"Encourage him!" It is impossible to describe the sense of outrage which Zara de Echeveria managed to include in the enunciation of those two words. Listening from my place among the cushions in the Turkish bower, I was conscious of a feeling of gladness that it was so; that she resented the tone of the man, as well as the words he had uttered; that she repudiated utterly the insinuation he had made. "You use the term as if you thought it were a pleasure to me to lead men on, simply because God gave me the beauty and the power. I hate it; oh, how I hate it! Suppose that Jean Morét is dead, who, then, in God's name is responsible for his death? I, I alone! Do you think that I am so heartless that I can look upon such things with no pang of self-reproach? I wish that I were old and ugly, fortuneless and an outcast—or dead. Then I would not be compelled to prostitute my beauty and my talents to conspire with a rabble of scoundrels and convicts who discuss murder and assassination as if they were pastimes."
"Hush! You do not realize what you say, Zara. Your own life——"
She laughed outright, interrupting him.
"My own life! Do you think I care for that? I wish they would kill me and so end all this hateful, horrible scheming to murder and destroy."
"Hush, Zara! hush! You must not talk in that way."
"Not talk that way?" The princess laughed somewhat wildly, I thought, from my place of concealment, but still she made no sound that could have penetrated much farther than I was distant from their interview. "Not talk that way?" she repeated, and this time was silent for a spell, as if she were herself considering the reasons why she should not do so. There had been more of fright than menace, in the tone of the man called Ivan, when he cautioned her, and I could imagine how terrorized any member of the nihilistic fraternity must be if there were the least danger that disloyal thoughts of theirs might find lodgment in unsuspected places. "I will talk that way; I will talk as I please; nor you, nor any one, shall stand between me and my liberty of action and speech. What care I for all the murderers and assassins who form this terrible society of which we are members? Hear me? They could only swear my life away as they have done to others in many parallel cases. They could only destroy me; and Ivan, sometimes, upon my bended knees I pray for death. What matter would it be to me how death might come, so long as I am prepared to welcome it? I hate and loathe myself when I stop to consider all the contemptible acts I am compelled to perform, when I pause to realize the utter prostitution of self-respect I am forced to undergo, in order to carry on the plots of our 'good friends,' as you call them. Good friends, indeed! To whom, let me ask you, do they demonstrate the friendly spirit? Where can you point to a friendly act done by any one of them, unless it is to a prisoner already condemned, or to an assassin who is in danger of arrest? My own life?" she laughed again. "Ivan, were it not that I honestly believe that I can, by myself accomplish some great good in this undertaking, I would destroy that life with my own hands; for I tell you that it would be much easier to drive a poniard through my own heart, or to swallow a cup of poison, than it is for me to make sport of the affections of such men as the stately, generous Prince Michael, or that poor love-sick fool, Morét. Hush! don't say another word to me on the subject of warning, for it only angers me, and fills me with a contempt which I find it difficult to master."
"But, Zara, you must not talk so. I cannot listen."
"Then leave me. Go. I wish to be alone for a time before I return to the salon. Deliver my message, and also the order I gave you."
I heard no more after that, but I knew that he had gone, although there was no sound of his departure. Then I listened for the rustle of the princess' dress when she should move away. Presently it came. She sighed, then rose from the couch where she had been sitting, and I knew that she had stepped out upon the path. I closed my eyes, the better to think upon the remarkable revelations that had come to me as a result of that conversation. One, two, five, perhaps ten minutes I remained thus, turning the extraordinary incident over in my mind. But presently I opened them again, lazily and slowly at first, and then with a sudden start, for they encountered the form of the princess where she stood as motionless as a statue but with one arm extended holding back a palm leaf which half filled the entrance to my place of concealment.
God knows what impulse it was that had impelled her, in parting with her recent companion, to pause at the Turkish bower in which I was concealed, and so, to discover me. I had heard no sound whatever. I had supposed that both were gone. The shock induced by the revelations I had just overheard, the disillusionment I had experienced in regard to Princess Zara, had affected me more than I realized, and the act of closing my eyes and thinking it over had been the result of the same impulse which sends a frightened woman to her own room, to close the door behind her in order that she may be alone. By the act of closing my eyes, I shut out the world by which I was surrounded—that world which had now become so hateful to me because of the work I had to do. But nevertheless I looked up steadily into the eyes of the princess, wondering at the calmness and grace of her attitude, and amazed that she should not show more consternation than she did, at the discovery that there was a witness to her interview with the man Ivan. Save for a suggestion of pallor which had driven away the natural flushes from her cheeks, and perhaps for an added brightness, or rather a different brightness, to her eyes, she was the same as ever, although the smile which she now bestowed upon me seemed a bit constrained.