And crowding on this came the drunken chanting of the deeper voice: “Therefore will I discover thy skirts upon thy face that thy shame may appear. I have seen thine adulteries and thy neighings, the lewdness of thy whoredom and thine abominations on the hills in the fields—and thou wilt be made clean!”
Conkling, emerging from the well of the narrow stairway, stood panting and stunned. The air was thick with smoke, and for a moment or two he found it far from easy to see. But he made out two gaunt old women, disheveled and rapt, so intent on their own ends that they neither challenged nor regarded him. He saw the taller one kneeling beside the hone-white sarcophagus which stood toward the center of the attic floor. In this wide basin of marble she had built what first impressed him as a funeral pyre. Heavy coils of smoke were rising from it as she rocked her body back and forth and prayed aloud. But a vaguely familiar smell about that heavy smoke brought Conkling toward her at a bound, for his nostrils, he knew, were sniffing the odors of burning canvas impregnated with oil. But he stopped midway in his flight and ran to the far side of the room, where he knew the Titian stood. He saw there only the empty frame from which the canvas had been slashed. That took him at a leap back to the sarcophagus.
As he stared down through the thick air he saw a stretch of rimpled canvas belly up with the heat of the flames beneath it. He saw the mellowed and magic ivory gold of a rounded breast swell up and burst in a darkening bubble of heat. He stooped forward with a gasp and caught at one unseared edge of the crumpled-up canvas. Then he just as quickly dropped it and wheeled about. For a repeated hissing sound, followed by a gasp that might have been an echo of his own, fell on his ears.
He saw Lavinia Keswick, with her hair down, with a face like a mænad and with a crop of plaited leather in her hand. Beyond her in the blue-gray air he saw the slender white back of a girl. Her posture impressed him as singularly unnatural, until he suddenly wakened to the fact that she was tied with a cotton rope to the heavy-timbered easel in front of her. Then as he saw the mænad with the flying scant tresses raise the whip in her hand he realized what was taking place.
He forgot about the crumpled canvas in the narrow marble basin. He ran for the claw that held the whip, caught it and twisted it back. With almost one and the same movement he wrested the rawhide from that shaking claw and sent the bony figure tumbling back over a headless winged lion in marble.
“You muckers! Oh, you muckers!” he cried out, reverting in his excitement to the language of his school-days. Then he turned back to the easel. “Oh, God! Oh, God!” he kept mumbling as he tugged at the knotted cotton rope, for he could see two stripes of red across the whiteness of the stooping slender back.
The girl’s face, when he had set her free, was as white as the shoulders from which the clothing had been stripped. She said nothing. She did not even raise her eyes to his. But she drew back as he essayed a futile effort to lift her fallen waist up about her naked shoulders. His hands were shaking and the thick air stung his throat. He turned about, dazed, as he heard the renewed shrill duet of voices in prayer. The two frenzied old women were on their knees side by side in front of the smoking sarcophagus. They were on their knees, swaying back and forth and calling on God to cleanse their house of its lewdness. In the sarcophagus lay nothing but a layer of smoldering ashes, subsiding slowly, like melting snow. And Conkling, who knew by this time entirely what it meant, felt a blind wave of hate untouched by pity well through his body.
“You fools!” he gasped. “You hopeless fools!”
He was even sobbing a little with the nauseous reaction of it all, and he tried to smother his shame by a parade of ferocity as he turned back to the white-faced girl.
“They’ve made their nest, the muckers, and now they can lie in it!” he cried, as the girl shrank away a little to stare at the intoning pair still on their knees. She, he remembered as he in turn stared at the youthful face with the prematurely tragic look in its eyes, was all that he could get out of it now. But it was enough, God knew! And the time for claiming his own was at hand.