The mandolines in the distance were playing the haunting melody “Sorrento,” and the soft refrain, blending with the sound of the sea, formed a dreamy accompaniment to the story.
“He carried her away and gave her a golden diadem, and made her his queen; but the legions of Rome came and defeated Mithridates, and he sent his eunuch, Bacchides, to her, here in Alexandria, where she had fled, bidding her kill herself, as he was about to do, rather than endure the disgrace of her adopted dynasty. She did not want to die, but, like an obedient wife, she took the diadem from her head, and tried to strangle herself by fastening the silken cords around her throat.”
“I remember now,” said Jim. “It is one of the stories from Plutarch. Go on.”
“The cords broke, and thereupon she uttered that famous, bitter cry: ‘O wretched diadem, unable to help me even in this little matter!’ And she threw it from her, and ordered Bacchides to kill her with his sword....”
She paused and stared with fixed gaze across the bay to the lights of Ras-el-Tîn, and those of the houses which stood where once Cleopatra’s palace of the Lochias had towered above the sea.
The native waiter had removed the débris of their meal from the table, and the candles had been extinguished. Her hands rested upon the arms of her chair, and there was that in her attitude which in the dim light of the waning moon, now rising over the sea, suggested a Pharaonic statue.
“She died just over there across the water,” she said at length. “Poor Monimé....”
Jim put his hand upon hers. Very slowly she turned to him, looked him in the eyes steadily, looked down at his hand, and then again looked into his face.
“Monimé,” he whispered, and presently, receiving no response, he added, “What are you thinking about?”