There were Vincent Seff and Mary Hutton, now. Why were they still together?... Strange that whichever died first, the other would be there, attentive to the end lest the fear of God overcome the fear of man in a death-bed repentance.... They could be sure of each other’s company to the end.... Hate, then, bound people closer than love.... Love? How lonely was love!
“I never—knew God, but I knew—you. Why—why hast thou—forsaken—me?”
The gasp was wrung from her stress of body and soul. In the darkness and the aloneness it quavered heartbrokenly upward with her thought of John Cabot.
Then she remembered the lady she had admired in the railway station, long, long ago—the lady who had sneezed. She hadn’t made the usual fuss about it; had just leaned out and done it, neatly and composedly.... What was human life but a sneeze? Birth was the warning; youth the preparation; life the sniffing and death the wiping of eyes. After death perhaps one settled back into composure.... The lady had proved a good example in so many crises of her life. It was well to have remembered her in death.... She must make no fuss; must do it neatly and composedly.
She threw back her head; set her lips hard; breathed deep and long ... deep and long ... deep and long....
CHAPTER XXII
“A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. And she, being with child, cried, travailing in birth and pained to be delivered.”
The girl-shade heard the words intoned in mezzo voce. At the door of the throne-room she paused, loath to enter the next scene of the co-star piece. All the day following the completion of her story of earth she had lain within her chamber, in a state of narcosis, varied only by the dull ache of dread. All day she had expected the summons which now had come, that she appear before the King. Through the séances she had done her best; had whipped her spirit as a slave-seller might have lashed some modest, naked body on the block. She had come for the reckoning. If so be it she had met the royal expectations, her reward would be that lowest high office yet assigned in Greater Gehenna—She-Destroyer of Womankind. If she had failed——
“And the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.”
Again the deep intonations. Glancing into the blaze of light which had confused her eyes after her approach through the dim, winding corridors, Dolores saw a tall figure in the full effect of male evening attire on earth, with back toward her and gestures directed into one of the mercurized walls.