I looked at her. What will be the scaffold to-morrow to me, since I have lived through that moment?
She looked at me, always with her sorceress's eyes. "You must kill him," she said briefly. "It will be so easy to you. If you love me it will be done. If not—farewell."
A horrible terror seized on me. I said nothing. I was stupefied. The gloomy shadows of the chamber surrounded us like a mystic vapor; the pale figures of the tapestries seemed like the ghosts arisen from the grave to witness against us; the oppressive heat of the night hour lay on our heads like an iron hand.
A phantom parted us: the spectre of a cowardly crime had come between us.
"You do not love me," she said slowly. She grew impatient, angered, feverish: a dumb rage began to work in her. She had no fear.
I drew my breath with effort. It seemed as if some one were strangling me. Kill him! Kill him! These ghastly words re-echoed in my ears. Kill an old and feeble man? It was worse than a crime: it was a cowardice.
"You do not love me," she repeated with utter scorn. "Go—go!"
A cry to her sprang from my very soul: "Anything else, anything but that! Ask my own life, and you shall have it."
"I ask what I wish."
As she answered me thus she drew herself in all her full height upward under the faint radiance from the lamp. Her magnificent beauty shone in it like a grand white flower of the datura under the suns of autumn. A disdain without bounds, without limit, without mercy, gleamed from her eyes. She despised me—a man of the people, a public wrestler, a bravo, only made to kill at his mistress's order, only of use to draw the stiletto in secrecy at the whim and will of a woman.