” The young man’s face was a study in horrified astonishment.
Chassaigne looked over his comrade’s shoulder at the photograph. It represented their host arm in arm with a good-looking young woman.
“She?” he queried, with a tolerant smile. “Be a little more explicit, my dear Vincent.”
The young man turned on him.
“You remember the deportations from Lille? The women and girls thebochesnatched from their homes?—My fiancée was among them.” His voice checked at the painful memory. “Other women have been traced, returned to their relatives. She has never been heard of again.”
“My poor friend!” murmured the major, sympathetically.
Vincent stared once more, as if fascinated, at the photograph in his hand.
“It is she—in every detail! Yet——” his tone was puzzled. “No! I cannot believe it! It is some chance resemblance. This woman is obviously happy—content, at least.” He looked up, passed over the photograph. “Chassaigne, you are an analyst of the human mind. What relationship do you diagnose between those two people?”
The major took the print, scrutinized it critically.
“Friends, certainly—lovers, possibly,” was his sententious verdict.
“Then it cannot be!” cried the young man. “My fiancée was—is, I am sure of it—incapable of a faithless acquiescence in the wrong done to her.”
“Can one ever be sure about a woman?” said the major, with a gentle cynicism. “However, I agree with you that it is improbable that the person in the photograph is your lost friend. It is, as you say, a chance resemblance.”
“If I could only be certain of it!” The young manwas obviously stirred to the depths. “Imustmake sure, Chassaigne.—I must get to know this woman—find out who she is!”
Both men turned at the sound of the door opening behind them. A young woman, tall, dark, strikingly handsome, stood timidly upon the threshold. It was the woman of the photograph.
“Doctor—Doctor Breidenbach?” she faltered, as though disconcerted by an unexpected meeting with strangers.
Vincent stared at her, held in a suspense of the faculties where he seemed not to breathe. At last he found his voice.
“Hélène!” he cried. “Hélène! Itisyou!” He sprang to her, clutched her arm. “What are you doing here?”
With a frightened gesture of repulsion, the young woman disengaged herself from his grasp. She drew herself up, looked at him without the faintest recognition in her eyes.
“Ich spreche nicht französisch, mein Herr!” she said in a tone of cold rebuff.
“Hélène!”
She shrank back in obviously offended dignity, and, without another word, haughtily left the room.
Vincent reeled away from the closed door, his hands to his head.
“My God!” he groaned. “Am I going mad?”
Then, ceding to a sudden impulse, he eluded his friend’s restraining grasp, dashed to the door.
“Hélène!”
He found himself confronted by the smiling figure of Doctor Breidenbach.
“Pardon the unintended intrusion, messieurs!” he said, good-humouredly apologetic and taking no notice of Vincent’s excited appearance. “My ward, Fräulein Rosenhagen, was unaware that I had guests.—I merely wished to reassure myself that you require nothing before I go into the town. Is there anything you desire of me?”
“Nothing, thank you,” interposed Chassaigne, quickly, before Vincent could speak.
“A tantôt, then!” He nodded amicably and went out.
“We ought to have questioned him!” cried Vincent, resentful of the missed opportunity.
“We ought to do nothing of the kind, my dear Vincent,” replied Chassaigne. “Calm yourself. Be sensible. What question could we possibly ask that would not be ridiculous? You may be utterly wrong.”
“It is she!I swear it!” asserted the young man, vehemently. “Do you think I cannot recognize a woman I have known all my life?”
He commenced to pace up and down the room in wild agitation. His friend contemplated him with a gaze of genuine solicitude.
“You may be mistaken for all that,” he said, gently. “Doubles, although rare, exist——”
Vincent stared at him in exasperation.
“My fiancée had three little moles just above her right wrist—I looked for those three moles when I held that woman’s arm just now—and I found them! Are doubles so exactly reproduced as that?” he asked, furiously.
“It sounds incredible, certainly,” agreed Chassaigne. “But her attitude——”
“I know,” said Vincent, recommencing his pacing up and down the room. “She looked at me like a complete stranger. But,” he ground his teeth in jealous rage, “if she has consented to live with that man—she might have pretended—to hide her shame——”
“My friend,” said Chassaigne, seriously, “in that young woman was neither shame nor pretence. I observed her closely. She genuinely did not recognize any acquaintance in you. She genuinely did not even know French. She was genuinely resentful of your familiarity. That was no play-acting performance. She was taken by surprise. She had no time to prepare herself for it.”
