And his poor drawn face expressed such suffering that I could not speak.
“Yes, yes, let us go, let us go,” he added, pretending to have heard; and he rose, a prey to evident agitation. He had the air of a maniac, he was so pale and tottering. “Let us go away from here! Anatolia, get up....”
He spoke quite low, as if he feared to be overheard by some one in the neighbourhood. His tone filled us with dread.
“Get up, Claudio. Let us go.”
Anatolia ran to him and took his hands.
“Here she is, here she comes!” he stammered, quite beside himself, turning his pale eyes, diluted by the hallucination, towards the alley. “Here she is! Do you hear?”
Perplexed and troubled as I was, I thought at first that he was terrified by some phantom called up by his madness. But the sound of approaching steps reached my ears also; and all at once I understood as I saw the sedan chair appear between the walls of box.
There we stood, dumb, motionless, holding our breath as the strange convoy passed along. In the icy silence which had fallen on us, like that surrounding a bier, one could distinctly hear the poles carried by the two servants creaking slightly in their places.
Then through the open window of the chair, against the background of green velvet, I saw the face of the mad princess; it was unrecognisable, disfigured, and swollen and bloodless, like a mask of snow; the hair was piled on her brow like a diadem. Her great black eyes blazed out of the opaque whiteness of her skin from beneath the commanding arched eyebrows, their extraordinary splendour maintained perhaps by the continual hallucination of fantastic pomp and luxury. Her double chin hung down over the necklace round her throat. And this pale inert mass suggested to my imagination the dream-figure of some Byzantine empress of the time of a Nicephorus or a Basil, lying in her golden litter.
“There, she sees us; she is stopping, she is getting out, and coming towards us,” I fancied with growing uneasiness, half expecting some proof of the reality of what seemed to me an unreal apparition on the point of vanishing and of entering the void again like a dream when one wakes. “There, she is calling some one, speaking to them, asking who I am, questioning me....” In the silence I heard in imagination the sound of her voice, the dialogue between the children doomed to an inhuman sacrifice, and the mother whose madness had transported her into another world; a world into which she was inevitably drawing them all, one after the other. And in my horror I understood the deep shudder of instinctive repugnance that had passed over Antonello as she approached, something like the shudder which runs through the folded flock at the approach of the wild beast who is going to devour them.