The web was torn, the veil was rent, the labour was lost, the pictured story of loves and wars was all undone.
But there, white in the silvery dusk of the alabaster shrine, there was the visible Helen, the bride and the daughter of Mystery, the World’s Desire!
There shone that fabled loveliness of which no story was too strange, of which all miracles seemed true. There, her hands folded on her lap, her head bowed—there sat she whose voice was the echo of all sweet voices, she whose shape was the mirror of all fair forms, she whose changeful beauty, so they said, was the child of the changeful moon.
Helen sat in a chair of ivory, gleaming even through the sunshine of her outspread hair. She was clothed in soft folds of white; on her breast gleamed the Starstone, the red stone of the sea-deeps that melts in the sunshine, but that melted not on the breast of Helen. Moment by moment the red drops from the ruby heart of the star fell on her snowy raiment, fell and vanished,—fell and vanished,—and left no stain.
The Wanderer looked on her face, but the beauty and the terror of it, as she raised it, were more than he could bear, and he stood like those who saw the terror and the beauty of that face which changes men to stone.
For the lovely eyes of Helen stared wide, her lips, yet quivering with the last notes of song, were wide open in fear. She seemed like one who walks alone, and suddenly, in the noonday light, meets the hated dead; encountering the ghost of an enemy come back to earth with the instant summons of doom.
For a moment the sight of her terror made even the Wanderer afraid. What was the horror she beheld in this haunted shrine, where was none save themselves alone? What was with them in the shrine?
Then he saw that her eyes were fixed on his golden armour which Paris once had worn, on the golden shield with the blazon of the White Bull, on the golden helm, whose visor was down so that it quite hid his eyes and his face—and then at last her voice broke from her:
“Paris! Paris! Paris! Has Death lost hold of thee? Hast thou come to drag me back to thee and to shame? Paris, dead Paris! Who gave thee courage to pass the shadows of men whom on earth thou hadst not dared to face in war?”
Then she wrung her hands, and laughed aloud with the empty laugh of fear.