The young man beat his brow.
“Oh, I am going mad!” he cried. “It was she, I swear it!—and yet—she did not know me! It baffles me.” He stopped for a moment, then looked up with a new idea. “Chassaigne! You are an authority on these things. It is possible—by hypnotism or anything of the sort—to change a personality completely—so that they forget everything—start afresh?”
Chassaigne met his glance, hesitated.
“It is—perhaps—possible,” he said, slowly. He went up to his friend, put his hand on his shoulder, drew him to a chair. “Sit down, my dear fellow. Let us be calm and think this out. If you are right—if this young woman is indeed your—your friend—your suggestion mightperhapsbe the key to the enigma. But we shall achieve nothing by getting excited.”
Vincent allowed himself to be gently forced into the chair. He looked white and ill, thoroughly shaken. His friend, contemplating him, was impressed by his appearance. Could such a shock be produced by a merely imagined resemblance? He felt that it could not—and then those three moles! His mind reverted to the young woman, to her indubitably genuine non-recognition, and he felt more than ever puzzled. With a quiet deliberation he drew up a chair and seated himself close to his comrade.
“Now let us analyze this problem,” he said. He spoke in a calm, consulting-room voice which eliminated in advance all emotion from the discussion.
Vincent looked up, his eyes miserable.
“Have you ever known of such a case?”
“Of a personalitypermanentlychanged? No.”
“Is it hypothetically possible?”
“Hypothetically—yes.”
“By hypnotism?”
“By hypnotism and suggestion.”
“But a woman cannot be hypnotized against her will, can she?”
“No—technically not—but her will may be stunned, so to speak, into abeyance by a sudden shock or by terrorand then, virtually, she might be hypnotized against her will. It is possible.”
The young man took a deep breath.
“That acquits her moral responsibility. But you say it is hypothetically possible to change a personalitypermanently? It sounds fantastic to me. Would you please explain?”
Chassaigne leaned back in his chair and lightly joined the finger-tips of his two hands. He spoke in the impersonal tone of a professor elucidating a thesis.
“Well, my dear fellow, to begin at the beginning we should have to analyze personality—and human personality is a mystery I confess myself unable to explore. You are aware, however, that there are people who have double personalities—even triple and multiple personalities—which differ utterly. For some reason which eludes us, one of these submerged personalities in an individual may suddenly come to the top. He, or she, entirely forgets the personality which was theirs up to that moment, forgets name, relations, every circumstance of life—and is completely someone else, quite new. There is a recent case, exhaustively studied, of a young woman with four such personalities—over which she has not the slightest control, and which differ profoundly, mentally and morally. I mention this merely to show you how unstable personality may be.”
“These are pathological cases,” interposed Vincent. “My fiancée was a thoroughly well-balanced woman.”
Chassaigne nodded.
“Before the war when you last saw her. She must have gone through great stress since. But let us continue. Under hypnotism a person is extraordinarily susceptible to the suggestions of the operator. He will carry out perfectly any rôle indicated to him. The reason is that in the hypnotic condition the conscious personality is put to sleep and the subjective mind—the dream-creating consciousness which is independent of the will—is paramount. That subjective mind possesses little if any powerof origination, but it has a startling faculty of dramatizing any suggestion made to it. Tell a hypnotic that he is President Wilson at the Peace Conference and he will get up and make a speech perfectly in character, amazingly apposite, expressing ideas that are normally perhaps quite alien to his temperament. Tell him that he is Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo and he will act the part with a reality that is impressive. He believes himself actually to be Napoleon. Under hypnotism, then, the personality which is mirrored in the Ego—which you believe to be the essential, unchanging you—may be utterly changed——”
“Yes,” objected Vincent. “But that is only during the hypnotic trance. It is not permanent.”
“Wait a moment,” said Chassaigne. “Suggestions made during the hypnotic trance may and do persist after the subject has awakened from it. I may, for example, suggest to the hypnotized person that when he wakes he will have forgotten his native language—and he will forget it. If he knows no other, he will remain dumb until I remove the suggestion. I may suggest to him that a person actually in the room is not there—and he will not perceive him. I may suggest that in a week, a month, a year, at such and such an hour, he will perform some absurd action—and punctually to the moment, without understanding the source of his impulse, he will perform it. Post-hypnotic persistence of suggestion is a scientific fact.”
