Tioka recovered. Taller, thinner and paler, he came out once more into the sunshine, leaning on my arm, enraptured at everything, greeting every ray of light and every winged or flowering thing as if it were a new acquaintance.
Not for an instant did I suffer my mind to waver. God, the terrible God of my disordered fancy, had accepted the compact, and it was now for me to carry it out.
As soon as Tioka was well enough to travel, I sent him to Russia to some of our relations. While I was discharging my debt for his life, he must be far away.
Then began the ghastly game, the sinister comedy with the three puppets, whose strings I held in my fragile hands. I had to tranquilize and disarm Kamarowsky; to kindle and fan the murderous fury of Prilukoff; and above all to enchain and infatuate Naumoff, so as to impel him to the crime.
Ah, every art that Lilith, daughter of Eve and of the Serpent, has bequeathed to woman, every insidious perversity and subtle wile did I bring into play to charm and enamor this youthful dreamer. With every incitement did I lure and tempt him; with every witchery did I entangle him in the meshes of my perversity and in the whirlwind of my golden hair.
I was indeed the modern Circe, weaving her evil spell. I was fervent and temerarious, full of exotic anomalies, eccentric, unexpected.... I delighted in causing him both pleasure and suffering in a thousand unnatural and outrageous ways; I cut my initials in his arm with the triangular blade of a dagger; I pressed my lighted cigarette upon his hand; I assumed all the absurdities, perversities and puerilities with which since time immemorial woman has decoyed and beguiled man, who, after all, is essentially a simple-minded and ingenuous being.
Nicolas Naumoff was dazed and fascinated by all this strange hysteria and subtlety. He believed himself to be the hero of a fabulous passion—the incomparable conqueror of a wondrous and portentous love.
There were times when I myself was carried away by this play of my own invention. Now and then I lost sight of the grim purpose of this process of seduction; I rejoiced in my own coquetries, and myself burned in the flame I had deliberately kindled.
One evening as he knelt before me, pressing my cool hands against his fevered forehead, I bent over him with a smile.
“Why do you love me so much?” I asked. “Tell me. Tell me the truth.”