“Make us immortal, Sanson!”
“Give me eternal life!” raved the cracked voice of an aged man; and that blasphemy against Nature seemed to shock the mob into silence, until once more the low chant swelled and echoed and died away in wailing overtones of helplessness.
Suddenly a single solar light flashed at one side of the Temple, and, high above the multitude, where the end of the bridge span rested against the curve of the wall, I perceived Sanson. He was standing alone upon the drawn-back span, which, shadowy and vague, gave him the aspect of a figure poised in the air.
He was a master of stage-craft. It even awed me, that calculated effect of the dark Temple and the crowd, invisible each to his neighbor; and the hypnotic mise en scène of the solitary figure aloft beneath the single light. I, too, felt the contagion of the universal expectation.
Sanson uttered no word, but stretched one arm out and pointed across the Temple. Then I heard the tramp of men coming from the direction of the elevator shafts; and suddenly a second light burned across the vast void of the dark.
Upon the second span, now dimly visible, drawn back against the wall opposite Sanson, I saw the prisoners from the vaults, marshaled under the charge of the Guard. There, at the extreme edge, Elizabeth stood, a slender, virginal figure, her hands clasped over her bosom; at her side David, behind them the patriarchal figure of Bishop Alfred. Behind him were ranged the other victims of Sanson’s rage. They, too, under that single light, seemed to be poised in air.
At the sight of them, hysteria swept the minds of the mob into frenzy.
“The Christians!” they screamed. “Kill them! Kill them! Out with the dogs who hold their bodies cheap! To the Rest Cure! Ah—h!”
The groaning end was drawn out as the vibration of a G-string. The air was heavy and foul with hate; I felt it as something ponderable.
A woman’s voice rang shrill through the Temple, and the devil that goaded her had raised his head now after two thousand years of stupor. He returned into a world that had forgotten him since the first shapings of Europe’s peoples began, out of the deepest place in hell.