“Then—in this case?”
“In this case we have to do with a clever and possibly unscrupulous man who is a specialist in manipulating the human mind. Of course, he practises hypnotic suggestion as a part of his profession—it is the chief agent in modern mental therapeutics.It is possiblethat by some means he got this young woman into his power after she was dragged from her home. It is possible that he was violently attracted to her, and finding that she did not reciprocate his sentiments, proceeded to subject herindividuality to his. How would he do this? He would drug or stun her volition by terror—as, for example, a bird is helplessly fascinated in fear of the snake. Then, using some common mechanical means such as the revolving mirror—staring into her eyes—anything that would fatigue the sensory centres of sight—he would induce a hypnotic trance. In that trance he would suggest to her that her name was no longer Hélène whatever it was—but Fräulein Rosenhagen, that she was a German woman ignorant of French, that she was perfectly happy and contented in his society. In the supernormally receptive state of the hypnotized mind he could give her lessons in German, which would be learned with a speed and accuracy far surpassing that of ordinary education. He would suggest to her that all his lessons persisted after waking. Finally, he would constantly reiterate these suggestions in a succession of hypnotic trances—once the first has been induced, it is easy to bring about the second—until he had reconstructed her personality, or rather imposed a new one upon her consciousness.
“There, my dear Vincent, presuming that you are correct in your recognition of this young lady, is a theoretical explanation of the phenomenon which confronts us. For that the young woman genuinely did not recognize you, I am certain.”
“She is held in the most diabolical slavery ever conceived, then!” cried Vincent, in despair. “A slavery of the soul! But can nothing be done?”
Chassaigne shrugged his shoulders.
“Something can be attempted, my dear fellow. I promise nothing.” He rose from his chair. “Now, I want you to promise to keep quiet—not to interfere. Fortunately, I speak German, and can talk to her in the language she believes to be her own. Wait a minute.” He roved round the room, opening the cupboards under the bookcases, the drawers in the writing-table by the window. “Ah, here we are!” he ejaculated. He held up a small silver mirror which revolved quickly upon itssingle support under the motion of his fingers. “I expected that our friend the doctor would possess this little instrument.” He smiled. “Very considerate of him to go out and leave us to ourselves! Now we will try and profit by the circumstance. I am going to find that young lady and bring her to you. You will maintain the attitude of a complete stranger who regrets an impulsive familiarity for which a mistake in identity is responsible. Master yourself!” He put the little mirror on the table and went out of the room.
A few moments later he returned, held the door wide open for the young woman to enter. He spoke in fluent German.
“My young friend, Fräulein, will not be consoled until he has had the opportunity of a personal apology!”
The young woman inclined her head gravely, and somewhat shyly advanced to the centre of the room. Vincent rose to his feet, his face deadly white, trembling in every limb, and bowed. Ignorant of German, he could not utter a word. Chassaigne turned to him, spoke to him in French.
“Look closely at Fräulein Rosenhagen,mon ami—and satisfy yourself.”
The muscles of his face tense under the effort to repress his emotion, to appear normal, the young man looked at her for a long moment. She returned his gaze without a quiver of the eyelids, smiled with the kindliness which sets a stranger at his ease.
“It is she—it is she,” he muttered, hoarsely. “I swear it!”
Chassaigne turned to the young woman.
“My young friend is much affected by your extraordinary resemblance to a lady he knew, Fräulein,” he said, smilingly, in German. “But he perceives now that he was mistaken. You will, I am sure, pardon an emotion that a person of your charm will readily understand. My friend was greatly attached to the lady he thought he recognised in you.”
The young woman smiled upon Vincent in feminine sympathy for a lover.
“Is she a German?” she asked in a rich deep voice that made him start.
Chassaigne replied for him.
“No, Fräulein—she is a Frenchwoman brought to Germany against her will.”
He observed her narrowly as he spoke. Her face remained calm. His words, evidently, awakened no latent memory in her.
