"Well, we sat there, perfectly mute, for about half an hour, I suppose. The chief was almost as impassive as an Englishman. I have seen the Almehs in Cairo, but I have never seen real poetry of motion—mind more completely expressed by matter—than that woman's body translating the anguish she endured; languor turning to deep weariness, weariness to agony, agony to despair. There was not a note in the gamut of mental suffering that she left unstruck—that savage, whom one would not guess possessed a mind. There came a pause. She looked about with a wild, fixed purpose in her eyes; like a panther she leaped on me with her sinuous body, in a second she had snatched the knife from my belt, and had fallen on the earthen floor, her head almost severed from the trunk by the violence of the blow she had struck at her throat with the keen blade. The chief made a sign to the guards who had brought her in (one of whom, by the way, was her deceived husband) to remove the body, and then he inquired, with some satisfaction, if I believed in the drug.
"I was about to leave on the morrow for the coast, and I begged with all humility for the formula, or what answered for it, of the medicine-man, who shook his head decidedly.
"From a corner of the tent he produced a small wicker cage, in the bottom of which lay coiled a snake of a bright orange yellow color, whose very triangular head showed it to be an especially venomous variety of the naja species.
"Muttering a few words and crooning to it after the manner of snake-charmers, it presently became lethargic, and he seized it by the neck and poured a few drops from an earthen bottle down its throat; then he dropped its tawny coils into its cage again, and placed the cage in front of me. Soon the serpent roused. It glided frantically about its cage; like a trail of molten gold was its color. Suddenly it coiled upon itself in a spiral, and stung itself to death!
"After the most profound praise and flattery, and the present of a little glass medicine dropper which I chanced to have with me, and a small quantity of arsenic, which he tested with very satisfactory results, on a dog, he gave me a portion of the drug, but I'm sorry to say I could not prevail on the old scoundrel to give or sell the secret of its composition," concluded Hilyard regretfully, lifting the phial with tenderness. "I've tried to analyze it myself, and I sent it to a celebrated chemist, but the ingredients completely defy classification, and tests seem powerless to determine anything except that they are purely vegetable," he said, shaking the liquid angrily, and then rising to lock it in his cabinet.
I, too, rose with a shudder, half-believing, half-sceptical, yet none the less with a strong distaste for the memory of the story I had just heard. I left Hilyard arranging the shelf of his cabinet, and opening the long French window I walked out on the lawn.
Under the elm I saw Mrs. Mershon, Amy's aunt, with whom we were all staying. Kate Mershon was idly tossing a tennis-ball into the air, and making ineffectual strokes at it with a racquet, and at Mrs. Mershon's feet sat Amy, reading, the golden sunlight resting tenderly on her head, and bringing out the reddish tones of her hair. We were to be married in a month, and she looked so beautiful in the peace and quiet of the waning day, that I wished we two were alone that I might take her in my yearning arms and raise that exquisite colorless face to my lips. She never seemed so lovely as when contrasted with Kate's mature, sensual beauty, dark and rich as the Creole, and completely devoid of that touch of the pure and heavenly without which no woman's face is perfect to me. Amy was brilliant, full of raillery at times, but in the depths of those great clear eyes, like agates, in the candor of that white face, like a tea-rose, one read the beautiful chastity of soul in whose presence passion becomes mixed with a reverence that sanctifies it.
Later that evening, when the drawing-room was gay with light and music, and Kate was singing one of Judie's least objectionable songs, with a verve and grace of gesture that the prima donna herself need not have despised, Amy and I went out on the moonlit lawn, leaving Hilyard leaning over the piano, and Mrs. Mershon sleeping peacefully in a corner. We strolled up and down the gravelled path in a silence more pregnant than words, and I felt my darling's hands clasped on my arm, and heard her gown sweep the little pebbles along the walk.
Something brought to my mind the conversation with Hilyard, and I half thought to repeat it, but the night seemed too peaceful to sully by telling a tale of such horrors, and beside, I fancied Amy disliked Hilyard, although he had been intimate with the family for years, and in fact, he and Amy had almost grown up together; but he had been travelling for three years, and since his return Amy declared that he had grown cynical and hard, and altogether disagreeable, and as I really liked him, although our ideas on most subjects were radically opposed, I thought I would not connect him, in Amy's mind, with an unpleasant story.
I looked down into the delicate face lifted to mine, and pressed a fervent kiss on the cream-white cheek. There was usually, even in her tenderest moments, a certain virginal shrinking from a caress that was an added charm, but to-night she moved closer to my side, and even touched her lips to mine shyly, an occurrence so rare that I trembled with joy, realizing as never before, that this sweet white flower was all my own. I wanted to kiss her again, and with more fervor, upon the mouth, but for her I had the feeling that I could not guard her, this dear blossom of purest whiteness, too jealously. I would no more have permitted myself, during our betrothal, to give her a very ardent caress, the memory of which, however harmless it might seem to the majority of affianced people, might cause her a troubled thought, than I would have permitted a stranger to kiss my sister. Her maiden shyness was a bloom which I did not wish to brush off. I took her hand in my own as we turned to retrace our steps to the house, and stood looking down at her in the wonderful September moonlight. She seemed a vestal virgin, in her long, clinging dress of white wool, with a scarf thrown about her head and throat.