“I come, Harmachis—royal no more!—I come to say that thou art free! Thou art free to face thine own infamy, and see it thrown back from every eye which trusted thee, as shadows are from water. I come to tell thee that the great plot—the plot of twenty years and more—is at its utter end. None have been slain, indeed, unless it is Sepa, who has vanished. But all the leaders have been seized and put in chains, or driven from the land, and their party is broken and scattered. The storm has melted before it burst. Egypt is lost, and lost for ever, for her last hope is gone! No longer may she struggle—now for all time she must bow her neck to the yoke, and bare her back to the rod of the oppressor!”
I groaned aloud. “Alas, I was betrayed!” I said. “Paulus betrayed us.”
“Thou wast betrayed? Nay, thou thyself wast the betrayer! How came it that thou didst not slay Cleopatra when thou wast alone with her? Speak, thou forsworn!”
“She drugged me,” I said again.
“O Harmachis!” answered the pitiless girl, “how low art thou fallen from that Prince whom once I knew!—thou who dost not scorn to be a liar! Yea, thou wast drugged—drugged with a love-philtre! Yea, thou didst sell Egypt and thy cause for the price of a wanton’s kiss! Thou Sorrow and thou Shame!” she went on, pointing her finger at me and lifting her eyes to my face, “thou Scorn!—thou Outcast!—and thou Contempt! Deny it if thou canst. Ay, shrink from me—knowing what thou art, well mayst thou shrink! Crawl to Cleopatra’s feet, and kiss her sandals till such time as it pleases her to trample thee in thy kindred dirt; but from all honest folk shrink!—shrink!”
My soul quivered beneath the lash of her bitter scorn and hate, but I had no words to answer.
“How comes it,” I said at last in a heavy voice, “that thou, too, art not betrayed, but art still here to taunt me, thou who once didst swear that thou didst love me? Being a woman, hast thou no pity for the frailty of man?”
“My name was not on the lists,” she said, dropping her dark eyes. “Here is an opportunity: betray me also, Harmachis! Ay, it is because I once loved thee—dost thou, indeed, remember it?—that I feel thy fall the more. The shame of one whom we have loved must in some sort become our shame, and must ever cling to us, because we blindly held a thing so base close to our inmost heart. Art thou also, then, a fool? Wouldst thou, fresh from thy royal wanton’s arms, come to me for comfort—to me of all the world?”
“How know I,” I said, “that it was not thou who, in thy jealous anger, didst betray our plans? Charmion, long ago Sepa warned me against thee, and of a truth now that I recall——”
“It is like a traitor,” she broke in, reddening to her brow, “to think that all are of his family, and hold a common mind! Nay, I betrayed thee not; it was that poor knave, Paulus, whose heart failed him at the last, and who is rightly served. Nor will I stay to hear thoughts so base. Harmachis—royal no more!—Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, bids me say that thou art free, and that she waits thee in the Alabaster Hall.”