“How dreadful!” she said. Her rich voice vibrated on a note of unfeigned sympathy which was, nevertheless, impersonal. “Poor man! And he does not know where she is!”
“He has no idea, Fräulein,” replied Chassaigne. “But let us leave this painful subject. Will you not keep us company for a few minutes? We are strangers in a strange land.” With a gallant courtesy, which, however, omitted to wait for her assent, he took her right hand and led her to a chair. His quick eyes noted the three moles upon her wrist. She seated herself almost automatically. He registered, in support of his theory, her easy susceptibility to a quietly insistent suggestion. “Will you not tell us what is most worth seeing in Mainz?” he asked, smilingly.
She looked up at him.
“Alas, mein Herr, I cannot!” she said. “I have never been in the city.”
“Indeed?” He expressed mild but courteous surprise. “Perhaps you have only recently come to live here yourself?”
“Yes—er—no!” She smiled at her own confusion. “I mean we have been here some time—but we travelled so much before we came here—that I—I have really lost count——”
Chassaigne made a reassuring little gesture which relegated the matter to a limbo of indifference.
“You travelled with Doctor Breidenbach, I presume?” he asked, casually.
“Yes. We went to a great many places. He was in the army then.”
“When you first met him?”
“Yes.” Her first tone of confident assertion changed almost as she uttered it to one of puzzled doubt. “Yes—I—I think so—I really forget.” She smiled in self-apology. “I have a very bad memory, you see, mein Herr,” she said, as if in explanation. “Doctor Breidenbach is treating me for it.”
“Ah?—Doubtless he is doing you a great deal of good?” Chassaigne seated himself upon the edge of the table and smiled down upon her in paternal benevolence.
“Oh, yes,” she began, impulsively. “You see, we are going to be married. But Doctor Breidenbach thinks it would not be right to be married until my memory is perfectly restored. So”—she hesitated, then smiled up with an innocent naïveté—“so you see I am doing all I can to concentrate and—and get it right.”
“Mon Dieu!” groaned Vincent in a low tone of anguish, turning away and staring out of the window.
Chassaigne frowned admonition at him in a quick glance unperceived by the young woman. Unobtrusively, he put one hand behind him, picked up the revolving-mirror from the table, held it behind his back. He nodded assent to her little self-revelation.
“Of course. No doubt you are making very rapid progress. Doctor Breidenbach is a very clever man, is he not?”
“Oh, yes—very clever. And so kind!”
Chassaigne nodded again, his smile holding her confidence. As if absent-mindedly, he brought the little mirror in front of him, played with it. He noticed that her eyes fixed themselves instinctively upon it.
“Pretty toy!” he remarked, casually. “It belongs to Doctor Breidenbach I suppose?”
She stared at it in a strange fascination, shuddered suddenly.
“Yes,” she said, with a little gesture before her eyesas though trying to throw off a spell, “yes—I—I think so——”
“A scientific instrument, I presume?” continued Chassaigne, imperturbably, as if merely interested in a curiosity, twirling the support between his fingers so that the mirror rapidly revolved. Imperceptibly he leaned forward, brought it nearer to her eyes. “It suggests sleep, I think,” he continued in a quiet level voice that had suddenly acquired a peculiar intensity. “Sleep. Sleep, Fräulein!”
She stared at it, open-eyed, stiffening curiously. A phrase of protest seemed frozen on her lips.
He held it very close to her face, revolving the mirror in a long-continued series of rapid flashes before her eyes.
“Sleep!” he commanded in his intense level voice.
Her breast heaved in a long, sleepy sigh. She shuddered again, stiffened suddenly, sat rigid, entranced. Vincent, watching, crept forward, tense with anxiety.
“What are you going to do?” he whispered.
Chassaigne motioned him to silence with a gesture of his forefinger. He turned to the young woman.
“You are asleep, are you not?”
She did not reply.
“You hear me?”
“Yes.”
Her lips moved, but beyond that she did not stir.
“In that sleep you remember things which you had otherwise forgotten.” He turned to Vincent, whispered: “What is her name?”
“Hélène Courvoisier.”
Chassaigne bent over her, picked up her wrist with the three moles.
“Do you remember Hélène Courvoisier?”
“No.”
“Not even the name?”
“Not even the name.”
There was a short silence, and then Chassaigne spoke again in insistent level tones.