Thamar, not less than her victim, is in the clutch of over-whelming passion. The hour is at hand, and as the fateful moment approaches, she thrills with fearful expectancy. Bemused, the luckless stranger sees not the dagger which Thamar with stealthy motion of the hand withdraws from her girdle; neither does he note the yawning abyss, revealed through a panel in the wall a watchful guard has rolled noiselessly aside, towards which his unheeding steps are being surely and relentlessly guided. There comes at last the climax. Even as the infatuated youth leans towards her, with a tigerish spring the Queen stabs him to the heart. He is already on the brink of the open precipice; and as he reels backward under the blow, a push from the minion at his elbow sends him hurling to the rushing torrent far below. Thamar with outstretched neck watches, in gloating ecstasy, the consummation of her fell design.
The panel in the wall slides back again. The guards resume their posts of duty. The courtiers, grouped about the chamber, relapse into immobility. The appointed doom is achieved. What was to be, is. Once more the sense of fantastic unreality asserts itself in the spectator’s mind. Mere ghouls, dread phantoms in human form, this dazzling throng of courtiers—not creatures of warm flesh and blood as in the midst of their simulated revelry he had almost deemed them. Thamar alone exhibits emotion. It is not remorse, however, which sets her shivering as with an ague, and turns her knees to water. Reaction must follow action, and the hideous spectre that treads so close upon the heels of indulgence has her in its grip. The hour has passed, the supreme moment has gone; and Thamar, like every true artist, is plunged in depths that are measurable only by the heights she has erstwhile scaled.
The court, regarding her attentive but impassive, is dismissed with a gesture, and the great chamber is cleared of all save Thamar and her women, by whom she is now unrobed. As the festal garments drop from her, the Queen’s exhaustion, physical and mental, seems to verge upon collapse. Slowly she gains the head of her couch, as the arras is drawn from before the window. Night has fled and the purple rays of the dawn pour into the room. The Queen steps into the midst of this luminous flood, drinking deep of the morning glory. Her senses revive, she imbibes new vigour, the black shadows are lifted from her. As presently she lays herself upon the couch, her women sink to rest upon their cushions.
Thus from supreme climax the action of the ballet subsides gradually to statuesque immobility once more. Stillness broods over the quiet figures of Thamar and her women. Realisation comes suddenly to the spectator that the scene is now identical with that which the lifting curtain first disclosed. And at that moment of quick apprehension—a woman stirs! In a flash of inspiration the spectator’s eye, outrunning the action on the stage, foresees the inevitable happening. Is not the whole ghastly round yet fresh and vivid in his mind? The woman looks again, whispers to another. A third bends to the Queen’s ear, and as the curtain slowly descends the treacherous scarf is being once more lightly tossed into the air.