"What sorcery have you practised upon that poor girl, to drive her into this state of distraction, red fiend?" was the answering question, bold enough in seeming, though Tom Leslie, asked in regard to the matter to-day, would undoubtedly acknowledge that he had felt far less tremor when under the heaviest play of the Russian cannon at Inkermann, than when throwing this sharp taunt into the teeth of the sorceress.
"Nothing but what you have seen and endured!" was the reply, made in the same tone as before. "I have shown them the truth, and the truth is terrible. It is murder and ruin in their own households—it is battle and death around those they love—it is desolation and destruction to the land! Go!—those who cannot witness my power without blenching, should never seek me; and you blench like those sick girls—I have seen you blench before?"
"Seen me?" echoed Leslie.
"Seen you!" was the fierce reply of the sorceress. "Fool! do you think I cannot penetrate that thin disguise—that old man's hair and those false wrinkles? You were younger-looking, eighteen months since, in another land where the eagle screams less but tears its enemies more deeply with its talons!"
"I was," answered Leslie, carried beyond himself. "I remember the Rue la Reynie Ogniard, and I acknowledge your fearful power, though I know not if it comes from heaven or hell! But tell me—who are you, so magnificently beautiful, and yet so—so—" and here (a rare thing for him,) the voice of Tom Leslie faltered.
"So horribly hideous, you would say," broke in the sorceress. "Stay! you have said one word that touches the woman within me. You have recognized my beauty as well as my terror. Look for one instant at what no mortal eye has seen for years or may ever see again! Look!"
Tom Leslie started, nay, staggered—for no other word can express the motion—back towards the door, infinitely more surprised than he had been on the night of his first adventure with the sorceress. She held something in her hand, but that could only be seen afterwards: for the moment his eyes could only behold that marvellous face. If the Sons of God when they intermarried with the beautiful daughters of clay, left any descendants behind them, certainly that face must have belonged to one of the number. No longer ghastly red, but almost marble white, with the hue of health yet mantling beneath the wondrous transparent skin, and every line and curve of beauty such as would make the sculptor drop his chisel in despair—with a lip that might have belonged to Juno and a brow that should have been set beneath the helmet of Athena—with the glorious dark eye fringed with long sweeping lashes and the wealth of the dark brown hair swept back in masses of rippled and tangled shadow that caught and lost the eye continually,—what a perfect vision of high-born beauty was that face, the patent of nobility coming direct from heaven!
And what was that which she held in her hand, and the removal of which had produced so wonderful a transformation? One of those masks of dark red golden wire, so fine as to be almost impalpable, and wrought by fingers of such cunning skill that while it concealed the natural skin of the face, every lineament and even every sweep and dimple was copied, as if the moulder had been working in wax—the eye looking through as naturally as in the ordinary face, and even the very play of the lips permitted. That strange red light which had seemed to permeate the whole face and affect even the eyes, had merely been the red metallic glitter of the gold, leaving little work for the imagination to complete a picture fascinating as unnatural.
"Great God!—can such beauty be real?" broke out Leslie, when he had gazed for one instant on the splendid vision before him. "Matchless, peerless, glorious woman! Let me come nearer! Let me look longer on God's master-work, if I even die at the sight!"
Here was the faithful lover of Josephine Harris half an hour before,—and in what a situation! Oh man, man, what an eye for miscellaneous beauty is that with which your sex is gifted! All Mormons at heart, it is to be feared, however a more self-denying canon may be observed perforce! It is not certain that Tom Leslie would have run away with his new divinity, had the chance been offered at that moment; and it is not certain that he would not have done so. Very fortunately, the opportunity was wanting. Very fortunately, too, the storm had not yet ceased altogether, and the two ladies in the other room were likely to be too busy in restoring and being restored, to hear very clearly what was going on within.