"He has again poured out the blood of the doves, and he sings the sacred Hymn of Homer, and kisses her marble body until his lips bleed;—and the goddess still smiles the smile of perfect loveliness that is pitiless."
And the King answered:
"It is even as I desire."
A second time the messengers came to the palace, and whispered in the ears of the iron-eyed King:
"He bathes her feet with his tears: his heart is tortured as though crushed by fingers of marble; he no longer eats or slumbers, neither drinks he the waters of the Fountain of Bronze;—and the goddess still smiles the mocking smile of eternal and perfect loveliness that is without pity and without mercy."
And the King answered:
"It is even as I had wished."
So one morning, in the first rosy flush of sunrise, they found the Prisoner dead, his arms madly flung about the limbs of the goddess in a last embrace, and his cheek resting upon her marble foot. All the blood of his heart, gushing from a wound in his breast, had been poured out upon the pedestal of black marble; and it trickled down over the brazen tablet inscribed with five ancient tongues, and over the mosaic pavement, and over the marble threshold past the statue of Love who is the brother of Death, and the statue of Death who is the brother of Love, until it mingled with the waters of the Fountain of Bronze from which the sacrificial doves did drink.
And around the bodies of the serpent-women the waters blushed rosily; and above the dead, the goddess still smiled the sweet and mocking smile of eternal and perfect loveliness that hath no pity.
"Thrice seven days he has lived at her feet," muttered the King; "yet even I, hoary with years, dare not trust myself to look upon her for an hour!" And a phantom of remorse, like a shadow from Erebus, passed across his face of granite. "Let her be broken in pieces," he said, "even as a vessel of glass is broken."