But the sound must have partly attracted her. She looked up, and instead of looking at the speaker her eyes fell on me.
Such a look of dull despair and misery I had never seen before. It seemed to blind her very sight and deaden all objects but itself. Then she sighed, and the spirit beside me laughed softly. The shadow deepened round her, and the flimsy light passed on along the wall till it came to a rude altar having a crucifix above it. I looked at the plain cross and noticed that the light played round it curiously. And at last out of this light I formed a figure hanging there. It was the woman lying in the corner whose cell this was. Helplessly, painfully, she hung there, her eyes still dully bent on the ground. Then the shadow fell once more, and all was left in dreary darkness, and when next I breathed we were out in the passage once again.
“They are fulfilling the behest of Christ,” declared Vestné, idly. “They are taking up the Cross.” And yet it seemed as if among the roofs and rafters there still floated the old wild cry, “Too late—too late.”
“This is the women’s ward,” she remarked as we passed along. “I never visit the men. Plucritus can take you there if you wish to go. But being, as they say you are, simply a woman dressed as a man, I have no compunction in bringing you here at all.”
Again the light she held had vanished.
Once more we stood within a cell, and the same pale flickering light that haunted it was playing on the wall. Another woman lay crouching on the damp floor, and as the light fell on her it seemed as if she tried to catch it with her hand. Unlike the other she was never still. Lying there when we entered, in half a second she was up, walking with uncertain, faltering steps some little distance, then returning. She pressed her hands against the wall, beating against it feebly as if trying to get away. Next she moved towards the plain-cut altar and passed her hands over it aimlessly, as if trying to find something in the concealing gloom. Then back she came to the corner where she had first lain and threw herself on her knees.
“I’ll find it sometime,” she cried in a clear monotone. “But the night is so long and my dream so dark. What follows night? The next night, and yet it seems there’s something missed out that comes between.”
The pale light flickered to the crucifix. I saw her lying there; each sharp, uncertain movement was translated into a painful writhe.
From thence we passed out to another cell, and the faint light showed us the floor all covered with gold and silver coins, mostly gold. In the middle, surrounded by all this tarnished wealth, a woman knelt huddled up in a small clear space, the money heaped up around her. Every now and again a pile would slip and fall towards her. And from the place where it had fallen a serpent’s head appeared, stretching in her direction with open jaws and cruel tongue. Then she would jump up and fly across the narrow cell, screaming in hideous terror, and throw herself upon the altar as if for protection. And the coins leapt up like cruel fire about her feet as she fled, and the great serpent, with its golden, hardened scales, followed her with fearful hiss, with forked tongue and leaping fire all round it. Neither was the altar any protection from fire or poison, and being immortal she could never die, so that she must suffer her term of punishment in an endurance much worse than death.
Then I noticed the light fell upon the crucifix, and looking up I saw the woman’s form lashed to it, not by nails, but by the serpents’ coils, which this surface wealth had fostered and engendered.