Kalmim had beguiled him out of every particular before sundown, affecting, the better to deceive him, an irreconcilable enmity to the Great Queen, and entire devotion in the service of her son.
If a woman makes up her mind to duplicity, a little more or a little less counts as nothing to her conscience. She finds it as easy to profess an affection she does not feel, and a candour of which she is incapable, as to push another bodkin into her hair, lay another coat of red or white on the cheek she is not ashamed to paint. When Kalmim had resolved she would take him into captivity, it was no more possible for Beladon to resist than for the bird to escape out of the snare of the fowler. And, although the latter was exceedingly lavish of smiles and liberal of promises, the prey found itself captured, plumed, and despoiled, with no material equivalent for utter discomfiture and disgrace.
More than a match for a score of priests, she could indeed have outwitted the whole male population of Babylon, but that she too had found her master, and was but a weak foolish woman in presence of the man she loved.
To him she betook herself in her distress, imploring him to interfere at such a juncture, and prevent a crime which, with all his loyalty to his prince, seemed to Sethos too foul and unnatural to contemplate.
"There is danger also for you," she exclaimed, wringing her hands and sobbing in real perplexity. "No son of Ashur must leave the city to-night on pain of death; and yet, if the queen be not forewarned, nothing can save her from the vengeance of these blood-thirsty priests. O Sethos, Sethos, did I not love you dearly, I had never trusted you with such a mission; yet how can I bear to send you out into the very jaws of death?"
But the cup-bearer's equanimity was proof even against so formidable a consideration. Accepting her confession of attachment with a good-humoured carelessness that at any other time would have cut her to the quick, he professed his readiness to incur any amount of peril so that he might preserve Semiramis from the threatened assault, and her son from the commission of so hideous an outrage. It was agreed, therefore, that he should escape from the city at all hazards, and make his way to the tent of the Great Queen, under cover of night. To leave Babylon through any one of her gates was impracticable, so closely were they guarded by the spearmen of Ninyas under Assarac's orders; and it was only by watching a favourable opportunity during the darkest hours before the moon had risen, that Kalmim succeeded in letting her lover down from the wall by a rope, to dispatch him on his errand of life and death.
With characteristic coolness the cup-bearer received his instructions and embarked on his perilous enterprise; but Kalmim, though not a nerve failed her while, swinging in mid-air, his life depended on her steadiness of hand, had over-taxed her strength; for no sooner was the tension of the rope relaxed, and the form of Sethos lost in darkness as he sped from beneath the wall, than brain and sense gave way, leaving her pale, prostrate, and helpless on the ground.