CHAPTER XIII
DEAD LEAVES
hile the Nubians set about in cleaning the hall and removing the last vestiges of the night's debauch, Theodora faced Benilo with such contempt in her dark eyes, that for a moment the Chamberlain's boasted insolence almost deserted him, and though seething with rage at the chastisement inflicted upon him he awaited her speech in silence. She faced him, leaning against a marble statue, her hands playing nervously with the whip.
"For once I have discovered you in your true station, the station of the foul, crouching beast, to which you were born, had not some accident played into the devil's hands by giving you the glittering semblance of the snake," she said slowly and with a disdain ringing from her words, which cut even his debased nature to the core. "I have whipped you, as one whips a cur: do you still desire me for your wife?"
With lips tightly compressed he looked down, not daring to meet her fierce gaze of hatred, which was burning into his very brain.
"I see little reason for changing my mind," he replied after a brief pause, while as he spoke his cheek seemed to burn with shame, where the whip had struck it, and her evil, terrible beauty, exposed in her airy night-robe, roused all the wild demoniacal passions in his soul.
The whip trembled in her hands.
"And you call yourself a man!" she said with a withering look of contempt, under which he winced.
Then she continued in a hard and cheerless voice, wherein spoke more than simple aversion, a voice that seemed as it were petrified with grief, with remorse and hatred of the man who had been the cause of her fall.