The wily old Russian had for once met more than his match. He was seated in a chair with his arms fastened behind the back of it, staring up, with leaden face and fear-filled eyes, into the face of the woman who stood over him with a long, deadly-looking dagger in her raised hand, passion and hate blazing in her eyes, and making the blade tremble in her grasp so that the light quivered and danced on the steel as the taunting, scoffing words flowed volubly from her lips.
“Yes, you are to die. I lured you here for the purpose—lured you, as you say, with lies about the secret proofs of this Count’s guilt which I could put into your hands. A single movement, and my blade strikes home to its sheath in your treacherous old heart!”
The words came through her clenched teeth, and she looked a very she-devil as she gloated over her helpless and cowering victim. He might well cower, for if ever the lust for human blood was written on a human face, it was there in every line of hers.
“What do you want?” he asked at length.
“Nothing but revenge. Nothing but that you shall feel before you die some of the pain and horror you and your cursed agents and spies have made my Prince endure for months past; nothing but to know that at last our accounts are squared, and what you tried and failed to do with me I have tried and succeeded in doing with you; nothing but your life, murderer!”
“You can name your own terms,” he said again; and I saw him glance about him as if in desperate search of some faint hope of escape from the menacing knife. She saw the glance too, and laughed, a fiend’s laugh, scornful, sneering, and utterly loathsome.
“You may look where you will, but you remember your own condition—alone in the house. Alone, that you might not be seen with me, or perhaps might trap me with more of your damnable treachery. Well, you’ve had your way, and we are alone; but it’s the trapper who is trapped, the spider who is caught in his own web. I’m glad you are afraid of death. I thought it would be so, you are so prompt and quick to order the deaths of others. And now you want to find proofs that will enable you to have this Englishman put out of your way, something to give a colour to your order for his removal; and when your men had searched here and found nothing strong enough, you swallowed the bait I put to you, to guide you to the place where you should find all you wanted and more.”
“He is no friend of yours.”
“What is that to me? You are my enemy, and here helpless in my power. The great, powerful, ruthless, implacable enemy of my Prince and of Bulgaria here alone, fastened like a child to a chair by the hand of a woman. Where is your power now? Will it help you to unfasten even a strand of your bonds? Will it bring a single soul to your aid? Will it stay by a second the plunge of my knife, or turn by so much as a hair’s breadth the point from your heart? Were you as feeble as the meanest and weakest of your victims, you could not be more helpless than alone here with me.”
The bloodthirsty fury of this unsexed demon was a hateful sight. Had she plunged her knife into the man’s heart in a paroxysm of rage I could have understood the passion which impelled her to her act of revenge, but it was loathsome to see her standing gloating over the wretched, quivering old man. I made up my mind to stop her; and I was about to dash into the room to tear the knife from her grasp, for I could stand the sight no longer, when a thought inspired by his fear struck me. Like a flash of light a way to safety for me darted into my mind. If he was the coward at heart she had proved him I could turn his fears to good account, and in a moment I turned as anxious to save his life as I was to end the intolerable sight of her cruel, tigerish, callous gloating.