With the word, she was there before them. The curtain over the alcove had silently risen and revealed her. The flame in the tripod, going up like a blue draught, shot her tawny drapery with streaks of emerald. A broad cincture, heavy with large green stones, was looped about her hips. Her bare arms and bosom rounded into soft violet shadows. Amid the chestnut loopings of her hair a coil of little jewelled serpents shone entangled. She was lovely in her face—life blooming out of death—her lips incarnadined with lust of sorrow—large eyes of tragic blue. The King looked on her, fascinated.
“Priestess,” said the Wizard, in a hollow voice: “answer, if of thine inspiration thou mayest, whence threatens the shadow of this Kingdom’s foretold eclipse?”
As he spoke, there came out of the darkness a string of little stars, of softest radiance and many colours, which took noiseless flight about the Sibyl’s head, and circled there in wondrous convolutions, faster and faster, until they seemed to whirl like lashing snakes. Then, in a moment, one of a red tint poised itself above her brow, and the rest fled away and were extinguished.
His Majesty, flaccid with awe, was by now in a condition to believe anything. And the priestess answered—in that old soft English voice. Poor Molly’s broken “Frenchings” had by now mended themselves wonderfully; but no call to shriller accents could spoil the quality of the throat which uttered them.
“I see a figure down in Faissigny,” she cried—“the figure of a man. It standeth in the sun like other men, and like other men doth cast its shadow. But, lo! the shadow of this man swells outward from his feet, onward and ever onward, until it engulfs the whole Province, laying it under tribute to his darkness.”
“The Prefect!” muttered the King. He saw his confirmation here of some black suspicions.
“Ask her,” he said, trembling, to the Wizard; “is the figure that of mine own Prefect of Faissigny?”
“Thou hearest, Cassandra?” said Bonito.
“Ay,” she answered; “it is the man!”
The King uttered an ejaculation, and lifted deploring hands.