His thoughts pursued his visitor. He wondered if, her mission accomplished, she would in truth succeed in winning back that errant passion to herself. On the whole, he rather hoped she would. It would serve to kill two birds for him with a single stone. She would keep Cartouche away, and Cartouche her. Neither, once escaped, could afford to return. That would be as it should be. He himself was in need of her no longer—had wanted, in fact, only a convenient pretext for dissolving their partnership. Here—his usual luck—that had offered itself opportunely. The sum, for which he held the Saint-Péray’s bond, was so large, that its investment would justify him in an immediate retirement from business. He had no desire, at the same time, to hamper it with the burden of a Sibylline pensioner. And so—yes, he hoped the two would escape together, never to reappear in Savoy. He had every confidence in their being permitted to. Even in a democracy it was no good precedent to hang a Prefect; any more than it was its good policy to alienate, at the outset of its campaign, by the vindictive sacrifice of its first prisoner taken, the sympathies of the temperate among reformers. He believed that Le Prieuré, in the person of its new Prefect—though intentionally uninspired by himself—saw this clearly, and would be satisfied with its moral triumph, since, whatever the real facts, the execution would be given a political complexion. He believed that, though the girl should carry into the prison a rope ladder bound about her waist, its visible presence on her would be winked at.
Winked at, forsooth! The thought tickled him. What a deal of winking there had been here from first to last. The association of ideas brought the knife to his mind, and he fetched it from his pocket and examined it curiously. There had been nothing but a morbid sentiment in his desire to secure it for himself. It gave him a gloating pleasure now to finger the long blade, and to think how the smears of its rust were the very dried essence of di Rocco’s heart. What secrets it might speak, through its seven years’ intimacy with that corrupt organ! “Wouldst thou not rejoice to utter them into mine—hard in—fast in?” he croaked, grinning, and apostrophising the rat’s head, as he held it out before him. “But there’s none to wield thee at the last. Bonito—poor old scorned and wronged Bonito—stands the victor and immortal!”
He had no taste for bed, in the present tingling poise of things; but presently, lost in ineffable altitudes of star-dreaming, he dropped into a doze where he sat, his head fallen back upon the forge.
* * * * * * * *
“Give me the order. You’ve not used it? Say you have, and I think I shall kill you.”
“I’ve not used it—not yet.”
“Not yet? You beast without a heart! You kissed me once—on my lips—I’d tear them weren’t they his! So you’d have let him die but for me!”
In the melancholy half-light of the room the two women stood facing one another. Here was tragedy in white and red—blood and spirit in gripping combat. It was veritably, in its aspect, in its significance, a struggle between life and death. The issue hung upon a word.
“O, my sister! I love too!”
It was death that spoke, flinging herself with a heartworn cry at the other’s feet.