On the Borderland

by F. Britten Austin

Again the scene changed. It was night in the colonnaded hall, moonbeams patching the tessellated floor, flickering points of yellow flame swinging slightly with the hanging lamps in the gloom under the intricacy of the arches. A shadow moved out of the darkness, stood in the moonlight, waited for a moment, then dropped a veil from its face. It was the dancing-girl. She turned questing eyes about her as though, at risk to herself, she was fulfilling an appointment that was not yet met.

Another shadow slid out of the gloom under the arches, approached her—another woman, young also and also beautiful, but with a beauty—its character was startlingly vivid to those watchers—that was insinuatingly treacherous, the beauty that smiles as it betrays. She stood now with the erstwhile dancing-girl in the moonlight, spoke to her with an assumption of gravely concerned and pitying friendship, shook her head dolefully as though in distress at her own message. The dancing-girl revolted with a vehement gesture of denial, of impossibility—but her dark eyes flashed and her nostrils quivered. The other persisted, in emphatic asseveration, her face a study in subtle malice. She pointed to the heavy curtains which draped the just-seen extremity of the hall, a fiercely assertive significance in her gesture.

The girl shrank back, shuddered. Then, with a slow turn of her body from the tempter, she relapsed into herself, into a fierce meditation where her eyes swept the shadows about her, where her lips uncovered her teeth in a quick-caught breath and her clenched fist went slowly, tensely, up to the side of her head in an agony that was beyond words. The other woman contemplated her, just restraining a smile, diabolically malicious—appealed once more to those hanging curtains for proof of her sincerity. The girl, forlorn, gripped in some immense unhappiness, nodded sombrely, with set teeth. With one last unobserved smile of evil triumph, the other woman vanished.

For a long moment the girl hesitated. Then, with stealthy, feline step, her shoulders crouched, she commenced to move along the hall. Her gaze, a gaze of wide-open eyes set in the horror of some torture of the soul, was fixed as though fascinated upon those heavy curtains which she approached. She attained them, stopped, stood with one hand in a final hesitation upon the folds, her bosom heaving with fiercely primitive emotions. Then, in a violent determination, she flung them aside.

Beyond, in a small torch-lit apartment, the prince reclined in company with another woman. His head turned in sudden anger to the intruder. Before he could make a movement of defence or escape, the dancing-girl had sprung upon him, with a bound like a tigress, a long knife flashing in her hand....

Even as they gasped their horror, they found themselves once more staring at the milky cloud suffusing the depths of the crystal globe.

“Oh, Jim!” she breathed, in an awe-stricken recognition, “that was my crime—the crime for which you punished me——”

“Look!” he murmured. “Look! It is not finished yet.”

In fact, the cloud was parting once more, parting this time over a scene in ancient Egypt. Once more they recognized themselves, princess and priest of a temple, in a drama that passed vaguely, too quickly in its remoteness to be fully grasped, before their sight.

Scene after scene unfolded itself in the depths of the crystal, in a succession of varying settings, in an ever-briefer duration, an ever more vague drama of relationship, whose blurred outlines were perhaps the effect of their fatigued attention, no longer able to follow in their details visions possibly as minutely exhibited as the first. Always their two personalities, in ever-changing incarnations, met and reacted in wild passions that claimed them fully. In the eternal history of their lives, all was possible, all had happened, every variation of experience—save only indifference to each other. An unseen link held them always, tightened into contact from the moment of propinquity. On islands in a blue sea furrowed by long-oared and primitive galleys; in cities of Cyclopean masonry that glittered, as if vitrified, in a burning sun; in dark forests where skin-clad savages went furtively with stone-barbed spears and knelt in worship of the animal that they had just slain; by the side of reedy lakes where hairy, scarce-human creatures crouched and gnawed the bones they plucked from the embers—always they two met and always they were lovers, fortunate sometimes, tragic sometimes, but always lovers.