While he was asking about my health, in accents of honeyed hypocrisy, his eyes, as yellow as a lion's, were sounding the depths of my soul. Presently—"The famous harlot Clarimonde is dead," says he, in a piercing tone, "dead at the close of an eight days' revel. It was a feast of Belshazzar or of Cleopatra. Good God, what an age is ours! The guests were served by dusky slaves who spoke no tongue known among men, and who seemed like spirits from the pit. The livery of the least of them might have beseemed an emperor on a coronation day. Wild tales are told of this same Clarimonde, and all her loves have perished miserably or by violence. They say she was a ghost, a female vampire, but I believe she was the devil himself."
He paused, watching me, who could not master a sudden movement at the name of Clarimonde.
"Satan's claw is long," said Sérapion, with a stern glance, "and tombs ere now have given up their dead. Threefold should be the seal upon the grave of Clarimonde, for this is not, men say, the first time she hath died. God be with thee, Romuald!"
So speaking, Sérapion departed with slow steps, and I saw him no more as at that time.
Time passed and I was well again. Nay, I deemed that the fears of Sérapion and my own terrors were too great, till, one night, I dreamed a dream.
Scarce had I tasted the first drops of the cup of sleep when I heard the curtains of my bed open and the rings ring. I raised myself suddenly on my arm and saw the shadow of a woman standing by me.
Straightway I knew her for Clarimonde.
She held in her hand a little lamp, such as are placed in tombs, and the light touched her slim fingers to a rosy hue, that faded away in the milk-white of her arms. She was clad with naught on but the linen shroud that veiled her when she lay in state; the folds were clasped about her breast, as it were in pudency, by a hand all too small. So white she was that her shroud and her body were blended in the pallid glow of the lamp.
Swathed thus in the fine tissue that betrayed every line of her figure, she seemed a marble image of some lady at the bath rather than a living woman. Dead or living, statue or woman, spirit or flesh, her beauty was the same; only the glitter of her dull sea-green eyes was dulled—only the mouth, so red of old, wore but a tender tint of rose, like the white rose of her cheeks. The little blue flowers that I had seen in her hair were sere now, and all but bloomless; yet so winning was she, so winning that, despite the strangeness of the adventure and her inexplicable invasion of my chamber, I was not afraid for one moment.
She placed the lamp on the table, and sat down by my bed-foot. Then, in those soft and silver accents which I never heard from any lips but hers—"Long have I made thee wait for me," she said, "and thou must have deemed that I had forgotten thee quite. But lo! I come from far, very far—even from that land whence no traveler has returned. There is no sunlight nor moon in the country whence I wander, only shadow and space. There the foot finds no rest, nor the wandering wing any way; yet here am I; behold me, for Love can conquer Death. Ah, what sad faces and terrible eyes have I seen in my voyaging, and in what labor hath my soul been to find my body and to make her home therein again! How hard to lift was the stone that they had laid on me for a covering! Lo, my hands are sorely wounded in that toil! Kiss them, my love, and heal them." And she laid her chill palms, on my mouth, that I kissed many times, she smiling on me with an inexpressible sweetness of delight.