She presented her submissive face in imploring tenderness, displaying her bare neck at the part where it voluptuously met the bosom. And he, seeing her white skin as in a burst of flame, raised his fist armed with the knife. But she perceived the flash of the blade and started back, gaping in surprise and terror.
"Jacques, Jacques!" she cried; "me? Good God! Why?"
With set teeth and answering not a word, he pursued her. A brief struggle brought her again beside the bed. She shrank from him, haggard, without defence, her night-dress in shreds.
"Why? good God! Why?" she continued asking.
His fist came down, and the knife stuck the inquiry in her throat. In striking, he twisted the blade round in a frightful compulsion of the hand which satisfied itself. It was the same blow as President Grandmorin had received, inflicted at the same place, and with the same fury. Did she shriek? He never knew. The Paris express flew by at this moment with such violence and rapidity that it shook the floor; and Séverine was dead, as if struck down in this tempestuous blast.
Jacques, standing motionless, now looked at her, stretched at his feet before the bed. The riot of the train was dying away in the distance as he gazed upon her in the oppressive silence of the red bedroom. On the ground, amidst those red hangings, those red curtains, she bled profusely. A crimson stream trickled down between her breasts, spreading over the abdomen to one of the lower limbs, whence it fell in great drops upon the floor. Her night-dress, rent half asunder, was drenched with it. He could never have believed she had so much blood.
But what retained him there, haunted, was the abominable look of terror that the face of this pretty, gentle, docile woman took in death. The black hair stood on end as a helmet of horror, dark as night. The blue eyes, immeasurably wide open, were still inquiring, aghast, terrified at the mystery. Why? why had he murdered her? And she had just been reduced to nothing, carried off in the fatality of murder, a creature irresponsible, whom life had rolled from vice into blood, and who had remained tender and innocent notwithstanding, for she had never understood.
Jacques was astonished. He heard the sniffing of animals, the grunting of wild boars, the roaring of lions; and he became calm, it was himself breathing. At last! at last! he had gratified his thirst—he had killed! Yes; he had done that. He felt elevated by ungovernable joy, by intense delight at the full satisfaction of his everlasting desire. He experienced surprising pride, an aggrandisement of his male sovereignty. He had slaughtered the woman. He possessed her as he had so long desired to possess her, entirely to the point of destroying her. She had ceased to belong, she never would belong any more to anybody. And a bitter recollection recurred to him, that of the other murdered victim, the corpse of President Grandmorin which he had seen on that terrible night five hundred yards from the house. This delicate body before him, so white, striped with red, was the same human shred, the broken puppet, the limp rag that a knife makes of a creature.
Yes, that was it. He had killed, and he had this thing on the ground. She had just been hurled down like the other; but on her back, the left arm doubled under her right side, twisted, half-torn from her shoulder. Was it not on the night when the body of the President was found that with heart beating fit to burst, he had sworn to dare in his turn, in a prurience for murder which exasperated him like a concupiscence at the sight of the slaughtered man? Ah! if he could only have the pluck, satisfy himself, drive in the knife! This had germinated and developed within him obscurely. For a year, not an hour had gone by without him having advanced towards the inevitable result. Even with his arms about the neck of this woman, and amidst her kisses, the secret work was approaching its termination; and the two murders had become united. Did not the one show the logic of the other?