The crowd packed close together in a common impulse, was agitated by a common emotion that set a forest of arms waving above their heads and contorted their faces in cries that were inaudible. Something was happening in that square—something that evoked fierce passion—invisible behind the densely serried mob whose backs alone could be seen.
“Look!” breathed the girl in the chair. “Look!—that poor girl!” There was a curious accent of vivid sympathy in the whispered ejaculation.
A young girl was forcing her way through the throng, her face covered in her hands, her shoulders shaking with sobs, weeping convulsively in a paroxysm of despair. The crowd, intent on the spectacle beyond, parted and made way for her automatically.
“Oh,” murmured the girl in the chair, “I feel so funny—I feel I want to cry, too—as if a terrible calamity had suddenly come upon me—a frightful danger to someone I loved——” She shuddered, “oh, it’s awful!—it numbs me—it’s—it’s as if I felt what she was feeling!”
The girl in the vision took her hands from her face, looked about her with eyes of wild misery.
“My God, Helen!” whispered the man in the chair, in a thrill of excitement. “It’s you!”
“Shh!” she breathed, gazing intently into the magic scene. The air about them seemed mysteriously charged with tumultuous passion, with the inaudible vociferations of that surging mob. To both, it seemed as though they were in contact with a real crowd, beset by the vague, fierce emotions that gather and roll in the collective, primitive soul of humanity in congregation. It set their hearts to a quicker beat, bewildered their brains with unheard clamours.
The girl in the vision—so strikingly like the girl in the chair that she seemed a duplication of her personality—drew herself erect on the edge of the crowd and wiped her eyes. Evidently, with a great effort, she was mastering herself. The girl in the chair drew a hard breath, as though of some supreme determination. Then, taking a few steps, the figure that they watched moved close under the houses of the nearer side of the square and, looking up at the doorways as though seeking an inscription, commenced to walk along the pavement.
The crystal held her still as its centre—like the lens of a cinematograph following always the chief personage upon the screen—and, watching her, the man and woman in the chair forgot the globe that they held with cataleptic rigidity, forgot the diminished scale of the vision. Their perceptions adjusted themselves like those of children who day-dream among their toys, and it seemed to both of them that they gazed into a real scene with full-sized human emotions at clash in the acute earnestness of present life.
The girl, her face white and tense, her eyes fixed in the courage of timidity brought to despair, moved along the houses. Suddenly she stopped, looking upward to a portal surmounted by a trophy of tri-coloured flags and a shield on which the three words “Liberté—Egalité—Fraternité” were crudely emblazoned. A couple of ruffianly men in quasi-military uniform, exaggeratedly large cocked hats coming down over their ears, short pipes in the mouths hidden by untrimmed, pendent moustaches, enormously long muskets with bayonets fixed leaning against the bandoliers across their chests, guarded the doorway. The girl spoke to them, with vehement gestures, evidently imploring entrance. They barred her path, callously untouched by her agonized entreaty. She pointed up to an inscription below the trophy “RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE—Réprésentant en Mission,” smiled at them in a heart-breaking assumption of coquetry, candid innocence never more purely virginal. One of them shrugged his shoulders and spat upon the cobbled pavement without removing his pipe. The other winked broadly, and, still retaining his musket, reached out with his disengaged hand. The girl shrank back, horror in her eyes—and then, as if bethinking herself of an unfailing resource, felt feverishly in the neckerchief which covered her bosom. She drew out a packet of notes, offered them. With a broad grin on their faces, the two ruffians parted to allow her passage.